Questioning the quest for Pluralism: How Decolonial is Non-Western IR?

Since early 2000s, scholars of international relations have been questioning the Western-centrism of their home discipline and, in a quest for pluralism, have been envisioning ways of conceptualizing the world beyond the West. At the same time, an intellectual movement known as modernity/coloniality research collective has been critically reflecting about modernity and its often-neglected counterpart, coloniality, to resist universalism and to decolonize knowledge. Engaging with the attempts to procure pluralism in the discourse of international relations, the purpose of this article is to question the different perspectives of non-Western international relations from a decolonial angle to identify intellectual projects that could lead to decolonizing the discipline. In its discussion of how decolonial non-Western IR theory is, the article argues that while some perspectives within the subfield openly reject or simply ignore the concerns raised by decolonial thought, others put forward intellectual projects where decolonial arguments resonate. Hence, rather than characterizing the subfield in general terms, the article distinguishes those perspectives that are attentive to the need of generating a true dialog among knowledges and, by so doing, it contributes to critical scholarship within international relations.

Critical Scholarship on Terrorism

Understandings of “critical” in critical scholarship on terrorism range from a Frankfurt School–influenced definition to a broader definition that aims to interrogate commonsense understandings of terrorism and counterterrorism. Overall, critical scholarship on terrorism draws on multiple disciplines and methodological traditions to analyze terrorism and counterterrorism. Within these, there have been ongoing debates and discussions about whether the state should be included in research on terrorism and, if so, what the inclusion of the state would do for the understanding of terrorism. Critical scholarship has also outlined the need for further attention to research ethics, as well as urged researchers to acknowledge their standpoints when conducting and communicating research. Some, but not all, critical scholarship has a normative orientation with the goal of emancipation, though the meaning of emancipation remains debated. Methodologically, the majority of critical scholarship on terrorism utilizes an interpretive lens to analyze terrorism and related issues. A central goal of critical terrorism research is to rework power relations such that Global South subjectivities are centered on research. This means including research conducted by Global South scholars and also centering Global South peoples and concerns in analyses of terrorism and counterterrorism. The role of gender, analytically and in practice, in relation to terrorism is also a key part of critical scholarship. Critical scholars of terrorism have observed that race is absent from much of terrorism scholarship, and there needs to be ongoing work toward addressing this imbalance. Media and popular culture, and their depiction of terrorism and counterterrorism, form another key strand in critical scholarship on terrorism. Overall, critical scholarship on terrorism is about scrutinizing and dismantling power structures that sustain commonsense knowledge regarding terrorism.

From Chiapas to Palestine: Historicizing Social Movement Media Before and Beyond the Arab Uprisings

Critical scholarship investigating media and the Arab uprisings has called for “a return to history.” This article argues that researching the contemporary constraints and opportunities of social movement media in the Arab region requires historicizing such practices. Reflecting on the role of media activism within the Arab uprisings necessitates broadening the historical context of social movement media in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region by investigating the diversity of media tactics and alternative political economies mobilized to resist the military-industrial communications complex. This article develops a political economy framework to historicize social movement media practices from Chiapas to Palestine and provides a critical reflection on the use of media for revolution before and beyond the Arab uprisings. Learning from the long and global history of revolutionary media struggle is beneficial to media activists and researchers working in the MENA region.

Ideologies of Corporate Responsibility: From Neoliberalism to “Varieties of Liberalism”

Critical scholarship often presents corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a reflection or embodiment of neoliberalism. Against this sort of sweeping political characterization we argue that CSR can indeed be considered a liberal concept but that it embodies a “varieties of liberalism.” Building theoretically on the work of Michael Freeden on liberal languages, John Ruggie and Karl Polanyi on embedded forms of liberalism, and Michel Foucault on the distinction between classical liberalism and neoliberalism, we provide a conceptual treatment and mapping of the ideological positions that constitute the bulk of modern scholarly CSR debate. Thus, we distinguish between embedded liberalism, classical liberalism, neoliberalism, and re-embedded liberalism. We develop these four orientations in turn and show how they are engaged in “battles of ideas” over the meaning and scope of corporate responsibilities—and how they all remain relevant for an understanding of contemporary debates and developments in the field of CSR and corporate sustainability.

Skulls, Tree Bark, Fossils

Studies of material objects in the field of memory studies have followed diverse epistemological and disciplinary trajectories, but their shared characteristic has been the questioning of philosophical assumptions concerning human relations with inanimate things and lower-level organic objects, such as plants, within the Aristotelian hierarchy of beings. Rather than accept at face value their categorizations as passive or deficient in comparison to the human subject, critical scholarship has reformulated the place and role of nonhuman entities in culture. This essay examines the nexus of materiality and memory in the work of the French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, with the focus on the questions of mnemonic affordance of things and plants. The essay proposes that Didi-Huberman’s project can be approached from the perspective of “undoing” the key binaries of Western historiography of art and material culture: surface/depth, exteriority/interiority, visibility/invisibility, and malleability/rigidity. Focusing on imaginal representations of memory objects in Didi-Huberman’s two essays Bark and Being a Skull, the essay situates these texts within the context of his philosophical reading of Aby Warburg’s iconology, and argues that Didi-Huberman’s undoing of the binaries that have traditionally structured thinking about materiality and memory could be productively approached as a philosophical project of transvaluating surface.

The participatory turn in health and medicine: The rise of the civic and the need to ‘give back’ in data-intensive medical research

What has been called the “participatory turn” in health and medicine refers to a general shift from paternalistic and hierarchical, to more collaborative and egalitarian relationships between medical experts and patients/research participants; a shift from what the pragmatic sociologists Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) call a “domestic” to a “civic” order of worth. Critical scholarship on the participatory turn tends to emphasize discrepancies between ideals of equality and empowerment, and practices of increased individual responsibility and disempowerment. In this paper, we depart from this critical literature by suspending evaluation about authentic and inauthentic ideals and practices. Instead, we explore the issues and challenges that arise in the process of ensuring that ideal and practice align in what we call a civic-participatory style of doing medical research. Drawing on interviews and observations carried out with medical researchers, coordinators and assessors in a longitudinal cohort study called the Personalized Parkinson’s Project (PPP), we show that for study staff it is often unclear how they can meet the demands of reciprocity towards research participants that are presupposed by civic-participatory ideals. In particular, in the context of a study whose aim is the creation of a comprehensive dataset comprised of clinical, environmental and lifestyle data that study participants generously “give” over a period of 2 years, we observed a persistent concern on the part of study staff regarding what and how to “give back”. As we show, study staff negotiate and resolve this tension through recourse to creative workarounds and innovative ways of giving back, including frequent project and scientific updates, newsletters, the designation of personal assessors and pampering Event Days. The paper makes a contribution to the critical literature on the participatory turn by showing the utility of the orders of worth framework in probing the challenges and workarounds that emerge in settings where an incumbent style of organizing medical research (here, the 'civic') comes to challenge practices hitherto organized according to a wholly different logic (in this case, the 'domestic')—without making assumptions about the (in)authenticity of such ideals and practices. Moreover, we contend that this framework offers new tools for evaluating participatory research projects in the form of “good” or “successful” civic–domestic compromises.

From Margin to Center: Intersectionality and the Politics of Environmental Gerontology

As the population becomes increasingly older and culturally diverse, so too does the need for critical scholarship that examines the complex lives of differently positioned older adults in relation to their social and physical ecologies. This innovative symposium reflects the importance of putting intersectional frameworks (Collins & Bilge, 2016) in conversation with environmental gerontology to critically examine structures of power in assessing who matters and who benefits from place-based initiatives that intend to support healthy aging (Phillipson, 2004). Perry et al.’s paper addresses the politics of responsibility, asking who is responsible for keeping older people safe in light of Covid-19 though a citywide senior housing coalition in Detroit. The second paper, authored by Johnson, speaks to the politics of access and structural inequalities that create disparities in end-of-life care for unhoused older adults. The third and fourth papers, by Stinchcombe and colleagues and Oswald, critically examine dominant paradigms of age-friendliness in Canada and the United States though a politics of representation that highlights who is (in)visible in these initiatives. The final paper by Reyes, on the civic participation of Latinx and African American older adults, illustrates how structural change cannot happen without engaging these populations in the political process. Together, these papers exemplify the politics of environmental gerontology and demonstrate that without acknowledgment of multi-layered identities and the structures contributing to their inequities, environmental gerontology is inadequate, as it may overlook important social and environmental factors that connect older people to the places where they live and die.

Demarcating Boundaries: Against the “Humanitarian Embrace”

Recent years have seen recurrent calls for bridging the “gap” between the worlds of policy-makers, practitioners, and academic scholars concerned with forced migration and humanitarian aid. This has resulted in growing partnerships between international organisations, governments, businesses, foundations, and universities with the aim of harnessing market economic thinking to create new practice-oriented knowledge rather than out-of-touch theories. This intervention responds critically to these developments and questions the seemingly common-sense logic behind attempts to forge ever closer collaborations across institutional lines. Rather than benefitting displaced communities, bridging divides has often served as a way of consolidating the hegemony of humanitarian actors and inadvertently delegitimized more critical scholarship. Scholars in refugee and forced migration studies have hereby been engulfed in a tightening “humanitarian embrace”. This paper argues that in order to fulfil a scholarly commitment to social justice, anti-violence and pro-asylum politics, it is time to again demarcate the boundaries between the practices and institutions that reproduce humanitarian power and their critics.

Using humor to disguise racism in television news: the case of the Roma

It has been argued that more research is needed on the role of humor in the expression of racism. One reason is that, in the ‘post racial’ society, overt racism has become publicly unacceptable and, therefore, tends to appear in more concealed forms. In this paper, as part of a larger project on media representations of the Roma, we look at the role of humor in a Romanian television news clip reporting on the financial rewards of begging. We draw on the critical scholarship in humor research and carry out a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a news report selected from a larger corpus. We argue that through humor a recontextualisation of the Roma’s situation takes place, transforming their actual situation of poverty and social marginalisation into a humorous account of cultural failure, incompetence, stupidity and calculated money grabbing. We show that humor is one way by which culture becomes represented as embodied by ethnic minorities.

The Literary Motif of Cush in the Old Testament

There are 56 references to Cush in the Old Testament and these occur in all the three main corpuses of the Hebrew Bible namely the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. Traditional historical-critical scholarship has not showed great interest in the Old Testament texts about Cush. However, the Nigerian biblical scholar David Tuesday Adamo has through his many contributions about the Cush texts made the guild observant of what can be labelled an African presence in the Old Testament given that Cush is applied as a literary motif in the Old Testament. Following a presentation of the Cush texts in the Old Testament, this paper examines how the literary motif of Cush functions in the text, taking Isaiah 18 as a representative example.