About:
This presentation offers a conversation about racism and coloniality in past and present-day ideas, practices and discourses on solidarity beyond borders. Rather than as glitches or occasional aberrations enacted by actors of ill-will, they are understood as constitutive features of the global order, including the aid industrial complex. The aim of this talk is to collectively think through the implications of engaging decolonial, antiracist and abolitionist thought to the politics and practices of solidarity. I engage epistemic Blackness as a methodology, i.e. I engage knowledges from experiences and sense-makings from peoples of African descent, and end up centering the concepts of dignity, retreat and repair radically rethink what solidarity beyond borders, coloniality and racism could look like.
Speaker:
DR. OLIVIA UMURERWA RUTAZIBWA
Dr. Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa (1979) is a Belgian/Rwandan International Relations scholar and former journalist. She is Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK and Senior Research Fellow of the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies (JIAS), South Africa.
She holds a PhD in Political Science/International Relations from Ghent University (2013, Belgium), following the doctoral training programme at the European University Institute (2001-6, Italy) and internships at the European Commission in Brussels and the EU Institute for Security Studies in Paris (2003-4). Before joining the LSE, she was Senior Lecturer in European and International (Development) Studies at the University of Portsmouth. (2013-21, UK).
Her research and teaching focuses on ways to decolonise (international) solidarity. Building on epistemic Blackness as methodology, she turns to recovering and reconnecting philosophies and practices of dignity and repair and retreat in the postcolony (e.g. autonomous recovery in Somaliland, agaciro in Rwanda and Black Power in the US, Tricontinentalism and the political thought of Thomas Sankara) to theorise solidarity anticolonially.
She has published in various (academic) journals (Foreign Policy, Millennium Journal of International Studies, Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, Postcolonial Studies, Ethical Perspectives, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, and Journal of Contemporary European Studies), is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics (with Robbie Shilliam, 2018) and Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning (with Sara de Jong and Rosalba Icaza, Routledge, 2018).
She is associate editor of International Feminist Journal of Politics and recently joined the editorial boards of International Politics Review and Review of International Studies and the 2021-22 Section and Programme Chair of the Global Development Section of the International Studies Association.
She is the former Africa desk editor, journalist and columnist at the Brussels based quarterly MO* Magazine and the author of forthcoming non-academic monograph The End of the White World. A Decolonial Manifesto (in Dutch, EPO). In 2011 she delivered a TEDx talk titled: Decolonizing Western Minds; in 2019 she had widely watched conversation on racism [Racism Serves a Purpose – in Dutch, subtitled in English] in the interview collective ZIGO [Zwijgen is Geen Optie – Silence is Not an Option].