Robbie Shilliam
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3677239 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Robbie Shilliam |
| NOMBRES | Robbie |
| APELLIDO | Shilliam |
| FIRMA | SHILLIAM R |
| AFILIACIONES | Johns Hopkins University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9966-8574 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 44 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 274 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 40 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 6 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2004 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
Race, Racism, and the Crisis of Democracy in Political Science
Over the past decade, autocratization has increased worldwide, and the United States itself has seen its own democracy erode. While political scientists have begun to study both phenomena in earnest, with exceptions, they have been unable to fully wrestle with either. We suggest that this incomplete understanding is the result of the discipline's problematic racial history. At the time of its founding in the late nineteenth century, political sci…
Racialization in history and theory
World War II was saturated by racialized dynamics including imperialism, racist ideologies, persecution of racial minorities, and genocide. It was also the foundational conflict that inspired modern international relations, a field that during the late 20th century grew notable for its colorblindness—refusing to reflect on the potential importance of racialized dynamics in world politics. Why did a field built to explain such racialized events co…
Intervention before interventionism
Raced Markets
Theorizing (with) Amy Ashwood Garvey
This chapter returns to the foundational questions of what it means to produce international thought. What are the markers of recognition, in terms of location and genre? Amy Ashwood Garvey was a race woman, a ‘street-strolling’ Pan-Africanist and leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. For this gifted conversationalist, public orator and rhetorician, political praxis and organizing were a way of theorizing. Although her political …
Forum
Tales of Entanglement
Entanglement, and the way people and worlds ‘emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating’, becomes nowhere more apparent perhaps than when we tell stories. In telling stories we invoke a reader, a listener, an audience, even if sometimes that audience is within what we call our selves. But stories do more. They draw out the complex and ambiguous mutual constitution of selves with others, of present with past, of person with place…
Race and racism in international relations
Enoch Powell
Enoch Powell was not only Britain’s best known racist, he was also its first neoliberal politician. By making this provocative claim, I wish to consider political and intellectual departure points that might provide a more adequate account of the contemporary relationship between racist populism and the neoliberal project. This relationship might be seen as paradoxical. However, I suggest that racist populism should be apprehended as, formatively…
The past and present of abolition
Abolish prisons; abolish police; abolish immigration enforcement: current “abolition” movements have yet to receive the attention that international political economy has given to its social justice forerunners, e.g. World Social Forum and Occupy. I argue that to make the current abolition movement legible to the field first requires a retrieval of abolition’s import for classical political economy. Towards this aim, I reassess the ways in which …
Race and the Undeserving Poor
Redeeming the 'ordinary working class
Critical responses to the rise of right-wing populism in the Western world have done much to draw attention to the racialization of moral economies. However, it is not only remarkable that class has returned to the grammar of politics as an intractably racialized category - the white-working-class; it is just as remarkable that the racialized moral opprobrium of the underclass has given way rhetorically and ideologically to a racialized moral com…
Race and the Undeserving Poor
Over recent years, tabloid readers have become familiar with the concept of the 'white working class', those thought to have been 'left behind' by globalization, including immigration. Such sentiments were weaponized by politicians on all sides to fuel the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Brexit campaign. And this racialized narrative has emerged repeatedly in mature democracies - in the political campaigns of Trump, Le Pen and others - and continu…
Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics
This chapter considers the following question: Should ‘security’ be a point of departure when thinking about the postcolonial? In considering this question, I will focus on recent debates on cosmopolitanism and security. Cosmopolitan approaches to security have focused on concerns with the security of peoples beyond one’s own borders plus the global environment (Linklater, 2005, Burke, 2013). Doing so while avoiding treating the postcolonial in a…
Race and the Undeserving Poor
Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics
Indebtedness and the Curation of a Black Archive
Addressing Mbembe’s interview with Goldberg and reflecting upon the book – Critique of Black Reason (2017) – that the interview probes, the author points to a tension in Mbembe’s thought. Mbembe apprehends black reason as all-at-once ‘reason’s unreason’ and the remaking-reasonable of reason. In this respect, there is a clear sense of a simultaneity of imposition–struggle and destruction–repair. Yet this ethos of simultaneity is in tension with Mb…
Collective Discussion
As students and scholars of global politics, we have been witnessing, participating in, and feeling the effects of recent global upheavals. These include specific events, such as the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit, but are better understood through their resulting political effects (e.g., pushing back on migration, hardening national borders, denying climate change, reneging on trade deals, gutting the welfare state, increasing resourc…
Raced Markets
The central consensus among the scholars and activists who came together for the first Raced Markets Workshop in December 2015 was that ‘race’ may have begun as fiction, an invention of Europeans in the service of colonisation, however, the fiction of race became material over time, reproduced in relation to the manifold raced markets of the global political economy. Since that original workshop, and against a consolidated neoliberal capitalist c…
Soldiers of empire
Soldiers of empire is a wonderful book: beautifully written, expertly crafted and mixing high theory with historical detail in a way that is as rare as it is illuminating. All contributors to this forum agree that it is a work of immense scholarship, one that occupies an innovative space at the interstices of military history, historical sociology and post-colonial theory. Curiously for a book that engages relatively little International Relation…
Race and Revolution at Bwa Kayiman
It is no longer remarkable to claim that, out of all the revolutions in the making of the modern world order, the Haitian Revolution was the most radical and remains the most challenging to Euro-Western narratives. The Haitian Revolution did what no other did – end slavery – in an age when white Europeans and North Americans spoke of natural rights and freedoms while they remained traffickers and brutal exploiters of African flesh. The stakes at …
Rastafari and the Arts
Darren Middleton's Rastafari and the Arts is an introductory text targeted primarily at undergraduate students. The book seeks to introduce Rastafari – a faith/movement or, in the language of the f
Meanings of Bandung
The Bandung Conference was the seminal event of the twentieth century that announced, envisaged and mobilized for the prospect of a decolonial global order. It was the first meeting of Asian and African states, most of which were newly independent, to promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and to oppose colonialism or neocolonialism by any nation. This book focuses on Bandung not only as a political and institutional platform, but a…
White world order, Black Power politics
In White world order, Black Power politics, Robert Vitalis renarrates the disciplinary history of International Relations (IR) in the United States academy. His story is framed by four intersecting lines of argument. First, imperial administration posed a—perhaps the—key problem for the emerging field. Second, theories of race development were central to addressing this problem. Third, the challenges of imperial administration and race developmen…
Colonial Architecture or Relatable Hinterlands? Locke, Nandy, Fanon, and the Bandung Spirit
Raced Markets
The central consensus among the scholars and activists who came together for the first Raced Markets Workshop in December 2015 was that ‘race’ may have begun as fiction, an invention of Europeans in the service of colonisation, however, the fiction of race became material over time, reproduced in relation to the manifold raced markets of the global political economy. Since that original workshop, and against a consolidated neoliberal capitalist c…
What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the transformation of sovereignty debate
Post World War I, Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African movement managed to coalesce, however briefly and imperfectly, an extra-territorial sovereign authority in the form of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Through the recollection of this project the article seeks to disturb the predominant uni-linear narrative in IR debates of the transformation of sovereignty that posit a recent shift from territorial exclusivity to multi-level gover…
Sociology and international relations
While sociological concepts have often been implicitly used in International Relations (IR), recent years have seen a more explicit engagement between IR and Sociology. As with any such interdisciplinary assignation, there are both possibilities and challenges contained within this move: possibilities in terms of reducing IR's intellectual autism and opening the discipline towards potentially fertile terrain that was never, actually, that distant…
Race and Revolution at Bwa Kayiman
It is no longer remarkable to claim that, out of all the revolutions in the making of the modern world order, the Haitian Revolution was the most radical and remains the most challenging to Euro-Western narratives. The Haitian Revolution did what no other did – end slavery – in an age when white Europeans and North Americans spoke of natural rights and freedoms while they remained traffickers and brutal exploiters of African flesh. The stakes at …
Hegemony and the Unfashionable Problematic of `Primitive Accumulation
This article proposes that the neo-Gramscian tradition in IR forbids a direct enquiry into the international dimension of processes of social transformation. Rather, neo-Gramscians deploy the concept of hegemony to the level of world order by implicitly universalising the specific structural qualities of capitalist social relations. This article asserts that the transformation towards capitalist sociality, a process that has been termed “primitiv…
Enoch Powell
Enoch Powell was not only Britain’s best known racist, he was also its first neoliberal politician. By making this provocative claim, I wish to consider political and intellectual departure points that might provide a more adequate account of the contemporary relationship between racist populism and the neoliberal project. This relationship might be seen as paradoxical. However, I suggest that racist populism should be apprehended as, formatively…
Colonial Architecture or Relatable Hinterlands? Locke, Nandy, Fanon, and the Bandung Spirit
Creating memorials, building identities
Creating memorials, building identities: the politics of memory in the Black Atlantic, by Alan Rice, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2010, 244 pp., £65.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781846314711 Thro
Ethiopianism, Englishness, Britishness
In this article, I problematise a tendency to situate concerns for citizenship and belonging via what might be called ‘narratives of settlement’. In these narratives, the chronology of settlement begins with the visceral and institutional racism met by non-white immigrant peoples of the commonwealth post Second World War, and the tempo of settlement is marked by the problem of integrating into and within UK society. Such narratives occlude a broa…
Intervention and colonial-modernity
In this article I utilise the editors' conceptual frame of sovereignty/intervention/transnational social forces to argue that the relationship that ensues between these phenomena has to be understood in colonial-modern – rather than modern – terms. I thereby argue that intervention is a distinctive technology of colonial-modern rule, specifically, one that erects and polices the difference between sovereign and quasi-sovereign entities via a stan…
Civilization and the poetics of slavery
Civilizational analysis is increasingly being used to capture the plurality of routes to and through the modern world order. However, the concept of civilization betrays a colonial legacy, namely, a denial that colonized peoples possessed the creative ability to cultivate their own subjecthoods. This denial was especially acute when it came to enslaved Africans in the New World whose bodies were imagined to be deracinated and deculturated. This a…
Tales of Entanglement
Entanglement, and the way people and worlds ‘emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating’, becomes nowhere more apparent perhaps than when we tell stories. In telling stories we invoke a reader, a listener, an audience, even if sometimes that audience is within what we call our selves. But stories do more. They draw out the complex and ambiguous mutual constitution of selves with others, of present with past, of person with place…
On Africa in Oceania
In this text, written in relation to my book The Black Pacific, I introduce the connections of the Black Pacific, especially those by which Māori and Pasifika struggles against land dispossession, settler colonialism and racism connect with the struggles of African peoples against slavery, (settler) colonialism and racism. Sociologically, historically and geographically speaking, these connections between colonized and postcolonized peoples appea…
Open the Gates Mek We Repatriate”
Constructivism has inherited a hermeneutic tension from the sociology of knowledge tradition regarding a strong ontological proposition that all social beings interpret their reality and a qualified epistemological proposition that some social beings are better able to interpret the reality of others. This article focuses on the politics of knowledge production that arise from this tension, namely that a privileged group, the ‘scholastic caste’, …
Redeeming the 'ordinary working class
Critical responses to the rise of right-wing populism in the Western world have done much to draw attention to the racialization of moral economies. However, it is not only remarkable that class has returned to the grammar of politics as an intractably racialized category - the white-working-class; it is just as remarkable that the racialized moral opprobrium of the underclass has given way rhetorically and ideologically to a racialized moral com…
A Fanonian Critique of Lebow's A Cultural Theory of International Relations
Ned Lebow's new project is not so much a cultural theory of international relations as an affective praxis of modernity. Lebow seeks to elucidate the psychical drivers of intersubjective identity formation that dynamically constitute status hierarchies in societies. And through this understanding Lebow holds that present-day possibilities of structural transformations in international relations might be clearly guided by practical reason. In what…
The past and present of abolition
Abolish prisons; abolish police; abolish immigration enforcement: current “abolition” movements have yet to receive the attention that international political economy has given to its social justice forerunners, e.g. World Social Forum and Occupy. I argue that to make the current abolition movement legible to the field first requires a retrieval of abolition’s import for classical political economy. Towards this aim, I reassess the ways in which …
Morgenthau in Context
By what criteria might the human condition be considered `tragic'? In this article I argue that historically contextualizing the criteria by which Morgenthau judged the human condition to be tragic requires a sensitivity to what might be called the `international dimension' of knowledge production. Specifically, I argue that Morgenthau's tragic sense of the relation between liberal ethics and the reality of politics was constructed as a reaction …
Redemption from development
Amartya Sen's ‘capabilities approach’ has, over the last 20 years, become the most influential contender to the dominant neoliberal understanding of development as quantitatively assessed economic
Keskidee Aroha
In 1979 a Black theatre group from London toured the north island of Aotearoa New Zealand, visiting community centres and marae (traditional Māori meeting places).1 The troupe was named after a small Guyanese bird renowned for its resilience - the Keskidee - and consisted of Black British, African-Caribbean, African-American and African performers including a group of Rasta musicians, the Ras Messengers. The New Zealand organizers of the tour cal…
Contesting Imperial Epistemologies
This special issue addresses theEurocentred nature of knowledge production by examining alternative loci of knowledge production and the consequences of subverting standard narratives of particular events and conceptual paradigms through a focus on "other" places and traditions of thought, especially those formed in colonial encounters. In contesting imperial epistemologies, this special issue draws together contributors working on a variety of g…
Race, Racism, and the Crisis of Democracy in Political Science
Over the past decade, autocratization has increased worldwide, and the United States itself has seen its own democracy erode. While political scientists have begun to study both phenomena in earnest, with exceptions, they have been unable to fully wrestle with either. We suggest that this incomplete understanding is the result of the discipline's problematic racial history. At the time of its founding in the late nineteenth century, political sci…
The Hieroglyph of the `Party
Questions about the agency of the Communist Party — especially its failure to effect and support radical social transformations — formed one crucial aspect of the socio-political context in which the agent—structure debate was rejoined by social scientists in the 1960s and 70s. Moreover, the Party had long existed as a hieroglyph for Marxist thought. And deciphering the historical importance of the Party in processes of world development required…
Hegemony and the Unfashionable Problematic of `Primitive Accumulation
This article proposes that the neo-Gramscian tradition in IR forbids a direct enquiry into the international dimension of processes of social transformation. Rather, neo-Gramscians deploy the concept of hegemony to the level of world order by implicitly universalising the specific structural qualities of capitalist social relations. This article asserts that the transformation towards capitalist sociality, a process that has been termed “primitiv…
What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the transformation of sovereignty debate
Post World War I, Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African movement managed to coalesce, however briefly and imperfectly, an extra-territorial sovereign authority in the form of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Through the recollection of this project the article seeks to disturb the predominant uni-linear narrative in IR debates of the transformation of sovereignty that posit a recent shift from territorial exclusivity to multi-level gover…
Morgenthau in Context
By what criteria might the human condition be considered `tragic'? In this article I argue that historically contextualizing the criteria by which Morgenthau judged the human condition to be tragic requires a sensitivity to what might be called the `international dimension' of knowledge production. Specifically, I argue that Morgenthau's tragic sense of the relation between liberal ethics and the reality of politics was constructed as a reaction …
The Hieroglyph of the `Party
Questions about the agency of the Communist Party — especially its failure to effect and support radical social transformations — formed one crucial aspect of the socio-political context in which the agent—structure debate was rejoined by social scientists in the 1960s and 70s. Moreover, the Party had long existed as a hieroglyph for Marxist thought. And deciphering the historical importance of the Party in processes of world development required…
A Fanonian Critique of Lebow's A Cultural Theory of International Relations
Ned Lebow's new project is not so much a cultural theory of international relations as an affective praxis of modernity. Lebow seeks to elucidate the psychical drivers of intersubjective identity formation that dynamically constitute status hierarchies in societies. And through this understanding Lebow holds that present-day possibilities of structural transformations in international relations might be clearly guided by practical reason. In what…
International Relations and Non-Western Thought
Biographies: 1. Non-Western thought and International Relations Robbie Shilliam 2. The perilous but unavoidable intellectual terrain of the non-West Robbie Shilliam Part I : Colonial Conditions 3. On colonial modernity: Civilization versus nationhood in Cuba, c.1840 Gerard Aching 4. Anti-Racism and Internationalism in the thought and practice of Cabral, Neto, Mondlane and Machel Branwen Gruffyd Jones 5. Voices from the Jewish Colony: Sovereignty,…
Sociology and international relations
While sociological concepts have often been implicitly used in International Relations (IR), recent years have seen a more explicit engagement between IR and Sociology. As with any such interdisciplinary assignation, there are both possibilities and challenges contained within this move: possibilities in terms of reducing IR's intellectual autism and opening the discipline towards potentially fertile terrain that was never, actually, that distant…
Creating memorials, building identities
Creating memorials, building identities: the politics of memory in the Black Atlantic, by Alan Rice, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2010, 244 pp., £65.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781846314711 Thro
Keskidee Aroha
In 1979 a Black theatre group from London toured the north island of Aotearoa New Zealand, visiting community centres and marae (traditional Māori meeting places).1 The troupe was named after a small Guyanese bird renowned for its resilience - the Keskidee - and consisted of Black British, African-Caribbean, African-American and African performers including a group of Rasta musicians, the Ras Messengers. The New Zealand organizers of the tour cal…
The Polynesian Panthers and the Black Power Gang
Scholars of Black Power are increasingly exploring its global dimensions.1 A number of studies have paid attention to the international connections and influences of key US Black Power people and organizations,2 and the mapping of the influence of US Black Power across the American and African continents is well underway.3 However, further analysis of the global import, influence, and effect of Black Power across the postcolonial world must pay m…
Redemption from development
Amartya Sen's ‘capabilities approach’ has, over the last 20 years, become the most influential contender to the dominant neoliberal understanding of development as quantitatively assessed economic
Civilization and the poetics of slavery
Civilizational analysis is increasingly being used to capture the plurality of routes to and through the modern world order. However, the concept of civilization betrays a colonial legacy, namely, a denial that colonized peoples possessed the creative ability to cultivate their own subjecthoods. This denial was especially acute when it came to enslaved Africans in the New World whose bodies were imagined to be deracinated and deculturated. This a…
Who Will Provide the West with Therapy?
In this chapter I follow the poetic method suggested by the above Francophone Caribbean writers. I will express the question, ‘who will provide the West with therapy?’ through a set of meditations whose inter-connections across time, space and discipline I manifest wilfully. In a sense, this is a necessary method through which to critique Western liberalism, a pathologically narcissistic and racialised sense of human being. Western liberalism is …
Intervention and colonial-modernity
In this article I utilise the editors' conceptual frame of sovereignty/intervention/transnational social forces to argue that the relationship that ensues between these phenomena has to be understood in colonial-modern – rather than modern – terms. I thereby argue that intervention is a distinctive technology of colonial-modern rule, specifically, one that erects and polices the difference between sovereign and quasi-sovereign entities via a stan…
Race and Racism in International Relations
Open the Gates Mek We Repatriate”
Constructivism has inherited a hermeneutic tension from the sociology of knowledge tradition regarding a strong ontological proposition that all social beings interpret their reality and a qualified epistemological proposition that some social beings are better able to interpret the reality of others. This article focuses on the politics of knowledge production that arise from this tension, namely that a privileged group, the ‘scholastic caste’, …
Contesting Imperial Epistemologies
This special issue addresses theEurocentred nature of knowledge production by examining alternative loci of knowledge production and the consequences of subverting standard narratives of particular events and conceptual paradigms through a focus on "other" places and traditions of thought, especially those formed in colonial encounters. In contesting imperial epistemologies, this special issue draws together contributors working on a variety of g…
Decolonizing theManifesto
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
The Black Pacific
Why have the struggles of the African Diaspora so resonated with South Pacific people? How have Maori, Pasifika and Pakeha activists incorporated the ideologies of the African diaspora into their struggle against colonial rule and racism, and their pursuit of social justice? This book challenges predominant understandings of the historical linkages that make up the (post-)colonial world. The author goes beyond both the domination of the Atlantic …
Rastafari and the Arts
Darren Middleton's Rastafari and the Arts is an introductory text targeted primarily at undergraduate students. The book seeks to introduce Rastafari – a faith/movement or, in the language of the f
Meanings of Bandung
The Bandung Conference was the seminal event of the twentieth century that announced, envisaged and mobilized for the prospect of a decolonial global order. It was the first meeting of Asian and African states, most of which were newly independent, to promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and to oppose colonialism or neocolonialism by any nation. This book focuses on Bandung not only as a political and institutional platform, but a…
White world order, Black Power politics
In White world order, Black Power politics, Robert Vitalis renarrates the disciplinary history of International Relations (IR) in the United States academy. His story is framed by four intersecting lines of argument. First, imperial administration posed a—perhaps the—key problem for the emerging field. Second, theories of race development were central to addressing this problem. Third, the challenges of imperial administration and race developmen…
Colonial Architecture or Relatable Hinterlands? Locke, Nandy, Fanon, and the Bandung Spirit
Ethiopianism, Englishness, Britishness
In this article, I problematise a tendency to situate concerns for citizenship and belonging via what might be called ‘narratives of settlement’. In these narratives, the chronology of settlement begins with the visceral and institutional racism met by non-white immigrant peoples of the commonwealth post Second World War, and the tempo of settlement is marked by the problem of integrating into and within UK society. Such narratives occlude a broa…
On Africa in Oceania
In this text, written in relation to my book The Black Pacific, I introduce the connections of the Black Pacific, especially those by which Māori and Pasifika struggles against land dispossession, settler colonialism and racism connect with the struggles of African peoples against slavery, (settler) colonialism and racism. Sociologically, historically and geographically speaking, these connections between colonized and postcolonized peoples appea…
Sociology (37 obras) · Political science (33 obras) · Law (30 obras) · Politics (25 obras) · Gender Studies (18 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Philosophy (18 obras) · History (14 obras) · Epistemology (13 obras) · Colonialism (11 obras)