*Originally published in 2021 and preserved as part of our archive project. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui is Professor of International Relations Theory and African Political Thought at Cornell University in the United States of America. He is also the Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University for 2020 and 2021. He is the author of Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law (1996) and Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Order and Institutions (2006). He is currently in the final phase of completion of a manuscript titled The Gaze of Copernicus: Postcolonialism, Serendipity, and the Making of the World. The manuscript offers a critique of international relations, its practices, disciplinary canons, archives, and regimes of truth as foundations for a set of propositions on postcolonial inquiries, methods, and utopias.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

That is a tricky question. From where I am sitting today, it is very difficult to see where the next exciting research comes from. First, because since the seventeenth century the social sciences have been beholden to certain traditions of thinking. After Francis Bacon’s Novus Organum, his reply to Aristotle, he introduced a number of instruments for looking at the world; but it was very clear that his commitments were to monarchy, the church, and empire. Those commitments were taken up by people who followed him in creating the Royal Society in Great Britain and the Académie Française in France. The disciplines that were created after the seventeenth century differ very radically in outlook from the disciplines before. The disciplines before had to do with subject, unity, integrity. After this moment, every single discipline became about managing the new order – political science, political economy, international relations, and so on. In the new order, even old disciplines like history and anthropology were given new purposes. We are therefore located in a tradition of thought of managing an order that was predicated to be imperial, European-centred, and hierarchical. That is our legacy. Whether we like it or not, we are situated in a discipline that was supposed to be about managing empire. Empire has to go before we can actually look at the interesting questions.

Second, we have to decide whether International Relations and foreign policy are one and the same. They are not. The commitments of those who do foreign policy have to be about the foreign policies of their own countries. But our commitment in International Relations or global politics has to be about the entire universe. This is where I actually agree with Francis Bacon, Jeremy Bentham, James Lorimer, and people who followed them. Our discipline is about the global order. It should not be about our particular sympathies or attachments. And here is also were I lie slightly with Kant, that we have to dare to know. I don’t know if Kant himself did that, but daring to know was one of the predicates of the Enlightenment.

If we do these things, then we will begin to imagine what our questions are going to be, but we don’t seem to be there yet. We have empire, we have our attachment to foreign policy, and we have the confusions about the purpose of our discipline – whether we should be a certain tradition or whether we shall commit ourselves to knowing the world and be the handmaiden of our own future.

This does not mean there is no hope. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), said something very profound. He said: “Not so long ago the Earth numbered 2 billion inhabitants, i.e., 500 million men and 1.5 billion ‘natives’” (p.xliii). Today the natives have become citizens. It means that we can not only speak for the natives. As Indians, Chinese, Brazilians, South Africans, etc. are setting off their own International Relations fields and are having their own conferences, we’ll actually have a chance to understand how the world really, fully operates. One of our problems now is that we don’t have a grasp of how the world came together; we don’t have a full path before European ascendancy.

Our entire history seems to be 1492-onward, and predicated on metaphors that ought to actually scare us, ideas such as state of nature, of which we actually have no practical sense at all. It in fact never existed. We have to have more global knowledge, which takes account of all the histories of politics, power, statehood and so forth, before European ascendancy. Now, we have an International Relations not based on observation, but on some predicates that actually are very harmful, and we only form models based on that. We should commit ourselves to, at minimum, observe the world, to give ourselves the means to observe the world. Not just to imagine it. We are caught between imagining the world and following the norms set by empires. Hovering between the two we make this concoction we call International Relations. It’s not an interesting discipline at that level.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

The Iraq War, the so-called Iraq War. Europe, with all its flaws, aspired to a post-Cold War era with a minimum degree of normativity – international law, rule of law, all of that. Europe had managed to convince the rest of the world that America was committed to that. The Iraq War is the only war in human memory, against which a group of people in every capital on this planet stood up and said, ‘This war should not be fought.’ Because the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency provided credible evidence that the alleged weapons of mass destruction did not exist. That evidence was discarded by US officials. We had the war; and there was no consequence when it was found that the evidence for the war itself had been fabricated.

The war in (or on) Iraq shuttered a window of opportunity after the collapse of the Cold War; the idea that we could return to the basis upon which the new world, under the UN Charter, was founded – multilateralism, mutual coexistence, mutual respect, rule of law, everybody abiding by international law, etc. The Iraq War, for me, closed that window, and what was frightening was that in ‘official’ Europe there was actually no sanction at any level; nor any unambiguous condemnation afterwards by any incorporated European body: EU Council; EU Parliament; none.

All of those things have echoes. If African people can permit themselves to say, ‘We don’t care about the International Criminal Court,’ it’s partly because of Iraq. The lack of consequence for it led many to the conclusion that there was no universal justice; universal humanitarian morality; universal jurisdiction. European double-speak around the war also said a lot about European self-doubts around US unilateralism, which also caused many to rethink whatever expectations they had about the emergent role of Europe in the post-Cold War era. The debates about the fallout of the Iraq war were as much about Europe as they were about the US, because people had hoped that Europe would rally around traditions such as the Geneva Conventions, the norms around aggression, and so forth.

The impression that Europe would rally to its humanitarian tradition was given by Europe itself in its discussions about the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But US elites were clear about what that moment meant: not a new start, but the so-called ‘end of history’. To be sure, the rhetoric was that the fall of ‘Soviet communism’ meant a new commitment to democratic principles (rule of law, international coexistence). But these professions belied US actions within international institutions and around the world.  With the invasion of Iraq, we moved then from what people thought was going to be a multipolar system to a virtually unipolar system. It taught me that even a country that had the longest democratic tradition (except for the Dutch Provinces), allowed a war like that to happen: unprovoked, unnecessary, and without legal justification.

That the war occurred without any consequences for its perpetrators led me to rethink the so-called democratic peace; the idea that liberal democracies are inherently peaceful; that liberal Western societies abide by traditions and ideologies of legality, legitimacy, and normativity. Iraq led me to think anew about the compositions and traditions within so-called liberal societies that are atavistic: racism; Islamophobia; imperialism; etc., which continue to reside in deep pockets within Western societies. I was astounded by discourses around the Iraq War that still oozed anti-Muslim resentment going back to the Crusades. I was amazed at how related sentiments blinded so many people to simple truths, to the evidence that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As an observer, discussions and narratives around and about the Iraq War, official and not, brought me back in time to memories of the beginning of empire: This is when liberal and progressive forces joined hands with conservative ones to commit to the colonial enterprise, all of them guided by popular sentiments and the fear of their own electorates: the demos. I have since been disabused of the notion that salvation lies in the democratic process alone. Bush went to war against the public sentiment of America because the majority were opposed to it, but he still had those core groups in the public that were for it and thought that they would accord him immunities and the right to re-election.

What is the importance of Black history for the discipline of IR?

Symbols matter and so does symbolism. Black Lives Matter has brought attention to the symbols of the past. Society seems to respond symbolically through gestures of solidarity, signs of empathy, etc. Some conservatives – and even progressives – seem to want to dispense with what they call somewhat dismissively as ‘virtue signalling’. Yet, symbols and symbolism have their own materiality. They relate to our collective ability to see, to connect, and to converse. Symbolic events, initiatives and programmes create spaces and openings for us to look at the world in a new light – to use a different language, to see our neighbour (Levinas). What we have not considered, is exactly what I started with, with Jean-Paul Sartre, which is that your neighbour did not appear just today. Why wasn’t this seen before?

We all need one another and have at........

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