Sam Okoth Opondo
Biographic Data
| ID | 642863 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sam Okoth Opondo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sam Okoth |
| FAMILY NAME | Opondo |
| SIGNATURE | OPONDO S O |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vassar College |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-5874-3923 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 43 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Slow Diplomacy
This Forum Discussion explores the notion of slow diplomacy via an engagement with the tradition of diplomatic epistolography. Specifically, it examines an overlooked aspect of diplomatic practice operating beyond the instrumental, fast-paced, and solution-based exchanges of diplomatic communication. Our focus on epistolography shifts from letters as static artifacts and correspondences to letters as “silent envoys” and iterative performances tha…
We” Think We Are Philip K. Dick
Through a critical reading of Ken Liu’s short story “The Caretaker,” Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” and Andrey Junkovsky’s Russian science fiction Netflix series “Better Than Us” (2018), this essay probes the long-held assumption that moral sentiments are uniquely human as well as the enlightenment vision of the world that feeds today’s mutations of capitalism, sovereignty, and the related techno-feudal and techno-l…
Legacies and futures for Global South research
Forum on Recognition in Foreign Policy (Analysis) and (The Study of) Diplomacy
What if the quest for recognition, not power, rank or security, were the overriding objective of foreign policies? What if practices of recognition both empower and subjugate by fixing identities and reproducing the terms upon which agents become recognisable in the first place? Can recognition as encounter become the diplomatic task of, and condition for, a post-colonial international order? This Forum addresses some implications of putting reco…
Musings and Meditations on the Edginess and Hatred of Forgiveness
Heeding Frantz Fanon's thoughts on colonialism and forgiveness alongside his call for us to "turn over a new leaf . . . work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man," this text-mediated meditation on the hatred of forgiveness contends with the question/quest of forgiveness and its relevance to our idea of Africa today. To attend to these ethical questions, the author assembles a textual montage by juxtaposing Wole Soyinka's The Burden of…
I was worlds ’
‘The fictitious world of novels, which is only by convention less real than our own,’ provides us with multiple diplomatic images, imaginaries, and imaginations (Constantinou 1996). This world of literary imaginations also reveals the avowed and unavowed fictions that animate our ideas of diplomacy, community, the home, the body, humanity, and more-than-human beings. Through a reading of the imaginative and speculative diplomatic worlds in Nnedi …
Thinking with Diplomacy
Following the considerable interest in practice theory, this Collective Discussion interrogates what it means to practice and, ultimately, to think with diplomacy. In asking how empirical, methodological, and axiological disagreements over what constitutes diplomatic practice can be productively employed to develop or revise practice theory, the Discussion engages the historically and culturally contingent practices of diplomacy. In doing so, it …
Aesthetic Separation / Separation Aesthetics
The consensual and dissensual modes of separation above alert us to how the COVID-19 pandemic has turned the present into a time of intense separation, one of which is between those bodies marked as essential versus non-essential, those that have 'pre-existing conditions' and those without, and those located in precarious zones of abandonment, congestion, and containment, and those that, owing to prevailing economic distancing and apartness, can …
On biodiplomacy
This article examines the intersection of biopolitics with diplomacy and engages its dynamic re-envisioning as biodiplomacy. It revisits Michel Foucault’s peripheral attention to diplomacy and his framing of the concept in his writings on raison d’état and the government of the living. The article suggests that biodiplomacy can help us understand better the complexity of global biopolitical projects, moving us beyond governmentality and sensitizi…
Subalterns ‘speak
The contemporary globalizing world has unleashed new flows of migrant labour, among which are young women working in homes. As is well known, many find themselves in a situation of virtual slavery, having no juridical protections against both physical and emotional abuse, and against being held in servitude against their wills. While the situation of migrant domestic workers is increasingly well known, there has been little analysis of how their …
Diplomacy and Ethnology between Empire and Nation
Opondo's essay focuses on the theoretical stakes of the debates in Frederick Cooper's Citizenship between Empire and Nation and looks at how ethnological reason haunts the debates over how to govern different people differently while at the same time articulating the language of citizenship. The essay also engages a corollary to Cooper's elaborate treatment of the empirics of empire and the related empire of empirics by looking at the book's cont…
Childhood, redemption and the prosaics of waiting
Contemporary developments have forced an analytical category to be reckoned with in understanding the current nature of global political life: time. The question of time and temporality of the present and the future has been making its way into the disciplinary debates within international relations. Critical scholars are taking interest in the temporal dimension of global politics and the assumptions about time informing disciplinary analyses. T…
Diplomacy and the Colonial Encounter
Between Camps/Between Cities
This essay examines insurrectional asylum-seeking and refugee practices that highlight and disturb the legal and spatial relationship between refugee camps, zones of capture, and cities. Through a critical consideration of the logic of the refugee camp and its intersection with the law, technology, security, and humanitarian discourses, we map a series of practices emerging from the proliferation of camps, the urbanization and normalization of re…
Biocolonial and Racial Entanglements
Through a reading of Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 science fiction/mock documentary District 9 and John le Carré’s novel The Constant Gardener, this article illustrates how the acceptance that we are all human has an identity-constituting function that enables bodies and lives to be valued differently with far-reaching implications for both biomedical experiments and experiments with the ethics of cohabitation. More specifically, this article examines bi…
Engaging the ‘ungoverned’
This article explores biopolitical practices that extend beyond national borders and take the whole of humanity as their province. It looks at how attempts to secure and optimize conditions of living in Africa are not merely governmental in scope but also diplomatic in their conceptualization and conduct. It specifically examines the merging of diplomacy, defence and development (or the 3Ds), which purports to optimize life and shape ways of bein…
Cinema is our ‘night school
This essay engages the political, aesthetic, and ethical significance of Ousmane Sembène's art by examining how it disturbs the truth claims that underlie African practices and conceptions of self that are streamlined into narrow colonial, ‘Afro-radicalist,’ and ‘nativist’ narratives of African identity. On the whole, the essay illustrates how the aesthetic entanglements and falsifications in Sembène's cinematic and literary practice dispose us t…
Affective economies
In this essay, we trace the national and religious anxieties that emerge with the influx of Somali refugees and capital investments into the Nairobi suburb of Eastleigh. More specifically, we look at how the ambiguity of Somali identity [citizen/refugee] in Kenya renders ineffective the state's attempt to police the circulation of the ‘Somali body’ and capital and how this becomes part of a quest for certitude that manifests itself in security di…
Libya's ‘Black’ Market Diplomacies
In this essay, I explore some of the values, exchanges and economies (moral, political and libidinal) characteristic of everyday life and official diplomacies in Libya. Through a consideration of multiple sites of estrangement and their related mediation practice, the essay engages the moral alibis, entangled yet unacknowledged relations, ontological commitments and duplicitous exchanges that made ‘Gaddafi's Libya’ possible. By patiently engaging…
Decolonizing Diplomacy
One of the most interesting, and paradoxically most disturbing aspects of thinking about Africa in general and diplomacy in Africa in particular, is the encounter with narratives that emphasize the Otherness or timeless sameness of African peoples. In many cases, these narratives emanate from encounters that seek to establish a consensual diplomatic identity by excluding or trivializing certain aspects of the ‘African’ lived experience. Encounter…
Genre and the African City
This article engages the genre—city intertext in order to make conceptual distinctions between the “city” and the “urban” by illustrating how certain textual representations and disciplinary practices in their constitution of the African city are actively involved in the killing of the plurality of rhythms, or heterogeneity central to urban life. It illustrates how certain modes of reading and writing about the African city (colonial autobiograph…
Thinking with Diplomacy
Following the considerable interest in practice theory, this Collective Discussion interrogates what it means to practice and, ultimately, to think with diplomacy. In asking how empirical, methodological, and axiological disagreements over what constitutes diplomatic practice can be productively employed to develop or revise practice theory, the Discussion engages the historically and culturally contingent practices of diplomacy. In doing so, it …
Engaging the ‘ungoverned’
This article explores biopolitical practices that extend beyond national borders and take the whole of humanity as their province. It looks at how attempts to secure and optimize conditions of living in Africa are not merely governmental in scope but also diplomatic in their conceptualization and conduct. It specifically examines the merging of diplomacy, defence and development (or the 3Ds), which purports to optimize life and shape ways of bein…
Subalterns ‘speak
The contemporary globalizing world has unleashed new flows of migrant labour, among which are young women working in homes. As is well known, many find themselves in a situation of virtual slavery, having no juridical protections against both physical and emotional abuse, and against being held in servitude against their wills. While the situation of migrant domestic workers is increasingly well known, there has been little analysis of how their …
On biodiplomacy
This article examines the intersection of biopolitics with diplomacy and engages its dynamic re-envisioning as biodiplomacy. It revisits Michel Foucault’s peripheral attention to diplomacy and his framing of the concept in his writings on raison d’état and the government of the living. The article suggests that biodiplomacy can help us understand better the complexity of global biopolitical projects, moving us beyond governmentality and sensitizi…
Between Camps/Between Cities
This essay examines insurrectional asylum-seeking and refugee practices that highlight and disturb the legal and spatial relationship between refugee camps, zones of capture, and cities. Through a critical consideration of the logic of the refugee camp and its intersection with the law, technology, security, and humanitarian discourses, we map a series of practices emerging from the proliferation of camps, the urbanization and normalization of re…
Biocolonial and Racial Entanglements
Through a reading of Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 science fiction/mock documentary District 9 and John le Carré’s novel The Constant Gardener, this article illustrates how the acceptance that we are all human has an identity-constituting function that enables bodies and lives to be valued differently with far-reaching implications for both biomedical experiments and experiments with the ethics of cohabitation. More specifically, this article examines bi…
Affective economies
In this essay, we trace the national and religious anxieties that emerge with the influx of Somali refugees and capital investments into the Nairobi suburb of Eastleigh. More specifically, we look at how the ambiguity of Somali identity [citizen/refugee] in Kenya renders ineffective the state's attempt to police the circulation of the ‘Somali body’ and capital and how this becomes part of a quest for certitude that manifests itself in security di…
We” Think We Are Philip K. Dick
Through a critical reading of Ken Liu’s short story “The Caretaker,” Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” and Andrey Junkovsky’s Russian science fiction Netflix series “Better Than Us” (2018), this essay probes the long-held assumption that moral sentiments are uniquely human as well as the enlightenment vision of the world that feeds today’s mutations of capitalism, sovereignty, and the related techno-feudal and techno-l…
Legacies and futures for Global South research
Cinema is our ‘night school
This essay engages the political, aesthetic, and ethical significance of Ousmane Sembène's art by examining how it disturbs the truth claims that underlie African practices and conceptions of self that are streamlined into narrow colonial, ‘Afro-radicalist,’ and ‘nativist’ narratives of African identity. On the whole, the essay illustrates how the aesthetic entanglements and falsifications in Sembène's cinematic and literary practice dispose us t…
Genre and the African City
This article engages the genre—city intertext in order to make conceptual distinctions between the “city” and the “urban” by illustrating how certain textual representations and disciplinary practices in their constitution of the African city are actively involved in the killing of the plurality of rhythms, or heterogeneity central to urban life. It illustrates how certain modes of reading and writing about the African city (colonial autobiograph…
Decolonizing Diplomacy
One of the most interesting, and paradoxically most disturbing aspects of thinking about Africa in general and diplomacy in Africa in particular, is the encounter with narratives that emphasize the Otherness or timeless sameness of African peoples. In many cases, these narratives emanate from encounters that seek to establish a consensual diplomatic identity by excluding or trivializing certain aspects of the ‘African’ lived experience. Encounter…
Libya's ‘Black’ Market Diplomacies
In this essay, I explore some of the values, exchanges and economies (moral, political and libidinal) characteristic of everyday life and official diplomacies in Libya. Through a consideration of multiple sites of estrangement and their related mediation practice, the essay engages the moral alibis, entangled yet unacknowledged relations, ontological commitments and duplicitous exchanges that made ‘Gaddafi's Libya’ possible. By patiently engaging…
Affective economies
In this essay, we trace the national and religious anxieties that emerge with the influx of Somali refugees and capital investments into the Nairobi suburb of Eastleigh. More specifically, we look at how the ambiguity of Somali identity [citizen/refugee] in Kenya renders ineffective the state's attempt to police the circulation of the ‘Somali body’ and capital and how this becomes part of a quest for certitude that manifests itself in security di…
Between Camps/Between Cities
This essay examines insurrectional asylum-seeking and refugee practices that highlight and disturb the legal and spatial relationship between refugee camps, zones of capture, and cities. Through a critical consideration of the logic of the refugee camp and its intersection with the law, technology, security, and humanitarian discourses, we map a series of practices emerging from the proliferation of camps, the urbanization and normalization of re…
Biocolonial and Racial Entanglements
Through a reading of Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 science fiction/mock documentary District 9 and John le Carré’s novel The Constant Gardener, this article illustrates how the acceptance that we are all human has an identity-constituting function that enables bodies and lives to be valued differently with far-reaching implications for both biomedical experiments and experiments with the ethics of cohabitation. More specifically, this article examines bi…
Engaging the ‘ungoverned’
This article explores biopolitical practices that extend beyond national borders and take the whole of humanity as their province. It looks at how attempts to secure and optimize conditions of living in Africa are not merely governmental in scope but also diplomatic in their conceptualization and conduct. It specifically examines the merging of diplomacy, defence and development (or the 3Ds), which purports to optimize life and shape ways of bein…
Cinema is our ‘night school
This essay engages the political, aesthetic, and ethical significance of Ousmane Sembène's art by examining how it disturbs the truth claims that underlie African practices and conceptions of self that are streamlined into narrow colonial, ‘Afro-radicalist,’ and ‘nativist’ narratives of African identity. On the whole, the essay illustrates how the aesthetic entanglements and falsifications in Sembène's cinematic and literary practice dispose us t…
Childhood, redemption and the prosaics of waiting
Contemporary developments have forced an analytical category to be reckoned with in understanding the current nature of global political life: time. The question of time and temporality of the present and the future has been making its way into the disciplinary debates within international relations. Critical scholars are taking interest in the temporal dimension of global politics and the assumptions about time informing disciplinary analyses. T…
Diplomacy and the Colonial Encounter
Diplomacy and Ethnology between Empire and Nation
Opondo's essay focuses on the theoretical stakes of the debates in Frederick Cooper's Citizenship between Empire and Nation and looks at how ethnological reason haunts the debates over how to govern different people differently while at the same time articulating the language of citizenship. The essay also engages a corollary to Cooper's elaborate treatment of the empirics of empire and the related empire of empirics by looking at the book's cont…
Subalterns ‘speak
The contemporary globalizing world has unleashed new flows of migrant labour, among which are young women working in homes. As is well known, many find themselves in a situation of virtual slavery, having no juridical protections against both physical and emotional abuse, and against being held in servitude against their wills. While the situation of migrant domestic workers is increasingly well known, there has been little analysis of how their …
On biodiplomacy
This article examines the intersection of biopolitics with diplomacy and engages its dynamic re-envisioning as biodiplomacy. It revisits Michel Foucault’s peripheral attention to diplomacy and his framing of the concept in his writings on raison d’état and the government of the living. The article suggests that biodiplomacy can help us understand better the complexity of global biopolitical projects, moving us beyond governmentality and sensitizi…
Aesthetic Separation / Separation Aesthetics
The consensual and dissensual modes of separation above alert us to how the COVID-19 pandemic has turned the present into a time of intense separation, one of which is between those bodies marked as essential versus non-essential, those that have 'pre-existing conditions' and those without, and those located in precarious zones of abandonment, congestion, and containment, and those that, owing to prevailing economic distancing and apartness, can …
Thinking with Diplomacy
Following the considerable interest in practice theory, this Collective Discussion interrogates what it means to practice and, ultimately, to think with diplomacy. In asking how empirical, methodological, and axiological disagreements over what constitutes diplomatic practice can be productively employed to develop or revise practice theory, the Discussion engages the historically and culturally contingent practices of diplomacy. In doing so, it …
I was worlds ’
‘The fictitious world of novels, which is only by convention less real than our own,’ provides us with multiple diplomatic images, imaginaries, and imaginations (Constantinou 1996). This world of literary imaginations also reveals the avowed and unavowed fictions that animate our ideas of diplomacy, community, the home, the body, humanity, and more-than-human beings. Through a reading of the imaginative and speculative diplomatic worlds in Nnedi …
Legacies and futures for Global South research
Forum on Recognition in Foreign Policy (Analysis) and (The Study of) Diplomacy
What if the quest for recognition, not power, rank or security, were the overriding objective of foreign policies? What if practices of recognition both empower and subjugate by fixing identities and reproducing the terms upon which agents become recognisable in the first place? Can recognition as encounter become the diplomatic task of, and condition for, a post-colonial international order? This Forum addresses some implications of putting reco…
Musings and Meditations on the Edginess and Hatred of Forgiveness
Heeding Frantz Fanon's thoughts on colonialism and forgiveness alongside his call for us to "turn over a new leaf . . . work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man," this text-mediated meditation on the hatred of forgiveness contends with the question/quest of forgiveness and its relevance to our idea of Africa today. To attend to these ethical questions, the author assembles a textual montage by juxtaposing Wole Soyinka's The Burden of…
We” Think We Are Philip K. Dick
Through a critical reading of Ken Liu’s short story “The Caretaker,” Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” and Andrey Junkovsky’s Russian science fiction Netflix series “Better Than Us” (2018), this essay probes the long-held assumption that moral sentiments are uniquely human as well as the enlightenment vision of the world that feeds today’s mutations of capitalism, sovereignty, and the related techno-feudal and techno-l…
Slow Diplomacy
This Forum Discussion explores the notion of slow diplomacy via an engagement with the tradition of diplomatic epistolography. Specifically, it examines an overlooked aspect of diplomatic practice operating beyond the instrumental, fast-paced, and solution-based exchanges of diplomatic communication. Our focus on epistolography shifts from letters as static artifacts and correspondences to letters as “silent envoys” and iterative performances tha…
Political science (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Politics (13 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Diplomacy (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Art (7 works) · History (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works)