Around the world, the decoloning of the program (DTC) has been the word fashionable in higher education establishments following movements such as Rhodes must fall (2015) at the University of Cap, with similar iterations in the United Kingdom. The Black Lives Matter (2020) movement also prompted to challenge the entry of whiteness into the stories that have shaped the way we learn about the world. Many universities in the Northern World have answered the survey question: “Why is my study program white?” By establishing tool boxes for module competitors, by reducing manifests and organizing meetings and seminars meeting the requests of BAME students (black, Asian and minority ethnic). Researchers in the discipline of international relations have been vocal enough to express concerns concerning the Anglo-centric production and dissemination of knowledge of knowledge in international relations (Bhambra 2021; Go 2018; Santos 2014; Shilliam 2021; Smith 2012; Quijano 2007). Their decolonization attempts are based on the recognition of racialized structures, capitalist and heteropatriarchals in the modeling of global policy.
Decolonization implies questioning intellectual mono-cultures resulting from the positional superiority granted to Western knowledge systems that have treated (and continue to treat) native and non-Western knowledge such as raw materials and products to discover, extract, extract, extract, extract, extract, extract, extract, extract, extract, extract, extract appropriate and distributed (Smith 2012). Colonization could be part of history, but its post-parties model our classrooms in an indelible way. Whether it is to engage in the international political economy thanks to global financial imperialism or the teaching of security studies in reference to the world war against terrorism, the dominant frameworks of international policy remain Attached in Western theories, stories and methodologies rooted in the colonial heritage. The canon that we teach as universal knowledge, the stories of conquest and echoes of the Empire are reflected in the hegemonic discourses taught in the “standard” courses.
This is a reflective article about what the IR study program looks like at an elite private university in India? It is an exercise in contradictions. The efforts to decolonize although necessary, take place within the institutions which are shaped by the structures of privilege and inequality that decolonization seeks to dismantle. The neoliberal ideals defined by intensified marketing, focused on the supply of products and productions activated by economic rationalism and managementalism leave little space for critical thinking (Smith 2022). Often, the institutions of the world South imitate other “basic” institutions to obtain recognition; Feeling a feeling of belonging and competing for rankings and, in the process, end up reproducing the dominant structures of knowledge production. It is important to restore that knowledge hierarchies are promulgated and experienced differently in different sites. Rather than approaching decolonization as a “single size” control list of the tokenistic diversification of the reading lists, the author pleads for the need to reinvent what the decoloning of the study program in relation to the context socio-political-economic in which we teach and engage with global policy.
In my introductory module on last international relations, students participated in an apparently fun group activity: filling out the world map with so many country names they will remember. While their scribbled sheets were collected, the gaps were quite obvious. Europe was complete, the United States, Canada and Australia were marked with precision. But Africa? South America? Middle East – Only a handful of scattered names. Retrospectively, activity has become an involuntary but powerful demonstration of the way their world was already hierarchical, certain regions being the center and the hyper-visible while others were peripheral, neglected, forgottenly forgotten. This lack of knowledge was not an accident; The omissions were not only geographic but epistemic: the result of fundamental ways whose international relations are imagined. This imagination is organized in their social contexts – in the muns with which they participate, the peers with which they hang and the aspirations they hold, their vision of the world is colored by a glamorous rivalry of great power with a hint of nationalist fervor . The card activity has exposed the way all the knowledge is located, shaped by context and power. While we finish the course, looking at a Ted Talk from Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie on the `Danger of a single story ”, the awareness that decolonization implies to unlearn our prejudices and the first step was to recognize wherever The silences made me appear.
As a teacher at the start of a career, the question of preserving or abandoning the barrel always persists while reflecting on the design of the program. This is a question that does not simply reside in the academic field but extends to wider anxieties to be taken seriously in the academic world. What really matters as successful decolonization? The decision to teach, whatever our rigorous business to remain neutral facilitators, is never innocent of power. The programs, by their very nature, are exclusion joints which are shaped by definitive decisions on what should be incorporated and what should be left out. This can promote certain elite votes from the periphery and more exclude those marginalized among marginalized. We unconsciously erect the traffic signs and are accomplices to guide our students towards the creation of meaning.
The call for multi-epistemic literacy and pluralizing knowledge systems not only includes what we learn, but also how and where we learn. The IR introduction program diligently covers the Canon: John Mearsheimer, John Ikenberry and Alexander Wendt but also includes works by Sankaran Krishna, Pinar Bilgin, Siba Grovogui, among others. However, a truly decolonized study program must go beyond the famous researchers treated as “display ethnographic trophies” (Puwar 2020). Like Anibal Quijano (2007: 174) underlines “all peripheral knowledge is not equal”. It would be impossible to dump without incorporating Adivasi and Dalit contributions to question the oppressive power structures. A large part of this knowledge exists in oral traditions, folk stories, community memory and activist movements – forms which are often excluded as not being a “appropriate” scholarship. The exclusion that is adopted depends on many structural constraints – not only because of the finished nature of the semester but also shaped by concerns concerning accessibility and translation. Decolonization therefore remains an incomplete project – which continues to exclude, even if it seems inclusive.
In one of the cases during a class discussion, a student raised his hand with a passionate question: “Why are we studying Morgenthau?” Shouldn’t he be replaced by Kautiliya? Another sounded: “Shouldn’t we be objective?” Isn’t that just political? These questions reflect a misinterpretation of decolonization as an absolute rejection of Western ideas rather than criticizing its domination and the structures that have favored these ideas on other traditions. The decolonial interventions formulated in a descending way in the context of a political project, often perpetuate what they seek to cancel, in part because non-Western knowledge themselves have imperial trends, thus replacing a form of hegemony with another one.
The University Subsidies Commission (UGC) has published a report on guidelines for the integration of Indian knowledge in the higher education program in 2023 within the framework of the new education policy (NEP). Supervised as a step towards decolonization of programs, there is a disturbing confusion between decolonization and indigenization. The call to decolonize the study program, to its heart, is a repair of hierarchies which erase marginalized knowledge systems. However, there is a related danger of decolonization co -opted to promote nationalist revivalism. The nationalist cooptation of decolonial speeches tends to selectively target “foreign” influences leaving intact interior hierarchies. Rather than contesting the existing structures of knowledge production, decolonization risks becoming a smoke screen for cultural exceptionalism, a call to return to an imagined glorious past and to strengthen majority ideologies (ACHARYA 2014; Hurrell 2016) .
The classrooms reproduce the epistemicide by the promulgation in alternative cannon and devaluation ways to visualize and study the world (Hutchings 2023; Paraskeva 2011). Students do not know education by being part of the silo lessons but as a global programs. If decolonization must be significant, it must be woven in the very fabric of the academic experience. Students sitting in classrooms are about to work in reflection groups, diplomatic circles and multinational institutions. The way they are formed – the texts they read, of which they consider voices as authority will influence their understanding of the world. Decolonial praxis implies a committed reflexivity that encourages students and instructors to reflect critically on their own positions and dynamics of power inherent in their epistemological hypotheses. We cannot singularly assume the role of “decolonial Killjoy” (borrowed from the feminist of Sara Ahmed Killjoy).
By trying to bleach the classroom, we pass descendant teaching models with participatory and dialogical pedagogies that allow students to co-create knowledge. The classroom does not necessarily emerge as a space with answers, but leads students to ask more clear and more disturbing questions. These questions require experiential learning based on collaborative projects, interacting with local communities to base theoretical discussions in real contexts. It is important to introspectively locate the shortcomings, limitations and contradictions which perpetuates the status quo of the status quo rather than dismantling it. The challenges of decolonization do not invalidate the continuation of the critical educational approach, they rather underline the need for continuous introspection, a recalibration and a dialogue.
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