Race and imperialism in international relations

Professor Andrew Dorman

Well, welcome. It’s a delight to see you all here, and those on, in person and those online. Welcome to the launch of the International Affairs Journal centenary year. We’re delighted that you’re here, we’re delighted to have colleagues and friends on the stage to present to us our first edition of the year. So, the journal is 100 years, and I hope you’re already engaged with our centenary celebration. Over the course of the last century the journal has changed in many ways. It started off as a journal that recorded the events of what was being said in the House, including questions and answers, and it’s moved on to a journal, which very much looks at academic debates and so forth, and looks at the world of today and tomorrow.

But at its heart it still focusses on that engagement between policymakers and academics and others, interested in the events of the world, and we’re hopeful we can carry this forward. And I’m delighted to introduce our January edition. It’s Jenna and Jasmine who very kindly edited for us. They won a competition. We had a competition to say, “What should this, that first edition of our 100th anniversary be?” And our Editorial Board looked at it, evaluated it and came up and really much enjoyed the idea of looking at race and imperialism, ‘cause it’s been at the heart of a lot of the debates within the journal for – out its time. And it’s great to see this collection of papers really explore the issues related to race and imperialism that affect both the journal over its time, but also, debates we’re seeing today, and how our society is moving forward. And I hope that you all have enjoyed looking at the edition, and we’ve got copies here for those who haven’t seen it as yet.

Before I hand over to the panel and let them get on with tonight’s proceedings, I just want to say a few thank-yous. First to the Members of Chatham House, and to the readership of the journal, for the long-term support for the journal in terms of how it’s gone. I’d like very much to thank the panel for their work tonight on putting the edition together, and their contributions, and introducing and looking at those papers and offering some critiques. Thank you very much for making this event worthwhile.

I’d like to thank the team within Chatham House, the events team, for helping to put this together, and especially also the team with International Affairs. We are – I have a great team. I’m the Editor. I have the easiest job of all, ‘cause I have a great team putting up and doing all the hard work, and I just get to stand here and pontificate occasionally, and so forth.

I’d like to thank the panellists, and I would like to especially thank Jenna and Jasmine for putting this edition together. It’s been a real joy working with you, and I think the collection they’ve produced has been really fantastic, and I hope you’ll enjoy it. And with that, let’s get on with tonight’s proceedings. Thank you again, and over to you two. Thank you [applause].

Dr Jenna Marshall

Thank you so much, Andrew, for those kind words, and again, welcome to tonight’s event, the official launch of the 100th anniversary special issue. My name is Jenna Marshall. I’m one of the Co-Editors and it is my pleasure to introduce tonight’s panellists: Dr Jasmine K Gani, Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at University of St Andrews, Dr Amal Abu-Bakare, Lecturer in the Politics Department at the University of Liverpool, and Inderjeet Parmar, Professor of International Politics at City University of London and Visiting Professor at the LSE.

So, tonight’s format will begin with each speaker offering up an opportunity to speak for approximately five to seven minutes. We will then follow with an open discussion, with the panellists, and then we would later open to the floor for in-person, as well as comments and questions virtually. So, just some instructions for the online attendees: please continue to submit questions using the Q&A function. Please try to keep your questions as succinct as possible, to allow us to get as many questions as possible, and a reminder to provide a question mark, they say right here in the notes, to – when posing a question, rather than a comment.

For those of you in attendance, we ask that you keep your mask on, and during the question and answer session, if you could raise your hands, I will call on you, and there will be a roving boom mic, and you can then remove your mask and pose your questions then. There will also be, at the end of tonight’s event, a drinks reception, so you’re all welcome to attend that as well. So, without further ado, welcome, again, to the panellists, and I will pose the first question to my Co-Editor, Jasmine. I think for many, many would be interested in how colonial-era thinking has persisted within international relations research, and how has this impacted policy implementation up to this point?

Dr Jasmine K. Gani

First of all, thank you so much, Jenna, my Co-Editor. It’s been a joy to work with her on this special issue. A huge thank you to Andrew, the Editor of International Affairs, and the entire team. It’s been a pleasure to work with them. To all of the contributors, it’s been such a joy to see the journey that their articles have gone on and we really are very certain that it’s going to have quite an important intervention in the field, and thanks also to Inderjeet for being a discussant.

So, in response to this question, how has the colonial era affected academia, and especially international relations? We do recognise with this special issue that there’s been a lot of important intellectual activist, grassroots and even institutional work on race and imperialism, not just in recent years, but going back for decades, especially in the Global South. But we argue in the premise of this special issue that there remains a neglect of race and imperialism in much of mainstream Western knowledge production, and so we can see this as a product of various processes, how this colonial-era thinking is retained in knowledge production. So, first is a very incidental one, and it’s that knowledge is fundamentally shaped by one’s standpoint, so, what’s in, what’s visible to the individual, right? What seems important to them? What to them seems worth knowing about and writing about then gets reflected in their intellectual work, subconsciously even. So, if the producers of knowledge are not adversely affected by racism or imperialism, then it might not seem important enough to then research that issue or teach that issue.

The second way in which that neglect occurs, and which then feeds into policy, is less accidental, right? So there’ll be a silencing of certain topics to retain the status quo, and existing dynamics of power within the discipline, but also within the policy world, and if we give more attention to, for example, matters of race, to matters of imperialism, then who we listen to, what sources we take into consideration, the sites of knowledge production and even of power necessarily shift.

And then finally, as a number of the articles in the special issue argue, IR has been historically complicit, international relations in particular has historically been complicit in constructing so-called watersheds, in which racism and imperialism are relegated to history, whether that’s via the creation of the United Nations, or with the end of the Cold War, for example. That produces the idea that, “If racism and imperialism occurred in the past then why do we still need to talk about it today?” And rather than having a reckoning with the past, therefore, it allows a redemption of that past and allows a redemption of both Western identity and academia, and then also justifies positions of hegemony or leadership, whether in politics or knowledge.

And so, just to close, we make four key contentions in this special issue, all of the fantastic contributions argue these points in various ways. And the first is that there is an assumption often that there is a gap between academic knowledge production and policy, and so knowledge production, academia is filled with jargon, it might be quite theoretical, might be quite abstract, and that this doesn’t have relevance to policy, and in this special issue we contest that. The evidence has demonstrated, actually that’s not necessarily the case, and there’s in fact been quite a close entanglement between policymaking and knowledge production, and academia has played quite a key role in that.

Secondly, we argue that in that entanglement, in that relationship, academics have historically supplied policymaking, especially in the Western context, with colonial ideas, so actively constructing hierarchies of race, which then feed into foreign policy or development, which then is justified because it has an aura of scientific credibility. Sometimes academics make a transition, in fact, personally from the university into policymaking, either in, as government officials or in consultancy.

The second argument that we make, in which this entanglement persists, is that policymaking, and especially colonial or racialised policymaking, provides a foundation for knowledge production. So, academics, knowledge producers might not question the status quo, might not interrogate the status quo, might normalise racist or imperialist underpinnings to policy.

And then finally, we argue that actually that entanglement has also been contested. So you do have knowledge producers, as I mentioned right at the outset, who have pushed back against imperialist or colonial or racist policies. You might even have practitioners that don’t typically get classified as policymakers or practitioners, especially from the grassroots and the bottom up, who might be challenging that imperialism that exists not just in policymaking, but also, in knowledge production. So, the question that we end with, in the special issue and we’re left with, is the responsibilities of both the practitioners, policymakers and academics, knowledge producers, to actually take that contestation seriously, to take that archive of knowledge seriously, moving forward. Thank you.

Dr Jenna Marshall

Brilliant. Well, onto Amal. So, taking – so, your work has been on counterterrorism. Taking the UK Prevent strategy, and I’ll come back to you, Jasmine, as well, taking the Arab Spring as examples, are there any identifiable areas, within policy, which are predicated on this outdated thinking that Jasmine has outlined for us?

Dr Amal Abu-Bakare

Yes.

Dr Jenna Marshall

Short answer.

Dr Amal Abu-Bakare

No, I mean, the main focus of my article is just showing and giving example of the ways that counterterrorism continues to be observed as a practice that racializes populations, as part of its imperial objectives that are still here, and to demonstrate how counterterrorism procedures continue to normalise racial inequalities that have existed at the heart of Western nations, since their conception.

I mean, you can tell from my inelegant way of speaking, that’s definitely right here, so I encourage you to read it, but the logic that we use to assess what claims of oppression are still valid, particularly when they conflict with government infrastructure, national security frameworks, and to show us where we are in the, sort of, racial hierarchy and so what constitutes the real nation. And to just show that when we try to use academic expertise, often we are shut down, particularly when we’re in policy spaces, because the academic expertise is questioned, because its body is a body that’s a non-white body. So, I think that when we are the knowledge producers, often we’re not recognised as such, even when it comes into issues that greatly affect people who are in those direct situations.

So, particularly I examine both British and Canadian debates on the situation of Islamophobia, and it’s usually information deriving of British Muslims, Canadian Muslims themselves that are countering that of counterterrorism experts, counterterrorism law enforcers. But they are told that, one, their experiences must be regulated, so that they can be understood for their objective merit, and, two, their experiences are secondary. Which is wonderful, but then don’t commit to any sort of plan or security to ask for some sort of respect in relation to citizenry, and respect in relation to understanding that we’re on your side in the issue of racial inequity and systemic racism.

Dr Jenna Marshall

Jasmine.

Dr Jasmine K. Gani

So, my paper in the special issue speaks to the Arab uprisings and the reaction both amongst academics and policymakers, and if we look at the discourse in the immediacy of the uprisings, there was a euphoria. Even though it was unpredictable, there was a sense that a lot of the discourse was, in the media as well, was predicting the Arab uprisings as following a Western trajectory, and so the euphoria was very optimistic.

There was a sense that it was a liberal model that was being followed, a democratic, liberal model, and so you had the use of the term ‘Arab Spring’, something which is quite optimistic. But as the trajectory of the uprisings seemed to change, it seemed to be messier. You also had non-liberal forces coming to the forefront, who’d been very active for decades in opposing those authoritarian regimes. Then the nature of that discourse shifted, and you started to see rising to the top a lot of the Orientalist framings of the uprisings that had gone back for decades, in the knowledge production about the Middle East. So question marks about whether the changes in regimes would lead to increased sectarianism, whether they’re going to have a likelihood of increased conflict, whether you’re going to see increased repression of freedom of speech, whether, in fact, that this will be a threat to the West.

And so, that shift that we saw from optimism to pessimism, so many headlines shifting from talking about an Arab Spring to an Arab Winter, was really reflective of these, the Orientalist underpinnings that had stemmed from actually academic constructions about the Middle East. And that was problematic, because even if the direction of the Arab uprisings didn’t match what Western policymakers were hoping for, it was still denying agency to the people of the region. So in that, we can see those hierarchies, racial hierarchies about who knows best, and who’s able to dictate to people in the region, even if the people in the region know best what might be working for them.

Dr Jenna Marshall

Alright. I’ll move on to Inderjeet, and as discussant, could you provide us with some of your comments to the special issue?

Professor Inderjeet Parmar

Sure. Thank you very much, first, for inviting me to give some remarks here. It’s a pleasure to read the special issue and, to my mind, it seems to me that it’s a landmark special issue, because it marries two developments, which, I think, have been carrying on in relation to one another, but also independently, and that is a, kind of, movements of resistance to racial and other kinds of violence, movements of resistance to imperial wars and colonial wars, particularly in this century, endless wars, forever wars or whatever we call them. But also, a tendency within academic life to increasingly see the role of race and colonialism in the making of the international system, and the way in which states behave in that international system.

And I think there were glimpses of the relationship between the two over time, but what I think it seems to have, kind of, created the conditions for this special issue to be published by International Affairs and at Chatham House, I think, is the explosion, since the killing of George Floyd, and the mass movements of resistance against police and other kinds of inequalities and violence, which spread all over the world. And it’s interesting that the responses to that set of movements, in public opinion generally, but also among institutions, so, you saw corporations suddenly discovering that they – that their brands could be held up and, sort of, seen in the light of past racism or slavery, or some things like that. Some universities, including my own, changed the name of their – one of their – their business school, for example, from Cass, who had benefited from slavery, to Bayes.

So, corporations stated to rebrand themselves, in various ways, as being on the side of this. The Republican Party in America lost a lot of donors, and even journals like Security Studies, which are very traditional kinds of journals, started want – hunting around for Special Issue Editors, in order to create – do something about race and security. So, knowledge and, if you like, political life have always been connected, not only in terms of the structures of power or elite power and elite knowledge production, but also in the production of knowledge, which is resistance, kind of, knowledge or challenging knowledge or critical knowledge, in relation to activism and spontaneous uprisings. And I think that’s a really important factor in the current kind of a condition.

So, I think the special issue then, is not only responding to academic development of ideas about race and empire and so on in International Relations. It’s also responding to the real world developments, which I was alluding to, which we’re all familiar with. So, I think that, in a way, helps me understand why a journal like International Affairs, 100 years old, embedded in that colonial-era thinking, inside a think tank, Chatham House, where we are sitting now, is able to publish something, which is, if you like, such an indictment of the international system and the hierarchies of power, and how deeply they are embedded in political and in academic kinds of life.

So, I think it’s a really important barometer, because International Affairs is not only an academic journal, it’s a journal, which bridges the divide between academic life and knowledge production, but also political life, that is read by Journalists and MPs and many other kinds of people in public life. So I think therefore it’s a, kind of, landmark issue, a very significant one, and it speaks to this moment in time, in a variety of ways. So I think it’s going to have legs, if you like, it’s going to last, in terms of its legacies.

Now, in one of the essays, Amitav Acharya, in the special issue, says, “It is important that this moment not be passed over as a fad, something which you take up because it’s a big deal and you want to be relevant at that moment, and you lean towards it in a tokenistic kind of way.” I’m not sure that necessarily, that it will be a fad this – on this particular occasion, but it can reflect a really important part of the way in which power works in liberal-democratic societies. That when you have mass uprisings and explosions of criticism from whatever quarter, liberal-democratic societies are very, very adept at adaptability, flexibility, accommodation and assimilation, or rather, domestication.

That is, you can take the external look of an idea, the name of an idea, you can gut it almost completely, lob it onto your, as a label for your policies, but to persist in practices which are little changed, as a result of the actual, kind of, original, kind of, idea. So, I think that’s one of the key things we need to be concerned with.

But when we look at academics, and I will mention only one in this case, in particular, a lot of liberal academics, liberal internationalists and others have had to bend in order to accommodate the fact that there’s a rising crescendo of recognition in academic life and elsewhere of race and empire as a key – key factors in world politics. I’ll name one Scholar, who I believe is probably the, kind of, emblematic of this, John Ikenberry. If you look at the difference between his book of around 2012 or so, Liberal Leviathan, and then the one he published last year, A World Safe for Democracy, you can see the landmark shift in liberal thinking in regard to race, empire, colonial violence, military violence and so on, the periphery versus the core, and recognising all of those factors as key factors in anyone who analyses world politics and the international system.

However, it is a form of gloss, because in the end, recognising colonial violence, military violence, racism, the periphery, etc., you can say it because the literature is now screaming at you, but you don’t necessarily have to take it seriously, because you carry on analysing the world and politics in the same old way. That is, you have to do what some corporations have done, you recognise there is an inevitability of this, but you don’t necessarily – your theory cannot accommodate all that. Because if your theory were to accommodate that level of hierarchy and violence then your long piece and so on, claims about the world are going to be annihilated. So, I think you will see that there will be those who will lean towards, but not necessarily take it seriously at a fundamental level. So, what I would argue is that the depth at which this kind of thing is embedded in institutions is so great that it’s very, very difficult to alter it. However, there are these resistances, and there are these kinds of movements.

So, I’m going to end on something that Jasmine talked about as well, and that is one of the key elements of the special issue, which is really to do with, what is the responsibility of Scholars now, right now, what are we – what should we do? And it seems to me there are a number of opportunities provided by the environment, including the incentives provided by the Research Excellence Framework, which I know all academics like to complain about, but the fact is that impact and Scholars’ impact on other, you know, aspects of political or social or economic or other life are incentivised by the REF agenda. And that is to say that Scholars need not only be interested in policymakers and influence on them, although that ought to be done too, but Scholars can also be linked with these mass movements, and studying the character of those mass movements, the influence of those mass movements, why some of those movements are successful, and when, and how, and when they are not successful. And linking with those particular kinds of movements, with the benefits of the knowledge and the research that we may do or you may do, that that can have a big influence.

There’s also ways in which the REF impact agenda can work in regard to schools and the school curriculum. One of the key problems, of course, is in school education itself, and the relative absence of race and empire and colonialism in the histories and the study of British society, American society and many others. But by the kind of work that REF can encourage and does encourage, it is possible to change the way in which the classroom actually works, and what is taught and how it is taught, by the production of research-based educational materials, which could assist Teachers to develop their curriculum in various kinds of ways, so that – and then of course there’s the media itself, or elements of the media, where that research which is carried out, which is – which we can then translate into a more popular kind of language, can have an effect on public awareness and understanding, and that Scholars, in a way, have to learn to rethink and rewrite, or learn to write in different ways, and be accessible. That it’s not a sign of intelligence to be incomprehensible to your readers, and to belittle them in certain ways.

So, what I would argue is that there is a responsibility on Scholars to take seriously these academic and political developments, particularly in the field of international relations, but others as well, and I think there are opportunities within the way in which the universities themselves are set up. But at the end of it all, what we have are two forces, which are incredibly powerful. There’s the persistence of the, kind of, the symptoms of the depth at which these racialised and imperial, kind of, thinking is embedded, the persistence of that and the incentivisation of that, against the resistances, which keep breaking out and will keep breaking out, because these hierarchies are violent hierarchies, and they have real-world effects on real-world people who, from time-to-time, will rebel in small number, and at certain points will explode, like it did in 2019 and 2020. And therefore these are, kind of, key submerged issues most of the time on which they break out, and I think we have a responsibility to study those, to think about those, and to talk about and try to have some sort of influence in a way in which we understand those, and what kind of contribution we might make to understanding, which we can operate in various ways through media, through schools, through other kinds of work that may have a greater impact as well.

So, I would say, congratulations on this special issue. It’s a really important event and I think, Andrew, as the Editor of the Journal, it’s a really brave move on your part. I have done a lot of work in the archives of Chatham House, including the study of its, kind of, racialised and imperial, colonial thinking, over, from the early part, from its inheritance from the roundtable, sort of, imperial reform movement, right the way through to the Cold War, into the 1960s and 70s, and its formation of the Board of Race Relations in the 1950s and so on. And so it is clear to me how deeply embedded this kind of thinking is in powerful institutions.

The fact that Chatham House is – the Journal of Chatham House, International Affairs, is publishing this special issue is an important event, and the fact that Chatham House is now also publishing a book on the past 100 years of its development, and so on, and the next 100 years, and it includes the study of race and other things within it, I think, is also a suggestion that there is a desire to reflect. There is a desire to rethink, and maybe a desire to be uncomfortable with what the findings might suggest. And I would applaud that movement, and I’d hope it could be carried out in a more – in a thoroughgoing kind of way. And I am a part of the group of Scholars that Chris Hill and Michael Cox and Caroline Soper and Alex May have gathered together, and the chapter I’m writing is actually on the Board of Race Relations, which operated in Chatham House in the 1950s, and it was designed, just very briefly, it was designed to prevent anti-racism and communism from uniting in world politics, which would thoroughly undermine Western power. And it ended up creating an institution, which actually was the exact opposite of what they wanted to produce, so that by 1972 it became a Marxist, anti-racist organisation, which still exists today, called the Institute of Race Relations, and publishes a journal called Race & Class, so that elites don’t always get what they want. What they performed in 1952 was reversed and turned upside down by 1972, and these kind of things can happen, in various ways, interesting ways. But I do applaud International Affairs and Chatham House for the kind of initiatives that they are taking, so thank you for that.

Dr Jenna Marshall

Well said, Inderjeet. Now we will move onto a more open panel discussion amongst the three panellists. Inderjeet, you’ve done quite well to foreground the question that I want to pose to the three of you. So, do research organisations and think tanks need to radically rethink their research methodology, particularly their approach to global security?

And then the second question, what are the policy lessons that can be learned if we consider anti-racist and anti-imperial thinking? So, Jasmine, would you kindly begin?

Dr Jasmine K. Gani

I’ll take the second question first.

Dr Jenna Marshall

Sure.

Dr Jasmine K. Gani

So, what are the policy lessons that we can learn if we do take imperialism, anti-racist thinking seriously? The key thing is to listen. That’s the key lesson that we can take away, because not everyone is going to experience that, or those trends in the same way, and if you are someone, or if it’s a community that is at the sharp end of being racialised and experiencing prejudice and discrimination, then those communities will be in the strongest position to understand what needs to be done, to be in the strongest position to identify what the sources of the problems might be, because it’s a lived, everyday experience. And it’s also an inherited experience often as well, right? So it’s not always starting with one generation, but will go back several generations, so that will be the first lesson, is to listen.

I think the second is something that’s already been mentioned, and is – it comes through in the articles as well, is to be careful that because there might be an event in domestic or world affairs, which then sparks interest, and then you have lots of activity and discussion in the media and social media, even in the classroom, that we don’t treat it as something which has a time limit to that discussion, but to think about how we can make changes which are sustainable, which are more long-term. And that often requires discussions that will continue for months, maybe even years, long-term thinking, and often real institutional changes, right? So, not tokenistic changes.

And the third lesson is – and this is something that Amal mentioned in the workshop earlier, and I hope that you will elaborate on the point that you made, but – and also Inderjeet just mentioned it now, as well, the discomfort. And so this type of work, anti-imperialist work, anti-racist work, if we look at examples of movements across the world, during the decolonisation movement, at the peak of imperialism in fact, these communities were not passive.

They were intensely engaged in seeking their emancipation, but often also transnational emancipation for other groups, other communities suppressed in other parts of the world, so really demonstrating an example of solidarity. But it came with a lot of sacrifice, and often the results were not immediate, it’s very long-term, might have been decades in the future. So, that discomfort, we see that in the example of anti-racist, anti-imperialist work of the past, and we should expect that discomfort, whether it’s in the classroom, whether it’s in our publishing. Whichever sphere of life it’s in, you’re going to face a resistance against it, but if you’re prepared for it, then at least you know what’s coming, and you’ll be able to retain some resilience and adapt.

Dr Jenna Marshall

Well said. Amal, would you like to…?

Dr Amal Abu-Bakare

Thank you. So, the point I made in our decolonising workshop was that the path or route to world repair will be one of discomfort, and, I mean, Jasmine explained it. It was the idea that a lot of the conversations that we’re having about race and international relations draw on pain, and trauma, and longstanding pain and trauma, and that the idea is that there’s no-one who won’t be scarred from that conversation, which is a -it’s not a positive way to start a conversation about something that many feel should be about healing. But it’s a realistic way that acknowledges those who have been silenced, those who have been forgotten, those who have been purposely left behind, and to acknowledge that we have been a part of that process, for good or bad.

In terms of rethinking research methods, the centre – recentring of counternarratives and those who we don’t often see at the table is key, and in relation to discussions, those who are at the receiving end of policy should be the ones discussing it, because they are the ones who know the policy best, is something that policymakers continue to struggle with, but it’s the reality of the situation. If there are circumstances, I look at terrorism, I look at counterextremism, I look at Islamophobia, I look at conversations, deradicalization, where the idea is that you want a safer world, you need one that’s more equitable. So only equitable conversation will allow that.

Years, also in terms of the policy lessons that we can learn in relation to anti-racism, is that we are all part of the problem and that’s okay. Power structures delineate who is more – has more to lose and who has more to gain, but we are part of the problem, and we need to work together for, towards a solution, and I say this, we are part of the problem, because I exist in policy spaces where the response to oppression has been to say that, “We will take control of the problem,” whether it’s in Canada with Statistics Canada saying, “We will monitor how systemic racism is calculated and described in this country, and we will let you know what we come up with,” whether it is in the UK, where Senior Counterterrorism Officers say that, “The definition of Islamophobia you have proposed to us is unacceptable and it does not compute with our operations.”

The problem is that there’s this kind of distancing, and again, a purposeful forgetting that they are not the people with the answers. And I think there’s a lot of humility that will need to be considered, as well as empathy, but I don’t think that we can come to these conversations without keeping those things in mind.

Dr Jenna Marshall

Fantastic. Inderjeet.

Professor Inderjeet Parmar

I think Jasmine and Amal have said a lot of the things I would want to say, and I think I’d just reiterate a couple of things, that I think the first question about methodology, and I think it goes to the heart of the question is, when you are looking to define something as a problem, to whom do you speak to find out if there is a problem, whose voice do you hear, and who do you take seriously, and who do you ignore, or who do you just, sort of, marginalise completely?

So, that is to say, how do you actually even define a problem, and whose problems really count as problems for dealing with by governments and big institutions and so on? And very often, there’s a veneer of the local people and their needs and interests, but very often what we find is that they are the objects of policymakers. They’re not the subjects who are consulted about their lives, what their problems might be, what their solutions may be, because they tend to be there, solving their problems and trying to survive, however long periods of time.

So, I think the methodological issue is right there, but the real – the idea that, you know, deeply embedded, powerful knowledge institutions, which are getting donations from very large corporations and governments and big international institutions are going to change their methodology in any radical or thoroughgoing way, I think that’s probably illusory. So, we have to expect that an onslaught, an onslaught from those who do not wish to recognise the past, the – with which they’re very familiar, they know exactly what the history of slavery, colonialism and other kinds of racism and violence is. But they have vested interest in the way in which the world works right now. They don’t want to necessarily change it, or they don’t – and they don’t want to diminish the level of power that they operate.

So, prepare for an onslaught, and we may call them culture wars right now, but the fact remains that there is an onslaught going on, and it will increase and intensify, ‘cause there will be those who do not wish to change. But there are others who just are, if you like, caught in the middle of these particular kinds of wars, if you like. They are the – in the battle of ideas they’re the ones who, if you like, if you have access to the main means of mass media and other, kind of, organs of public opinion shaping and so on, they’re the ones who, if you like, they don’t necessarily know a great deal. And this is where I think the scholarship and the Scholars come in, where we have to get out of the ivory tower, if we are in it, but we have to get out our voices more, and we’re the ones who are actually doing a lot of the research, and we need to get those voices out, and basically support that kind of knowledge production.

But to my mind, it is a, kind of, it’s a revolutionary struggle that you’re talking about. And it is not a question of changing the minds of people in very, very powerful positions, because I suspect that they are actually fully conscious of the kinds of things they stand for, the kind of interests they seek to defend, who finance their political parties, and so on and so forth. So, I think it’s a question of the, sort of, very powerful forces, which are embedded in a status quo, which is deeply historically rooted in institutional and financial power, and you’re taking on some of the biggest guns in this society and other societies as well. And, so, therefore you have to expect that there’s going to be a lot of pushback, but that does not diminish the rightness of your cause either.

Dr Jenna Marshall

Well said, thank know. Amal and Jasmine, would you like to comment? Otherwise we can now open to question and answers. Just a reminder, please keep your mask on, raise your hands. I will choose one of you and the roving mic will – yes, in the front row. Well, just one second for the mic.

Member

I’ve got a question, in terms of racism and also colonialism. I understand that a lot of these revolutionary movements, whether they’ll be the Arab Spring or whether it’s a coup d’état in some of the African countries, and these independence movements, they do raise issues around racism and colonialism. But what I want to understand is that it seems to me that a lot of these international conflicts at the moment, they do raise those issues. However, at the same time, if you put aside the cultural war, or we put aside the values of Western liberalism, some of these conflicts in the world, whether they be in the Middle East, with an Afghanistan exodus, and Syria, with the refugees coming into the EU, and then the Arab Spring, and then if we move into Africa, it seems to me that there is a Christian dominance in international relations.

And in understanding racism and colonialism, we need to consider the dominant powers, international actors being Christian, whether they are the United Kingdom, whether it is United States of America, or even the EU countries, NATO, for example. So, what I’m asking is that it seems to me that there is a deliberate, contrived construction of the international system, whereby Christian international actors and powers are suppressing or oppressing certain regions, such as the Middle East, or – and Africa, based on very traditional, archaic Christian beliefs.

Dr Jenna Marshall

Sorry, I just have to just stop you there, and I think the, we understand the question about the question of Christian dominance, so thank you for that. What I’ll also do is take two more questions to allow the panellists to answer them in groups. So, the lady there in the dress, floral dress, and then the other lady – yes, in the black, yes.

Member

As a student who’s an MA, I’ve often found it really difficult to decolonise a lot of the, like, the literature that we’re reading, because oftentimes we’re being taught from one specific framework. And, as you were speaking about knowledge makers and people coming forward, students like myself are people who are coming next, and RMAs are only one year, it’s not an MPhil, it’s not something that’s a PhD, it’s not longer, and so it’s very difficult to challenge a lot of the institutions that are present.

What are some ways that either students or faculty members, when there’s not a lot of people who are people of colour, like at my university, on faculty, can challenge what’s being – what’s going on. Because while we have practices like, we have a decolonising committee at our university, there’s not much that can actually be done, because a lot of the teaching that is done is only one single facet. It’s not moving any forward, and Lecturers aren’t truly incentivised to change their, like, bibliography and change any of what they’re teaching. And so, there’s not really much movement, in terms of actually teaching something that isn’t just whitewashing and giving a veneer of, Europe is doing what is supposed to be right, in terms of international relations, moving forward.

Dr Jenna Marshall

Okay, thank you. Thank you for that, and just the final question here, in this round, and then we’ll open for other questions.

Member

I have a similar question. I’m a graduate student at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and our school recently had an independent advisory committee assess institutionalised racism, and release a public report in December, to spur discussion. So, I would like to pose if you all think it should be standard practice for academic centres and research universities to have independent committees come in, and to publicly release findings on those reports?

Dr Jenna Marshall

Very good questions. Okay, so, I’ll just give you a moment to make some notes. We also have questions coming in via the ‘chat’, but those can be posed later. Inderjeet, would you like to take any of the questions?

Professor Inderjeet Parmar

Well, I won’t do all three, ‘cause then we’ll never get out of here, but I’ll take the first one, which I – it’s a really interesting question, but to my mind, you know, one can have religious beliefs or ideological beliefs, or any other forms of beliefs, but it’s not always the beliefs that drive behaviour. Sometimes beliefs are systems of ideological domination, under the cover of which lots of things are done.

Now, I’m not an expert on Christianity, but I have been a product of the British educational system, so I’ve had – read the bible quite a bit over the years. So, the fact is that you can use Christianity or Islam or Sikhism or Hinduism to do pretty much whatever you like, ‘cause there’s enough there for you to justify pretty much any behaviour in particular contexts. So, I wouldn’t set the primacy of Christianity as the driving, primary source of Western imperial, colonial behaviour, although it’s a key element of it. There is a hell of a lot of other things going on, which is, primarily, I would say, is economic, commercial, financial and other forms of exploitation. And very often the missionary and the businessperson and the trader and so on would operate in conjunction with one another, and sometimes, the missionaries, actually, would be more advanced and anti-racist and more pro the local population than the other people would be.

So, I would say that you’d have to – it’s an empirical question, but I wouldn’t say as a, kind of, general, I wouldn’t generalise that Christianity is the driver, or any religious or other beliefs are drivers. Often it’s power and economics and other factors, which are important.

Member

Would you say that there’s a clash of civilisations? It seems to me that it’s a clash between Islam, between Christianity and other religions, predominantly. What would you say?

Professor Inderjeet Parmar

Well, I think you – there is a veneer of that and, you know, when Samuel Huntington wrote “The Clash of Civilisations” and so on, yeah, there is a, sort of – there is a way in which you can understand the world, and it makes sense, if you understand it in that way, but that does not mean to say that that’s one of the drivers of that. That often is the, kind of, if you like, the symptomatic element of it, or the element of it which is in the public sphere.

But actually there’s a lot of more, other things going on, because what you can see is, there are lots of alliances across religious powers, if you like, or the religions of great powers or other states and so on. And so the – Saudi Arabia, for example, although I wouldn’t call it something which is not Islamic, right, is allied with lots of Christian and other countries too, and it’s allied also with the Jewish State, for example. So, what you see is a lot of other interests, which could be security, economic or any other, so, I’d say those are more powerful.

To the student here, just, I’ll touch on very briefly, what – oh, no, sorry, it’s the person behind you. What should a student do? I would say, follow the example of the economic students up and down the country since 2008, when the studies – the things they were being taught in economics at university couldn’t explain what happened in 2008/2009. This massive financial meltdown, which impacted all our lives, was not on the syllabus, on the curriculum of the economics departments, and I would say, is that they, kind of, revolted against it, and they created pressures for it.

So, I would say, students have to take up that task and support that kind of movement, and challenge the curriculum. And there are lot of little Twitter accounts and websites, women also know stuff, people of colour also know stuff, which I’ve located recently, ‘cause I was setting up these webinars to try to get other voices into the room, or whatever. There are lots of Scholars out there, so it’s a question of doing some digging, and what I did discover is one of the difficulties, having been trained in, you know, the British Academy myself, is that we are hardwired into Global North networks.

Whether you like it or not, you come up against it, because you try to find somebody from outside of those networks, which is incredibly difficult, but it’s not impossible. So, the key thing is to, kind of, look outside of those, the curriculum and so on, and put pressure on those departments to make a change in line with what is going on in many other departments. This is the right time to do it, because it is a big open question at this time.

Dr Jenna Marshall

Jasmine, if you just want to briefly respond.

Dr Jasmine K. Gani

Very quickly and very briefly. I mean, I think, just the question about Christianity, I think the same thing could be said about, and has been said about Islam, and is it because of Islam that there’s a propensity for authoritarianism in the Middle East, for example? So, I am very familiar with essentialist traits being attributed to a particular religion, which often is not reflective of the empirical reality and the political conditions that might be leading to that.

I think Inderjeet made some very good points. Huntington’s thesis has widely been debunked by lot of academics because of the cross-country, cross-regional alliances, but also, you’ve got prominent examples, and just recently Archbishop Desmond Tutu passed away, and he was such a prominent, foremost figure in challenging apartheid, which was being supported and sponsored by other so-called Christian states. So, the cleavages, based on religion, are not necessarily reflective of the reality, but of course, if any country, any state, any people are going to engage in imperialism, or any kind of oppressive policies, they’re going to necessarily need some kind of moral justification for it, because it’s not justifiable. So, Christianity’s been a very convenient mask for a lot of those policies. But thank you for the question.

Very quickly, I’m going to connect the two questions, ‘cause they’re quite, sort of, touching upon similar things. The interesting thing about, when it comes to teaching or what’s in the reading list, actually having – expanding the reading list to incorporate Scholars from different backgrounds, from marginal backgrounds, sort of, what might be seen as niche, theoretical backgrounds, postcolonial, decolonial backgrounds, actually that expansion is a reflection of rigour, right? It’s not even pandering to some kind of, sort of, woke movement, it’s rigour, right, to demonstrate they’re able to take into consideration a diversity of voices and opinions and theories. So, I think Teachers have a responsibility to recognise that that pushback and resistance that students might be encountering outside of the classroom, and wanting to bring it in, yes, they need to recognise that.

The second thing I would say is that, have belief that the discussions that you’re having in the classroom, even if it feels like it’s not making a difference, it is making a difference, I can guarantee that. I have students who’ve sat in classrooms from ten years ago, and who are doing really fantastic things, and yet the syllabus was very mainstream and conservative at the time, but it was the conversations that were being had in the classroom that made a difference, and often that impact can be taken outside of the classroom.

And the final, I think, is a really important question that you raised, about, should there be some kind of independent monitoring of the teaching that’s done in the classroom? And now the academic and the Teacher side of me is going to come through, which is, autonomy’s really important. I think that’s really – it’s necessary to have standards and some degree of oversight. But at the same time, a lot of this critical, radical work that’s happened in the classroom has happened because of autonomy, and there was a time when independent monitoring would have precisely debunked some of that work, so just being careful about having some – a top-down process in monitoring.

Dr Jenna Marshall

Amal – sorry, Amal, would you like to add?

Dr Amal Abu-Bakare

I’ll try and speak briefly. I can’t speak to the committee question, but I can speak to the first two. So, I would think that there’s so many readings, whether it’s Theodore [Vielle – 56:19] or Richard Dyer or Cemil Aydin, that discuss how religion has been, and race has been used as a culture through – sorry, race has come through as a vector in the essence of culture and the essence of religion. And I think it’s important to consider both the good and the bad and not acknowledging that race and culture are intersectional.

And I think it’s had good in relation to bringing communities together, but it’s had bad in relation to acknowledging the diaspora, the history, how we have responded, both oppressively to the suggestion that because our religion is anarchic, because our religion is barbaric, we’ve created this, sort of, identity. Particularly Cemil Aydin’s work talks about how in the Muslim world where “We felt pressured to create an idea of a good Muslim and to propagate that we are good Muslims, because we need to respond to the accusation that Muslims are barbarians.” So, there’s no need in relation to retaliate in the context where we look at the religion as though this is the sole response. It’s the power dynamics, again in agreement with my colleagues, and how they’ve been used and how, which vector will be used to push my power today. I think that’s a really important thing to consider, and reflect on and read more on, so I would encourage you to continue.

I would also like to say, I’ve been a Masters student not too long ago, and I’m on this stage, and one of the things that I did to get by when I was in a white-dominant space, when I didn’t have the figures, is I created it for myself. And a year’s not a lot of time, but if I want to have what I consider to be international relations, and if I want to see that, I – there was no other choice but to create a space to where I could exchange that knowledge, usually through conversation, usually within the university, and invite or involve myself, whether we use social media. It was very powerful, but we raised awareness of the kind of education we wanted to have, and it was acknowledged, because they saw how beneficial it was, they saw that this was what interested us, and we might not see the immediate benefits. But I know for a fact that the curriculums that have followed after us as Master’s students where I was have changed, because they knew what we wanted, and they built on it. Unfortunately, the changes aren’t immediate, but they do matter.

Dr Jenna Marshall

Thank you so much, Amal. Many questions coming in online. One here in particular, I’ll just read it. Unfortunately, you won’t have time to respond, but just for food for thought. Philip Smith says, “Very interesting discussion. Whilst there are obvious historical and current reasons for our focus on Western racism, imperialism, is there a danger of neglecting experiences in other world regimes, for example, China and Japan?”

As I said, many questions coming in online. I know there are probably many questions here in the audience as well. However, unfortunately, we have reached our time. I just want to again thank the panellists for their thought-provoking discussions, and thanks to the audience for coming in-person for the launch of this special issue [applause].