The ethics of the international monetary system (IMS) can be framed either as a case of background injustice or of structural injustice. Both ideas suggest that due to the background conditions, the interaction of agents, in a context of no rules, can lead to domination and unfairness. Moreover, both ideas emphasise the need to create regulation, or a structure, that prevents domination and unfairness. This article asks how (if at all) do monetary regimes, or each of the three scenarios that stem from the Mundell-Fleming trilemma, raise domination and unfairness. This article identifies domination and unfairness in both regimes with open capital markets: the one with floating exchange rates and the one with fixed exchange rates. Moreover, it offers a principle of non-domination, according to which institutions of the IMS ought to guarantee effective sovereignty of participant states or offer an equal distribution of this value when securing full effective sovereignty for all is not possible. For the last regime, of closed capital markets, this article identifies unfairness but no domination. By identifying domination and unfairness in each regime, this article proposes policies and regulation, or a structure, to prevent and mitigate these issues.

What is the relationship between political ideology and realism in international relations? This article reconceptualizes the realist relationship with ideology in terms of a recurring experience of ideological exile. Exile was a crucial part of the biographical experience of early realists like Hans Morgenthau and John Herz. I argue that the idea of exile also marked an aspect of their relationship to ideology. Realists often allied themselves with ideological camps, through which they aimed to shape political practice. Yet realists mistrusted ideological utopianisms, and these liaisons often ended badly – in effect driving realists into ideological exile. The resulting exile persona has marked realism durably, recurring among later realists who do not have a biographical experience of exile in the conventional sense. Exile has thus become a persistent, constitutive feature of the intellectual project of realism itself. My argument has ongoing implications for how we understand realism as a political project.

This paper analyzes two ideal-type signaling interactions that are fundamental to international relations: reassurance and coercive bargaining. In reassurance, states attempt to signal that their goals are compatible in order to avoid conflict, whereas in coercive bargaining, they attempt to inflate the incompatibility of their goals in order to increase their negotiating leverage over a disputed asset. This article conceptualizes these two types of signaling interaction and delineates semi-overlapping conditions under which each obtains. It then identifies three ways in which credible signaling occurs differently in reassurance versus coercive bargaining. First, the directional effects of power shifts are reversed in each interaction, generating incentives for rising states to misrepresent in reassurance but not in bargaining. Second, whereas signals that are costless to honest, high-resolve senders are widely available in bargaining, the most prominent reassurance signals are typically costly even to honest senders with benign intentions. Third, it is often difficult to infer which issue area motivates senders’ behaviors in reassurance, whereas in bargaining senders have incentives to reveal which issues they prioritize. In combination, these distinctions suggest that reassurance is systematically more difficult than signaling high resolve.

International Relations (IR) has come under increasing and sustained criticism for marginalizing Africa’s intellectual traditions, rich history, Indigenous knowledge systems, and lived experiences. Several scholars of IR have argued that meaningful engagement with African contexts and thought would lead to better theory and pedagogy, more robust concepts, sharper analysis, and the study of issues that have greater relevance to contemporary global life. Despite the seriousness and widespread nature of the criticism, it is rare to find manuscripts in major IR journals that move beyond critique to demonstrate concretely how centring Africa in IR scholarship could transform the discipline or substantially enhance its analytical tools. This symposium takes up that difficult task by showing how a focus on African systems of thought can enrich IR’s conceptual vocabulary, reorient core assumptions, and expand the range of questions the discipline is equipped to address.

How can we read International Relations from the perspective of Africa in a way that does not perpetually put the continent in a permanent state of exception vis-à-vis global politics? What strategies are available to study Africa without overhyping narratives of its rise or demise? This article contends, drawing on Edward Said, that adopting contrapuntal reading enables reading Africa’s place in international politics beyond narratives and counter-narratives of Africa moving from one exceptional state of despair to an exceptional state of prosperity with nothing in between. The article uses the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative and its counter-narrative of Africa as a place of perpetual lack, deviance, and demise to illustrate how to practically adopt contrapuntalism as a method and as an ethos when engaging African perspectives in IR. It argues that contrapuntalism is a commitment to practicing critical thinking and questioning Eurocentric modes of thinking when approaching mainstream accounts of the history, origin, or interpretations of any political event. Contrapuntalism acknowledges that dominant narratives need to be read side-by-side with narratives of resistance and that non-Western concepts do not always need to be translated or rendered legible by creating (forced) Eurocentric equivalents for them to be legitimate or valid.

The article examines the ideas of Pan-Africanism and Black internationalism as African political thought and core concepts in African International Relations. They acquire significant meaning through their framing as political activism or as theoretical frameworks aimed at advancing social and political change. Pan-Africanism has been understood as an idea and a movement for African peoples’ self-determination and solidarity worldwide and has been linked to the concept of internationalism, specifically Black internationalism. Both concepts call for solidarity between Africa and its diasporas worldwide, and they both evoke the ideals of self-determination and Black liberation. The article argues that the two concepts are deployed not as problem-solving theories but rather as intellectual activism. They are central pillars of African intellectual exercises that seek to change or transform the international system to reflect the experiences of Africans and Black people, who have historically been marginalized in both scholarship and practices of international politics.

The field of International Relations (IR) has come under increasing and sustained criticism for producing and disseminating a particular reading of European history, one rooted in violence, as if it were universal knowledge. Generations of students, academics, practitioners, and policymakers have been taught and socialized into accepting this violent historical experience as the norm and, implicitly, as a reflection of human nature. As a result, the dominant accounts of IR tend to foreground competitive, conflictual, domineering, power-seeking, and exploitative behaviours as defining features of international life. This understanding of IR marginalizes and often ignores Indigenous ways of knowing that emphasize relationality, solidarity, mutual care, and cooperative forms of social organization. In this article, we argue that centring Afrocentric Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS), particularly their conceptualizations of persons in IR scholarship, has the potential to move the field beyond its bleak and violent roots towards a more humane and relational epistemology. The AIKS-centred approach to IR is better suited to capturing the nuances of contemporary global life while speaking to the lived experiences of Africans and potentially other Indigenous peoples around the world.

How should we assess and judge the harm inflicted by egregious wrongdoing and how should we respond to such wrongdoings after they have occurred? These are the questions this contribution tackles from an African communitarian Ubuntu worldview that centres the humanity of everyone impacted in both its understanding of wrongdoing and remedy. It argues that restoration of shared humanity is regarded as the primary and ultimate function of justice in the African systems of political thought.

Scholars of Africa’s International Relations (IR) have criticized how the continent is studied in IR and its positioning on the margins of the field. Though a significant portion of the IR literature on Africa focuses on gender, and women, African feminist thought has not been centred in this literature. In this paper, I examine how African feminisms can contribute to IR. I show that by drawing on African feminist thought, IR can address weaknesses in how Africa is studied in the field. Specifically, I discuss how African feminists’ understanding of the complexity of context, and attention to history and intersectionality, provide direction on how to study African states and societies and their interaction with the international.

Spurred on in part by the large social justice mobilizations that began in 2020, recent years have seen growing calls for diversifying and decolonizing the disciplinary practices in the field of International Relations (IR). In response to these calls within the field and across academia more broadly, faculty and students in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University embarked on a project to produce a ‘Resource Bank’ highlighting and centring alternatives to Euro-American epistemologies, pedagogies, and ontologies that have thus far dominated the IR field. Drawing on our experiences as project managers of this Resource Bank project since its inception in 2021, we discuss some of the most salient issues and important challenges that emerged in the course of this work. We employ a postcolonial theoretical framework to tease out and problematize the Eurocentric foundations of the IR field and utilize the Resource Bank to reimagine research and teaching in the IR field.