This webinar looks at the changing world order and distinguishes between the imperialist and anti-imperialist world-making projects.
This event has been rescheduled to take place on 30 July 2023 at 10AM US Central Time.
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About this event
As the contradictions of capitalism mount and the challenge to imperialism represented by China, Russia and the majority of the world that continues cooperation with them gains momentum, dominant views of the world order are also challenged. Seeking to expose the ideological basis of the resulting debates, the speakers in this webinar will clarify how the primary contradiction today is between a US-led Western imperialism and the projects of anti-imperialist sovereign reclamation it aims to contain. In doing so, the webinar will draw out a distinction between the structural foundations of imperialist and anti-imperialist world-making projects.
Speakers
Zubairu Wai is Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Development Studies. He is the author of Epistemologies of African Conflicts: Violence, Evolutionism, and the War in Sierra Leone (2012), which won the ATWS Toyin Falola Africa Book Award for 2013, and co-editor (with Marta Iñiguez de Heredia) of Recentering Africa in International Relations: Beyond Lack, Peripherality, and Failure (2018). His research takes up epistemological questions regarding the nature, conditions, and limits of disciplinary knowledge and practices in International Relations, Development Studies, Conflict and Security Studies, and African Studies. Specifically, he focuses on how the intersections of power and coloniality frame the discourses and political economy of knowledge, violence, conflict, development, and state formation in Africa, and the Global South more broadly. His most recent manuscript, Thinking the Colonial Library: Mudimbe, Gnosis, and the Predicament of Africanist Knowledge, which interrogates the contaminating vectors of the colonial archive and its implications for epistemic decolonisation, will be published by Routledge early next year.
Nina Farnia is a legal historian and scholar of Critical Race Theory. Her scholarship examines the role of modern U.S. imperialism in shaping domestic areas of law, with a particular focus on the rise of autocratic legalism. Her publications explore a variety of related subjects, including the role of U.S. foreign affairs in shaping modern jurisdiction, the formation of the national security state, and the evolution of freedom of speech and religion. She is currently working on a book entitled Imperialism in the Making of U.S. Law. Farnia has published in a wide range of academic journals and popular media outlets, including the Stanford Law Review, UCLA Women’s Law Journal, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Geopolitical Economy Report, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. She currently serves as the Secretary of the American Association of Law Schools Section on Law & the Humanities and is the Co-Chair of the International People’s Tribunal on US Imperialism: Sanctions, Blockades, and Economic Coercive Measures.
Matteo Capasso is Marie Curie Global Fellow between Columbia University, USA and University of Venice, Italy. He is the author of Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (2023, Syracuse UP) that reconstructs the last two decades of the country’s politics, leading up to the NATO-led regime change operation in 2011 that sanctioned its fall. His current research focuses on the impact of US-led imperialist policies, and the political economy of war, sanctions, and militarism. He is editor of the academic journal, Middle East Critique, and his work has appeared in several academic outlets, including Review of International Political Economy, World Review of Political Economy, Politics, Review of African Political Economy, Journal of Labor and Society, among many others. He is a Special Rapporteur of the International People’s Tribunal on US Imperialism: Sanctions, Blockades, and Economic Coercive Measures.
Manu Vimalassery is Term Assistant Professor of American Studies at Barnard College. A co-editor of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013), his book-in-progress is Empire’s Tracks: Plains Indians, Chinese Migrants, and the Transcontinental Railroad.
Radhika Desai is Professor at the Department of Political Studies. She is the Director, Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She is the convenor of the International Manifesto Group. Her books include Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy (2023), Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013), Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics (2nd rev ed, 2004) and Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’ and the Labour Party (1994), a New Statesman and Society Book of the Month.
Moderator and Speaker – Bikrum Gill is a scholar of International Political Economy. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech, where he is also core faculty in the ASPECT doctoral program. His research is generally centered on the global intersections of political economy, race, and ecology, and he explores these themes more specifically as they bear upon issues of agriculture and development, the climate crisis, and decolonization. He has long been involved in anti-war and anti-imperialist campaigns, and has most recently joined the International People’s Tribunal on US imperialism as a special rapporteur.
