Description
Britain’s complicity in the Gaza genocide is a stark reminder of the enduring significance of the British state as a global actor. Not least since it follows the 2015-22 Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, another case of extensive war crimes and a consequent humanitarian catastrophe in which Britain’s complicity was even deeper than in the case of Gaza. For scholars of international relations working in the British context, Britain’s involvement in this extraordinary violence over the past decade presents an urgent challenge: how to contribute to critical knowledge production around the crimes of the British state, and how to place that knowledge at the disposal of wider civil society efforts to ensure accountability for these crimes? Also, if Britain’s role as an accomplice to US imperialism in these and other cases can only be fully understood in the context of Britain’s own colonial history, how might the recent decolonial turn in IR be brought to bear as a theoretical frame to illuminate empirical analysis of British foreign relations?
This roundtable brings together scholars working on British militarism, arms exports and imperialism more broadly, and on the ways in which colonial legacies continue to shape British foreign relations. They will discuss what a new critical research agenda on British foreign relations might look like, in terms of potential topics for research and the theoretical and evidential resources that are available to those interested in pursuing this work.
