EDI Café Chat: Race and Imperialism in International Relations

Chair: Dr Amanda Chisholm, Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security

Speakers: Jasmine K Gani, Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, and Co-Director of the Centre for Syrian Studies, and Jenna Marshall, Senior Researcher at the Chair of Development Policy and Postcolonial Studies at Universität Kassel, Germany.

In this EDI café chat we will be discussing in greater detail with the editors of the 100th anniversary special of International Affairs. 

The special issue questions whether there is an academic–policy divide, and whether this gap needs to be bridged. For decades, International Relations scholars have reflected on their roles and responsibilities towards the ‘real world’, while policy-makers have often critiqued the detachment of academic research. In response, there have been increased calls for academics to descend from their ‘ivory tower’. However, the articles in this 100th anniversary special issue of International Affairs interrogate this so-called theory–policy divide and problematize the exchange of knowledge between academics and practitioners, highlighting the colonial underpinnings of their historical entanglements.

Bio 

Jasmine K Gani is Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, and Co-Director of the Centre for Syrian Studies. She writes and teaches on colonialism, race, knowledge production, US–Syrian relations, and ideologies and social movements in the Middle East. She is author of The Role of Ideology in Syrian–US Relations: Conflict and Cooperation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Middle East and North African State and States System (2019) and Actors and Dynamics in the Syrian Conflict’s Middle Phase (Routledge 2021). She was previously a Fellow in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University, and a Co-Editor of Millennium, Journal of International Studies.

Jenna Marshall is Senior Researcher at the Chair of Development Policy and Postcolonial Studies at Universität Kassel, Germany. She previously held the Sassoon Visiting Fellow in South Asian and Black History at the University of Oxford (2019-2020) and she currently serves as co-convenor (2020-2022) of the Colonial, Postcolonial, and Decolonial (CPD) working group of the British International Studies Association (BISA). Her central research interests concern the political economy of the Global South, non-Western intellectual history, and critical/anti-racist methodologies of knowledge production and pedagogy. Her current book project chronicles the intellectual and economic histories of ‘creole elites’ of the Fabian Colonial Bureau as products of global encounters and anti-colonial contestations. 

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