Alina Sajed

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• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at McMaster University

Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations examines the social and cultural aspects of the political violence that underpinned the French colonial project in the Maghreb, and the multi-layered postcolonial realities that ensued. This book explores the reality of the lives of North African migrants in postcolonial France, with a particular...

This article argues that Critical IR theory’s (CIRT) claims to reflexivity, its engagement with “difference” and its emancipatory stance are compromised by its enduring Eurocentric gaze. While CIRT is certainly critical of the West nevertheless its tendency towards “Eurofetishism” – by which Western agency is reified at the expense of non-Western a...

This article explores the lateral connections between the Algerian anticolonial struggle and other similar struggles in the colonial world. Such connections linked up Algeria to Vietnam, Black Panthers in the U.S., and Palestine, among others. Not only were these anticolonial connections crucial to the FLN's strategy, but this strategy and the Alge...

The decades between 1960s and 1980s were punctuated by intense anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, the rise of Third World internationalism (both in terms of formal and informal connections), the articulation of viable economic alternatives to those imposed by the West, but also by a massive wave of counterrevolution with bloody coups, as...

This article theorizes and establishes some of the outlines of an epistemology of domination. An epistemology of domination interpellates the question of “how/what does the oppressor know about the oppressed?” Drawing on several studies of cultural encounters such as Ibrahim Abu-Lughod's The Arab Rediscovery of Europe, Ashis Nandy's The Intimate En...

This course explores the politics of the Third World/Global South from an International Relations perspective. We will situate the various issues, events, and topics within a global political and economic context. Discussions will center on global political and economic processes that have shaped the current contours of the Global South, such as co...

This introduction maps out the special issue’s main concerns. Bringing together political theorists of empire with critical scholars of international relations who have interrogated the methodological nationalism (indeed the fetish of the nation-state) of their disciplines, this special issue examines the multifaceted dimensions (including politica...

This a a critical sympathetic engagement with Somdeep Sen’s Decolonizing Palestine. I draw on Amilcar Cabral’s, Eqbal Ahmad’s, and Ghassan Kanafani’s visions of struggle and liberation to reflect on the political and ideational content of liberation.

Touted by John Le Carré as ‘the conjuror extraordinary of modern reportage,’ and by Gabriel García Márquez as ‘the true master of journalism,’ Ryszard Kapuściński was the first Africa correspondent from socialist Poland. He was seen as Poland’s most celebrated foreign correspondent working primarily for the Polish Press Agency. Between 1951 and 198...

This seminar challenges the assumptions found in the ‘canonical’ readings of IR Theory. It draws on a plethora of Non-Western thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Al-Afghani, Gandhi, Soekarno, Kwame Nkrumah, and Edward Said, among others. The course thus introduces students to several important political figures and concepts/issues from the...

This special issue examines the connections among (post)colonial spaces forged in the struggle for national liberation and after. The focus on anticolonial/postcolonial connectivity indicates the existence of alternative forms of spatiality that go beyond the linear (and hierarchical) relationship between metropole and colonial spaces. Here we seek...

This essay is a reflection on the location of woman/women in decolonization struggles. It explores the tensions between gender/feminism and nationalism, or rather the complicated transactions between colonialism, patriarchy (both Western and local), national liberation, and the “woman question.” While many analyses regarding the role of women in th...

This special issue aims to interrogate and reimagine the location of gender and sexual politics in anticolonial revolutionary struggles. This project builds on the exciting and important scholarly work, literary writing, and archiving projects that have emerged to document and explore the question of anticolonial feminisms, which remains under-repr...

Can we understand International Relations without colonialism and race? This chapter argues that we cannot examine the domain of the ‘international’ without a meaningful engagement with the crucial role that colonialism and processes of racialization and capitalist expansion have played in the very constitution of our current international system....

There has been renewed interest in the long 1960s over the last few years, not least spurred by the 50th anniversary, in 2018, of the 1968 global uprisings. What is remarkable about this interest is not simply the attempt to re-visit one of the most politically effervescent and revolutionary decades of the 20th century, but the shift in focus from...

There has been renewed interest in the long 1960s over the last few years, not least spurred by the 50th anniversary, in 2018, of the 1968 global uprisings. What is remarkable about this interest is not simply the attempt to re-visit one of the most politically effervescent and revolutionary decades of the 20th century, but the shift in focus from...

There has been a consistent effort over the last couple of decades to re-think the translation and the instantiation of anticolonial nationalism, with its hopes, desires, betrayals, and exhilaration, into the reality of the postcolonial state (Scott 2004, Prashad 2007, Wilder 2015, Sajed and Seidel 2019, Gruffydd-Jones, 2019, Getachew 2019). The de...

This course surveys diverse historical, political and socio-cultural facets of modern and contemporary Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Readings will focus on major historical landmarks (e.g. 1948 Nakba, 1967 Six Days War, 1979 Iranian Revolution, among others), larger transnational/global processes (European colonialism/American imperialism, r...

This is the Turkish translation of the same article 'From Third World to the Global South', which was published by E-International Relations in July 2020: https://www.e-ir.info/2020/07/27/from-the-third-world-to-the-global-south/ The Turkish translation appeared on Sosyalist Kritik: https://kritik.reviews/ucuncu-dunyadan-kuresel-guneye/

The term ‘Global South’ is not an uncontroversial one. There have been many debates in the last few decades regarding its usefulness, both analytical and historical, but especially its connection to another equally debated term, ‘Third World.’ In the midst of these debates, however, there has appeared a loose consensus around their meaning and thei...

Abdelkebir Khatibi’s collection of essays was first published in French in 1983 as Maghreb Pluriel. It comprises six essays originally published between (roughly) 1970 and 1982 in various venues. The first three essays of the collection – ‘Other-Thought’, ‘Double Critique’ and ‘Disoriented Orientalism’ – are the best-known, and, as Françoise Lionne...

This article re-examines Third Worldism as a political ideology, with a specific focus on a number of Algerian intellectuals. By taking Algeria as a privileged locus of investigation, the discussion zooms into a specific context of Third Worldism, the Algerian War and the decade after, therefore focusing on the period between 1950s and 1970s. As ma...

Tim Seidel and I had a good chat with Sina Rahmani, the mastermind behind The East is a Podcast. We talked about our recently published special issue with Interventions, focusing especially on the ambivalence of anticolonial nationalism and its contemporary reverberations. https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/escaping-the-nation-w-alina-sajed-and...

Our recently published special issue with Interventions was featured on Jadaliyya. We had a chat with the editors of Jadaliyya about crushed hopes and national liberation, and about current and future projects.

This article examines the ideological terrain of the Algerian War and takes seriously the question of the nature of the fight, namely not only the type of anticolonial discourse and mobilization (whether ideological or militant), but also the vision deployed in pursuit of independence, and the means by which it is pursued; in doing so, it explores...

This special issue emerges from the debates around the ideas of violence, liberation, and national consciousness. The catalyst that prompted us to interrogate both the necessity of the nation-state form within decolonization, and the need to excavate and illuminate what Gary Wilder (2015, xi) called “non-national orientations to decolonization” was...

This review essay surveys four recent publications in postcolonial studies: Edmund Burke's Ethnographic State; Gary Wilder's Freedom Time; Viatcheslav Morozov's Russia's Postcolonial Identity; and Nayoung Aimee Kwon's Intimate Empire. The central topics covered by these four books range from questioning the inevitability and givenness of the nation...

International relations theory has broadened out considerably since the end of the Cold War. Topics and issues once deemed irrelevant to the discipline have been systematically drawn into the debate and great strides have been made in the areas of culture/identity, race, and gender in the discipline. However, despite these major developments over t...

This first chapter introduces readers to the main theoretical orientations within postcolonial studies, but also to the most prominent postcolonial theorists associated with these orientations. Additionally, it also discusses the relevance of race and gender to better understand past and contemporary world politics.

The course examines the connections and intersections between decolonization movements and struggles in the Third World (1950s to 1970s: Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, Palestinian organizations), and those radical leftist insurrectionary movement in the Western world that were inspired by decolonization struggles and the anti-colonial ethos (e.g. the Red...

Postmodernity is commonly perceived as a stage of late modernity or late capitalism that follows modernity, whereas postmodernism is understood as a theoretical trend that attempts to unsettle a number of key concepts associated with the Enlightenment, such as grand narratives of progress, a linear unfolding of history, and traditional notions of r...

In this course, students will review and come to understand well the concept of globalization and its implications for global governance. The course begins by offering insights into the history of globalization, and into the historical roots of contemporary global governance. Our discussions will then focus on some of the most pertinent processes a...

This roundtable continues the debates provoked by the roundtable with the same title at the Annual Convention in Atlanta. However, it now moves beyond a critique of the various conceptualizations of subaltern agency in critical IR. The previous roundtable focused on the limited range of agential strategies envisioned for subaltern agents, within cr...

Sajed's and Inayatullah's joint intervention focuses on Hobson's effort to bring forward a notion of non-Western agency as an antidote to the prevailing Eurocentrism of contemporary IR scholarship. They reflect on the stakes involved by constructing a story of an agentic non-Western world co-participant in the past and current world system. They wo...

This forum started out as a roundtable at the 2015 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in New Orleans. Our interventions (then and now) zoom in on the distinction John Hobson draws, in his book The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, between scientific racism and Eurocentric institutionalism. In this forum, we engage Ho...

This analysis investigates the limits of colonial modernity in the 20th century Dutch East Indies at a time that coincided with the building of the Indonesian national project. I am interested in the constitution of the national teleology as an inexorable socio-political project, deploying specific racial and gendered economies. As a locus of inves...

This roundtable explores current conceptualizations, in critical IR theory (CIRT), of subaltern/peripheral agency. More specifically, it looks at how critical analyses in IR deploy a limited range of agential strategies envisioned for subaltern/peripheral agents, which oscillates between silent victimization and heroic resistance. Put differently,...

This article focuses on the idea of ‘colonial modernity’ to pursue a dual theoretical purpose: to interrogate the givenness of ‘modernity’ as an overarching and over-determining epistemological framework; and, secondly, to indicate how movements against colonial modernity were part of a ‘deep, global infrastructure of anti-colonial connectivity’. B...

I focus here on the political stances of Frantz Fanon and Albert Camus regarding the Algerian War of Independence. By examining their reflections on this violent anticolonial struggle, I seek to highlight the role of colonial difference and of racial hierarchies in the constitution of global politics. Fanon's position relies on an ethos of decoloni...

Fifty Key Thinkers on Globalization is an outstanding guide to often-encountered thinkers whose ideas have shaped, defined and influenced this new and rapidly growing field. The authors clearly and lucidly survey the life, work and impact of fifty of the most important theorists of globalization including: Manuel Castells Joseph Stiglitz David Hel...

This article makes the case for rethinking the relation between poststructuralism and postcolonialism, by building on the claims advanced by Robert Young, Azzedine Haddour and Pal Ahluwalia that the history of deconstruction coincides with the collapse of the French colonial system in Algeria, and with the violent anti-colonial struggle that ensued...

This chapter examines the constraints that acts of securitization place on migrant activism among immigrant Muslim communities. It looks at various activisms of North African Muslim communities in France, who find themselves at the intersection of various transnational links, such as those of migrant labour, postcolonial (in)difference, the global...

This article challenges the liberal assumption that socialist societies were closed or isolated entities, and that it was the 1989 revolutionary moment that both freed them and integrated them into global dynamics. Everyday encounters with a particular vision of the global had already shaped the political imagination of ordinary Romanians prior to...

Last year’s roundtable in New Orleans focused on the idea of a critical dialogue between IR scholars with postcolonial sensibilities and those working within poststructuralist approaches. What ensued was a heated (and sometimes angry) discussion about the limits of current critiques of the IR discipline, and about the self-imposed marginality of po...

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203837221-13/waiting-revolution-foreigner-narrative-alina-sajed?context=ubx&refId=e66a0e49-2287-454f-bdb8-52a870c39c63

Current critical theorizations within citizenship studies on the condition of migrants and refugees celebrate the nomadic dimension of the contemporary migrant/refugee figure and assign her the potential to disrupt hegemonic practices of capital and state-centric citizenship. However, such enthusiastic accounts need to exercise a sense of caution i...

The idea that women are perceived and treated in an objectified manner, and that women's images and bodies are exposed to practices of commodification, acquires a complex dimension when approached from the perspective of the academic discipline of International Relations (IR). IR, as a field of studies that focuses on particular dynamics related to...

This presentation invites participants to explore what many postcolonial scholars consider to be the problematic nature of current deconstructionist/post-structuralist exercises within IR that are divorced from postcolonial horizons.

This dissertation examines the production of the "native" in literary and photographic narratives in the Franco-Maghrebian postcolonial context. More specifically, I selected a group of a few well-known Maghrebian intellectuals who write in French, who act as mediators of postcolonial difference between France and the Maghreb, while living between...

The topic of this paper was inspired by Fiona Terry’s book Condemned to Repeat?, in which she illustrates the moral paradoxes confronted by humanitarian agencies in their work. I intend to show how, in their intention to ‘do no harm,’ humanitarian organizations ‘successfully’ avoid facing the consequences of their own hubris. By purporting that the...