There has been increasing attention paid to, as well as research on, the ongoing impacts and outcomes of imperialism and colonialism on international politics, including on the subject of how we research and communicate information about international/global politics. The Review of International Studies (RIS) has published a range of articles on the politics of knowledge production, ranging from conceptual histories, debates about research approaches, as well as examinations of historical and contemporary effects of imperialism and colonialism. In doing so, the journal has hosted contributions that present critical reworkings of what International Relations is and offer ways to imagine and act towards what it could be.
This RIS Special Collection brings together some of these key texts, with the caveat that they are not exhaustive of the subject matter. Hobson calls for a “post-racist critical IR” in his 2007 article. Building on this, Barkawi and Laffey critique the Eurocentric standpoints of security studies and propose an alternative postcolonial approach. Bayly, writing on the imperial imagination and framing of Afghanistan, provides an example of rethinking and reworking categories in international relations. Charbonneau’s article on peacebuilding in Francophone Africa illustrates the complexities of peacebuilding while complicating humanitarian and imperial meanings of intervention.
In more recent articles, the coloniality of knowledge production is more explicitly acknowledged and critiqued. Rabea Khan critically examines the interconnections made between religion and terrorism in scholarship and policymaking on terrorism and illustrates how religion is made to be counter to an image of a (secular, cosmopolitan) West, with attendant implications for counterterrorism. Sulley and Richey illustrate their attempts to decolonize a concept (humanitarianism) through collaborative research practices in Tanzania. Cho and Seo focus on narratives in the form of a South Korean novel to critique Westphalian IR and offer an alternative vision for world politics. From regional standpoints, el Kurd illustrates some challenges to decolonizing IR in the Arab world and thus the related connections to global knowledge production regarding IR, while Tieku turns to Ghana to illustrate IR in and from Ghana through the Legon School of International Relations.
The RIS forum on “Decolonising to Reimagine International Relations” in Issue 49(3) contains numerous interventions on rethinking and reworking international relations, globally. Finally, el-Malik’s article innovatively outlines what decolonial practice could be like at an everyday level and offers an alternative way to think and write about racialized violence that connects personal narratives with global concerns. In doing so, it, along with the other texts in this Special Collection, spotlight the production of knowledge and provide alternative ways to think, write, and act about international politics.
These articles thus provide a starting point to consider how IR scholars can include reflexivity regarding the inequities of global knowledge production, in terms of access and meaning-making, while discussing and debating IR research.