Symposia | The Duck of Minerva

Symposia

On reckoning and repair in the international: revisiting imperialism and race in IR

by Jasmine K. Gani & Jenna Marshall | 5 April 2024, 1030 EDT | Academia, International Affairs, Race, Race and Imperialism in International Relations, Theory & Methods | 0 Comments

THe short-term contributions of the Special Issue have been worthwhile, but there remains a continued concern and challenge that with greater attention paid to race and imperialism in IR, these issues will become co-opted into the game of academic production, sanitised as intellectual curiosities, instead of being treated as matters of life and death that need to be opposed practically and not just on paper.

On the politics of decolonization theory and practice

by Heloise Weber | 5 April 2024, 1000 EDT | Academia, International Affairs, Race, Race and Imperialism in International Relations, Theory & Methods | 0 Comments

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

A reckoning with the traditional diplomatic community

by Patrick Quinton-Brown | 5 April 2024, 0930 EDT | Academia, International Affairs, Race, Race and Imperialism in International Relations, States & Regions, Theory & Methods | 0 Comments

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.

Landmarks and warning signs

by Inderjeet Parmar | 4 April 2024, 1000 EDT | Academia, International Affairs, Race, Race and Imperialism in International Relations, Theory & Methods | 0 Comments

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.

International Relations and the Problem of Literacy

by Lina Benabdallah | 4 April 2024, 0930 EDT | Academia, Race, Race and Imperialism in International Relations, Theory & Methods

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

Is Latin America “International” enough for IR?

by Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli | 4 April 2024, 0900 EDT | Academia, International Affairs, Race, Race and Imperialism in International Relations, States & Regions, Theory & Methods

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.

On the Global Entanglements of Race, Empire, and Knowledge

by Martin Bayly | 3 April 2024, 0940 EDT | Academia, International Affairs, Race, Race and Imperialism in International Relations, Theory & Methods

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 what?

by Oumar Ba | 3 April 2024, 0935 EDT | International Affairs, Race and Imperialism in International Relations, Symposia, Theory & Methods

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”?

Introduction to the Symposium on “Race and Imperialism in International Relations”

by Jasmine K. Gani & Jenna Marshall | 3 April 2024, 0930 EDT | Academia, International Affairs, Race, Race and Imperialism in International Relations, Theory & Methods

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.

Indeterminacy, Uncertain Contexts and the Dual Nature of Norms

by Lucrecia García Iommi | 8 December 2022, 1241 EST | International Norms in a Time of Uncertainty, International Organization, Security, Theory & Methods

When it comes norm dynamics and how we theorize them, uncertainty presents something of a paradox. We study norms because we think that they matter. But if norms are inherently uncertain, then how is it possible that they constitute, constrain, and otherwise shape the behavior of global actors? Unless norms produce stable and defined expectations, then how can they have the power to structure international politics?

Autonomous Weapons Systems: Uncertainty and Anticipatory Norm-building

by Berenike Prem | 1 December 2022, 0900 EST | International Norms in a Time of Uncertainty, International Organization, Security, Theory & Methods

Since 2014 the international community has considered the issue of autonomy in weapons systems under the framework of the United Nations (UN) Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). Despite hopes that 2022 would see some kind of breakthrough, the 2019 eleven guiding principles remains the only international agreement regarding lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS or AWS). Many believe that action is long overdue. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots argues that: With ongoing uncertainties around technological change and instabilities in international security, a principled...

Making norms for uncertain times to come

by Nils Stockmann | 28 November 2022, 0900 EST | International Norms in a Time of Uncertainty, International Organization, Theory & Methods

At the 1939 World Fair in New York City, the big attraction was "Futurama," an exhibition put on by the U.S. car manufacturer General Motors. Every visitor to Futurama received a souvenir — a small blue-white badge that read “I have seen the future.” That is, the future presented by (at the time) one of most influential companies in the world, one built around its main product: the automobile. Yet the exhibition wasn't exactly wrong. It was part of an effort to sell Americans on automobile-centric planning and development: its "theory of the future" produced a future (or, in current jargon,...

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