Alina is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University. She researches and teaches on anticolonial thought and praxis; Third Worldism and its reverberations; North Africa and Middle East.
Her research has been published in Review of International Studies, Third World Quarterly, International Studies Review, Globalizations, Interventions, Middle East Critique, Citizenship Studies, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and Postcolonial Studies. She is the author of Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations. The Politics of Transgression in the Maghreb, published by Routledge in 2013; and the co-author (with William D. Coleman) of Fifty Key Thinkers on Globalization, published by Routledge in 2012. She is also the co-editor (with Randolph B. Persaud) of Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations. Postcolonial Perspectives (Routledge, 2018).
This article theorizes and establishes some of the outlines of an epistemology of domination. An ... more This article theorizes and establishes some of the outlines of an epistemology of domination. An epistemology of domination interpellates the question of “how/what does the oppressor know about the oppressed?” Drawing on several studies of cultural encounters such as Ibrahim Abu-Lughod's The Arab Rediscovery of Europe, Ashis Nandy's The Intimate Enemy, and Zeynep Çelik's Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient, the discussion explores epistemic tropes around colonial encounters: the power and politics of representation; the burden of belatedness/the denial of coevalness; the over-emphasizing of Western agency. Wlad Godzich states that “Western Thought has always thematized the other as a threat to be reduced, as a potential same-to-be, a yet-not-same.” My discussion here accepts this premise but only partially, and asks the question: does domination always entail the projection of alterity as a threat, or is there a wider spectrum of epistemic projections? How does the other encounter and experience the Western self, and does such encounter modify hegemonic epistemological paradigms? Following Michel de Certeau's assertion that “what is near masks a foreignness,” I seek to complicate the relation between selfhood and otherness in the colonial encounter, and its entanglements with colonial violence. What pedagogical moments emerge from such encounters? And how do such pedagogical moments structure postcolonial epistemologies?
The decades between 1960s and 1980s were punctuated by intense anti-colonial and anti-imperialist... more The decades between 1960s and 1980s were punctuated by intense anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, the rise of Third World internationalism (both in terms of formal and informal connections), the articulation of viable economic alternatives to those imposed by the West, but also by a massive wave of counterrevolution with bloody coups, assassinations, and interventions. Symbolically, the long 1960s started with Patrice Lumumba’s assassination and ended in 1980 with Walter Rodney’s assassination, and the defeat of the NIEO (New International Economic Order). While numerous analyses have engaged with these assassinations as historical events, this article seeks to provide a theoretical engagement with the phenomenon of Third World assassinations. The author’s engagement with this phenomenon aims to broaden the idea, put forth by Quynh Pham and Himadeep Muppidi, of the “anxiety of domination.” Drawing on Edward Said, James Baldwin, and Eqbal Ahmad, the article seeks to situate theoretically Third World assassinations within a larger paradigm of colonial/imperial anxiety: these acts of annihilation happened not simply because these individuals were on the opposite ideological divide, but because their political vision exceeded the grasp of domination and intelligibility of imperial/colonial power and challenged in fundamental ways the imperially sanctioned “epistemic conformity.
This introduction maps out the special issue’s main concerns. Bringing together political theoris... more This introduction maps out the special issue’s main concerns. Bringing together political theorists of empire with critical scholars of international relations who have interrogated the methodological nationalism (indeed the fetish of the nation-state) of their disciplines, this special issue examines the multifaceted dimensions (including political, ideological, and psycho-affective) of a radical international thought. Going beyond articulations of anti-colonial struggle at the national level, the issue charts radical theories and praxes of insurgency and revolutionary violence and brings an internationalist framework to bear on historical moments like the Spanish Civil War, the rise of anti-imperial development alternatives, and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and others. In doing so, the issue spotlights thinkers who are rarely read in a global register, such as Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Jalāl Al-e Ahmad, Ghassan Kanafani, and Eqbal Ahmad, among others. Furthermore, the introduction argues, the essays track these understudied articulations of radical international thought in the context of the traveling projects of imperial domination to which they responded. These radical figures’ political thought and action, in turn, inspired further imperial responses, such as political assassinations in the Third World, counterrevolutionary tactics, and other modes of violence in the service of empire.
This a a critical sympathetic engagement with Somdeep Sen’s excellent book Decolonizing Palestine... more This a a critical sympathetic engagement with Somdeep Sen’s excellent book Decolonizing Palestine. I draw on Amilcar Cabral’s, Eqbal Ahmad’s, and Ghassan Kanafani’s visions of struggle and liberation to reflect on the political and ideational content of liberation.
Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, 2023
This special issue aims to interrogate and reimagine the location of gender and sexual politics i... more This special issue aims to interrogate and reimagine the location of gender and sexual politics in anticolonial revolutionary struggles. This project builds on the exciting and important scholarly work, literary writing, and archiving projects that have emerged to document and explore the question of anticolonial feminisms, which remains under-represented in broader questions of anticolonialism, twentieth century politics, histories of the left, and scholarly work on revolutions. We therefore imagine this as a contribution to the rich body of work focusing on marginalised, subaltern, and radical knowledges, movements, and figures, as well as to what thinking about anticolonialism from feminist spaces can tell us about past, present, and future. From Pan-Africanism to Eastern European socialism; from contemporary Palestine, Iran, and the Philippines to indigenous struggles for sovereignty; how might thinking with and through gender and sexual politics shift the frame of what justice, freedom, care, and hope look and feel like? How might revolutionary pasts and revolutionary presents speak to feminist knowledge, and how might the radical futures imagined by those involved in gender and sexual politics tell different stories about familiar spaces, structures, and events? For instance, how might we complicate understandings of women’s positions either as nationalist heroes or as victims, bringing out nuances often left out from such debates? How might the long history of feminist re-imaginings of concepts such as freedom, sovereignty, community, care, sexuality, socialism, and more tell different histories of anticolonialism?
Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, 2023
This essay is a reflection on the location of woman/women in decolonization struggles. It explore... more This essay is a reflection on the location of woman/women in decolonization struggles. It explores the tensions between gender/feminism and nationalism, or rather the complicated transactions between colonialism, patriarchy (both Western and local), national liberation, and the “woman question.” While many analyses regarding the role of women in the anticolonial context highlight either their lack of agency vis-a-vis the nationalist movement (the prevailing feminist view) or their political autonomy as historical agents (the postcolonial feminist perspective), this discussion aims to go beyond this binary. Beyond the image of woman as a historical force or woman as a victim of her historical context, lies the idea of woman as wound. The emphasis here is thus not so much on the “contributions” of women to decolonization processes, but on the idea of revolutionary hope as a deep wound that continues to haunt the memory of decolonization and its subsequent betrayals. In that vein, I explore women’s entanglements with decolonization in Algeria and Palestine. However, the emphasis here is not on the Palestinian women’s movement per se but rather on the manner in which they internalized the history of Algerian women’s trajectory in the project of national liberation.
This special issue examines the connections among (post)colonial spaces forged in the struggle fo... more This special issue examines the connections among (post)colonial spaces forged in the struggle for national liberation and after. The focus on anticolonial/postcolonial connectivity indicates the existence of alternative forms of spatiality that go beyond the linear (and hierarchical) relationship between metropole and colonial spaces. Here we seek to challenge the dominant focus in the literature on the relations between colonial metropoles or hegemonic centres and colonized spaces. Rather we explore the ways through which colonized and postcolonial subjects cultivated knowledge ‘sideways’, meaning they inter-connected tactically, materially and intellectually without needing to call upon the imperial centre for interpretation or authorization. In surveying the connections between Algeria, Vietnam, Libya and Palestine, for example, or between Palestine and Mexico, between Islamic revivalist groups in the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent, in the making of Pan-Africanism and the anticolonial Caribbean, or the fragile moments of connections and solidarity in the Balkans - the articles in this special issue investigate a variety of anticolonial and postcolonial connectivities as well as a complex politics of solidarity that highlights both limits and blind spots but also untapped potentialities.
This article explores the lateral connections between the Algerian anticolonial struggle and othe... more This article explores the lateral connections between the Algerian anticolonial struggle and other similar struggles in the colonial world. Such connections linked up Algeria to Vietnam, Black Panthers in the U.S., and Palestine, among others. Not only were these anticolonial connections crucial to the FLN's strategy, but this strategy and the Algerian struggle more generally were crucial in generating the Third Worldist momentum as Algiers became the ‘Mecca of Revolution'. I examine how, although the goal of anticolonial struggles was national independence, the terrain whether logistic, ideological and even strategic was decidedly translocal. The focus on anticolonial connectivity in the Algerian War becomes a pretext for engaging with a political paradox: while the decolonization process seeks the recovery of dignity by the colonized, the nation-state becomes both the condition for the instantiation of this ideal, and the straightjacket that contains and limits its full realization. Here I re-focus the discussion from ‘alternatives to nation-state' to the idea of historical necessity. I thus treat the anticolonial narrative in more complicated ways, seeing it both as a necessary tragedy and as a narrative of ‘crushed hopes.’
There has been a consistent effort over the last couple of decades to re-think the translation an... more There has been a consistent effort over the last couple of decades to re-think the translation and the instantiation of anticolonial nationalism, with its hopes, desires, betrayals, and exhilaration, into the reality of the postcolonial state (Scott 2004, Prashad 2007, Wilder 2015, Sajed and Seidel 2019, Gruffydd-Jones, 2019, Getachew 2019). The debates have brought forth a number of heavy and important questions: why has the postcolonial state ‘failed’? Was anticolonial nationalism the wrong question to ask? Can the promise of anticolonial nationalism be revived and redeemed? David Scott (2004: 2, 4) talks about ‘anticolonial utopias […] gradually wither[ing] into postcolonial nightmares,’ and wonders whether the questions asked by the anticolonial narrative continue to be questions worth responding to at all. Indeed, he echoes many current criticisms of the ‘failures’ of postcolonial states to materialize the aspirations of their revolutionary beginnings. The contributions to this book forum by Adam Hanieh, Randolph Persaud and Zeyad el Nabolsy both deepen and complicate Salem’s excellent discussion of the politics of the Nasserist project. It is obviously beyond the scope of this introduction to the forum to do proper justice to the nuanced, layered and rich engagements of each of the contributors. The reader will benefit immensely from each of these fantastic conversations with Salem’s book. However, I want to focus on and highlight three main areas of discussion on which the three contributions seemed to converge in consensus. First, the attachment of the term ‘socialist’ to the Nasserist project requires a more careful engagement. Second, all three contributors see the book’s emphasis on the ruptures and breaks between the Nasser and Sadat eras in need of further discussion. Rather, we should examine what focusing on continuities (and indeed deep complicities) between these eras might reveal. Third, the three contributors offer a re-thinking of Fanon’s deployment of ‘national bourgeoisie’ and its role in the decolonization and post-independence eras.
The term ‘Global South’ is not an uncontroversial one. There have been many debates in the last f... more The term ‘Global South’ is not an uncontroversial one. There have been many debates in the last few decades regarding its usefulness, both analytical and historical, but especially its connection to another equally debated term, ‘Third World.’ In the midst of these debates, however, there has appeared a loose consensus around their meaning and their linkages. I will attempt to elucidate here the meaning and histories of both terms, and the connections and ruptures between them. To do so, I will be drawing on the work of several Marxist intellectuals, such as L.S. Stavrianos and Vijay Prashad, among others. It must be emphasized, however, that the term Global South cannot be considered separately from that of the Third World. Although different in terms of their historical timeframe and content, I argue that the idea of Global South could not have emerged without taking seriously the conceptual work done by the term Third World, and indeed without the legacy left by Third Worldism and its historical landmarks. The discussion below devotes significant space to understanding not only the emergence of the term Third World, but especially the central role played by processes of capitalist expansion to conceptualizing both Third World and Global South, albeit in different ways and at different historical junctures.
Abdelkebir Khatibi’s collection of essays was first published in French in 1983 as Maghreb Plurie... more Abdelkebir Khatibi’s collection of essays was first published in French in 1983 as Maghreb Pluriel. It comprises six essays originally published between (roughly) 1970 and 1982 in various venues. The first three essays of the collection – ‘Other-Thought’, ‘Double Critique’ and ‘Disoriented Orientalism’ – are the best-known, and, as Françoise Lionnet has noted, have long been out of print. From this perspective, the English translation is certainly welcome, if not without its problems. It is not clear, for example, why the editors of Bloomsbury’s series ‘Suspensions’, or perhaps the book’s translator, felt the need to add the subtitle ‘Writings on Postcolonialism’, which does not appear in the original. Why the need to attach Khatibi to a corpus he never clearly acknowledged in his writings? For two decades after the publication of Maghreb Pluriel, critics have lamented that Khatibi was never included alongside the likes of Said, Fanon, Césaire and Memmi in the canon of postcolonial thought. But little justification has been offered as to why that should have been the case – does any intellectual who thinks about and hails from a formerly colonised space need to be part of postcolonial thought?
This article re-examines Third Worldism as a political ideology, with a specific focus on a numbe... more This article re-examines Third Worldism as a political ideology, with a specific focus on a number of Algerian intellectuals. By taking Algeria as a privileged locus of investigation, the discussion zooms into a specific context of Third Worldism, the Algerian War and the decade after, therefore focusing on the period between 1950s and 1970s. As many analysts have pointed out, Third Worldism can only be understood by reference to the framework of European colonialism, the manner in which colonized intellectuals responded to and engaged with the colonial experience, and in relation to the formation of anticolonial thought and subsequent nationalist political agendas. Here I understand Third Worldism to mean more than the instantiation of the postcolonial state through anticolonial liberation struggles. Rather I take into consideration (Algerian) voices that push against the rigid boundaries of methodological nationalism and postcolonial theory. By embracing the ethos of ‘affirmative critique,’ the analysis aims to bring to light those ‘forgotten, hidden or invisible acts of critique’ that expose under-currents of Third Worldism not usually discussed or engaged. Thus, I engage writings of rarely considered Third World intellectuals, such as Kateb Yacine, Jean Amrouche, Jean Senac. These are all Algerian intellectuals; the reason behind this focus is the following: their involvement in Algeria’s decolonization struggles translated into translocal solidarity with other decolonization projects, whether in Vietnam or in Palestine. But aside from gesturing towards a translocal spatiality, their writings also embody a more genuine retrieval of dignity by the colonized, and an alternative memory of a different Algerian nation, intrinsically plural and hospitable to difference. Put differently, these voices both attempt a kind of diagnosis (however partial and incomplete) for the reductionism into which the Third World liberation state (inevitably) fell, while suggesting an alternative political horizon that comes closer to Fanon’s idea of ‘national consciousness’, especially in its attention to the ‘international dimension’ (Fanon 2004:179).
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2019
This special issue emerges from the debates around the ideas of violence, liberation, and nationa... more This special issue emerges from the debates around the ideas of violence, liberation, and national consciousness. The catalyst that prompted us to interrogate both the necessity of the nation-state form within decolonization, and the need to excavate and illuminate what Gary Wilder (2015, xi) called “non-national orientations to decolonization” was provided by Frantz Fanon’s reflections on national consciousness. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (2004, 179) states that “[n]ational consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an international dimension.” The immediate and obvious question that took shape was: what exactly is national consciousness, and how is it different from nationalism? Taking Fanon’s prompt, the contributions to this special issue launch the following provocations: what anti-colonial imaginaries and projects existed that did not envisage the end of colonialism as the beginning of nationalism? How and to what extent do these anticolonial imaginaries and projects confront the postcolonial settlements of the contemporary global order? Last but not least, what are the limits/traps of attempts to escape the nation?
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2019
This article examines the ideological terrain of the Algerian War and takes seriously the questio... more This article examines the ideological terrain of the Algerian War and takes seriously the question of the nature of the fight, namely not only the type of anticolonial discourse and mobilization (whether ideological or militant), but also the vision deployed in pursuit of independence, and the means by which it is pursued; in doing so, it explores the idea that how we fight determines the types of futures made possible by anticolonial revolt. I thus not only investigate the types of anticolonial imaginaries that came to compete for legitimacy and possibility during the Algerian War, but also examine the idea that the predicament of the national liberation state was not simply about policies adopted post-independence (whether regarding political or economic development, or social policies). Rather the predicament came to life during the anticolonial struggle, and acquired poignancy once the task of the struggle was accomplished, namely removing the colonizer. In that sense, what Amilcar Cabral (1980, 121-122) identifies as ‘the struggle against our own weaknesses’ remains a struggle very much unfinished.
This review essay surveys four recent publications in postcolonial studies: Edmund Burke's Ethnog... more This review essay surveys four recent publications in postcolonial studies: Edmund Burke's Ethnographic State; Gary Wilder's Freedom Time; Viatcheslav Morozov's Russia's Postcolonial Identity; and Nayoung Aimee Kwon's Intimate Empire. The central topics covered by these four books range from questioning the inevitability and givenness of the national independence option during decolonization, to attempting to sketch a history of French Orientalism in Morocco, to re-visiting the notion of subaltern(ity) by positing Russia as a subaltern empire, and, finally, to examining the shared yet fraught experience of colonial modernity between Korea and Japan. In that sense, each of these books tries to push further the agenda of postcolonial studies by either questioning an established framework (e.g. national independence as the end goal of decolonization; Orientalism seen solely as epistemology; subalternity as morally superior because of its marginal position vis-à-vis power), or by complicating the binary of resistance vs. collaboration/assimilation.
This forum started out as a roundtable at the 2014 Annual Convention of the International Studies... more This forum started out as a roundtable at the 2014 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in New Orleans. Our interventions (then and now) zoom in on the distinction John Hobson draws, in his book The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, between scientific racism and Eurocentric institutionalism. In this forum, we engage Hobson's distinction between scientific racism and Eurocentric institutionalism on two grounds: 1) the relationship between everyday life and academia and 2) the possibility of change.
Sajed's and Inayatullah's joint intervention focuses on Hobson's effort to bring forward a notion... more Sajed's and Inayatullah's joint intervention focuses on Hobson's effort to bring forward a notion of non-Western agency as an antidote to the prevailing Eurocentrism of contemporary IR scholarship. They reflect on the stakes involved by constructing a story of an agentic non-Western world co-participant in the past and current world system. They worry that ‘in his attempt to recover Eastern agency, [Hobson] inadvertently plays down the impact (and the rigidity) of global structures.’
This article argues that Critical IR theory’s (CIRT) claims to reflexivity, its engagement with “... more This article argues that Critical IR theory’s (CIRT) claims to reflexivity, its engagement with “difference” and its emancipatory stance are compromised by its enduring Eurocentric gaze. While CIRT is certainly critical of the West nevertheless its tendency towards “Eurofetishism” – by which Western agency is reified at the expense of non-Western agency – leads it into a “critical Eurocentrism”. While this Eurofetishism plays out differently across the spectrum of CIRT, nevertheless all too often the West is treated as distinct from the non-West such that a fully relationalist conception of the West – one in which the non-West shapes, tracks and inflects the West as much as vice versa – is either downplayed or dismissed altogether. Our antidote to this problem is to advance such a relationalist approach that brings non-Western agency back in while simultaneously recognizing that such agency is usually subjected to structural constraints. This gives rise to two core objectives: first, that non-Western agency needs to be taken seriously as an ontologically significant process in world politics and second, that it needs to be explored in its complex, manifold dimensions. Here we seek to move beyond the colonial binaries of non-Western “silence vs. defiance” and an “all-powerful West vs. powerless non-West”. For in-between these polarities lies a spectrum of instantiations of non-Western agency, running from the refusal to be known and categorized by colonial epistemes to mundane moments of everyday agency to the embrace of indigenous cosmologies through to modes of developmental- and global-agency. Sometimes these speak back to the West and at other times they occur for reasons Other-wise. Ultimately we call for a relationalist sociology of global interconnectivities that problematizes CIRT’s Eurofetishization of the West as a separate, self-generating, self-directed and hyper-autonomous entity.
I focus here on the political stances of Frantz Fanon and Albert Camus
regarding the Algerian War... more I focus here on the political stances of Frantz Fanon and Albert Camus regarding the Algerian War of Independence. By examining their reflections on this violent anti colonial struggle, I seek to highlight the role of colonial difference and of racial hierarchies in the constitution of global politics. Fanon’s position relies on an ethos of decolonization and on an ethics of difference that—while specific to the Algerian context— also reverberated profoundly among other societies caught in the violence of imperial encounters. Camus’ conciliatory approach, however, and his moral equalization of the violence perpetrated by both sides enunciate the inherent racial hierarchies underpinning liberal narratives. I argue that the limits inherent in Fanon’s thought—but also its latent potentialities for decolonial thinking—become apparent when examined through the lens of the contemporary activism among North African migrants and their descendants in France. The emergence of self-proclaimed decolonial movements constitutes an attempt to enact a decolonial transnational citizenship, which contests the racial boundaries of French Republicanism. But it also signals a different vision of the universal—one that is entrenched in a terrain of historical specificity and which holds more promise in contesting the global colour line.
This article theorizes and establishes some of the outlines of an epistemology of domination. An ... more This article theorizes and establishes some of the outlines of an epistemology of domination. An epistemology of domination interpellates the question of “how/what does the oppressor know about the oppressed?” Drawing on several studies of cultural encounters such as Ibrahim Abu-Lughod's The Arab Rediscovery of Europe, Ashis Nandy's The Intimate Enemy, and Zeynep Çelik's Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient, the discussion explores epistemic tropes around colonial encounters: the power and politics of representation; the burden of belatedness/the denial of coevalness; the over-emphasizing of Western agency. Wlad Godzich states that “Western Thought has always thematized the other as a threat to be reduced, as a potential same-to-be, a yet-not-same.” My discussion here accepts this premise but only partially, and asks the question: does domination always entail the projection of alterity as a threat, or is there a wider spectrum of epistemic projections? How does the other encounter and experience the Western self, and does such encounter modify hegemonic epistemological paradigms? Following Michel de Certeau's assertion that “what is near masks a foreignness,” I seek to complicate the relation between selfhood and otherness in the colonial encounter, and its entanglements with colonial violence. What pedagogical moments emerge from such encounters? And how do such pedagogical moments structure postcolonial epistemologies?
The decades between 1960s and 1980s were punctuated by intense anti-colonial and anti-imperialist... more The decades between 1960s and 1980s were punctuated by intense anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, the rise of Third World internationalism (both in terms of formal and informal connections), the articulation of viable economic alternatives to those imposed by the West, but also by a massive wave of counterrevolution with bloody coups, assassinations, and interventions. Symbolically, the long 1960s started with Patrice Lumumba’s assassination and ended in 1980 with Walter Rodney’s assassination, and the defeat of the NIEO (New International Economic Order). While numerous analyses have engaged with these assassinations as historical events, this article seeks to provide a theoretical engagement with the phenomenon of Third World assassinations. The author’s engagement with this phenomenon aims to broaden the idea, put forth by Quynh Pham and Himadeep Muppidi, of the “anxiety of domination.” Drawing on Edward Said, James Baldwin, and Eqbal Ahmad, the article seeks to situate theoretically Third World assassinations within a larger paradigm of colonial/imperial anxiety: these acts of annihilation happened not simply because these individuals were on the opposite ideological divide, but because their political vision exceeded the grasp of domination and intelligibility of imperial/colonial power and challenged in fundamental ways the imperially sanctioned “epistemic conformity.
This introduction maps out the special issue’s main concerns. Bringing together political theoris... more This introduction maps out the special issue’s main concerns. Bringing together political theorists of empire with critical scholars of international relations who have interrogated the methodological nationalism (indeed the fetish of the nation-state) of their disciplines, this special issue examines the multifaceted dimensions (including political, ideological, and psycho-affective) of a radical international thought. Going beyond articulations of anti-colonial struggle at the national level, the issue charts radical theories and praxes of insurgency and revolutionary violence and brings an internationalist framework to bear on historical moments like the Spanish Civil War, the rise of anti-imperial development alternatives, and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and others. In doing so, the issue spotlights thinkers who are rarely read in a global register, such as Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Jalāl Al-e Ahmad, Ghassan Kanafani, and Eqbal Ahmad, among others. Furthermore, the introduction argues, the essays track these understudied articulations of radical international thought in the context of the traveling projects of imperial domination to which they responded. These radical figures’ political thought and action, in turn, inspired further imperial responses, such as political assassinations in the Third World, counterrevolutionary tactics, and other modes of violence in the service of empire.
This a a critical sympathetic engagement with Somdeep Sen’s excellent book Decolonizing Palestine... more This a a critical sympathetic engagement with Somdeep Sen’s excellent book Decolonizing Palestine. I draw on Amilcar Cabral’s, Eqbal Ahmad’s, and Ghassan Kanafani’s visions of struggle and liberation to reflect on the political and ideational content of liberation.
Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, 2023
This special issue aims to interrogate and reimagine the location of gender and sexual politics i... more This special issue aims to interrogate and reimagine the location of gender and sexual politics in anticolonial revolutionary struggles. This project builds on the exciting and important scholarly work, literary writing, and archiving projects that have emerged to document and explore the question of anticolonial feminisms, which remains under-represented in broader questions of anticolonialism, twentieth century politics, histories of the left, and scholarly work on revolutions. We therefore imagine this as a contribution to the rich body of work focusing on marginalised, subaltern, and radical knowledges, movements, and figures, as well as to what thinking about anticolonialism from feminist spaces can tell us about past, present, and future. From Pan-Africanism to Eastern European socialism; from contemporary Palestine, Iran, and the Philippines to indigenous struggles for sovereignty; how might thinking with and through gender and sexual politics shift the frame of what justice, freedom, care, and hope look and feel like? How might revolutionary pasts and revolutionary presents speak to feminist knowledge, and how might the radical futures imagined by those involved in gender and sexual politics tell different stories about familiar spaces, structures, and events? For instance, how might we complicate understandings of women’s positions either as nationalist heroes or as victims, bringing out nuances often left out from such debates? How might the long history of feminist re-imaginings of concepts such as freedom, sovereignty, community, care, sexuality, socialism, and more tell different histories of anticolonialism?
Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, 2023
This essay is a reflection on the location of woman/women in decolonization struggles. It explore... more This essay is a reflection on the location of woman/women in decolonization struggles. It explores the tensions between gender/feminism and nationalism, or rather the complicated transactions between colonialism, patriarchy (both Western and local), national liberation, and the “woman question.” While many analyses regarding the role of women in the anticolonial context highlight either their lack of agency vis-a-vis the nationalist movement (the prevailing feminist view) or their political autonomy as historical agents (the postcolonial feminist perspective), this discussion aims to go beyond this binary. Beyond the image of woman as a historical force or woman as a victim of her historical context, lies the idea of woman as wound. The emphasis here is thus not so much on the “contributions” of women to decolonization processes, but on the idea of revolutionary hope as a deep wound that continues to haunt the memory of decolonization and its subsequent betrayals. In that vein, I explore women’s entanglements with decolonization in Algeria and Palestine. However, the emphasis here is not on the Palestinian women’s movement per se but rather on the manner in which they internalized the history of Algerian women’s trajectory in the project of national liberation.
This special issue examines the connections among (post)colonial spaces forged in the struggle fo... more This special issue examines the connections among (post)colonial spaces forged in the struggle for national liberation and after. The focus on anticolonial/postcolonial connectivity indicates the existence of alternative forms of spatiality that go beyond the linear (and hierarchical) relationship between metropole and colonial spaces. Here we seek to challenge the dominant focus in the literature on the relations between colonial metropoles or hegemonic centres and colonized spaces. Rather we explore the ways through which colonized and postcolonial subjects cultivated knowledge ‘sideways’, meaning they inter-connected tactically, materially and intellectually without needing to call upon the imperial centre for interpretation or authorization. In surveying the connections between Algeria, Vietnam, Libya and Palestine, for example, or between Palestine and Mexico, between Islamic revivalist groups in the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent, in the making of Pan-Africanism and the anticolonial Caribbean, or the fragile moments of connections and solidarity in the Balkans - the articles in this special issue investigate a variety of anticolonial and postcolonial connectivities as well as a complex politics of solidarity that highlights both limits and blind spots but also untapped potentialities.
This article explores the lateral connections between the Algerian anticolonial struggle and othe... more This article explores the lateral connections between the Algerian anticolonial struggle and other similar struggles in the colonial world. Such connections linked up Algeria to Vietnam, Black Panthers in the U.S., and Palestine, among others. Not only were these anticolonial connections crucial to the FLN's strategy, but this strategy and the Algerian struggle more generally were crucial in generating the Third Worldist momentum as Algiers became the ‘Mecca of Revolution'. I examine how, although the goal of anticolonial struggles was national independence, the terrain whether logistic, ideological and even strategic was decidedly translocal. The focus on anticolonial connectivity in the Algerian War becomes a pretext for engaging with a political paradox: while the decolonization process seeks the recovery of dignity by the colonized, the nation-state becomes both the condition for the instantiation of this ideal, and the straightjacket that contains and limits its full realization. Here I re-focus the discussion from ‘alternatives to nation-state' to the idea of historical necessity. I thus treat the anticolonial narrative in more complicated ways, seeing it both as a necessary tragedy and as a narrative of ‘crushed hopes.’
There has been a consistent effort over the last couple of decades to re-think the translation an... more There has been a consistent effort over the last couple of decades to re-think the translation and the instantiation of anticolonial nationalism, with its hopes, desires, betrayals, and exhilaration, into the reality of the postcolonial state (Scott 2004, Prashad 2007, Wilder 2015, Sajed and Seidel 2019, Gruffydd-Jones, 2019, Getachew 2019). The debates have brought forth a number of heavy and important questions: why has the postcolonial state ‘failed’? Was anticolonial nationalism the wrong question to ask? Can the promise of anticolonial nationalism be revived and redeemed? David Scott (2004: 2, 4) talks about ‘anticolonial utopias […] gradually wither[ing] into postcolonial nightmares,’ and wonders whether the questions asked by the anticolonial narrative continue to be questions worth responding to at all. Indeed, he echoes many current criticisms of the ‘failures’ of postcolonial states to materialize the aspirations of their revolutionary beginnings. The contributions to this book forum by Adam Hanieh, Randolph Persaud and Zeyad el Nabolsy both deepen and complicate Salem’s excellent discussion of the politics of the Nasserist project. It is obviously beyond the scope of this introduction to the forum to do proper justice to the nuanced, layered and rich engagements of each of the contributors. The reader will benefit immensely from each of these fantastic conversations with Salem’s book. However, I want to focus on and highlight three main areas of discussion on which the three contributions seemed to converge in consensus. First, the attachment of the term ‘socialist’ to the Nasserist project requires a more careful engagement. Second, all three contributors see the book’s emphasis on the ruptures and breaks between the Nasser and Sadat eras in need of further discussion. Rather, we should examine what focusing on continuities (and indeed deep complicities) between these eras might reveal. Third, the three contributors offer a re-thinking of Fanon’s deployment of ‘national bourgeoisie’ and its role in the decolonization and post-independence eras.
The term ‘Global South’ is not an uncontroversial one. There have been many debates in the last f... more The term ‘Global South’ is not an uncontroversial one. There have been many debates in the last few decades regarding its usefulness, both analytical and historical, but especially its connection to another equally debated term, ‘Third World.’ In the midst of these debates, however, there has appeared a loose consensus around their meaning and their linkages. I will attempt to elucidate here the meaning and histories of both terms, and the connections and ruptures between them. To do so, I will be drawing on the work of several Marxist intellectuals, such as L.S. Stavrianos and Vijay Prashad, among others. It must be emphasized, however, that the term Global South cannot be considered separately from that of the Third World. Although different in terms of their historical timeframe and content, I argue that the idea of Global South could not have emerged without taking seriously the conceptual work done by the term Third World, and indeed without the legacy left by Third Worldism and its historical landmarks. The discussion below devotes significant space to understanding not only the emergence of the term Third World, but especially the central role played by processes of capitalist expansion to conceptualizing both Third World and Global South, albeit in different ways and at different historical junctures.
Abdelkebir Khatibi’s collection of essays was first published in French in 1983 as Maghreb Plurie... more Abdelkebir Khatibi’s collection of essays was first published in French in 1983 as Maghreb Pluriel. It comprises six essays originally published between (roughly) 1970 and 1982 in various venues. The first three essays of the collection – ‘Other-Thought’, ‘Double Critique’ and ‘Disoriented Orientalism’ – are the best-known, and, as Françoise Lionnet has noted, have long been out of print. From this perspective, the English translation is certainly welcome, if not without its problems. It is not clear, for example, why the editors of Bloomsbury’s series ‘Suspensions’, or perhaps the book’s translator, felt the need to add the subtitle ‘Writings on Postcolonialism’, which does not appear in the original. Why the need to attach Khatibi to a corpus he never clearly acknowledged in his writings? For two decades after the publication of Maghreb Pluriel, critics have lamented that Khatibi was never included alongside the likes of Said, Fanon, Césaire and Memmi in the canon of postcolonial thought. But little justification has been offered as to why that should have been the case – does any intellectual who thinks about and hails from a formerly colonised space need to be part of postcolonial thought?
This article re-examines Third Worldism as a political ideology, with a specific focus on a numbe... more This article re-examines Third Worldism as a political ideology, with a specific focus on a number of Algerian intellectuals. By taking Algeria as a privileged locus of investigation, the discussion zooms into a specific context of Third Worldism, the Algerian War and the decade after, therefore focusing on the period between 1950s and 1970s. As many analysts have pointed out, Third Worldism can only be understood by reference to the framework of European colonialism, the manner in which colonized intellectuals responded to and engaged with the colonial experience, and in relation to the formation of anticolonial thought and subsequent nationalist political agendas. Here I understand Third Worldism to mean more than the instantiation of the postcolonial state through anticolonial liberation struggles. Rather I take into consideration (Algerian) voices that push against the rigid boundaries of methodological nationalism and postcolonial theory. By embracing the ethos of ‘affirmative critique,’ the analysis aims to bring to light those ‘forgotten, hidden or invisible acts of critique’ that expose under-currents of Third Worldism not usually discussed or engaged. Thus, I engage writings of rarely considered Third World intellectuals, such as Kateb Yacine, Jean Amrouche, Jean Senac. These are all Algerian intellectuals; the reason behind this focus is the following: their involvement in Algeria’s decolonization struggles translated into translocal solidarity with other decolonization projects, whether in Vietnam or in Palestine. But aside from gesturing towards a translocal spatiality, their writings also embody a more genuine retrieval of dignity by the colonized, and an alternative memory of a different Algerian nation, intrinsically plural and hospitable to difference. Put differently, these voices both attempt a kind of diagnosis (however partial and incomplete) for the reductionism into which the Third World liberation state (inevitably) fell, while suggesting an alternative political horizon that comes closer to Fanon’s idea of ‘national consciousness’, especially in its attention to the ‘international dimension’ (Fanon 2004:179).
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2019
This special issue emerges from the debates around the ideas of violence, liberation, and nationa... more This special issue emerges from the debates around the ideas of violence, liberation, and national consciousness. The catalyst that prompted us to interrogate both the necessity of the nation-state form within decolonization, and the need to excavate and illuminate what Gary Wilder (2015, xi) called “non-national orientations to decolonization” was provided by Frantz Fanon’s reflections on national consciousness. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (2004, 179) states that “[n]ational consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an international dimension.” The immediate and obvious question that took shape was: what exactly is national consciousness, and how is it different from nationalism? Taking Fanon’s prompt, the contributions to this special issue launch the following provocations: what anti-colonial imaginaries and projects existed that did not envisage the end of colonialism as the beginning of nationalism? How and to what extent do these anticolonial imaginaries and projects confront the postcolonial settlements of the contemporary global order? Last but not least, what are the limits/traps of attempts to escape the nation?
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2019
This article examines the ideological terrain of the Algerian War and takes seriously the questio... more This article examines the ideological terrain of the Algerian War and takes seriously the question of the nature of the fight, namely not only the type of anticolonial discourse and mobilization (whether ideological or militant), but also the vision deployed in pursuit of independence, and the means by which it is pursued; in doing so, it explores the idea that how we fight determines the types of futures made possible by anticolonial revolt. I thus not only investigate the types of anticolonial imaginaries that came to compete for legitimacy and possibility during the Algerian War, but also examine the idea that the predicament of the national liberation state was not simply about policies adopted post-independence (whether regarding political or economic development, or social policies). Rather the predicament came to life during the anticolonial struggle, and acquired poignancy once the task of the struggle was accomplished, namely removing the colonizer. In that sense, what Amilcar Cabral (1980, 121-122) identifies as ‘the struggle against our own weaknesses’ remains a struggle very much unfinished.
This review essay surveys four recent publications in postcolonial studies: Edmund Burke's Ethnog... more This review essay surveys four recent publications in postcolonial studies: Edmund Burke's Ethnographic State; Gary Wilder's Freedom Time; Viatcheslav Morozov's Russia's Postcolonial Identity; and Nayoung Aimee Kwon's Intimate Empire. The central topics covered by these four books range from questioning the inevitability and givenness of the national independence option during decolonization, to attempting to sketch a history of French Orientalism in Morocco, to re-visiting the notion of subaltern(ity) by positing Russia as a subaltern empire, and, finally, to examining the shared yet fraught experience of colonial modernity between Korea and Japan. In that sense, each of these books tries to push further the agenda of postcolonial studies by either questioning an established framework (e.g. national independence as the end goal of decolonization; Orientalism seen solely as epistemology; subalternity as morally superior because of its marginal position vis-à-vis power), or by complicating the binary of resistance vs. collaboration/assimilation.
This forum started out as a roundtable at the 2014 Annual Convention of the International Studies... more This forum started out as a roundtable at the 2014 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in New Orleans. Our interventions (then and now) zoom in on the distinction John Hobson draws, in his book The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, between scientific racism and Eurocentric institutionalism. In this forum, we engage Hobson's distinction between scientific racism and Eurocentric institutionalism on two grounds: 1) the relationship between everyday life and academia and 2) the possibility of change.
Sajed's and Inayatullah's joint intervention focuses on Hobson's effort to bring forward a notion... more Sajed's and Inayatullah's joint intervention focuses on Hobson's effort to bring forward a notion of non-Western agency as an antidote to the prevailing Eurocentrism of contemporary IR scholarship. They reflect on the stakes involved by constructing a story of an agentic non-Western world co-participant in the past and current world system. They worry that ‘in his attempt to recover Eastern agency, [Hobson] inadvertently plays down the impact (and the rigidity) of global structures.’
This article argues that Critical IR theory’s (CIRT) claims to reflexivity, its engagement with “... more This article argues that Critical IR theory’s (CIRT) claims to reflexivity, its engagement with “difference” and its emancipatory stance are compromised by its enduring Eurocentric gaze. While CIRT is certainly critical of the West nevertheless its tendency towards “Eurofetishism” – by which Western agency is reified at the expense of non-Western agency – leads it into a “critical Eurocentrism”. While this Eurofetishism plays out differently across the spectrum of CIRT, nevertheless all too often the West is treated as distinct from the non-West such that a fully relationalist conception of the West – one in which the non-West shapes, tracks and inflects the West as much as vice versa – is either downplayed or dismissed altogether. Our antidote to this problem is to advance such a relationalist approach that brings non-Western agency back in while simultaneously recognizing that such agency is usually subjected to structural constraints. This gives rise to two core objectives: first, that non-Western agency needs to be taken seriously as an ontologically significant process in world politics and second, that it needs to be explored in its complex, manifold dimensions. Here we seek to move beyond the colonial binaries of non-Western “silence vs. defiance” and an “all-powerful West vs. powerless non-West”. For in-between these polarities lies a spectrum of instantiations of non-Western agency, running from the refusal to be known and categorized by colonial epistemes to mundane moments of everyday agency to the embrace of indigenous cosmologies through to modes of developmental- and global-agency. Sometimes these speak back to the West and at other times they occur for reasons Other-wise. Ultimately we call for a relationalist sociology of global interconnectivities that problematizes CIRT’s Eurofetishization of the West as a separate, self-generating, self-directed and hyper-autonomous entity.
I focus here on the political stances of Frantz Fanon and Albert Camus
regarding the Algerian War... more I focus here on the political stances of Frantz Fanon and Albert Camus regarding the Algerian War of Independence. By examining their reflections on this violent anti colonial struggle, I seek to highlight the role of colonial difference and of racial hierarchies in the constitution of global politics. Fanon’s position relies on an ethos of decolonization and on an ethics of difference that—while specific to the Algerian context— also reverberated profoundly among other societies caught in the violence of imperial encounters. Camus’ conciliatory approach, however, and his moral equalization of the violence perpetrated by both sides enunciate the inherent racial hierarchies underpinning liberal narratives. I argue that the limits inherent in Fanon’s thought—but also its latent potentialities for decolonial thinking—become apparent when examined through the lens of the contemporary activism among North African migrants and their descendants in France. The emergence of self-proclaimed decolonial movements constitutes an attempt to enact a decolonial transnational citizenship, which contests the racial boundaries of French Republicanism. But it also signals a different vision of the universal—one that is entrenched in a terrain of historical specificity and which holds more promise in contesting the global colour line.
International relations theory has broadened out considerably since the end of the Cold War. Topi... more International relations theory has broadened out considerably since the end of the Cold War. Topics and issues once deemed irrelevant to the discipline have been systematically drawn into the debate and great strides have been made in the areas of culture/identity, race, and gender in the discipline. However, despite these major developments over the last two decades, currently there are no comprehensive textbooks that deal with race, gender, and culture in IR from a postcolonial perspective. This textbook fills this important gap. Persaud and Sajed have drawn together an outstanding lineup of scholars, with each chapter illustrating the ways these specific lenses (race, gender, culture) condition or alter our assumptions about world politics. Drawing together prominent scholars in critical International Relations, this work shows why and how race, gender and culture matter and will be essential reading for all students of global politics and International Relations theory.
Fifty Key Thinkers on Globalization is an outstanding guide to often-encountered thinkers whose i... more Fifty Key Thinkers on Globalization is an outstanding guide to often-encountered thinkers whose ideas have shaped, defined and influenced this new and rapidly growing field. The authors clearly and lucidly survey the life, work and impact of fifty of the most important theorists of globalization including:
Manuel Castells Joseph Stiglitz David Held Jan Aart Scholte
Each thinker’s contribution to the field is evaluated and assessed, and each entry includes a helpful guide to further reading. Fully cross-referenced throughout, this remarkable reference guide is essential reading for students of politics and international relations, economics, sociology, history, anthropology and literary studies.
Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations examines the social and cultural aspects of th... more Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations examines the social and cultural aspects of the political violence that underpinned the French colonial project in the Maghreb, and the multi-layered postcolonial realities that ensued.
This book explores the reality of the lives of North African migrants in postcolonial France, with a particular focus on their access to political entitlements such as citizenship and rights. This reality is complicated even further by complex practices of memory undertaken by Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals, who negotiate, in their writings, between the violent memory of the French colonial project in the Maghreb, and the contemporary conundrums of postcolonial migration.
The book pursues thus the politics of (post)colonial memory by tracing its representations in literary, political, and visual narratives belonging to various Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals, who see themselves as living and writing between France and the Maghreb. By adopting a postcolonial perspective, a perspective quite marginal in International Relations, the book investigates a different international relations, which emerges via narratives of migration. A postcolonial standpoint is instrumental in understanding the relations between class, gender, and race, which interrogate and reflect more generally on the shared (post)colonial violence between North Africa and France, and on the politics of mediating violence through complex practices of memory.
Theories in International Relations, edited by Richard Devetak and Jacqui True; Edition: 6th; Chapter: 4; Bloomsbury, 2022
Can we understand International Relations without colonialism and race? This chapter argues that ... more Can we understand International Relations without colonialism and race? This chapter argues that we cannot examine the domain of the ‘international’ without a meaningful engagement with the crucial role that colonialism and processes of racialization and capitalist expansion have played in the very constitution of our current international system. Postcolonial theory grapples with the history and legacies of colonialism, and of race and racial hierarchies, and examines the ways in which they have shaped global politics and contemporary racial hierarchies. IR theory has failed to analyze these power structures and dynamics, and postcolonial theories have aimed to ignite debate and reflection in the discipline about its own foundations, and about its contemporary colonial and racist dynamics. The first section of this chapter outlines the history of postcolonialism as a theoretical perspective by discussing both a few major historical landmarks associated with the rise of postcolonial thought (e.g. Bandung Conference; Non-Aligned Movement; Suez Crisis; Tricontinental Conference), and a number of prominent theoretical contributions by intellectuals who are now seen as “foundational” of postcolonial theory (e.g. Aimée Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said). The second section then examines postcolonialism’s entry into International Relations by focusing on a number of key concepts which are central to postcolonial interventions in IR: colonialism, race, and epistemic justice. The last section engages the interactions and debates between postcolonial perspectives in IR and other critical approaches in IR (e.g. poststructuralism, Marxism and feminism). The concluding section highlights the continued relevance of postcolonial perspectives in a global world.
This first chapter introduces readers to the main theoretical orientations within postcolonial st... more This first chapter introduces readers to the main theoretical orientations within postcolonial studies, but also to the most prominent postcolonial theorists associated with these orientations. Additionally, it also discusses the relevance of race and gender to better understand past and contemporary world politics.
The idea that women are perceived and treated in an objectified manner, and that women's images a... more The idea that women are perceived and treated in an objectified manner, and that women's images and bodies are exposed to practices of commodification, acquires a complex dimension when approached from the perspective of the academic discipline of International Relations (IR). IR, as a field of studies that focuses on particular dynamics related to world politics, is oblivious to the gendered dimensions of its discourses and practices. This oblivion manifests itself both in IR's preference for specific objects of study (states, militaries, international organizations, various political crises) and in its methodological approaches. The latter involve a desire for an objective and value-free knowledge that purports to represent the realm of the international as it “really” is. This desire for value-free knowledge based on observation and prediction translated into discourses of world politics that were devoid of women, whether as political agents or as victims of political violence. The concrete implication of such “parsimonious” discourses is that the various political, social, and cultural practices through which women are objectified and their bodies and labor commodified are simply not relevant for a field that concerns itself with the competitive behavior of states in an anarchical international system.
The International Studies Compendium Project, 2010
Postmodernity is commonly perceived as a stage of late modernity or late capitalism that follows ... more Postmodernity is commonly perceived as a stage of late modernity or late capitalism that follows modernity, whereas postmodernism is understood as a theoretical trend that attempts to unsettle a number of key concepts associated with the Enlightenment, such as grand narratives of progress, a linear unfolding of history, and traditional notions of reason and rationality. Within the discipline of International Relations (IR), however, late modernity is used interchangeably with postmodernity/postmodernism. Postmodernist/poststructuralist accounts in IR emerged in the 1980s, drawing their inspiration from authors identified with poststructuralism, such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Julia Kristeva. Three important themes can be identified in the development of a set of concerns that shaped International Political Sociology (IPS) as a subfield of IR: the self-understanding of IR and its relation to broader sociopolitical structures and institutions; limits, borders, and frontiers; and the emergence of a concern with practices of power perceived as acting in various sites, such as security and citizenship. The concretization of a different set of research preoccupations that are associated with IPS has resulted in some of the more significant developments in postmodern IR theory. Nevertheless, there are a few issues that deserve further consideration in social research that would help decenter the Western frame of IR, including the need for postcolonial discussions concerning the project of Enlightenment.
Migration and Citizenship: Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement, Editors: Peter Nyers and Kim Rygiel., 2012
This chapter examines the constraints that acts of securitization place on migrant activism among... more This chapter examines the constraints that acts of securitization place on migrant activism among immigrant Muslim communities. It looks at various activisms of North African Muslim communities in France, who find themselves at the intersection of various transnational links, such as those of migrant labour, postcolonial (in)difference, the global politics of knowledge, and shifts in citizenship. Taking her inspiration from Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih's conceptualization of 'minor transnationalism', Sajed investigates both the necessity for a new theoretical vocabulary in understanding mobility and the need to explore the complex terrain of minority interactions in Western societies. She emphasizes the diversity of forms through which such activism can be enacted, including Islamic activism undertaken by migrants and 'second-generation' migrants, and the feminist activism taken on by North African women living in France.
This course surveys diverse historical, political and socio-cultural facets of modern and contemp... more This course surveys diverse historical, political and socio-cultural facets of modern and contemporary Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Readings will focus on major historical landmarks (e.g. 1948 Nakba, 1967 Six Days War, 1979 Iranian Revolution, among others), larger transnational/global processes (European colonialism/American imperialism, regional geopolitics, capitalism/neoliberalism), and various actors. The course will thus explore various aspects of the politics of the modern and contemporary Middle East: British/French colonialism and the mandate system, the rise of Arab nationalism, conflict (Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Yemen), the political economy of oil, the rise of political Islam, authoritarianism, human rights and protest, women's mobilization and feminisms, and neoliberalism and the rise of Gulf capitalism. The course will use various media to help students actively engage the various topics: aside from academic readings, weekly discussions will turn to literary texts (short stories, poetry), documentaries/films, podcasts, and spoken word.
The course examines the connections and intersections between decolonization movements and strugg... more The course examines the connections and intersections between decolonization movements and struggles in the Third World (1950s to 1970s: Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, Palestinian organizations), and those radical leftist insurrectionary movement in the Western world that were inspired by decolonization struggles and the anti-colonial ethos (e.g. the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baaden Meinhof cells in Germany, the Red Army Faction in Japan or Arab-JRA, Black Panthers in the US, among others). The emphasis of the course is thus on those global intersections between insurrectional movements in the Global South and North. Not only do we tend to study them separately, and forget the deep enmeshments among them, but we also assume that decolonization movements drew inspiration from the North-this course argues the reverse.
This course explores the politics of the Third World/Global South from an International Relations... more This course explores the politics of the Third World/Global South from an International Relations perspective. We will situate the various issues, events, and topics within a global political and economic context. Discussions will center on global political and economic processes that have shaped the current contours of the Global South, such as colonialism, the Cold War, development narratives, foreign aid and humanitarian intervention, neoliberal globalization, and the rise of BRICs as a global challenge to the North. The foregoing provides students with a critical lens to examine the ambiguities of the identity of the Global South. For whether referred to as the “Third World,” or other variants such as the “Developing World,” the “G-77,” the “Non-Aligned Movement,” or the “Post-colonial World,” a certain unity has long been assumed for the multitude of societies ranging from Central and South America, across Africa to much of Asia. Is it valid to speak of a Global South? The course begins with an investigation of the epistemological implications of studying the Global South/Third World. Therefore, an important part of the course will address the notion of an epistemology of the Global South: how do we know/study the Global South/Third World? What are the political implications of the knowledge production about the Global South? Next, the course investigates the impact of a number of global political and economic processes, briefly outlined above, such as colonialism and decolonization processes, the rise of Third World internationalism, modernization and development narratives, neoliberal globalization, security discourses (such as Cold War security politics, and the rise of humanitarian intervention and human security), the challenges posed by the changing current geopolitical framework with the emergence of BRICs.
In this course, students will review and come to understand well the concept of globalization and... more In this course, students will review and come to understand well the concept of globalization and its implications for global governance. The course begins by offering insights into the history of globalization, and into the historical roots of contemporary global governance. Our discussions will then focus on some of the most pertinent processes associated with global governance, such as colonialism, modernization, and neoliberalism. Some of the substantive issues studied in the course will include: the structure of global economy, shifting scales in governance (such as the transition from statism to polycentrism), political processes related to the governing of mobility and citizenship in an age of globalization, emerging approaches to war and conflict, the rise of the principle of humanitarian intervention, as well as the politics of environmental challenges, and transnational networks of activism. Through an examination of various perspectives and historical traditions, students should be able to assess both the direction that global affairs is taking and the direction that global affairs ought to take.
This seminar challenges the assumptions found in the ‘canonical’ readings of IR Theory. It draws ... more This seminar challenges the assumptions found in the ‘canonical’ readings of IR Theory. It draws on a plethora of Non-Western thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Al-Afghani, Gandhi, Soekarno, Kwame Nkrumah, and Edward Said, among others. The course thus introduces students to several important political figures and concepts/issues from the non-Western world. It seeks to foster a sustained engagement with non-Western political views, voices and perspectives. It also aims to engage questions, such as: what would a non-Western IR theory look like? Or, to put it differently, what would a genuinely international theory look like, one that included a diversity of voices, histories, and worldviews? The course thus intends to offer an alternative framework for thinking about international politics that is more accurately ‘international.’
Between 1951 and 1980, Ryszard Kapuściński embarked on a tricontinental journalistic career, cove... more Between 1951 and 1980, Ryszard Kapuściński embarked on a tricontinental journalistic career, covering more than twenty-seven revolutions and coups in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. In this piece, I reflect on the ethics of the journalist bearing witness, and on the politics of Third World reportage.
Our recently published special issue with Interventions was featured on Jadaliyya. We had a chat ... more Our recently published special issue with Interventions was featured on Jadaliyya. We had a chat with the editors of Jadaliyya about crushed hopes and national liberation, and about current and future projects.
This essay is an appreciation and Critique of John Hobson's The Eurocentric Conception of World P... more This essay is an appreciation and Critique of John Hobson's The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics (2012). The book reveals the racist and Eurocentric origins of our discipline. By starting the historiography of our field from the 1890s (and earlier), Hobson shows us the continuities between our Eurocentric present and the racist past. This link is ominous. How much we don't know about our origins will surprise most if not all of us. Nevertheless, we critically engage certain aspects of his argument.
There has been renewed interest in the long 1960s over the last few years, not least spurred by t... more There has been renewed interest in the long 1960s over the last few years, not least spurred by the 50th anniversary, in 2018, of the 1968 global uprisings. What is remarkable about this interest is not simply the attempt to re-visit one of the most politically effervescent and revolutionary decades of the 20th century, but the shift in focus from Western universities’ campuses and protests to the far more violent and entangled space of decolonization/anticolonial struggles in the Third World. Decolonization was the complex background against which students’ protests and labour movements in the West (and beyond) unfolded. Moreover, the overtly militant leftist groups in the West/industrialized world who engaged in violent action (such as the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader Meinhoff Group in West Germany, and the Japanese Red Army in Japan) drew direct tactical and theoretical inspiration from the ongoing anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles in Algeria, Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba and China. Indeed, this is the era in which Third Worldism was at its zenith, generated not only by the fervour of anticolonial struggles, but also by landmark events such as the Bandung Conference (1955), the Tricontinental Conference in Havana (1966), the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement and of the New International Economic Order in the 1970s (see Sajed 2020). At its core, lay the quest for political and economic sovereignty, and the desire to forge alternative paths of political and economic autonomy. Varieties of Marxist doctrines and interpretations (especially Marxist-Leninism) were foundational in many ways to decolonization. And while decolonization and Third Worldism are not exclusively leftist phenomena, one cannot undertake an intellectual history of decolonization without taking seriously the varieties of leftist movements and thought that were at the core of many anticolonial projects. A new volume edited by Laure Guirguis, Arab Lefts, is precisely such an attempt to sketch the contours of the varieties of leftist thought, movements and figures in the Arab world between the 1950s and the 1970s. In that sense, the volume is a wonderful contribution not only to the general history of the long 1960s, but also to recent literature on leftist histories in the Arab world. This review essay seeks to not only map out the main themes and contributions offered by this collection, but also to provide a critical engagement with what I see as two significant lacunae in the volume: the absence of women’s voices and participation, and the lack of a more serious consideration of the impact of political Islam on Arab leftist movements and theorizations (and vice versa).
‘Küresel Güney’ terimi de tartışma götürmez bir kavram değil. Geçtiğimiz birkaç on yılda bu terim... more ‘Küresel Güney’ terimi de tartışma götürmez bir kavram değil. Geçtiğimiz birkaç on yılda bu terimin hem analitik hem tarihsel kullanışlılığı, ama daha çok da onun kadar tartışmalı bir kavram olan ‘Üçüncü Dünya’ ile bağlantısı üzerine çok sayıda tartışma yapıldı. Yine de bu tartışmaların ortasında, bu kavramların anlamı ve arasındaki bağlantılar üzerine gevşek de olsa bir uzlaşı ortaya çıktı. Burada her iki kavramın anlamları ve tarihçeleriyle birlikte aralarındaki bağlantı ve kopuşları açıklamaya çalışacağım.
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Journal Articles by Alina Sajed
From Pan-Africanism to Eastern European socialism; from contemporary Palestine, Iran, and the Philippines to indigenous struggles for sovereignty; how might thinking with and through gender and sexual politics shift the frame of what justice, freedom, care, and hope look and feel like? How might revolutionary pasts and revolutionary presents speak to feminist knowledge, and how might the radical futures imagined by those involved in gender and sexual politics tell different stories about familiar spaces, structures, and events? For instance, how might we complicate understandings of women’s positions either as nationalist heroes or as victims, bringing out nuances often left out from such debates? How might the long history of feminist re-imaginings of concepts such as freedom, sovereignty, community, care, sexuality, socialism, and more tell different histories of anticolonialism?
regarding the Algerian War of Independence. By examining their reflections on this violent anti colonial struggle, I seek to highlight the role of colonial difference and of racial hierarchies in the constitution of global politics. Fanon’s position relies on an ethos of decolonization and on an ethics of difference that—while specific to the Algerian context— also reverberated profoundly among other societies caught in the violence of imperial encounters. Camus’ conciliatory approach, however, and his moral equalization of the violence perpetrated by both sides enunciate the inherent racial hierarchies underpinning liberal narratives. I argue that the limits inherent in Fanon’s thought—but also its latent potentialities for decolonial thinking—become apparent when examined through the lens of the contemporary activism among North African migrants and their descendants in France. The emergence of self-proclaimed decolonial movements constitutes an attempt to enact a decolonial transnational citizenship, which contests the racial boundaries of French Republicanism. But it also signals a different vision of the universal—one that is entrenched in a terrain of historical specificity and which holds more promise in contesting the global colour line.
From Pan-Africanism to Eastern European socialism; from contemporary Palestine, Iran, and the Philippines to indigenous struggles for sovereignty; how might thinking with and through gender and sexual politics shift the frame of what justice, freedom, care, and hope look and feel like? How might revolutionary pasts and revolutionary presents speak to feminist knowledge, and how might the radical futures imagined by those involved in gender and sexual politics tell different stories about familiar spaces, structures, and events? For instance, how might we complicate understandings of women’s positions either as nationalist heroes or as victims, bringing out nuances often left out from such debates? How might the long history of feminist re-imaginings of concepts such as freedom, sovereignty, community, care, sexuality, socialism, and more tell different histories of anticolonialism?
regarding the Algerian War of Independence. By examining their reflections on this violent anti colonial struggle, I seek to highlight the role of colonial difference and of racial hierarchies in the constitution of global politics. Fanon’s position relies on an ethos of decolonization and on an ethics of difference that—while specific to the Algerian context— also reverberated profoundly among other societies caught in the violence of imperial encounters. Camus’ conciliatory approach, however, and his moral equalization of the violence perpetrated by both sides enunciate the inherent racial hierarchies underpinning liberal narratives. I argue that the limits inherent in Fanon’s thought—but also its latent potentialities for decolonial thinking—become apparent when examined through the lens of the contemporary activism among North African migrants and their descendants in France. The emergence of self-proclaimed decolonial movements constitutes an attempt to enact a decolonial transnational citizenship, which contests the racial boundaries of French Republicanism. But it also signals a different vision of the universal—one that is entrenched in a terrain of historical specificity and which holds more promise in contesting the global colour line.
Manuel Castells
Joseph Stiglitz
David Held
Jan Aart Scholte
Each thinker’s contribution to the field is evaluated and assessed, and each entry includes a helpful guide to further reading. Fully cross-referenced throughout, this remarkable reference guide is essential reading for students of politics and international relations, economics, sociology, history, anthropology and literary studies.
This book explores the reality of the lives of North African migrants in postcolonial France, with a particular focus on their access to political entitlements such as citizenship and rights. This reality is complicated even further by complex practices of memory undertaken by Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals, who negotiate, in their writings, between the violent memory of the French colonial project in the Maghreb, and the contemporary conundrums of postcolonial migration.
The book pursues thus the politics of (post)colonial memory by tracing its representations in literary, political, and visual narratives belonging to various Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals, who see themselves as living and writing between France and the Maghreb. By adopting a postcolonial perspective, a perspective quite marginal in International Relations, the book investigates a different international relations, which emerges via narratives of migration. A postcolonial standpoint is instrumental in understanding the relations between class, gender, and race, which interrogate and reflect more generally on the shared (post)colonial violence between North Africa and France, and on the politics of mediating violence through complex practices of memory.
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/escaping-the-nation-w-alina-sajed-and-timothy-seidel/id1440795663?i=1000444278549