To book your place please RSVP to the Mitchell Institute at mitchell.institute@qub.ac.uk by noon on Thursday 17 December 2020.  A meeting link will be sent to you before the event.

Speakers: Dr Nivi Manchanda (Senior Lecturer in International Politics, Queen Mary University of London) and Dr Shane Brighton (Senior Lecturer in International Relations, HAPP, Queen’s University Belfast).

Calls for the ‘decolonisation’ of the academic study of war and peace have intensified in recent years. A range of critical and postcolonial scholars have argued, in various ways, that imperialist, Eurocentric and racist assumptions have dominated the field. At the same time, scholars have also sought to critique the narrow ways in which ‘war’ has been traditionally conceptualised by pointing to its wider transformative effects on state and society. Meanwhile, heightened activism around the world this year – from the toppling of statues, to Black Lives Matter and calls to decolonise educational curricula – has brought awareness of some of these themes to a wider public. This event will bring together two leading academics engaged in aspects of this critique from the perspectives of their own research. 

Dr Manchanda will address questions of war, knowledge production and coloniality by examining specific instances that have legitimated the invasion of Afghanistan, drawing insights from her recently published book, Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (CUP, 2020). She will then discuss the wider question of decolonising the curriculum, what that may look like in practice, and whether it is a sufficient in the current context. To find out more please click further information on Dr Manchanda.

Dr Brighton will offer some general observations on postcolonial war studies and a discussion of some current research (with Tarak Barkawi) on the function of 'social imaginaries' in the reproduction of colonial and decolonial understandings of war. He will conclude his talk with a reflection on the ambiguous position of postcolonial theorisation in addressing the history and legacy of political violence in Northern Ireland.  To find out more please click further information on Dr Brighton. 

Series Convenor: Dr Zaheer Kazmi