Dr Robbie Shilliam, B.A. (Sussex), M.A., DPhil (Sussex)
Senior Lecturer in International Relations
Location: Arts One 2.15email: r.shilliam@qmul.ac.uk
Phone: 020 7882 8431
Office Hours:
Monday 11am-12pm
Tuesday 1.30-2.30pm
Robbie blogs at http://thedisorderofthings.com/ and has a personal blog at http://robbieshilliam.wordpress.com/
Research interests:
I have an interest in historical sociological investigations of modernity, and the contextualization of social and political thought within the processes that are purported to drive modernity. While I have written on these issues within the context of 19th century Europe, my main focus is on their colonial inflection. My research programme consists of three overlapping streams:
Investigating “Atlantic modernity”:
I am working to retrieve the archives and traditions of thought of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas in order to re-assess the various European canons of thought that have predominantly framed understandings of enlightenment, modernity and capitalist development.
Mapping global interconnections between (post-)colonised subjects:
While most postcolonial theory focuses on the relationship between the colonised and coloniser, I am exploring ways to theorise the global relationships between differentially situated (post)colonised subjects. I seek to map out the way in which these relations have inspired and engendered critiques of a colonially inflected global modernity. My current major research project explores the American influences of Black Power and Rastafari upon the indigenous peoples of the South Pacific.
Decolonising International Relations (IR) Theory:
The archives and traditions of thought that I currently engage with focus upon suffering, surviving and resisting a (neo-)colonial world order. However, they do so by utilising understandings of time, space and relationality that fall outside of the broadly profane, impersonal and developmental frameworks of modernity assumed by historical sociology and implicit in the major frameworks of IR theory. I am therefore exploring the extent to which IR theory needs to be decolonised in terms of its accepted canon, broad assumptions, and central concepts.
I welcome PhD candidates in the following areas;
- Race and racism in world politics
- International relations and the (post-)colonial world
- Slavery and its legacies
- Postcolonial / Decolonial thought
Publications:
Books:
The Black Pacific: Anticolonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (Bloomsbury Academic Press, Forthcoming 2014)
(edited) International Relations and Non-Western Thoughts: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity (London: Routledge, 2010)
German Thought and International Relations: The Rise and Fall of a Liberal Project (London: Palgrave, 2009)
(co-edited) Silencing Human Rights: Critical Approaches to a Contested Project (London: Palgrave, 2008)
Book Chapters:
“The Intimate Other: Hegel’s Exploration of a European Self”, in Ritu Vij (ed.), Hegelian Encounters: Subjects to International Relations (Palgrave, 2013), 20pp.
“The Spirit of Exchange”, in S. Seth (ed.), Postcolonialism and International Relations (London: Routledge, 2013), pp.166-182
“The Polynesian Panthers and The Black Power: Surviving Racism and Colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand”, in Nico Slate and Joe Trotter (eds.), Black Power Beyond Borders (New York: Palgrave, 2012), pp.107-126
“The Drama Viewed from Elsewhere”, in Toni Erskine & Richard Ned Lebow (eds), Tragedy and International Relations (London: Palgrave, 2012), pp.172-184
“Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands Unto God: Garveyism, Rastafari and Antiquity”, in D. Orrells, G. Bhambra and T. Roynon (eds.), African Athena: New Agendas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) pp.106-121
“Modernity and Modernization”, in Robert A. Denemark (ed.), The International Studies Encyclopedia Vol. VIII (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 5214-5232
“The perilous but unavoidable intellectual terrain of the “Non-West”” in R. Shilliam (ed.), International Relations and Non-Western Thought (Routledge, 2010), pp.12-26
(co-written with Martin Munro), “Alternative sources of cosmopolitanism: Nationalism, universalism and Créolité in Francophone Caribbean thought” in R. Shilliam (ed.), International Relations and Non-Western Thought (Routledge, 2010), pp. 159-177
“Jacobinism: the Ghost in the Gramscian Machine of Counter-Hegemony”, for Alison Ayers (ed.), Neo-Gramscians, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Palgrave, 2008) pp.189-208
“The 'Other' in Classical Political Theory: Re-Contextualising the Cosmopolitan/Communitarian Debate” in B. Jahn (ed.), Classical Theory in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) pp.207-232
Journal Articles:
“Intervention and Colonial-Modernity: Decolonising the Italy/Ethiopia Conflict Through Psalms 68:31”, Review of International Studies (forthcoming)
“Race and Research Agendas”, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26 (1), 2013 pp.152-158
“Redemption from Development: Amartya Sen, Rastafari and Promises of Freedom”, Postcolonial Studies 15 (3), 2012 pp.331-350
“Forget English Freedom, Remember Atlantic Slavery: Common Law, Commercial Law, and the Significance of Slavery for Classical Political Economy”, New Political Economy 17 (5), 2012 pp.591-609
"Civilization and the Poetics of Slavery", Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology, 108 (1), 2012 pp.97-116
“Decolonising the Grounds of Ethical Inquiry: A Dialogue Between Kant, Foucault and Glissant”, Millennium 39 (3), 2011 pp.649-665
“Keskidee Aroha: Translation on the Colonial Stage”, Journal of Historical Sociology 24 (1) 2011 pp.80-99
“A Fanonian critique of Lebow’s Cultural Theory of International Relations”, Millennium 38 (1) 2009 pp.117-136
“The Atlantic as a Vector of Uneven and Combined Development”, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22 (1), 2009 pp.69-88
“The Hieroglyph of the ‘Party’: Contextualising the Agent-Structure Debate through the Works of Trotsky, C.L.R. James and Althusser”, International Relations 22 (2) 2008 pp.193-219
"What the Haitian Revolution Might Tell Us About Development, Security and the Politics of Race", Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 (3), 2008 pp.778-808
“Morgenthau in Context: German Backwardness, German Intellectuals, and the Rise and Fall of a Liberal Project”, European Journal of International Relations 13 (3), 2007 pp.299-327
“What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the Transformation of Sovereignty Debate”, Review of International Studies 32 (3), 2006 pp.379-400
“Marx's Path to Capital: the International Dimension of an Intellectual Journey”, History of Political Thought 27 (2), 2006 pp.349-375
“Hegemony and the Unfashionable Problematic of Primitive Accumulation”, Millennium 33 (1), 2004 pp.59-88
Selected Conference Papers:
British International Studies Association (BISA) annual conference, Edinburgh Jun 2012, “The Crisis of Europe and Colonial Amnesia”
Black Power Beyond Borders Conference, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, April 2011: “We Don’t Want to be Brown Skinned Pākehā”: Black Power and its Articulations in Aotearoa New Zealand”
ESRC Network: Connected Histories / Connected Sociologies: Rethinking the Global, University of Warwick: Workshop: International Interconnectedness: Rethinking the Global, Dec 2010: “The Ancestors Are Meeting Because We Are Meeting": Why Has Rastafari Resonated With Indigenous Peoples?”
Centre for Excellence in Global Governance Research, University of Helsinki, Nov 2010: Workshop with G. Bhambra on Connected Histories and Non-Western Thought in International Relations
ESRC Series: Rethinking Intervention in the Modern World, Brunel University, Oct 2010: “Babylonian Bondage: Intervention and the African Diaspora”
Millennium Journal Annual Conference, London School of Economics, Oct 2010: “Decolonizing the Dialogue” – Final Conference Roundtable
Vassar College, NY, Sep 2010, “Rastafari in Aotearoa: Exploring the Global Decolonial Imagination”; followed by faculty/student workshop on Non-Western Thought.
Critical and Decolonial Dialogues Across South-North and East-West, Workshop, Jul 2010, University of Middleburg, presentation on research project
Norms, nomos or normalisation? Interrogating the use of norms in international relations, workshop, University of Sydney, March 2010: “Fanon’s Sociogenic Approach to Inter-Cultural Relations”
ESRC Network: Connected Histories / Connected Sociologies: Rethinking the Global, University of Warwick, Workshop: Translation and the Problem of (Methodological) Difference, Dec 2009: “Keskidee Aroha: Translation on the Colonial Stage”
Institute for Comparative Modernities, Cornell University, USA, Workshop: The Space-time of Modernity and Global Hierarchies, May 2009: “Civilisation and its Abjects”
University of Osaka Conference on Human Development, Osaka, Japan, Apr 2009: “Redemption from Development: Amartya Sen, Rastafari and Promises of Freedom”
POLSIS Conflict and Security Seminar Series, University of Queensland, Apr 2009: “Race, Slavery and the Poetics of Human Security”
Hegel and IR Theory, Workshop, University of Aberdeen, June 2008: “The Death of Geist? Hegel's Haunting of IR Theory”
University of Osaka Conference on Human Security, Osaka, Japan, Mar 2008: “The "Human" as Interpolated Subject: Maori Struggles In New Zealand and the Antinomies of "Human Security" as a Concept”
Beyond the Neo-Gramscian Turn workshop, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver Jun 2007: “Jacobinism: the Ghost in the Gramscian Machine of Counter-Hegemony”
Undergraduate teaching:
Professional activities and outreach:
Minority communities - social justice and education
