SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This Symposium on 'Teaching IR Globally' engages with and contributes to the current debate on non-Western and alternative analyses and the question of the inevitability of perspectivity in the field of IR and the study of global politics. This Symposium is unique in that it specifically addresses not how to undertake effective research on or in global IR, but rather how to teach IR globally to students at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels. In this group of contributions, Meera Sabaratnam and Kerem Nişancıoğlu present a syllabus that challenges final-year undergraduate students to link the racial history of International Relations, the wave of political decolonizations in Asia and Africa in the twentieth century, and current decolonisation struggles in theory and practice. In a presentation of a core course for an international Master's Degree, Martin Weber shows how to work with and against the '-isms' that usually organize the field of IR by staging thematic juxtapositions of familiar classics with texts usually relegated to the catch-all category 'other approaches.'