Clive Gabay
Biographic Data
| ID | 642456 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Clive Gabay |
| GIVEN NAMES | Clive |
| FAMILY NAME | Gabay |
| SIGNATURE | GABAY C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen Mary University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6853-3063 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 79 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
IR theory, history and retrieval in a time of genocide
This article foregrounds the ethical nature of the relationship between temporality and history in International Relations (IR) theory, in the context of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. The article contends that a retrieval of history is a defining feature of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. However, both mainstream and more critical IR frameworks, including those critical of how IR theorises temporality, struggle in different way…
Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better: IR theory, utopia, and a failure to (re)imagine failure
Important scholarship in International Relations (IR) theory engages with the utopian tradition in order to render it ‘realistic’, whereby ‘failed’ utopian projects become necessarily unrealistic, and anti-political. The paper suggests such scholarship is informed by a narrow chronotic register, and a dichotomous ontology of chronos and kairos derived in part from the work of Karl Mannheim and E.H. Carr. As such, utopian scholarship in IR constru…
What do you call it when Jeremy Corbyn walks into a Seder? Jewishness, Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) and ethical subject-formation
Then UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn's attendance at a Passover Seder organised by the radical leftist group, Jewdas, in April 2018, led to a brief but vitriolic controversy involving Anglo-Jewish umbrella organisations concerning who qualifies to speak as a Jew. This article uses this controversy to engage with Judith Butler's attempt to address this question, suggesting that in decentring Zionist claims to Jewish subjectivity she fails to …
Exploring a European tradition of allyship with sovereign struggles against colonial violence: A critique of Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida through the heretical Jewish Anarchism of Gustav Landau…
The Politics of Destination in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals: Leaving No-one Behind?
Imagining Africa: Whiteness and the Western Gaze
There has been a long history of idealism concerning the potential of economic and political developments in Africa, the latest iteration of which emerged around the time of the 2007–8 global financial crisis. Here, Clive Gabay takes a historical approach to questions concerning change and international order as these apply to Africa in Western imaginaries. Challenging traditional postcolonial accounts that see the West imagine itself as superior…
Decolonizing interwar anticolonial solidarities: The case of Harry Thuku
This essay suggests that a focus on the transnational and transcultural dimensions of twentieth-century interwar anticolonial movements in Africa creates opportunities to decolonize a historiographical tendency to foreground certain elitist accounts of the period that continue to pervade contemporary anticolonial scholarship. The essay explores the case of Harry Thuku, an early Kenyan nationalist and pan-Africanist active in Kenya Colony in the e…
Politics of Destination in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
The Affective Politics of the Sustainable Development Goals: Partnership, Capacity-Building, and Big Data
In this article, we argue that whilst international studies broadly construed has benefitted in recent years from a turn to theories of affect, a notable absentee in this regard has been critical accounts of international development. We suggest that theories of affect have much to contribute to an understanding of a set of international policies and practices that seek to remake individual and collective capacities to act in the pursuit of ‘deve…
Leaving No-one Behind? The Politics of Destination in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
We are in the age of the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). Two years ago this journal published a special forum on the transition away from the previous UN millennium development
The Radical and Reactionary Politics of Malawi's Hastings Banda: Roots, Fruit and Legacy
This article reconsiders the political thought and practice of Hastings Banda, prime minister and then president of Malawi from 1963 to 1994. Often side-lined and maligned in considerations of post-colonial African leaders for being an authoritarian comprador in service to western interests, the article suggests that Banda’s life and practice illustrates a complex interplay between two types of conservatism: a more radical anti-colonial conservat…
Sisyphus on the Mountain: A Conversation with Professor James C. Scott
Special Forum on the Millennium Development Goals: Introduction
The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), eight time-bound targets aiming, amongst other issues, to reduce extreme poverty, address school enrollment and the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, expire in September 2015. World leaders, civil society organisations, philanthropists, and the private sector are all frantically negotiating and consulting over what will follow them. This special forum in Globalizations is dedicated to questions which …
Doing Biopolitics Differently? Radical Potential in the Post-2015 MDG and SDG Debates
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been critiqued as an ambitious project which sought to produce entrepreneurial neo-liberal subjects. From this perspective, the opportunities and dangers of the post-2015 debates acquire a more urgent importance than the cynical dismissal of the MDGs as ‘minimum development goals’. This article identifies two potentially radical shifts in development discourse offered by the proposals for global Sustai…
Critical Perspectives on African Politics: Liberal interventions, state-building and civil society
Two ‘transitions’: The political economy of Joyce Banda's rise to power and the related role of civil society organisations in Malawi
When Joyce Banda became Malawi's president in 2012, she was welcomed by the international community as an antidote to the increasingly erratic and autocratic behaviour of her unexpectedly deceased predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika. Banda appeared to be the product of the twin drivers of a ‘rising’ Africa; namely a newly empowered donor-supported civil society on the one hand, and a Western-oriented political elite committed to transparency and good …
Critical Perspectives on African Politics: Liberal Interventions, State-Building and Civil Society
Political culture and nationalism in Malawi: Building Kwacha
Political culture and nationalism in Malawi: building Kwacha, by Joey Power, Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2010, 350 pp., £55.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781580463102 Given the protests, killi
Building States and Civil Societies in Africa: Liberal Interventions and Global Governmentality
(2012). Building States and Civil Societies in Africa: Liberal Interventions and Global Governmentality. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding: Vol. 6, Civil Society and Intervention in Africa, pp. 1-6
The Millennium Development Goals and Ambitious Developmental Engineering
Donor governments have been accused of not doing enough to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (mdgs), while the mdgs have been accused from other quarters of not doing enough for development. The former position takes the mdgs as an unquestionable good, while the latter posits them as a Western ruse for the sedimentation of core–periphery relations. This paper transcends this debate, identifying in the goals a logic of ambitious social, cul…
Beyond the securitisation of development: The limits of intervention, developmentisation of security and repositioning of purpose in the UK Coalition Government’s policy agenda
Consenting to ‘Heaven’: The Millennium Development Goals, Neo-liberal Governance and Global Civil Society in Malawi
This article investigates a significant actor within global civil society: the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP). GCAP claims to be the world's largest civil society alliance, and was the umbrella coalition behind the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign, as well as the annual Stand Up against Poverty mobilisations. GCAP is constituted by autonomous non-governmental organisation coalitions in over 100 countries. Utilising an actor-networ…
Transnational political action and 'global civil society' in practice: The case of Oxfam
The term 'global civil society' has taken on increasing significance within scholarly debate over the past decade. In this article we seek to understand transnational political agency via the study of a particular transnational actor, Oxfam. We argue that various schools of thought surrounding the global civil society concept, in particular the prevailing liberal-cosmopolitan approach, are unable to conceptualize transnational political action in…
Anarcho-cosmopolitanism: The Universalisation of the Equal Exchange
This paper concerns itself with the values which make up what has been labelled “ethical cosmopolitanism”—that which entails a universal scope of ethical concern. Conceptions of this ethic have underpinned the development of a “global civil society” and associated humanitarian and activist campaigns. However, such cosmopolitan campaigns have illustrated the ways in which the dismissals of difference and importance of embeddedness have caused suff…
Doing Biopolitics Differently? Radical Potential in the Post-2015 MDG and SDG Debates
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been critiqued as an ambitious project which sought to produce entrepreneurial neo-liberal subjects. From this perspective, the opportunities and dangers of the post-2015 debates acquire a more urgent importance than the cynical dismissal of the MDGs as ‘minimum development goals’. This article identifies two potentially radical shifts in development discourse offered by the proposals for global Sustai…
Beyond the securitisation of development: The limits of intervention, developmentisation of security and repositioning of purpose in the UK Coalition Government’s policy agenda
Building States and Civil Societies in Africa: Liberal Interventions and Global Governmentality
(2012). Building States and Civil Societies in Africa: Liberal Interventions and Global Governmentality. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding: Vol. 6, Civil Society and Intervention in Africa, pp. 1-6
Two ‘transitions’: The political economy of Joyce Banda's rise to power and the related role of civil society organisations in Malawi
When Joyce Banda became Malawi's president in 2012, she was welcomed by the international community as an antidote to the increasingly erratic and autocratic behaviour of her unexpectedly deceased predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika. Banda appeared to be the product of the twin drivers of a ‘rising’ Africa; namely a newly empowered donor-supported civil society on the one hand, and a Western-oriented political elite committed to transparency and good …
The Affective Politics of the Sustainable Development Goals: Partnership, Capacity-Building, and Big Data
In this article, we argue that whilst international studies broadly construed has benefitted in recent years from a turn to theories of affect, a notable absentee in this regard has been critical accounts of international development. We suggest that theories of affect have much to contribute to an understanding of a set of international policies and practices that seek to remake individual and collective capacities to act in the pursuit of ‘deve…
Consenting to ‘Heaven’: The Millennium Development Goals, Neo-liberal Governance and Global Civil Society in Malawi
This article investigates a significant actor within global civil society: the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP). GCAP claims to be the world's largest civil society alliance, and was the umbrella coalition behind the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign, as well as the annual Stand Up against Poverty mobilisations. GCAP is constituted by autonomous non-governmental organisation coalitions in over 100 countries. Utilising an actor-networ…
Leaving No-one Behind? The Politics of Destination in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
We are in the age of the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). Two years ago this journal published a special forum on the transition away from the previous UN millennium development
Transnational political action and 'global civil society' in practice: The case of Oxfam
The term 'global civil society' has taken on increasing significance within scholarly debate over the past decade. In this article we seek to understand transnational political agency via the study of a particular transnational actor, Oxfam. We argue that various schools of thought surrounding the global civil society concept, in particular the prevailing liberal-cosmopolitan approach, are unable to conceptualize transnational political action in…
Special Forum on the Millennium Development Goals: Introduction
The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), eight time-bound targets aiming, amongst other issues, to reduce extreme poverty, address school enrollment and the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, expire in September 2015. World leaders, civil society organisations, philanthropists, and the private sector are all frantically negotiating and consulting over what will follow them. This special forum in Globalizations is dedicated to questions which …
The Millennium Development Goals and Ambitious Developmental Engineering
Donor governments have been accused of not doing enough to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (mdgs), while the mdgs have been accused from other quarters of not doing enough for development. The former position takes the mdgs as an unquestionable good, while the latter posits them as a Western ruse for the sedimentation of core–periphery relations. This paper transcends this debate, identifying in the goals a logic of ambitious social, cul…
Anarcho-cosmopolitanism: The Universalisation of the Equal Exchange
This paper concerns itself with the values which make up what has been labelled “ethical cosmopolitanism”—that which entails a universal scope of ethical concern. Conceptions of this ethic have underpinned the development of a “global civil society” and associated humanitarian and activist campaigns. However, such cosmopolitan campaigns have illustrated the ways in which the dismissals of difference and importance of embeddedness have caused suff…
The Radical and Reactionary Politics of Malawi's Hastings Banda: Roots, Fruit and Legacy
This article reconsiders the political thought and practice of Hastings Banda, prime minister and then president of Malawi from 1963 to 1994. Often side-lined and maligned in considerations of post-colonial African leaders for being an authoritarian comprador in service to western interests, the article suggests that Banda’s life and practice illustrates a complex interplay between two types of conservatism: a more radical anti-colonial conservat…
Anarcho-cosmopolitanism: The Universalisation of the Equal Exchange
This paper concerns itself with the values which make up what has been labelled “ethical cosmopolitanism”—that which entails a universal scope of ethical concern. Conceptions of this ethic have underpinned the development of a “global civil society” and associated humanitarian and activist campaigns. However, such cosmopolitan campaigns have illustrated the ways in which the dismissals of difference and importance of embeddedness have caused suff…
Transnational political action and 'global civil society' in practice: The case of Oxfam
The term 'global civil society' has taken on increasing significance within scholarly debate over the past decade. In this article we seek to understand transnational political agency via the study of a particular transnational actor, Oxfam. We argue that various schools of thought surrounding the global civil society concept, in particular the prevailing liberal-cosmopolitan approach, are unable to conceptualize transnational political action in…
Consenting to ‘Heaven’: The Millennium Development Goals, Neo-liberal Governance and Global Civil Society in Malawi
This article investigates a significant actor within global civil society: the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP). GCAP claims to be the world's largest civil society alliance, and was the umbrella coalition behind the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign, as well as the annual Stand Up against Poverty mobilisations. GCAP is constituted by autonomous non-governmental organisation coalitions in over 100 countries. Utilising an actor-networ…
Building States and Civil Societies in Africa: Liberal Interventions and Global Governmentality
(2012). Building States and Civil Societies in Africa: Liberal Interventions and Global Governmentality. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding: Vol. 6, Civil Society and Intervention in Africa, pp. 1-6
The Millennium Development Goals and Ambitious Developmental Engineering
Donor governments have been accused of not doing enough to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (mdgs), while the mdgs have been accused from other quarters of not doing enough for development. The former position takes the mdgs as an unquestionable good, while the latter posits them as a Western ruse for the sedimentation of core–periphery relations. This paper transcends this debate, identifying in the goals a logic of ambitious social, cul…
Beyond the securitisation of development: The limits of intervention, developmentisation of security and repositioning of purpose in the UK Coalition Government’s policy agenda
Political culture and nationalism in Malawi: Building Kwacha
Political culture and nationalism in Malawi: building Kwacha, by Joey Power, Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2010, 350 pp., £55.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781580463102 Given the protests, killi
Critical Perspectives on African Politics: Liberal interventions, state-building and civil society
Two ‘transitions’: The political economy of Joyce Banda's rise to power and the related role of civil society organisations in Malawi
When Joyce Banda became Malawi's president in 2012, she was welcomed by the international community as an antidote to the increasingly erratic and autocratic behaviour of her unexpectedly deceased predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika. Banda appeared to be the product of the twin drivers of a ‘rising’ Africa; namely a newly empowered donor-supported civil society on the one hand, and a Western-oriented political elite committed to transparency and good …
Critical Perspectives on African Politics: Liberal Interventions, State-Building and Civil Society
Special Forum on the Millennium Development Goals: Introduction
The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), eight time-bound targets aiming, amongst other issues, to reduce extreme poverty, address school enrollment and the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, expire in September 2015. World leaders, civil society organisations, philanthropists, and the private sector are all frantically negotiating and consulting over what will follow them. This special forum in Globalizations is dedicated to questions which …
Doing Biopolitics Differently? Radical Potential in the Post-2015 MDG and SDG Debates
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been critiqued as an ambitious project which sought to produce entrepreneurial neo-liberal subjects. From this perspective, the opportunities and dangers of the post-2015 debates acquire a more urgent importance than the cynical dismissal of the MDGs as ‘minimum development goals’. This article identifies two potentially radical shifts in development discourse offered by the proposals for global Sustai…
Sisyphus on the Mountain: A Conversation with Professor James C. Scott
The Affective Politics of the Sustainable Development Goals: Partnership, Capacity-Building, and Big Data
In this article, we argue that whilst international studies broadly construed has benefitted in recent years from a turn to theories of affect, a notable absentee in this regard has been critical accounts of international development. We suggest that theories of affect have much to contribute to an understanding of a set of international policies and practices that seek to remake individual and collective capacities to act in the pursuit of ‘deve…
Leaving No-one Behind? The Politics of Destination in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
We are in the age of the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). Two years ago this journal published a special forum on the transition away from the previous UN millennium development
The Radical and Reactionary Politics of Malawi's Hastings Banda: Roots, Fruit and Legacy
This article reconsiders the political thought and practice of Hastings Banda, prime minister and then president of Malawi from 1963 to 1994. Often side-lined and maligned in considerations of post-colonial African leaders for being an authoritarian comprador in service to western interests, the article suggests that Banda’s life and practice illustrates a complex interplay between two types of conservatism: a more radical anti-colonial conservat…
The Politics of Destination in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals: Leaving No-one Behind?
Imagining Africa: Whiteness and the Western Gaze
There has been a long history of idealism concerning the potential of economic and political developments in Africa, the latest iteration of which emerged around the time of the 2007–8 global financial crisis. Here, Clive Gabay takes a historical approach to questions concerning change and international order as these apply to Africa in Western imaginaries. Challenging traditional postcolonial accounts that see the West imagine itself as superior…
Decolonizing interwar anticolonial solidarities: The case of Harry Thuku
This essay suggests that a focus on the transnational and transcultural dimensions of twentieth-century interwar anticolonial movements in Africa creates opportunities to decolonize a historiographical tendency to foreground certain elitist accounts of the period that continue to pervade contemporary anticolonial scholarship. The essay explores the case of Harry Thuku, an early Kenyan nationalist and pan-Africanist active in Kenya Colony in the e…
Politics of Destination in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
Exploring a European tradition of allyship with sovereign struggles against colonial violence: A critique of Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida through the heretical Jewish Anarchism of Gustav Landau…
What do you call it when Jeremy Corbyn walks into a Seder? Jewishness, Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) and ethical subject-formation
Then UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn's attendance at a Passover Seder organised by the radical leftist group, Jewdas, in April 2018, led to a brief but vitriolic controversy involving Anglo-Jewish umbrella organisations concerning who qualifies to speak as a Jew. This article uses this controversy to engage with Judith Butler's attempt to address this question, suggesting that in decentring Zionist claims to Jewish subjectivity she fails to …
Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better: IR theory, utopia, and a failure to (re)imagine failure
Important scholarship in International Relations (IR) theory engages with the utopian tradition in order to render it ‘realistic’, whereby ‘failed’ utopian projects become necessarily unrealistic, and anti-political. The paper suggests such scholarship is informed by a narrow chronotic register, and a dichotomous ontology of chronos and kairos derived in part from the work of Karl Mannheim and E.H. Carr. As such, utopian scholarship in IR constru…
IR theory, history and retrieval in a time of genocide
This article foregrounds the ethical nature of the relationship between temporality and history in International Relations (IR) theory, in the context of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. The article contends that a retrieval of history is a defining feature of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. However, both mainstream and more critical IR frameworks, including those critical of how IR theorises temporality, struggle in different way…
Political science (21 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (12 works) · Political economy (12 works) · Economics (8 works) · International Development and Aid (7 works) · Civil society (6 works) · Economic growth (5 works)