Can International Relations (IR) be studied without reproducing its violence? This is the central question of this article. To investigate this, the first step is to expose the violence that we argue remains at the heart of our discipline. The article thus begins by exploring the disciplinary practices firmly grounded in relations of coloniality that plague disciplines more broadly and IR in particular. An analysis of IR’s epistemic violence is followed by an autoethnographic exploration of IR’s violent practices, specifically the violent practices in which one of the article’s authors knowingly and unknowingly engaged in as part of an impact-related trip to the international compound of Mogadishu International Airport in Somalia. Here the article lays bare how increasing demands on IR scholars to become ‘international experts’ having impact on the policy world is pushing them more and more into spaces governed by colonial violence they are unable to escape. The final section of this article puts forward a tentative path toward a less violent IR that advocates almost insignificant acts of subversion in our disciplinary approach and practices aimed at exposing and challenging this epistemic and structural violence. The article concludes that IR does not need to be abandoned, but rather, by taking on a position of discomfort, needs to acknowledge its violence and attempt to mitigate it – one almost insignificant step at a time.
This article problematises Critical Terrorism Studies's (CTS) seeming reluctance to engage in causal explanation. An analysis of the meta-theoretical assumptions on causation in both orthodox as well as critical terrorism studies reveals that the latter's refusal to incorporate causal analysis in its broader research agenda reproduces -despite its commitment to epistemological pluralism -the former's understanding of causation as the only sustainable one. Elemental to this understanding is the idea that causation refers to the regular observation of constant conjunction. Due to the positivist leanings of such a conception, CTS is quick to dismiss it as consolidating Orthodox Terrorism Studies's lack of critical self-reflexivity, responsibility of the researcher, and dedication towards informing state-led policies of counter-terrorism. Drawing on recent work in philosophy of science and International Relations, the article advances an alternative understanding of causation that emphasises its interpretative, normative, and dialogical fabric. It is therefore argued that CTS should reclaim causal analysis as an essential element of its research agenda. This not only facilitates a more robust challenge against orthodox terrorism studies' conventional understanding of causation but also consolidates CTS's endeavour of deepening and broadening our understanding that (re)embeds terrorist violence in its historical and social context.
In this paper, the concept of white hallucination is developed through the prism of a recent debate about the permissibility of defending colonialism. The latter is, unsurprisingly, steeped in colonial nostalgia and a defence of free speech. These arguments, however, have to be related to the operation of whiteness itself. White hallucinations concern the psychopathological tendency of whiteness to incessantly reinscribe its mastery of the world. Cases for defending colonialism expose whiteness as a delusion that is reasserted by demanding 'proof' against its normativity while simultaneously discarding alternative knowledge claims made by testimonial epistemologies of colonial subjugation and dehumanization. The argument further unravels whiteness as a position-without-positionality that seeks to maintain its normativity and supremacy by aligning itself with rationality, objectivity and humanity as such and subjugating non-white perspectives, experiences and knowledges to the spectre of nonexistence. KEYWORDSWhiteness; colonialism; epistemicide; Frantz Fanon; free speech because white men can't police their imagination black men are dying Claudia RankineA Case for Colonialism. No matter how one reads this title of a recently published (and soon retracted) peer-reviewed academic article, the suggestion that there is such a thing as a reasonable and sincere defence of colonial enslavement, conquest, genocide, exploitation, subjugation and dehumanization immediately moves beyond the rhetoric of innocent provocation. Although it is easy to dismiss this as mere academic clickbait that should not be dignified with a substantiated response, leaving the case unchallenged arguably risks becoming complicit in its normalization. Typically, then, the controversy around the argument and especially its retraction solicited a range of responses that, while not agreeing with the argument itself, nonetheless opposed its retraction as a censorious violation of the virtuous endeavour of knowledge production. The whole affair could have been easily dismissed as further insulating the academic bubble if the suggestion that arguments such as this should be debated rather than discarded did not find
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