The Global Political Economy Project (GPEP) team presents a series of talks, GPEP-R, which focus on race in International Political Economy. The talks will be hosted on Zoom and will consist of a 20-minute presentation highlighting the speaker’s research and mapping a future research agenda, followed by Q&A and a broader conversation on the topic. Talks will stream live on Thursdays from 12-1pm ET and recorded versions will be available on the GPEP website.
In this discussion moderated by Professor Abraham Newman, Dr. Olivia U. Rutazibwa of the University of Portsmouth, UK and Dr. Naazneen Barma of the University of Denver will explore the intersections of race and international development. Click here to register for the event.
About the Speakers
Dr. Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa (1979) is a Belgian/Rwandan IR scholar and senior lecturer in European and International (Development) Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK and Senior Research Fellow of the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies (JIAS). She holds a PhD in Political Science/International Relations from Ghent University (2013, Belgium), following the doctoral training programme at the European University Institute (2001-6, Italy) and internships at the European Commission in Brussels and the EU Institute for Security Studies in Paris (2003-4). Her research and teaching focuses on ways to decolonise (international) solidarity. Building on epistemic Blackness, in her research she turns to recovering and reconnecting philosophies and practices of dignity and repair and retreat in the postcolony (e.g. autonomous recovery in Somaliland, agaciro in Rwanda and Black Power in the US, Tricontinentalism) to theorise solidarity anticolonially. She has published in various (academic) journals (Foreign Policy, Millennium Journal of International Studies, Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, Postcolonial Studies, Ethical Perspectives, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, and Journal of Contemporary European Studies), is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics (with Robbie Shilliam, 2018) and Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning (with Sara de Jong and Rosalba Icaza, Routledge, 2018). She is associate editor of International Feminist Journal of Politics and recently joined the editorial boards of International Politics Review and Review of International Studies. She is the former Africa desk editor, journalist and columnist at the Brussels based quarterly MO* Magazine and the author of forthcoming non-academic monograph The End of the White World. A Decolonial Manifesto (in Dutch, EPO, 2020). In 2011 she delivered a TEDx talk titled: “Decolonizing Western Minds”.
Naazneen H. Barma is Director of the Doug and Mary Scrivner Institute of Public Policy, Scrivner Chair, and Associate Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. She is a political scientist whose work spans topics including peacebuilding, foreign aid, economic development and institutional reform, natural resource politics, and global governance, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Barma is one of the founders and a co-director of Bridging the Gap, an initiative devoted to enhancing the policy impact of contemporary international affairs scholarship. She was Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School from 2000–2010 and previously worked from 1998–2001 and 2007–2010 as a development practitioner at the World Bank.