Blogs
Captive Minds, Coloniality and International Relations
Ever since Stanley Hoffman1 exposed International Relations as a hegemonized discipline, there has been a growing trend among International Relations scholars to unveil the knowledge and power structures which sustain the hegemony of the West in knowledge production...
Reading Between the Lines: The Devil is in the Interpretation
“…now is not the moment to blame the victim,” writes Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Steven Tian, and Dan Raviv in Time Magazine1 while defending the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has made Gaza the world’s largest ‘open-air prison’2 and killed thousands of...
‘Eurocentrism’ in the Field of International Relations (IR)
The field of International Relations (IR) adopts a ‘Eurocentric’ gaze in envisioning world politics. With Eurocentric biases contaminating IR, the discipline is identified as being parochial and not representative of the non-Western realities. Various scholars from...
Power and Consent: Interpreting Gramsci’s Multidimensional Nature of Hegemony
Just as a captain cannot steer a ship without the crew's cooperation, rulers cannot exercise power without the consent of the governed or as Parker contends: Dominant groups in society, including fundamentally but not exclusively the ruling class, maintain their...
‘Decolonizing’ higher education in Pakistan: If not now, when?
A body of discourse is emerging on the practice of ‘decolonization’ within education and the larger social sciences. Putting it plainly, decolonization means “the undoing of colonialism.”1 Decolonization signifies a range of positions that argue that despite former...
“The rest of the world – and you know this very well, Federica – is not exactly a garden”: The West, the ‘Rest’ and the Tale of Forgotten Colonialism
Antique photograph of the British Empire: Annexation of the territory of the king of AdoBeginning with uncivilized and barbarians and then moving to failed states; fragile states; failing states; and rogues states, Ladies and gentlemen we have now arrived to the...
The Use of Human Shields in Contemporary Armed Conflicts
The 21st century has brought about multiple problems for democracies engaged in armed conflicts. One such major problem that has caught the attention of international humanitarian watchdogs is the use of civilians as human shields during hostilities. Despite existing...
Re-Thinking FATF and its Widening Mandate
The 21st-century interstate conflict has taken a shift from conventional kinetic warfare towards other means, one being the use of legal warfare, to achieve similar strategic state interests. The international legal establishment influenced by global powers has taken...
Russia-Ukraine War from a Global South Perspective: Unveiling Western Hypocrisy
I am writing to draw attention to the Western hypocrisy that is in full display following the developments taking place in Ukraine. On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a "military operation" in eastern Ukraine in a televised speech.1 The...
Security Discourses in Pakistan: Exploring the Marginalization of Non-Traditional Security in Pakistani Think Tanks
In the security discourse of Pakistan, the idea of non-traditional security has slowly but gradually gained traction. Even though the discussions on non-traditional security issues were not wholly absent before, it is the present government of Pakistan, led by Prime...