 Mae'r gweithiau a'r gweithio. Yn y fath yn 1970, mae'r gweithiau yn cyffredinol o'r New Zealand i ymdeithasol yma yn Llywodraeth. Mae'r gweithiau a'r gweithiau yn y gallu. Mae'r gweithiau yn cyffredinol yma'n gyfroedd ym dderbyn ac mae'r gweithiau yn ysgol. Mae'r gweithiau yn yr ysgol, mae Prof. Cruze O Brind. Mae'r gweithiau i gyd ymlaen i. Bydd yn ymlaen i'n rhan o'r cyffredinol, ond yn hynny'n fath, Mae'r ddefnyddio yng Nghymru i angen i'r newid, wrth yr ysgol, y ddechrau a'r ddefnyddiaeth. Rwy'n arbennig yr arddangos drwy'r ddechrau, gimdigwyd gyda'r gweithio ysgol, definell Pór Wepley d示 boi. A rhai a fydd gwyfodd eich gweithio os y ddefnyddio arno. Mae'r ddefnyddio ysgol wedi bydd wedi gydag bau ystod am ysgol arno his rydych chi? mae ysgol yn ystod yn rhan o'r ddefnyddio ac mae'r cyfrifiad ystod, ac mae'n cygrifio'r llefnodd ac yn cyfrifiadau. Ac mae'n cyfrifiad ystod. Rydw i'n gweithio i chi eich tyfnodd. Rydw i chi'n cael ei chyfnod, mae'n gyrfa yn amser yn cael ei gael ei gael ac yn go iawn yn gweithio'r llefnodd. Rydw i chi'n gweithio i chi'r llefnodd. Rydw i chi'n gweithio'n gweithio i chi'n gweithio'r llefnodd. ac yn ymddangos i'r ddeunau a'r Llyfrgell gwirionedd ymddangos i'r gwaith. Felly, rwy'n credu bod chi'n bwysig i chi ddim yn bwysig i chi fathio. Mae'r ffordd o'i gwaith yma, yn y cwestiynau. Mae'n gwaith i chi ddim yn bwysig i chi, ac rwy'n dweud i'r gwaith i chi'n gweithio'r gwaith yma i chi'n bwysig. Yn y ffocws yw y ffaith ysgrifennu, is that my five colleagues on the panel are going to talk about their own work in the context of the departmental ethos that Professor Chan referred to, how it's affected the way that they have approached key issues in the contemporary world, and also how that has enabled them to, or them and colleagues, to contribute to the distinctive departmental approach to the study of politics. and to the discipline and discourse of political study more generally. When we began, I should say that Donald Cruz O'Brien predates me in the department, he joined in 1966, I joined in 1967, so I'm delighted to cede preeminence to Donald, but in 1966 or 1967, as Donald will remember, we were located in 24 Wobyn Square, three of us to a room, liner on the floors and a notice on the wall that said no more than five people in this room at any time, Camden Council, but of course in those days there were not that number of students, so we didn't really have to worry about the load bearing of the of the timbers, but of course that will be a very different matter today. We moved subsequently to first of all to the Phillips building and then for the last few years to our present home in the college building, the old building. Thinking of the institutional development of the department, of course the key event was in 1990 when the erstwhile department of economic and political studies, which had come into existence on the 1st of January 1962, just over 50 years ago, was split into two separate departments, and Professor Howell, who's just come in, was very much part of the joint department in those days, but if I could just cite Terry Byers, who wrote the official history of the school or contributed to the official history of the school, he referred, and it's not an unfair comment, to the baron union of economics and politics, and after the baron union had been dissolved, I think it's fair to say that both departments have gone from strength to strength, not just in terms of size, although that's a major factor, but also in terms of the intellectual productivity and excitement that both departments have demonstrated. Another milestone, Bob Taylor is here, and he was very much influential in its creation, the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, which having been incubated in the womb of the department of politics, is now its own separate entity, and as you know, doing extremely well. And then thirdly, the reorganisation of the school at the beginning of the 2000s into three faculties, and I have to say that I was part of the decision-making process at that time, and although perhaps faculties have proved their worth in some respects, there was something that was lost at the same time, and in particular, what we lost was perhaps that sense of closeness that having the departmental office meant, so that the work of colleagues like Catherine Guest, who's here this evening, of Rita Puiget, who's still very happily with us in the faculty office, and other key figures who kept the department going for year after year. So I do think that that was a shame that that reorganisation did lose that sense of departmental cohesion, but the cohesion has been supplied in other ways intellectually and through the students. I mentioned that in 1966 all the students in the department could have been fitted into one small seminar of them. Today you couldn't get all the students in the department here into this lecture theatre. The first expansion was in fact on the undergraduate side in the 1980s when the department introduced undergraduate degrees for the first time, particularly joint degrees that have proved enormously attractive. And then a little bit later, the masters and PhD programmes, which have been there from the beginning, began to expand very considerably, very rapidly indeed, and the diversity of offering also increased, particularly in the area of international relations, political economy, comparative politics and so on, so that there was something for everybody who wanted to come to Sirius and study politics. And many of the people who've gone through the masters and PhD programme have gone on to very distinguished academic careers elsewhere, and I'm not going to be comprehensive, but I could just single out Fred Halliday, the late Fred Halliday, who was a very early student in the department, and Bill Brugger, who went on to be Professor of Politics in Australia, also sadly no longer with us, and more recently, Ali Ansari, a specialist on Iranian politics at St Andrews, Jane Duckett, another China specialist, Duncan Macargo, at Leeds, Paul Nugent, at Edinburgh, an Africanist, Mohamed Wasim, who went on to be Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Caidiazum University in Islamabad, and there are many others who went on to senior professorial positions, having emerged out of the training and the common purpose of the department. And Charles Tripp, I should not forget Charles, who also fits that category. But undergraduates, of course, also define what a department is about, the undergraduate students here at Sirius, diverse, enormous, curious, interested, involved. I'm not saying that students aren't that everywhere, but somehow there's a particular quality about a Sirius student that you always recognise, and that certainly has been the case with Sirius undergraduate student body. Again, just as you could fit all the early students of the department into one room, so you could fit all the faculty members or the academic staff into a very small room in those early days, just half a dozen, seven or eight people perhaps in the 1960s. The founding fathers of the department, I would look on as Professor Hugh Tinker, who joined the department from history. Professor PJ Vaticiotis, the Middle East specialist, and Stuart Shram, who happily is still with us, who joined a year or two later, but I think very much gave the department some of its early initial qualities and characteristics, the great specialist on political thought in China, particularly of Mao. And there were more junior people in the department at that time. Sriram Moertra, my own supervisor, Donal, who joined in 1966, Dennis Dalton, Abbas Keledda, and others who have made careers for themselves elsewhere. But you'll notice that of all the names I've mentioned so far, except I think for Jane, there's not been a single woman. And it is true, and one has to say it, that in those early stages, the department was, if not exclusively Mao, at least almost exclusively Mao. And today, the department has changed out of all recognition. So that I think in gender terms, the department is approaching 50-50, not quite there yet, but rapidly approaching it. And it's also a very diverse department in terms of the national and ethnic background of colleagues. So that perhaps today's panel is a bit of a throwback to the past. And I'm sorry about that. We had hoped, we had hoped, that in fact that there would be some other colleagues joining us, but for various personal reasons they weren't able to make it to London today. And also to the extent that we're looking back towards the past, maybe that also partly accounts for it. But anybody who's in the department at the moment will be well aware of the diversity that it demonstrates. Now, we want to look a little bit at the academic focus, and it's for that reason that we've asked various colleagues to come and talk. But when I first joined the department, certainly, there was a very much an area studies focus using that word in a not totally favourable way, an emphasis on understanding from the outside the history and peculiarities of the areas that we were looking at. And I'm sure that that has changed fundamentally, and I sincerely hope that it has, that new areas of inquiry have come into focus, political economy, international relations in particular, discourses on human rights and justice, political thought, which was there from the beginning, but I think has now been informed by a completely new ethos deriving from critical theory. And there's a, I think probably if I think back to the early 60s, a greater openness to currents elsewhere in political science, and more generally in the social sciences. So that the department has evolved, I'm not sure that we've ever gone through a revolution, but we've certainly changed very considerably. And I hope that the speakers this evening will show you something of that. What we're going to do, I've asked everybody to speak really just for a few minutes, five to seven minutes, and I'll try and keep a watch on the time. And then there'll be, I hope, plenty of time for people, not just to ask questions, but to make comments and statements, although again I'll have to exercise a certain amount of discipline in terms of time. But I think this is an opportunity for people to share their impressions, their sense of what the department is, has been in the past and maybe will be in the future. I'm going to, first of all, invite Professor Charles Tripp, then Dr David Williams, Dr Mark Laffey, and Dr Rochinar Bajapai, and Dr Toby Dodge, so that's the running order. Most of you, of course, will know the colleagues, so I won't spend any time introducing them. So if I could first of all ask Charles, and we're going to speak from the table so that we won't have too much getting up and sitting down. David, thank you very much. And you'll be glad to know that I won't go into the archaeology of my career. So, as just to say, I started as an MSc student in 1974, and I'm still here. So that is a hope for you yet, or despair now, and you might as well go away. But I think one of the things that David said, which I think is important, is trying to sense of what was it that not simply brought me here as an MSc student, but maybe want to do my PhD here, and then eventually, I did go away, come back and apply for a job here. And I suppose there are two things that have been constant, despite the different ways in which they've been examined in over the years of my association with the department. One is the emphasis on the discipline, that taking politics seriously, not simply as an activity that happens in particular areas, but taking the study of politics seriously, and thinking about what you need in order to make sense of that comparatively, theoretically grounding it in an idea that this is a disciplinary area which needs considerable attention. But the other aspect of it is why do politics at SOAS? Well, exactly because SOAS has a very strong sense of place. And I think in many senses, therefore, what you get at SOAS is precisely a notion of the depth of place, what you need to understand in order to understand particular places and what goes on within them. So it was that combination of the two things, which may, of course, therefore, appeal to many who've joined SOAS since. But I think as far as I'm concerned, I think that that shaped up, I suppose, three main things in what I got out of learning at SOAS, but also eventually joining the staff at SOAS and clearly have shaped my own work as well and was also part of the department when I arrived and therefore, in a sense, the intellectual interests of the people who taught me as well. One was the whole question of autocracy, explaining autocracy. In fact, my PhD thesis, its subtitle, was creating mass enthusiasm for autocracy. And in some senses, it was a puzzle. It was a puzzle because at that stage and certainly in writing since, as we've seen from other places, very dominant personalities straddled the Middle East and straddled the study of the Middle East. My supervisor wrote particularly on Gamal Adal Nasa, but there was also of course Khomeini, Sadaq Hussain, Anasadat, Hafzal Asad. These were people who didn't simply dominate the Middle East because they are wonderful people, but because they made themselves so. But of course, the interesting thing is, and this is where my work has come full circle, is that starting with the study of autocracy isn't just to study the person, the necessary leader, as Sadaq Hussain was called, but is to study the circumstances that allow that leadership to emerge. And so you could argue that from the beginning where I studied creating mass enthusiasm for autocracy, we come to the events preceding 2011 and 2011 itself and watching autocracy unravel. In other words, where the strategies for the enthusiastic adulation of the autocratic leader begin to dismantle, are dismantled in one form or another, and a different kind of politics emerges. So one of the heartening things one could argue is that watching that happen has been, in a sense, a lifetime's work. You watch how autocracy is put together, but then you see how people have subverted it and taken it apart. And so that informs my latest work, which is a book that's going to come out later in the year, on the politics of resistance in the Middle East itself and seeing how that's organised. But I think there's another two aspects to studying politics here, which has been very distinctive and certainly has influenced the way I've thought about it. One was something that I noticed very soon when I came was, you could say, the eclecticism of the theoretical grounding of the department, the notion that there wasn't just one orthodoxy, one view, one way of looking at the world. But I think that one thing that united many people in the department and certainly has been an element since, quite refreshingly so, has been a strong suspicion of functionalism as a mode of explanation, whether of the left or of the right. And I would like to think that in some senses I have tried to engage with that critically in my work on Islam and capitalism, trying to, in a sense, understand how the functionalist perspective has been so appealing for certain kinds of power, but also in a sense how deeply unsatisfactory it has been as a mode of social explanation, political explanation. So, again, one of the things that I think I got out of the range of the people who taught me, but, of course, also the works that they had written and the worlds they introduced me to, was exactly this question that functionalism, in a sense, is a very circular form of explanation that needs to be taken apart. And, therefore, in taking it apart, you open yourself up to what I call, effectively, the eclecticism of theoretical grounding. And I think, finally, something that I've tried to deal with and, again, it's come a full circle, which is something that I noticed really right at the beginning and I think David alluded to it, was a strong emphasis on political thought, on how people think the political, and think the political in various ways, not just classical canons of political thought, but working at somewhere like SOAS where you had to think, how did people think of the political in very different kinds of situation? And, in that sense, therefore, it meant getting to grips with notions of translation, which wasn't simply translation from one language to another, but one setting to another. And thinking about that creatively has, again, I hope, been part of the endeavour that's tried to inform my work. And I'm glad to see that also is coming full circle in a more productive way, in the sense that my colleague, Rochna, will be saying something about that. She and Matt Nelson, another colleague in the department, are seeking at the moment to establish this subfield or a field of a discipline of political thought that hasn't been much talked about or explored of comparative political thought, getting some sense of what it means to compare political thought, not simply different traditions of political thought, but also the ways in which people acted out in different places and what, therefore, the meaning is, not simply as a textual or an elite production, but as a popular form of action. So those, I suppose, are three areas which, in some form or another, have informed my work, but there's certainly something that I've got out of teaching at SOAS, but also, of course, by the continued co-operation of colleagues in the department. Thank you very much. And I could turn to David Williams, who did his PhD in the department a few years ago. I did. Thank you very much for asking me. Yes, I came in 1991 along with Toby as master's students here and then stayed on to a PhD and left in 1997. So in some of it, it was lovely to be asked and Toby and I have been reminiscing about SOAS for quite a long time, since a long time, actually, since we both left the department. I also confessed to a certain kind of anxiety about what exactly I was going to say today. The first was, I was reminded of something my supervisor said to me in one of our characteristic discussions about the state of British academia that there was no space left anymore for what he called the bespoke book review. You know, a kind of wonderfully polished engagement with the series piecework. And I kind of feel like this occasion requires the kind of equivalent of the sort of bespoke book review. But also, of course, with the way that modern academia is with the NSS and the research excellence framework and all the other things we have to deal with, I haven't really had time to produce the equivalent of the bespoke book review. The second reason I'm anxious is is a kind of memories of SOAS seminars past when I was a graduate student here. We went in kind of extremely fiercely anyone who came to talk to us, you know, had to be on their metal otherwise they were going to be savaged by graduate students and indeed members of staff as well. So the thought of being presented with a room full of people who have that kind of attitude is also slightly terrifying. And the third reason is a kind of consciousness of a kind of reluctance to reflect, I suppose. Partly it's the sort of thing you tend to do at the end of your career, not in the middle of it. And I think one sort of one thing that come out of my thinking about it is a reluctance to think about the context of my own work at SOAS and indeed beyond. Partly because we don't like to think of our own work as being heavily informed by the context which we inhabit. And yes, of course, we know, as we've all kind of academic thought, that it is kind of heavily contextual. Somehow we want to think of ourselves as, you know, a kind of individually inspired when, of course, we're not. So what I thought I'd do is just say something about some of the context, if you like, which have helped inform my work and that came to me kind of reflecting on my time here. The first one is obvious, which is, of course, the international context coming in 1991 at the end of the Cold War, the first or the war against Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait, the ending of Cold War rivalries in Africa in particular, the sort of so-called wave of democratisation in Africa that happened in the 1990s. And since, in other words, that things were changing and that there was a new kind of world to be explored and that some of the kind of older arguments that people characteristically had about politics in Africa or about the role of external powers in Africa somehow weren't any more appropriate for these kind of new circumstances. And very specifically, as some of you may know about my own work, two obvious points. One was that in the aftermath of the Cold War, Western states and Western agencies had a vastly expanded agenda in their relations with developing countries, particularly in Africa, so democracy, human rights, good governance, accountability, transparency, and so on. And so forth. And, of course, there was also, it seemed to me, a kind of increasing intrusiveness on the part of these Western states and agencies in these contexts, partly, of course, as a result of the end of the Cold War, as I phrase my supervisor said to me, which I still use to my students, there's only one game in town during the 1990s. And that, I think, sort of substantially informed the kinds of problems, if you like, that I was thinking about. The second thing I thought I would say something about is theory. This is much more complicated, or at least it seems to me on reflection that it was much more complicated. Part of it was associated with this kind of sense of newness that older arguments about dependency theory or certain kinds of attempts to show the utility of kind of Marxist categories for thinking about politics or economy in developing states. In a sense, weren't working anymore, or at least we wanted to do something new and interesting and more exciting, more innovative, I suppose. The trouble was, I think, in retrospect, that the obvious alternatives to these kind of strands of thought, forms of sort of liberal social science, particularly rational choice theory, or the kind of crudly, teleological accounts approaches to particularly Afghur, why isn't there more democracy in, why isn't there more civil society in, and so on, and so forth. We're all deemed, at least by us at the time, I think, to be kind of obviously theoretically kind of inadequate. That theory in some ways certainly, when I was a PhD student, was held in such high regard by ourselves and I think by others, that these kind of alternatives simply kind of wouldn't work for us. And also, I think it's important to remember, this is the context in the sense of American political science going through one of these kind of, it's kind of behaviourist, kind of empiricist high points, and we didn't want to do that, whatever it was that we actually did want to do. A third point is that, I think, for me anyway, and I think for some others of us, that what Western states and agencies were doing in this new kind of context, couldn't be reduced to their accru, kind of economic or geo-strategic interests, and that when the opportunity arose, as in after the end of the Cold War, or indeed during the period of colonialism, that these sort of states and agencies somehow transcended or at least kind of weren't driven by these kind of crude interests, and instead approached particularly African states, but I think other places as well, with a more kind of fundamental set of ideas about how politics, the economy, society should be constituted, and indeed about how, what it meant to kind of have a policy, and what kind of relationships individuals ought to have with their policy, and indeed with each other. So given this, it seems to me anyway, I'm touching retrospect, it didn't seem like that at the time, of course, there is no surprise that some of us at least tried to find a way to make sense of, I suppose, what we rather crudely call the role of these kinds of ideas in informing the way that Western states and Western development agencies kind of thought about politics and the economy in developing countries, and given, and so I suppose that also accounts for, at least my youthful enthusiasm for Foucault, but also others interesting Gramsci or indeed both. And I think that this kind of engagement, at least as I recall it, I don't quite know whether it's really accurate, was kind of also situated in a kind of, an admiration of, or at least the recognition of the necessity of engaging with these broader questions of social theory that kind of dominate the social sciences about structure and agency, about identity, about the role of ideology. And so I now needlessly say I make no claim to have resolved any of those kinds of questions, only that that thought that they ought to be engaged with in that kind of serious intellectual context is certainly one that I took for my time here as a PhD student. The third thing very briefly I thought I would talk about is the sort of disciplines Charles has alluded to it and it's always struck me certainly having left Sirus that Sirus is a kind of slightly sort of house divided in a sense on the one hand the disciplines, characteristics, social sciences or humanities, disciplines of history, sociology, economics and politics and so on and area studies. And at best of course this is a very creative tension where we're forced always to think about the categories that are used in the disciplines in these particular contexts. Although I think it also at worst is a kind of mutual in comprehension. Either way that kind of division certainly kept all of us kind of grounded as you're always forced to think about what it meant in particular countries or particular regions. In terms of theory I think that this kind of tension if you like within Sirus this tension between the disciplines and kind of area studies reinforced some of the things that I mentioned earlier on which is that some of the sort of characteristic categories if you like of Western political science things I'm thinking here particularly things like civil society, democracy, the public space even as it were the individual who at least kind of inhabits Western political theory didn't really work they didn't fit what was actually happening it didn't fit the reality in many of these kind of countries and the thought that these forms of theory were in some senses autobiographical really autobiographical that is of the West rather than kind of analytical to be used in some kind of comparative politics but the tension between sort of disciplines and area studies certainly created for me at any rate a kind of attention I suppose partly because it seemed looking back on it anyway that the alternative to the sort of categories of Western political science was the kind of detailed empirical contextual knowledge of particular countries or particular regions and I think anyway for me in some senses that wasn't I wouldn't say it wasn't enough but for various reasons that wasn't kind of what I wanted to do and I think there was a slightly sort of paradoxical outcome in some senses for me at any rate which was that rather than study the exotic other I would actually study us instead in a sense study the West study Western states study Western development agencies in their relationships too and their attitudes towards others and that in this way at least certain forms of generalisation certain kind of possibilities of kind of grasping something important something general that was going on the other thing I should say finally on that point finally finally is that that kind of thing led me if not exactly to embrace certainly to inhabit international relations as a kind of sub-disciplinar politics something which didn't really exist here when I first arrived so obviously subsequently it has grown a lot in some senses discipline of international relations helped me at anyway to not just find a home but also to provide some answers to the tensions or at least an escape from the tensions of the kind of comparative politics and some of the tensions between the disciplines as it will work and area studies you know thinking all academic work is contextual as I said at the beginning but I think my time here as a student taught me at least the importance of always trying to take seriously the values of academic practice while we recognise this kind of contextual situatedness and always to recognise these are the two things I've always tried to take away from it successfully I don't know something for me to say that there was always a need to know more that is we can't stop and that in some sense that there's always more thinking to do about the particular problems that you're interested in I could ask Mark Laffey to have Okay, thank you David I have to say it's an honour and a privilege to be invited to speak this evening I was going to say something nice about David but I think he just told me I was the pastor of the department and since I understood part of my response but he was come along and talk about the arrival of what has just been referred to as international relations in the department I'm not going to say nice things about you now David but I'm actually I'm actually more concerned really about my my senior colleague Stephen Hopgood who was the first international relations person in the department so if I'm in the past I'm not quite sure that's his about his future prospects so if you want to like get together and sort of like help Steve sort of like cope with this moment we'll be meeting outside immediately afterwards so as I said I'm going to say something about what it's like to be in international relations or what it's has been like to be an international relations person it so is and I want to start by simply saying that when I applied for a position at SOAS I'd never heard of the institution now admittedly I had been to a party in the old PhD student office and at that party I met Toby and I met Nick Hosh-Ditlar who's out here this evening and I also met my former colleague Catherine Dean but it was a party and I'm pretty certain that if you'd asked me if I could find my way back to SOAS I probably couldn't have done it because back in those days I relied on my co-author and colleague Tarek Bakawi with whom I was staying at the time I relied on him to sort of guide me around London because he had the local knowledge and he also had a real ale guide and so he knew where the good pubs were so anyway after I accepted the post in 1999 I went back to Akron which is the former rubber capital of the world and in the dark post industrial heart of Ohio United States which was where I was then teaching and suddenly people that I'd never met or heard of or had anything to do with started coming up to me on campus and congratulating me on going to SOAS that's great congratulation you're going to SOAS so even if I was not aware of SOAS it rapidly became apparent to me that SOAS had this wider reputation even in small town Midwest America which is where I was at the time now my initial ignorance of where I was going to be working was not for lack of interest in the kinds of things that SOAS represents so I wrote my first paper on post colonialism and international relations in 1992 and I presented it at the international studies association conference in Acapulco in Mexico in 1993 and that paper was very nearly my first publication which would have meant that I sort of started out as a post-colonial international relations person which I didn't the paper was solicited for what went on to become a very prestigious volume one of the seminal texts of critical international relations but it wasn't published because my co-author at the time Hemadid Mubadid never finished his bit and I was either too stubborn or too stupid or probably both to finish it myself that was my first introduction to the joys and the frustration of collaborative writing now I have to say that it's something I've continued to pursue I really like the experience of thinking together which collaborative writing is about and I think that's a kind of a nice way of thinking about what scholarships about because I think scholarship is in essence always a collective and a social process and I certainly think that's true of my time at SOAS so it wasn't that I was unaware of the sort of emerging recognition of the ways in which my field international relations had been and continues to be shaped by imperial power issues of imperialism and its implications for our concepts and our theories as a continuing theme in all of my research and writing as my work on the democratic piece for example which we're currently promoting in the Middle East and pretty much everywhere else my ignorance also did not stem from a lack of interest in interpretive social science or if you want to put that more simply in people international relations in the field I think that's fair to say this isn't particularly interested in people or at least it's not interested in most people now it might pay attention to you if you're the leader of a government say or if you're a foreign secretary maybe but most people most of the time international relations just isn't interested now from the start my work had been part of sort of the broader critical and interpretive turn in international relations while as a PhD student I helped to co-edit and contributed to a book called cultures of insecurity which brought together on the one hand sort of cultural anthropologists and on the other international relations these scholars political scientists to talk about the meaningful production of insecure worlds now that one actually got finished so no matter how slow or difficult some of my contributors and co-authors turned out to be so I understood the importance of sort of ethnographic knowledge what Charles invoked in terms of location for making sense of the lived realities out of which international relations of diverse kinds emerge in which they intern shape so why wasn't so as on my radar I think the major reason stems from the fact or from the nature if you like of political science and in particular international relations of the field particularly United States which is where I was trained in her presidential address to the American Political Science Association a few years ago Suzanne Hubarudov referred to the imperialism of categories reflecting on her field work in India in the 1950s she discussed the ways in which political science as a discipline drew on and reinforced a set of sort of Eurocentric forms of knowledge what she was doing she was one of the first sort of behaviorally trained or behavioral oriented political scientists to go to India as an example of a new state coming into existence coming to its own after the British left kicked out and she was going with her husband around villages and conducting survey research now in the United States when you conduct research because people see themselves as individuals they sit down and they discuss this with you and it's kind of like an interaction between the the political scientist on the one hand and the the person on the other what Susan Rudolf discovered going around these villages in India was that when she sat down with someone to get them to fill out the survey the entire family would sit there the household would sort of like do it collectively and they discuss what the answers should be now she might have just thought that the Indians were a bit confused about whether they were individuals or not and what individual experience and privacy was about but instead she went back and she reflected upon the ways in which the categories that informed survey research which is supposed to be kind of like a neutral way of excavating people's views values and so forth actually reflected a very particular context which was that of North American social science now that's political science now international relations which is sometimes also referred to as kind of an Anglo American social science is just like that with knobs on not only does it deploy categories which derive from a certain quite partial account of North Atlantic history it also assumes often quite explicitly an imperial perspective on the world much as SOAS did when it was first established as a school for the training of colonial administrators back at the start of the 20th century in fact you'd think about it like that there's actually a natural fit between international relations on the one hand and SOAS on the other but SOAS you know circa 1925 SOAS wasn't a reference point for me because international relations in fact even critical international relations for the most part just wasn't particularly interested in imperialism wasn't really particularly interested in thinking about its relationship to these larger imperial relations colonial relations of power and it also wasn't very interested in local knowledge or so-called local knowledge which was mostly seen and is by many still seen is mostly just kind of input raw data for abstract theoretical models that are produced by North American and North Atlantic political scientists anyway David wanted me to do all of that and talk about revolutions I'm now going to talk about revolutions for maybe a minute and a half I've been invoking a kind of a revolution in international relations when it builds on critical theory and post-colonialism and also by implication I've been sort of referring to or invoking the nature of the study of politics at SOAS now a key source of those ideas those ideas about critical theory and post-colonialism was the anti-colonial struggles of the post-1945 period in particular what's sometimes referred to as the moment of the tri-continental in Robert Young's terms so the Chinese revolution for example which I'm now working on I was integral to the to the tri-continental moment as indeed was the Cuban revolution as well critical theory too has diverse sources but it's inexplicable without the struggles of the civil rights in the 50s and the 60s the opposition to the war in Vietnam and the women's liberation movement if you like you could say that all of my work and indeed sort of critical work more generally post-colonial work in political science and international relations in one way or another draws on and seeks to extend the legacies in theory in thought of those revolutionary moments in that sense I think it contributes I hope in a small way to the continuing efforts over many years and by many scholars and students to remake SOAS not as an imperial institution but as an anti-imperial and perhaps even a post-imperial one thank you