On Monday 10 June, at 15h, we will welcome Maïka Sondarjee from the University of Ottawa. She will speak on: Decolonizing International Relations and Development Studies: What’s in a buzzword?

Over the past decade, there has been a new “decolonial turn,” albeit less related than before to land and political independence. “To decolonize” is now associated with something less tangible and often under-defined. I argue that IR scholars, especially Western ones, should avoid depoliticizing the expression “decolonizing” by using it as a buzzword. Scholars and policymakers should use the expression only if it is closely related to the political meaning ascribed to it by Global South and Indigenous activists and scholars. Decoloniality with the confines of international relations is a political project of human emancipation through collective struggles, entailing at least the following: 1) abolishing racial hierarchies within the hetero-patriarchal and capitalist world order, 2) dismantling the geopolitics of knowledge production, and 3) re- humanizing our relationships with Others and nature.

Maïka Sondarjee is an assistant professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and a SSHRC Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Montreal. Her first book, Perdre le Sud. Décoloniser la solidarité internationale (2020), addresses systemic sexism, colonialism and inequalities in North-South relations. She also edited a collective volume on feminist approaches of International Relations (PUM, 2022) and another one on white saviorism in international development (with Themrise Khan and Dickson Kanakulya, 2023). In addition to her regular contributions to the mainstream journal Le Devoir, she aims to support social activists and social movements and to be an engaged academic. She was awarded the Talent Award from the Social Sciences Research Council (SSHRC) in 2021, and the Alice Wilson Award from the Royal Society of Canada in 2020.