International institutional policy, shaped by a globally entrenched explanatory framework of development and underdevelopment, perpetuates the suppression of knowledge production aimed at challenging social, economic, and political injustices by elites across the global South
Intra-elite, state-centric society is a strategic front, and ought to be defended and put to use in the continued development of a global and decolonial turn in IR.
The special issue’s concerns could easily be a passing ‘fad’ as the forces of the status quo bide their time. A focal point on race, necessary as it is, could elide class and material factors’ influence on world politics.
There is no shortage of knowledge produced in various traditions and diverse scholarly communities. There is no lack of theoretical traditions and political thought that come from non-Euro-American and mainstream canons. There is also no shortage in theoretical concepts and approaches to global politics that are not produced in Anglophone spaces. Rather, there is still in mainstream IR a major problem of literacy to access, integrate, and dialogue with this wealth of IR scholarship produced in and from the margins
Even when Latin Americans are allowed to speak, IR scholars and practitioners do not listen to them due to the language in which they produce knowledge, epistemic violence and access barriers.
Decolonial methods, and the bringing of attention to race in knowledge production is necessarily historical. It demands a close re-reading of archives, forgotten texts, and sometimes “canonical” works. As a result, through this special issue and the wider work the authors build upon, we now have a very different understanding of the historical entanglements of race and international affairs knowledge.
Now that the myth of “theory-practice gap” has been largely refuted what role might IR and journals like International Affairs play in crafting a “reparative praxis”?
The International Affairs Centenary Special Issue on “Race and Imperialism in International Relations: Theory and Practice” was published two years ago in the aftermath of the global Black Lives Matter movement; it marked an atypical period of introspection by many scholars, departments, and journals of International Relations on the general paucity of attention given to matters of race and imperialism in IR research and teaching.
On February 21, the Federal Supreme Court of Iraq ruled on a set of cases pertaining to the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) electoral law. The Court declared that the 11 parliamentary reserved seats for minorities were unconstitutional. So too was the KRG’s single electoral district model. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) officials and their opposition supporters hailed the move. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) rejected the...
Gregory J. Kruczek is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Security and Risk Analysis Program at Penn State University (University Park). His teaching and research interests include Middle East politics and security, terrorism and crime, decision theory, technology and warfare, mobilization for armed combat.
Jasmine K. Gani is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews, and Co-Director of the Centre for Syrian Studies. She writes and teaches on (post)colonialism, race, knowledge production, theory and history of IR, and ideologies and social movements in the Middle East. She co-edited the International Affairs centenary special issue on "Race and Imperialism in International Relations: Theory and Practice" (2022)...
Jenna Marshall is a Lecturer in International Studies at King’s College London and former Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Her research interests focus on the political economy of developing countries and the intellectual traditions of the Global South. She is co-editor with Jasmine K. Gani of the 100th Anniversary Special Issue for International Affairs (vol. 98), "Race and Imperialism in International Relations:...