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.

History and Turning the Antitrust Page

Present-day advocates of antitrust reform referred to as “New Brandeisians” have invoked history in pressing the case for change. The New Brandeisians bemoan the upending of a mid-twentieth-century “golden age” of antitrust by an intellectual movement known as the Chicago School. In fact, mid-twentieth-century enforcement of antitrust was uneven and large corporations exercised substantial market power. The Chicago School also was not as decisive an agent of change as the New Brandeisians suggest. Doubts about the efficacy of government regulation and concerns about foreign competition did much to foster the late twentieth-century counterrevolution that antitrust experienced.

Hut at Strathmore – TWAIL for a Culturally Appropriate Teaching of Public International Law in African Law Schools

The teaching of Public International Law (PIL) in African law schools is backward. While Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights demands that, for education to be acceptable, it must also be culturally appropriate, the teaching of PIL in our schools is largely only reflective of European westernisation. This study reviews relevant literature in law, sociology, international relations, history and politics, and rely on surveys on PIL syllabi in select leading African law schools to attempt to make this violation more explicit. As a recommendation of a possible way forward, the study provides PIL as taught in the Hut at Strathmore Law School. The Hut is an intellectual movement within Strathmore Law School that has tried to contextualise Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) to Africa.

Prevention of Radicalism at Islamic Boarding College

This research aims to identify the background of radical thinking and behaviour among students at an Islamic Boarding College. We analysed through a qualitative descriptive approach by interviewing several key persons from the campus management, and some students indicated to be exposed to radicalism and radical behaviour. The Islamic struggle movement is synonymous with intellectual movement. Thus, radical movements and behaviour must be prevented as early as possible. The actors are the implementers at universities, starting from the study programs, departments, faculties, and university-wide levels. Several recommendations and suggestions were produced through this research to reduce radical understanding in the university environment with several humanist and psychological approaches. One of them is by deepening the Religion and Islamic compulsory courses such as Ahlussunnah wal Jama'ah courses, regular recitations at the faculty and university level to deepen understanding of Islam, as well as educational materials for defending the country and love for the homeland, as well as citizenship materials and others relevant to the mindset of today's students.

Constantine and the Christian Church

Christianity develops on the fringe of Roman intellectual society, gradually drawing new converts, into the fourth century. Constantine transforms Christianity from a fringe movement to the central intellectual movement in the Roman Empire when he converts as part of an effort to provide the empire with a new governing ideology. A crucial aspect of the conversion of Constantine had been the collapse of the ideological core of the imperial system in the previous century, which undermined faith in existing institutions and created space for radical redefinitions of imperial power which, even before Constantine, has stressed a reimagined connection between emperors and the gods.

No Evidence That Believers in Conspiracy Theories Have More Negative Attitudes Toward Transhumanism

Conspiracy theories regularly refer to the allegedly transhumanist agenda of the elites. We hypothesized that believers in conspiracy theories would hold more unfavorable attitudes toward the transhumanist movement. We examined the association between belief in conspiracy theories and attitudes toward transhumanism in two pre-registered studies (based on two French samples, total N after exclusion = 550). We found no evidence of a negative relation between belief in conspiracy theories and attitudes toward transhumanism. This null result was further corroborated by Bayesian analyses, equivalence test, and an internal mini meta-analysis. This work plays a precursor role in understanding the attitudes toward an international cultural and intellectual movement that continues to grow in popularity and influence.

Voltaire and the politicization of medicine and science

The 17th and 18th centuries witnessed an intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment that made possible future revolutions such as the scientific. No person better characterizes the Enlightenment than Voltaire (1696–1976) who, in his book Philosophical Letters published in 1734, venerated the liberalism of English institutions while criticizing the ancien régime of France. He was convinced that the personal freedom the English enjoyed was responsible for their country's success, pointing to inoculation for smallpox and advances in science as evidence. His choice of smallpox inoculation and science as exemplars of empiricism, which maintained that knowledge is obtained through sensory experience, is revealing as it pinpoints political flashpoints that persist to this day. This paper explores how inoculation and science were employed by Voltaire to advance his political idea of liberty.

Extensions after Man: Race, Counter/insurgency and the Futures of Media Theory

This article returns to the geopolitical scene and racial logics that provide the underacknowledged conditions of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and, specifically, its well-known proposition that media should be understood foremost as ‘outerings’ or ‘extensions of man’. Attending to the structuring inheritances of racial slavery and the plantation system in this founding statement of mid-twentieth-century media theory, as well as its debt to the literary and intellectual movement of the Southern Agrarians, I consider how the racializing figure of ‘Man’ conserved by the nascent field of media studies was contemporaneously brought to crisis by black (and) anticolonial freedom struggles. Arguing for the need to reread the career of western media theory through its political vocation in attempting to manage this crisis, the article concludes by turning briefly to a revisionary account of media and exteriority also circulated in 1964: the revolutionary intellectual James Boggs’s ‘The Negro and Cybernation’. Boggs’s writings, which situate emergent forms of computing and cybernation within a longer materialist genealogy of race, capitalism and technology, offer both a proleptic critique of the early disciplinary formation of media theory and a divergent set of coordinates for approaching media technology on the terrain of black political struggle.