Description
This Roundtable showcases a forthcoming Review of International Studies Forum.
This forum asks, what should a decolonized field of International Relations (IR) look like? Scholarly works have studied the colonial makings of the “core-periphery dynamics” of IR (Tickner 2013) and the way this places the Global North in the disciplinary mainstream and relegates perspectives from the Global South to the periphery (Engel & Olsen 2005; Harman & Brown 2013; Johnston 2012; Odoom & Andrews 2017; Taylor 2012). Others have argued for a recognition of the multiplicity of ways in which politics and society is experienced (Ling 2014; Tickner & Blaney 2012). They go on to demonstrate that the colonial roots of IR have ensured that racialized epistemologies and codes of knowledge production continue to determine the disciplinary norms and priorities (Anievas, Manchanda & Shilliam 2015; Hendersen 2013; Lake 2016; Rutazibwa 2016; Vitalis 2015).
But while it is important to persist with the effort to garner widespread recognition of the need to decolonize IR, this forum is motivated by the understanding that decolonization is not just a metaphor or a discursive struggle (Tuck & Yang 2012). Neither is the decolonization agenda fulfilled by the mere recognition of the colonial past and imperial present of the discipline. Instead, the articles in this forum contribute to the decolonization agenda as they propose ways of materially re-making IR as a decolonized discipline. Accordingly, they identify explicit and implicit mechanisms that constitute colonization and present pointed reparative strategies that aim to dismantle these mechanisms.
