01 ISSUE II
JANUARY 2025
JANUARY 2025
What Is to be Done?
After more than four years of teaching international affairs and the politics of decolonization, we have developed a robust curriculum and pedagogy that effectively engages our students in these topics.
By Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and Sean Jacobs
In June 2020, as Black Lives Matter protesters filled US streets, forcing a public reckoning with racist police violence in the country, the young international relations scholars Kelebogile Zvobgo and Meredith Loken wrote in Foreign Policy Magazine: “Western dominance and white privilege permeate the field. It’s time to change that.” They were saying out loud what some students and scholars have been saying for a while: that what makes up international affairs as it is taught and researched in the West, particularly in the United States, is deficient. Zvogbo and Loken weren’t asking for reforms of international affairs as an academic discipline or practice but for an overhaul, a new, decolonized curriculum.
Knowledge and experiences from the Global South are often neglected, suppressed, and erased by the academic mainstream and the attendant public intellectual magazine culture. To illustrate, in development economics, European and North American economists mostly write the literature on Africa, and the industrial policy experience in East Asia in the late 20th century is dismissed and suppressed in mainstream policy debates.
We agree with Zvobgo and Loken that new analyses should be grounded in the Global South’s experiences. This requires a new research agenda and an interrogation of knowledge production structures, which reflect power dynamics serving the Global North. These dynamics shape issues like refugee management, trade, infrastructure, and the politics of global public goods. Our theoretical models and practice do not adequately answer our students’ questions. Crucially, this also extends to practice, whether we consider the governance of refugees, debate public investments in infrastructure development, or formulate international trade agreements.
In some quarters, there has been much-needed introspection. Zoom roundtable discussions, conference panels, and pedagogical workshops abound, but there is little space for sharing these ideas or developing curriculums.
Our program - the Graduate Programs in International Affairs - when it founded in 2001, was a response to the limitations of Western-centric International Affairs at the time, most immediately the politics of the “War on Terror” and the Washington Consensus. Still, like everyone else, we had to confront the open and hidden biases and blindspots of our teaching and practice. That said, we are both from outside the US – Sakiko is from Japan, and Sean is from South Africa – and we have experience in organizations, social movements, and institutions, including parts of the academy, with progressive traditions. Sakiko is a development economist best known for her work on UNDP Human Development Reports with Amartya Sen, advocating a paradigm change to people and human rights-centered development and supporting a pro-Global South economic order. Sean was active in student movements as a journalist and researcher – during the Cold War's end, the democratic transition in South Africa, and efforts to entrench a democratic public sphere culture after apartheid. As a result, we understand the imperative of tackling how we teach international relations head-on. Between us, we have nearly half a century’s worth of teaching, research, and practical experience in international affairs.
One required course in our program at The New School is “Theory, Histories and Practice of Development,” also known as “Decolonizing International Affairs.” This course surveys critical or heterodox, but also mainstream, literature on global inequalities and policy frameworks. Following the summer of 2020, to react to changes in the political environment and questions raised by our students, our department agreed to rename and reorient that course to “Decolonizing International Affairs.” COVID-19 provided a real-life laboratory where these ideas could be stress-tested. We also wanted to survey the critical literature of post-colonial and decolonial authors and analyze colonial legacies and coloniality in contemporary policies and institutions.
We teach the course rotationally and collaborate on the syllabus.
In summary, the new course surveys the interdisciplinary field of international affairs in response to political phenomena like the Global Movement for Black Lives, democratic socialism, ascendant right-wing movements, and conflicts stemming from the acute ecological and health crises confronting the twenty-first century and the contours of the new Cold War. It reassesses contemporary social challenges—climate, pandemic, inequalities, and more—in light of the power structures that define global institutions and policy regimes.
After more than four years and six rounds of teaching (Sakiko is teaching the course again this Spring and Fall of 2025), we’ve gained a clearer understanding of how to approach international affairs and the politics of decolonization, but also to develop a “Handbook on Decolonizing International Affairs,” which will come out next year with Palgrave-MacMillan.
In the class and the Handbook, we introduce students to the theoretical and political movements that have critiqued and sought to reshape the study and practice of international affairs and its multiple disciplines and fields, from politics to refugee governance to anthropology to global trade. Next, we emphasize that decolonization demands a pluralistic approach, one rooted in the work of scholars not necessarily associated with international relations, like Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Samir Amin, James Baldwin, Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo and Edward Said. These thinkers have explored colonialism’s legacies and their intersections with race, class, and global capitalism.
Understanding decolonization requires recognizing its varied interpretations across disciplines, regions, and political contexts and seeing it as a theoretical and political necessity for more than just global governance. In the 21st century, economic power relies less on land but on other resources such as knowledge and the digital space.
The decolonization framework highlights injustices in global governance and critiques traditional political economy approaches as insufficient. It explains domination through power asymmetries in resource access and the hierarchical valuation of knowledge, culture, and race. Decolonial critiques also expose dysfunctions, such as ineffective climate change responses and vaccine apartheid.
International affairs must address how academic fields like political science, economics, philosophy, law, and history have reinforced colonial power structures, often sidelining the Global South. Scholars like Jessica Blatt, Serene Khader, Mohamed Sesay, and Karen Tucker are rethinking these disciplines. Social movements like Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Tricontinental, and more recently, Black Lives Matter and climate justice challenge colonial legacies and push for systemic change. For us, there is value in a usable past. Researchers and practitioners whose work we have incorporated on these subjects include Zachariah Mampilly, David Adler, and Varsha Gandikota.
Finally, decolonization is not merely theoretical; it must inform real-world practices. Colonial histories shape how we address global health, migration, international finance, and climate change. Experts like Bhumika Muchhala, Sedet Arat-Koc Ying Chen, and Sakiko offer critical perspectives on how decolonial thinking can transform these fields and provide new frameworks for addressing global inequalities.
Since 2020, we have learned that decolonizing international affairs is not just a passing trend but an urgent movement. As global challenges escalate, it is clear that rethinking the foundations of global governance is essential. Decolonizing international affairs offers a path toward a more inclusive and just world where all voices are heard in shaping the future.
Sean Jacobs is Director and Professor of International Affairs at the New School and edits The New Context.
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr is a Professor of International Affairs at The New School. She is co-editor, with Sean Jacobs, of The Handbook on Decolonizing International Affairs (Palgrave-MacMillan, Forthcoming).