What are the legacies of colonialism

The legacy of colonialism and empire continues to structure both contemporary International Politics and the discipline of International Relations itself. The articles in this reading list examine the contemporary legacies of colonialism and neo-colonial relationships of power in areas from peacebuilding and UK foreign policy to International financial institutions and the NGO sector. They also offer contributions to ongoing debates about how IR and the policy world remain grounded in imperial ways of producing knowledge about world politics.

1. Pacific women's anti-nuclear poetry: centring Indigenous knowledges

Rebecca H Hogue, Anaïs Maurer

Suggested seminar topics:
What role have Pacific women activists played in global anti-nuclear politics?
What are the advantages of engaging with poetry as a form of political knowledge?

2. Race and racism in the founding of the modern world order

Amitav Acharya

Suggested seminar topics:
a) How has racism manifested in the liberal international order?
b) Can the US-world order and the discipline more broadly shed its colonial origins?

3. From discourse to practice: Orientalism, western policy and the Arab uprisings

Jasmine K Gani

Suggested seminar topics:
a) How did orientalist tropes inform western understandings of the Arab spring?
b) In what ways can Orientalist discourses shape the policy actions of western governments?

4. African experiences and alternativity in International Relations theorizing about security

Kwaku Danso, Kwesi Aning

Suggested seminar topics:
a) What is ‘methodological whiteness’?
b) Can hybrid security orders help decolonize security studies? How?

5. Exploring mechanisms of whiteness: how counterterrorism practitioners disrupt anti-racist expertise

Amal Abu-Bakare

Suggested seminar topics:
Do counterterrorism partitioners marginalize anti-racist knowledges?
How does institutionalized whiteness manifest in a counterterrorism context?

6. Globalization, deglobalization and knowledge production

Navnita Chadha Behera

Suggested seminar topics:
What is the relationship between deglobalization and decolonization?
What do differing forms of deglobalization mean for the discipline of International Relations?

7. Securing the nation through the politics of sexual violence: tracing resonances between Delhi and Cologne

Billy Holzberg, Priya Raghavan

Suggested seminar topics:
a) How should we understand the relationship between contemporary nationalist responses to sexual violence and histories of racism and coloniality?
b) What would it mean to extricate the politics of sexual violence from nationalist and/or imperial policies of the state?

8. Decolonizing branded peacebuilding: abjected women talk back to the Finnish Women, Peace and Security agenda

Marjaana Jauhola

Suggested seminar topics:
a) What parallels are between the gendered colonial impacts of the women peace and security agenda on Sami and Aceh women and how have these been resisted?
b) What, if possible, might processes of decolonization within the women peace and security agenda look like?

9. State reconstruction in Africa: the relevance of Claude Ake's political thought

Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe

Suggested seminar topics:
a) In what ways do existing discourses on peacebuilding in Africa reproduce colonial patterns of knowledge production and policymaking?
b) Is Arowosegbe’s suggestion of a convergence between international interventionism and indigenous solutions the way forward?

10. On the pedagogy of ‘small wars’

Tarak Barkawi

Suggested seminar topics:
a) In what ways do Western perceptions of ‘small wars’ actively inhibit the ability of Western governments to understand them?
b) What influence do histories of resistance to and participation in imperialism have on how wars are fought and understood today?

11. The missionary position: NGOs and development in Africa

Firoze Manji and Carl O’Coill

Suggested seminar topics:
a) What are the key features of colonial missionary organisations and how have western reproduced this coloniality in their actions post-independence?
b) Manji and O’Coill suggest a move away from a colonial politics of development towards justice-oriented NGO action, to what extent would this make western NGOs less colonial?

12. African states, citizenship and war: a case-study

Mahmood Mamdani

Suggested seminar topics:
a) What role do imperial conceptualizations of citizenship play in fuelling political conflict in post-colonial states? 
b) What should be the basis of rights in political communities?

Snapshot from history

The following article was written by Shridath Surendranath Ramphal, senior Guyanese politician and then Secretary General of the Commonwealth. During his time as Secretary General, Ramphal was a vocal critic of both British support for apartheid South Africa and the existing international economic order. In this article Ramphal reflects on the position of the commonwealth as an institution and apartheid as a legacy of colonialism.

‘Our and the world's advantage’: the constructive Commonwealth

Shridath Ramphal

Suggested seminar topics:
a) How does Ramphal conceptualize the role of the Commonwealth in decolonization?
b) Are international institutions grounded in the structure of former empires inherently colonial? What are the possibilities and limitations of anticolonial activism within international institutions?

What are legacies of colonialism in Africa?

What are the legacies of colonialism in India?

What is the legacy of imperialism and colonialism?

What are the legacies of South Africa colonialism?