Research.
Research Agenda & Interests.
My work, located at the of intersection of international relations, political theory, and history, is focused on better understanding the sources and consequences of hierarchy and inequality in global politics. My current research centres on issues of race and colonialism in global politics and examines how political orders are organised around racialised and colonial hierarchies, as well as how these orders have been navigated, contested, and resisted. Drawing on and contributing to discussions in both international relations and political theory, I am invested in interdisciplinary research that offers deeper understandings of the unequal structures and processes of global politics that differently shape the life experiences and chances of peoples across the planet.
I am also interested in the politics of memory and public scholarship on colonial history and racialisation, having worked on a project titled “Manufacturing Race” that examined the colonial history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin and its (absent) memorialisation. I hope to continue publicly-oriented work in this vein.
My broader research interests include IR theory and international thought, critical theory, post- and decolonial political thought, Black political thought, German colonialism, the politics of memory, migration, aesthetics and politics, and interpretive methods.
(De)racialising Order: Race and Resistance in the Production of International Order.
My current book project, (De)racialising Order: Race and Resistance in the Production of International Order, analyses how the entanglements between the constitution of international order and processes of racialisation reproduce and secure an unequal global order, and how this order is challenged and resisted. Building on a tradition of scholarship on race and colonialism, and the recent turn reproblematise and politicise the development and operation of international order in international relations, I contend that the construction and maintenance of racialised hierarchy has been and remains central to the politics and practices of global ordering. The book illustrates the racialisation that inheres in the international order through an analysis of ordering discourses, practices, and processes across the spheres of international law, international security, and international political economy, as well as through a series of case studies on migration governance. Additionally, it examines the forms of contestation and resistance that have been organised and practiced against this inequitable order. In these analyses I draw on a range of sources including historical and contemporary scholarly discourses, political speeches and texts, legal documents and policy directives, as well as original archival research.
The approach I take in this project is an interdisciplinary one, drawing on insights in postcolonial and critical race studies, as well as social and political theory, history, philosophy, and migration studies. In so doing, I trouble the inattention that scholars of international order have paid to race and push the field of international relations to grapple with the legacies of colonialism and the presence of coloniality.
This book project builds on my dissertation “Ordering Through Race/Racialising Through Order: Race and the Production of International Order,” that I completed at Northwestern University and for which I received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, and the International Studies Association.
Publications.
“The International Order of White Sovereignty and the Possibility of Abolition.” Forthcoming in Ethics & International Affairs.
“Remembering the Anthropological Making of Race in Today’s University: An Analysis from a Students’ Memorial Project in Berlin,” with Thiago Pinto Barbosa, Julia Kirchner, and Julia Scheurer. 2018. Etnofoor 30(2): 29-48.
“Rights from the Other Side of the Line: Postcolonial Perspectives on Human Rights.” 2014. Politikon: The IAPSS Political Science Journal 25: 5–26.
Working Projects.
(De)racialising Order: Race and Resistance in the Production of International Order, book project.
“Practising the Imperial: Alain Locke’s Theory of Race Practice and International Order”
“Imperial Subjectivities: Indigenous Claims-Making as Intracolonial Agency,” with Arturo Chang.
“Negotiating Racial Subjection: Analyzing Black and Indigenous Resistance From within Colonial Orders,” with Arturo Chang.
“Crisis and Disorder in the Liberal International Order of White Sovereignty”
“Multilateralism and/as Imperialism: Masking Racialised Constituent Power in the Liberal International Order”