 My name is Dr. Aggy Hearst, I am a senior lecturer in international relations theory and methods here in the Department of War Studies, and I'm also the EDI lead for the department in addition to sitting on the decolonisation of the work stream steering group for the EDI faculty group as well. I'm delighted to be welcoming you to today's session, which is a discussion of the 100th anniversary special issue of the journal international affairs which is titled race and imperialism in international relations theory and practice. What we're going to be doing in today's session is hearing from the special issues to fabulous editors who I will introduce to you in a moment. First, just a quick word on what it is that the special issue is trying to do. The special issue explores the question of whether there is an academic policy divide in the context of discussion on race and imperialism in international relations. In this 100th anniversary special issue, what the editors and the contributions are seeking to do is to think about the role of academia as a supplier of knowledge for colonial policies to think secondly about the influence of imperial practice and policy makers in shaping an academic knowledge production, and then thirdly and importantly, contesting from from academics or prime contestation, I should say, from academics and or practitioners against racial hierarchies in knowledge production and policymaking. So I'm delighted to welcome our two fabulous guests are fabulous guests today who are the editors of this brilliant new forthcoming special issue. And first of all, we have Jasmine Kay Ghani who is senior lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, and also co director of the Center for Syrian Studies. Dr Ghani writes and teaches on colonialism race knowledge production us Syrian relations and ideologies and social movements, particularly in the Middle East, to the author of the role of ideology in Syria and US relations, which came out in 2014 with power grave and also co editor of the Routledge Handbook of Middle East and North African state and state system that came out in 2019. Also author of actors and dynamics in Syrian conflicts middle phase recently last year I believe came out with Routledge. Another fabulous speaker is Dr Jenna Marshall, who is senior researcher at the chair of development policy and postcolonial studies at the University of Castle in Germany. She previously held the soon visiting fellow in South Asian black history at the University of Oxford, and serves as co convener of the post of the colonial postcolonial and the colonial CPD working group of visa. Dr Marshall's work looks at the political economy of the global South, non Western intellectual history and critical anti racist methodologies of knowledge production and pedagogy. So it's my great pleasure to welcome the two of you here this afternoon. Thank you so much for joining us. And thank you so much for your excellent work on this new special issue. What we've decided to do today is to structure this as a discussion as a conversation back and forward. So I'll invite both Dr Marshall and Dr Ghani. Firstly to provide an opening remarks and contextualization about the special issue. And then we'll go from there to pose a few more questions and bring in some discussion and reflections as well. So shall I go firstly perhaps to Dr Marshall would you like to tell us a little bit about this special issue what motivated you to curate it. Thank you so much, Aggie and thank you all for joining us here today. I just want to just chart out some of the motivations and the aims of the special issue. Jasmine and I had been in conversation over some period of time when the open call for the special issue came about. And we were really motivated in particular by the moment, which was that of the murder of George Floyd, as well as the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests and we both were working on race, you know broadly defined. And we wanted to make legible in a way on the moment. And we thought, okay, well, international affairs world renowned journal. So how can we think about the production of knowledge, and what as well as policy by putting race and empire at the center of our conversations. So I that was the kickoff point, and then the proposal continued and we were fortunate enough to be accepted. And that was the guest editors for the, the special issue. But I just want to briefly identify for, I think, or maybe five of the broad aims that we wanted to identify and pursue for the project and the first was, we wanted to take the moment we wanted to take the occasion as one of reflection. It's not just like the journal's history, but also it's continued relevance to policy, and how the legacies of race and empire have in, in a way work to constrain how we think about the international and I think for many who study empire, or even study of race, empire is, you know, confined to the past. And we wanted to actually push against that logic and think about how empire, I guess with a capital E has ended, but there were still colonial afterlives. We wanted to interrogate how these afterlives were reproduced and sustained, and also with race in particular races typically confined to the domestic sphere. And we typically see this in the United States in particular there's a plethora of work there, but we wanted to then again broaden how we conceive of the international and look at race as actually one of the structuring logics of the international. And again how that inflex policy. So the second aim for us, following on from that was to offer a corrective to the systemic denial and erasures of race and imperialism to the study of IR. As I've mentioned, we wanted to broaden what could be considered acceptable within the discipline so when you read the special issue, you would see that it's not simply foreign policy as we understand it in terms of national security policy, but broader than the findings of what policy is so we look at for instance, the politics of memory for instance and how that is meted out throughout the different different countries. And also we wanted to render intelligible the political life of marginalized peoples and communities, and those who typically reside outside of the epistemic communities within the academy, as well as in the policy world. And here with the fifth aim of the paper and that was to also grapple with the complicities of the academy. And as you so well put in in your introduction for us. The idea that and Jasmine will speak to this later the idea of how the academy has helped to has been used as a site for producing knowledge for the purpose of empire. So with that in mind it was how do we then grapple with these complicities complicities, including our own. So it became quite self reflective as well. So I hope that gives you a little bit of a, a taste or a primer of our thoughts going into the special issue. Absolutely. Thank you and I think, as you so articulately say, you know, beginning on analysis or attempts to grapple with these questions with the idea of our own embeddedness in the institutions that historically but also today to perpetuate these relationships is so key. Thanks so much. Great. Over now to you Dr Ghani for your reflections on that question of the motivations of curating the issue. Yeah, thank you so much, Aggie. Thank you for such a warm welcome and introduction. I also just want to say a brief thanks to Amanda, who's not here at the moment, but she was really instrumental in organizing this. Thank you to everybody who's here. A huge thank you to Jenna as well. It's just been really wonderful co-editing the special issue with Jenna and thinking through this with her. And Jenna's covered some really foundational points in terms of what motivated us in doing this special issue really huge thank you and credit as well to international affairs as the number one leading journal to have the courage, right to select our proposal, which we thought this might be a bit too radical for international affairs but but they were bold enough to take it in that direction and been really supportive and really enthusiastic about this project and I think that's really helped and been really uplifting. And so as Jenna mentioned, there's some key arguments and propositions that we're putting forward with the special issue which we're so delighted with all of the contributions all the articles which have coalesced to bring these arguments forward and and the process actually was a very creative one where we held a workshop at the beginning of in January 2021, we brought all of the contributors together and they presented their work and what they're hoping to develop in their articles and there's just some really fantastic conversations that came about through that and and actually, I think all of us we fed into each other's ideas it came about as a result of that conversation with everyone. So as, as you articulated in the beginning agi. The first key argument in many ways that we're putting forward especially with international affairs being a journal that's widely read not just by academics but also policymakers is to grapple with this idea. It's a quite long standing idea actually that that the academics reside in the ivory tower, and that our work is quite abstract, and it might not always have relevance for the real world. And that actually we have an obligation and responsibility to make it intelligible and applicable. And that might often be a common refrain from academics who do work in in foreign policy policy arenas, and for myself. I've come into our actually being keenly interested in foreign policy and something that often is has been asked of me is, how does your work on foreign policy analysis relate to also your work on, which can be seen as quite a critical quite historical on race and imperialism. And so this question of how do we bring the two together was something that was really driving us. And there's been a lot of great fantastic work, not just in recent times but for decades actually by academics who've been working within international relations in other disciplines have really developed and theorized on race and empire. And we're not the first ones to do this at all we're really building on their work. But it's, we really want to also connect it to the more theoretical work with with policy how do we theorize that relationship to the first convention is to actually challenge the idea that there is this gap between policy and academia, because actually historically as the articles demonstrate. As we say in our introductory article, they're very close to have historically been very closely entwined. They've developed sort of two key ways in which they have been entangled. And the first is the arguments that academics have historically through the construction of hierarchies of race through the construction of imperialist thought, provide a scientific information, if you like, for colonial policies, so they really actually helped to supply those policies through their writing through their research, but also in a more embodied form by actually moving in some cases out of the academy into policy spaces. They're carrying those biases and erasures with them into policymaking. And so a number of the articles developed that theme historically but also in the contemporary era. So that carrying that imperialist thought into policy might not always be overtly imperialist. Right, but it might be through more masked theories such as the international liberal order, right, which perpetuates or reproduces some of that imperialist thought but in a way that's a bit more occluded. The second way in which that policy and academia has been entangled in relation to race and imperialism is that well vice versa. Colonialism and imperialism as a status quo has also shaped academic work and knowledge production. And by that we mean this the lack of interrogation of imperialist racist racialized structures in world politics. Which then they become naturalized through our knowledge production. And one that theme that was coming through a lot in a number of the articles is the naturalization of the state and of borders, right, and how that reproduces racial policies or validates racial policies without interrogating them. And then the final way in which we look at that relationship is because in those first two arguments we talk about the complicities, but actually also acknowledging that there have been contestations from academics towards policymaking and policymakers. Right, so there have been practitioners, particularly those from the global south and operating the policy sphere, who are challenging some of the received wisdoms from academia. And in that argument in that section, and which also the articles number the articles develop this theme, what we're trying to get across is when we say academics have challenged the policy sphere and vice versa is also to expand who we understand as producers, and who we understand to even be practitioners right so for example if these are indigenous or racialized or marginalized communities working at the grassroots level. Are we willing to see them as practitioners right even if they don't have access to state power, or if we see those again who are outside of the university, who are producing knowledge is and might be informed that we don't recognize such as all such as through culture and art. Are we taking that into consideration academic work. And so just to finish off, I think that the necessity to widen expand what we see as knowledge and who we see as experts actually feeds in we can talk about that a lot more with the developments with tensions and what a lot of people have been striking about. And so we're happy to talk about that a bit more and I'm just finishing with Jenna and I were really keen that some of these ideas are trying to put on all the contributors are putting forward with a special issue was also reflected in terms of who was a part of the special issue. And to put that into practice, so we have a number of amazing brilliant renowned academics who have written and contributed in the special issue, but we've also got upcoming fabulous but unless established junior scholars who are producing really cutting edge and we also wanted to bring in scholars who are independent scholars not attached to an institution, though that didn't end up happening because they had to drop out because there's bereavement issues and so many challenges with the pandemic. We really wanted to have a diversity of scholars from different parts of the world covering different regions. So yeah, I think I'll end there. Great, and what a brilliant sort of series of intentions and aims and what a brilliant kind of spread of expertise that you've been able to draw on and bring into the conversation that's so great. There's one question I have before we open it up and I do want to also return to those other issues that you mentioned Dr dining there around the concrete struggles that academics are currently experiencing and fighting for. What are your kind of key hopes really for the impact of the special issue who do you want it to reach in and what in your kind of ideal world would be its effect on those folks. Pat, we'll go back to Dr Marshall first and then everything. Thank you. Thanks for that question and a brilliant continuation Jasmine on the content and the contributions of the special issue. I do love research. I'll start there. However, when I was when we Jasmine and I were writing this, I was thinking a lot about my students. I was thinking a lot, especially my, I'm fortunate enough here in Germany, that my cohort is quite international and quite diverse, and especially my students from the global south. But they needed a language to make legible their experiences. So when thinking through with Jasmine about the special issue I really wanted to produce a document that they could refer to in order to then do the work they wanted to do. Right. So they didn't need to spend so much time deliberating and justifying why empire is important why is race important right why colonialism is important. They were able to have the space to do it as Jasmine mentioned in international affairs and one journal of the discipline. I think now it really provides impetus for those students to then do the work that they've been longing to do but couldn't because they just didn't have that foundation. So I think that's where my, my hope is for for my students. Absolutely. I think that was really key. What Jenna just mentioned thinking about students because especially in recent years, whereas, early on in my career, it felt like I was introducing these ideas to my students and my lectures. Now I'm finding there's a real appetite amongst students I'm sure everybody here is recognizing that trend, and they're wanting to hear us as their teachers raising these issues talking about these issues because it feels relevant to them and it feels relevant to the world that they are growing up in. And so if we weren't talking about it I think there'd be a demand anyway right so it's it's responding to that. We do want to speak to policymakers right so as mentioned there might be an assumption that there's a gap between some of the more theoretical works on race and imperialism, or as Jenna rightly mentioned that, well this is something that happened historically in the past so how is it relevant to us today, and thinking about not just applying these theories but also the challenges and the pitfalls when it comes to trying to challenge these items or apply these ideas, because sometimes there might be good intentions but if we're not thinking about it, for example, if we're collaborating with grassroots communities or local indigenous communities in our field work, or when it comes to policymaking inadvertently actually we can reproduce some of those hierarchies that exist between policymakers and researchers or people from the global north and the global south, and just even from the structural sense, not just even in the knowledge that's produced so just being really conscious of that is important and I think also obviously to our community right, not just an international relations very there's a lot of interdisciplinary approach to some of these articles, but academics broadly. I noticed that a number of colleagues who might not have engaged as much with these issues, given the fact that it's being published in international affairs. And then we also recently had the launch event at Chatham House. It almost allows people to talk about something that might have felt marginal or niche, or a bit radical, and recognizing that this is actually it's justified this is a central issue in international relations, and not to worry that they'd be pigeonholed. So yeah I hope we hoped that this would reach a sort of wide quite diverse audiences. I think that's great and extremely well put. I mean it's always a challenge right of how does one sort of translate one's aims and the content of academic thought academic work for both those students coming up in the field but also as you say and the purpose of this and directly speaks to this of the people out there for whom sort of immediate decision making and practical responses really are the order of the day. We don't have the time or the scope for the kind of theoretical musings that we might do here in the institutions that we work in. Great. I wonder if we would be an idea to draw in some other speakers at this point. There are some other questions I've got but I would love to hear if any of our attendees have any questions for our speakers at this stage or would like to follow up on any point raised so far. Do throw your microphones and cameras on if you'd like to come in or alternatively you can post in the chat. I don't think we've got anything in there so far but you're most welcome to do so. I would love to come in with a question or comment at all. Great. We've got one from Cortea over to you. Are you able to pop your microphone on? Otherwise you could pop your question in the chat if the microphone isn't functioning. Oh I can see your video. Yes please do come in Cortea over to you. Hi. Sorry I can't see myself. I can hear you. Yes. Okay great. Sorry I just wanted to say so I actually work for international affairs and I just wanted to jump in to say that it was really amazing working with Jenna and Jasmine. And I think what's been really great as well is that we've had so much positive feedback about the special issue with the last month. Especially sort of on social media after the launch event that we did a couple of weeks ago, which has been really great because we've had sort of a gender parity initiative in the journal around 50-50 and then with this issue as well. We were hoping that we could have a supportive reception but there's always a worry that, you know, do you have to prepare for people questioning it on Twitter for example. And we've had none of that. It's been 100% positive response. That's wonderful to hear. My goodness. Apologies for mispronouncing your name now. I think I was referring to you by your surname. Yes, that's fine. No worries. But that's wonderful to hear. I don't know if either of our speakers would like to respond to that piece of news. Just that. I mean, Christine has been brilliant and yes, I reckon that really supportive and definitely one of the people that we were referring to in terms of the support that we've received the enthusiasm really facilitating this and has made us feel very hopeful, right, that this is these changes, it might take a long time but it's possible. So I think giving that hope and facilitating is been so important. So thank you, Christina. Yes. I just also want to express my thanks and gratitude to the team but I was a little bit shocked. I think Jasmine and I, I think I could speak for Jasmine as well. We were a little shocked that there was like no, no negative. Everyone's really been on board and we thought okay, we're talking about race and empire and these can be hot button topics. But I think for us, or at least from my point of view, we really were quite rigorous in terms of the research. So it wasn't about typically when we discuss race it becomes quite a motive and becomes very individual individualized and for us it was really talking about a history and how it has continued and how certain processes sustain these and, and these ways of thinking and producing knowledge so I, we were very comfortable I think to standing in the project and knowing that the work would speak for itself and even if there were to be any negative feedback that we had done the work in IA had been, you know, quite, you know, rigorous in the in the peer review process so we were really happy to see that there were any negatives but we also are quite confident with what we produced as well. Absolutely. I mean just add to Jenna's points there that all the contributors mentioned that a it was on it was probably one of the most rewarding experiences and positive experiences they had had in publishing but also that had been the most challenging, the most rigorous. So it's like five or six reviewers multiple rounds of reviews. We really pushed everybody and thank you to all the contributors for being very patient. So, yeah, there was a lot of and precisely for that reason we, we anticipated that these arguments that can they'll receive pushback or could be challenged and so therefore the argument needs to be really concrete and substantiated and all of the contributors really rose to that challenge. That's great that's wonderful to hear thank you Christina for coming into the conversation and thanks to both speakers for those responses I mean I think any of us who've done any work on these kinds of issues, whether in our research or in our sort of institutional capacities. You know it's no no secret that there is a hot button issue and can precipitate all sorts of reactions and my hope is that the more work of this context place the more mainstream it becomes. And as you say the more really rigorous excellent scholarship can demonstrate that these are not the ideological issues or anything like that but they're simply empirical and historical and contemporary issues, which warrant, you know serious academic and research and I think really we are moving a pace in line with what you were saying about students now, you know having an appetite for this, you know there's the movement from from below from there from the younger people from student bodies, you know demanding and accounting of these things, but also I think institutions in parallel are starting to realize that this is, it's not a fringe question it's absolutely this it's at the heart of everything to do with our, our disciplines but also our material and historical institutions and locations. And on which point it would be interesting I think to link some of this to some of the kind of concrete struggles that academics, really indeed up until indeed yesterday have been engaging in here in the UK and again we'll be doing so next week. And of course the very devastating news that we've had just in the last 24 hours about the cuts to pensions having been ratified. So can we see your work in this area and the special issue in particular, speaking to these broader questions about things like workloads, inequality in employment, things like the race and gender pay gaps of course, casualised contracts that disproportionately affects certain members of our communities as we know. What's your sense on how these things intersect from the practical sort of position that you're coming from in the special issue. So I can start on this, and Jen I'm sure have comments to follow up on, I mean I think they're really fundamentally linked. Because, well, even in terms of representation, having a diversity of academics, students, researchers within the university is in part dependent on having the equality, when it comes to pay. Having equality when it comes to workloads. So when we're talking about issues of pensions, and it seems like it's something quite distant and it might for some on the outside look like it's a petty or a financial issue that we're only concerned with. It has a huge bearing on who's going to be willing to enter into the academy so typically historically academia, especially in the UK, or in Western institutions has been the preserve of those who can afford to enter into academia. It's been seen as a reserve of a privileged elite. More recent years we've seen the doors of academia opening up to a greater diversity of scholars whether it's on the gendered front or whether it's in terms of ethnicity. Now part of that is because there's a sense of certain financial stability and security that academia can offer me typically I know from some ethnic communities that I'm familiar with. In the past, it would be more normal for them to enter into sciences, for example to even be able to go into humanities and social sciences because science seems to offer a more safer route in terms of earnings afterwards and security in terms of finding a job. So academia has opened up in more recent years now all of this news coming out that pensions are going to be slashed and for those who don't have some private family wealth to be able to rely on. That will have huge implications for them, especially more junior scholars so all of this effort to diversify academia, and therefore also expand the type of knowledge that we're producing and engage in questions of race and empire with which I think we should recognize that so much of that development and change has come from the fact that we've had more racialized people, people from minority ethnic minority backgrounds in the Academy who have recognized this is our history. This is what's important to us, why isn't it being taken seriously by for example, I also a lot of that impetus has come from those scholars. So if we start reversing some of that because of these changes that we've seen, for example the decision yesterday that's going to have a significant impact. And I would just add as well and that's the four fights as well so it's not just about the pensions and so I had to teach out early this week with students and staff and reflecting on the relationship between decolonizing the university and the strikes and this is a deep connection because if we're fighting against overwork, we're fighting against precarity, those things, and gender and ethnic minority pay gaps those things lead to for example increased compliance, right if you're worried about you don't know where you're going to be working for even going to have a job in the next semester or the next year, then you're going to be worried about what rocking the boat or pushing the boundaries when it comes to knowledge if you are overworked you just don't have the capacity in the space of mental energy to expand what we're theorizing about, and again to be engaging in more radical thinking. So all of these issues feed back into an incapacity to decolonize university. You're quite right couldn't agree more did you want to add anything not really not really but I just wanted to echo Jasmine's point about when we talk about decolonization and I think many of us now have heard this term quite often. And in some cases it's been misused. It's been instrumentalized. And for me, if there's one thing I have to say to students when and, and interestingly enough my students to feel as though the themes and the term decolonize has become the seed of its radical of its radical ethos. So the one thing I would say as it relates to the current strike action is that when thinking about decolonization you always have to think about it through struggle, right the material implications of it are always centered in our understanding of it. It's not, it's not simply a question of knowledge production but to Jasmine's point earlier who gets to produce the knowledge what are the terms on which this knowledge is is developed is is really important. Can I just add one thing to what Jenna said which is a really brilliant point about the importance of struggle and so when we see the strike action it might seem like well this is a distraction from the work and it's a distraction from the actual teaching and of course it is and we all want to be in the classroom with our students but the nature of positive change and developments is going to happen through this discomfort and through the struggle. And it's a point that Amal Abu Bakr made in the workshop that we had with Chatham House is really salient point but I would just also add that the goals that we've been talking about in terms of expanding what we consider as knowledge and so one of the key points in the articles and the introduction is maybe it's time that we increasingly looked to knowledge produced outside of the academy. Because anyway there've been people who've been shut out of the university I mean that's been ongoing and the types of knowledge that's produced not only in course including it but expanding beyond just thinking about the articles published in in journals which is his very extortionate enterprise, but thinking about those who are producing knowledge, self publishing in blogs, who are producing knowledge through art and culture and they're telling their stories through all ceremonies. There are multiple ways in which we can still draw from those knowledges without only seeking to find it within the academy now if we're going to have more people who are prevented from entering into the university sector, then that becomes even more of an imperative. Yeah, I couldn't agree more I think it's a great moment to maybe open up to some of our speakers here and also some of our audience members. I'm sure some of you have been on strike recently and may have things to say about this. And I think you know this this point about, you know that the non separability of theory and practice I think is illustrated brilliantly, you know in the work here in the political issue, but also I think as you say in in the struggle here surrounding paying conditions and such that actually, you know the way we think is very closely related to the way we act, and theory and practice at that extent have never been separable that actually these these material questions these practical questions, you know form the basis of the theories that we use in our fields, feminist movements, queer movements, movements for civil rights and anti racism and all the rest of it. Right. And anyone else from our audience like to come in, I recognize a couple of faces and names and I will try not to refer to you by your surname in this case and go to your first name. Anyone like to come in. They're all ruminating. Indeed, or perhaps you answered all all questions already that people have. This means that you've you know you've done your job well this people are already fully informed. Good, I mean I can pose perhaps one question to wrap us up if anybody else wants to come in. I mean, obviously we've talked about how, and one of the key aims here at the special issue is to contribute to kind of mainstreaming and embedding conversations about race and anti racism and ethnicity and post and the colonial issues. How in your experience do you think we can continue to sort of move beyond the communities who are already convinced of this agenda and drawing people who might be ambivalent in some way who might be sort of outside the sphere of the conversation, even might in some context be or some some cases be hostile to this think that actually, you know IR is not about race and racism it should be about, as you said states or militaries or whatever it might be. So do you think it's important to try to sort of bring other folks into the conversation and if so how how might we go about this. Thank you. That's a fantastic question to conclude. Jasmine you don't mind if I, and I know you will have much to say as well. I mean, I we thought about this. This question and we, we want to the special issue, the audience with special issue to be a broad church and Jasmine spoke about policymakers and students and fellow fellow colleagues. But if if one were to say okay, you know, it's national relations is about questions of war and peace and so on. For me it's it belies the fact that the world that we live in was shaped by empire. So empirically, we must be able to grapple with and interrogate how empire has worked to to create. Sorry, I'm getting distracted by the sorry, but we have to be able to interrogate how empire has been able to construct the institutions and the and the processes that we understand in the contemporary world. So I just think to to seek to erase that is to erase how the modern world has come into being. So, that would be my my response to that but Jasmine can put it in a way more eloquent way. I absolutely agree with what Jenna has said. When we teach on these issues. It's, it's always interesting that whatever might be seen as a starting point in IR and certainly the way that I was taught IR I migrated out of history into IR so I had to learn a lot of those theories and realized, okay, there's a lot of stories are not being taken to consideration here. And we, whatever might be seen as a starting point you'll find is another starting point and that starting point often is a very imperial and a colonial one. So yeah I think just from a perspective of rigor and empirical accuracy it's necessary to take that into consideration. The other thing I'd say is it's hard to convince or provide an answer. It just as a short response. Right. And that's what the special issues is for. I mean there's 15 articles there. And some of those articles draw upon years of and really expansive research from each of the contributors, and they painstakingly lay out the arguments that respond to that exact question. We would say we recognize it's a valid question. Right, and we're not dismissing it and that hopefully by engaging with the special issues some of those queries and those doubts and those concerns would be addressed. So that would be my response to that. Absolutely. And as you said at the beginning, you know, to have this in a journal like international affairs really itself sort of performs that that that shift that cultural change from this being a conversation had among the small minority of scholars to really placing it front and center in the mainstream and, you know, it's present will be seen and noted by people across the political and theoretical spectrum in our field and beyond so that's brilliant. So that's the question that has just popped into the chat. Thank you very much for that. Tahir is saying greetings from from case I've been lucky enough to be a student of Dr Jenna Marshall. Thank you so much for the fascinating talks and conversations. By studying in Germany I've learned that there are some boundaries for critical thinking that one should consider in academia, especially when discussing race empire and imperialism regarding actual political events for instance, imperialist policy politics in West Asia. So my question for the speakers is considering your profoundly critical approach to mainstream I R and I T what constraints and challenges do you encounter in your work in academia, and how do you deal with them. And I think loops back to the core themes of the special issue but also these questions of a proxy logically what it's like to do work like this in the field. Great. And should we go first to Dr Ghani and then after Dr. There's Jenna beaming with pride there. And you're all her students are very lucky to have her. I mean that in terms of constraints faced. I think there's a really salient point that you make Tahir which is that there are even boundaries, not just for critical thinking but also within critical thinking. And I think one of the challenges, initially, in addressing these issues is that there was, and still exists this idea that the paradigmatic boundaries lie between positivist thoughts on one hand, very realist thoughts and then you'll have sort of post structuralism and post criticism and critical thoughts and the other, or even liberal thought right, which is supposed to be challenging that and actually if you dig deeper, even critical thought has at its foundation, a lot of racialized and racial concepts and assumptions. And some being some really interesting and great work recently been done to excavate that right looking at the work of people like or interrogating the work of people like Foucault, interrogating the work of those, such as Jean Paul Satra right so where they might have been seen as the bastions of critical response to more mainstream realist thought in the past, and actually they have been found to be incredibly limited and reproducing a lot of those colonial tropes so that's a constraint in a barrier first is where you're having to not just untangle some of the assumptions in that sort of more positivist mainstream ideas but also in the critical world. I think secondly also one of the constraints is and we've spoken to some of those already and Jenna mentioned this before that race or empire. Also I can imagine those who work on issues of gender have to deal with this those who work on issues of class have to deal with this as an assumption that well this is very ideological. If the thing is ideological then it's not objective and it's not neutral. And again, what's something that's special issues seeking to challenges well if you're engaged if you're discussing issues of the state and you're accepting concepts such as borders or imperialist concepts such as you know what the, who are the primary agents or what are the primary goals when it comes to world politics, then those are actually deeply embedded within certain ideological thinking it's just that we've been so socialized within academia to think that these are these are the norms, and these are objective goals, and these are objectively the main agents of IR that we don't see the ideology behind it. So that's also I would say something that exists as a constraint and one of the ways in which we challenged that is to point out that all of this might be ideological thinking, and once you recognize that then you're in a position to critique. And the final thing for I hand over to Jenna I'm sure she's got a lot more to say on this as well is that a question that I get a lot. And I think it's a very good question and increasingly so by the way and from students or it was a question that came up in the Chatham House event, and Jenna mentioned it but we didn't have time to talk about it is that it looks like sometimes and we talk about race and by the way we're only critiquing the West, and we're not taken to consideration actually aggressions and examples of imperialism from states from the global south from the East, right, whether it's Russia whether it's China or historical examples from the Middle East. And I guess our position on this and certainly one of the responses I give is that, whether it's decolonizing anti colonialism, even feminism or whichever is and we look at which is supposed to be amounts of ultimately what those theories and those approaches are concerned with, and certainly what I'm concerned with is the issue of justice. So if something is unjust it's unjust. Right. So yes I think it's necessary to also reflect on how decolonial anti colonial anti racist thought can also be used to apply to those countries or agents from the global for example non Western contexts who also sometimes reproducing imperialism that have been inherited from the West, as a result of the colonial experience, or also have historically had their own racism that need to be attended to. So what I mean is what we say this is only a Western problem but I, I think we do need to recognize that, at least over the past 100, 150 years. The West has been the hegemonic dominant imperialist power on a global level, and so therefore just from an ethical standpoint beginning with those who are the most hegemonic and have the most power seems logical starting point. So thanks very much, Dr Marshall I'll get to you. I don't know why we allow Jasmine to go first in these, in these instances because you, you pretty much covered everything I wanted to say but I think, thinking about my own type of research I'll just give practical example, and Jasmine says this is that one of the challenges is actually within the critical traditions themselves for me and my work is very easy to oppose a Merchheimer, you know, but within my work for instance with development, you know, development policy and how we understand it, even critical work has been had, have had as its foundation racialized logics as well and I know for instance with my work typically if we look at, you know, Atlantic slavery for instance, even within critical work, you know, the enslaved are seen are perceived as objects of accumulation. And for me I say well we have to push past this you know we have to be able to see them as historically and politically situated subjects, you know, with the ability to enact agency how that agency looks, is that a question for us as academics to to render that intelligible, but it's not to just say okay, they were dispossessed of their of their being, it's to understand where that social life and had had space. So I think I would end there. No, a great moment to end on a great point to end on and I agree completely I, I can't I think if there's anything to be hoped for in critical circles and critical theory, it's that it's very criticality can compel it to engage and be reflexive about these insights and about these emissions and illusions which historically have peppered all manner of critical thinking Marxian post structural feminist and all the rest of it. So I think the more we can embrace, you know, a kind of intersectional approach and the more we can center these these very very central questions of race and racism. You know, the more we do justice to the point of critical thinking which is Dr Ghani said is that one at once this question of justice and emancipation, but also this question of reflexivity right not assuming that aligning with a critical tradition somehow rinse and sense of one from from from messing up and reproducing problematic power relations. That's great. Lots of enthusiasm for the questions and indeed the responses in the chat. And also one or two folks saying they've had to leave early but they found the session to be really engaging and enriching. So a huge thank you so I'm afraid we've reached the end of our lot of time. So I'll draw the conversation to a close and please do join me everybody in thanking really really sincerely by Dr Ghani and Dr Marshall for their fantastic work on this special issue, and so they're really insightful comments today. Thanks also to Christina and everybody else at international affairs for really as has been said having the courage to put forward, you know, a pretty kind of path breaking special issue here. We're going to have more publications from international affairs and from other outlets to pursuing this really important line of research and it's very important agenda. So thanks ever so much. One regards to you both. Hope to see you again soon. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for being here.