Abstract
Introduction
In the last few fateful months of 2001, we published a Special Issue of Alternatives (Volume 26:4) on “Race and International Relations,” which seems to have received a warm reception in many quarters. Since then, political life has been subject to profound disruptions and transformations on many dimensions. As a consequence, and among many other dynamics, it has become more difficult to ignore the role of racialized practices in contemporary political life but also more obvious that race cannot be treated as a monolithic category set apart from all those other apparently discrete categories—class, gender, culture, economy, society, and so on—that necessarily bleed into each other in complex and ever-changing relations of coloniality. In this present Special Issue, we revisit the interplay of race and international relations with a collection of essays that are especially attuned to both relationalities and unpredictable possibilities in both existential and intellectual contexts.
Since that last Special Issue, global coloniality has also pushed into a new phase of what we call here the dialectic of temporal circumgression, meaning a broad re-embedding of relations of domination through violent military intervention and exploitative global capitalism. 1 The first of these two has taken multiple forms, including but not restricted to humanitarian intervention and global antiterrorism. The Middle East, in particular, has been recolonized, first through the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and subsequently by siding with autocratic forces to defeat a broad-based revolution often referred to as the Arab Spring. The removal of the first democratically elected government in Egypt under President Mohamed Morsi and the reinstallation of the “old elite” is poignant illustration of the circumgressive moment. General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is its trafficking symbol.
The concept of circumgressive time, therefore, speaks to reversals of political gains in the long struggles of decolonization. It also means forward movement in other areas, representing as it were, the push and pull of contending historical forces operating at multiple levels. One of the most important of these is the growing consolidation of a broad intellectual movement of decoloniality centered on issues of gender, race, and class. The authors of this volume, as was the case with the last Special Issue, have themselves been exemplary contributors to this growing movement of global decoloniality. Madina V. Tlostanova and Walter D. Mignolo have noted that the focus of decoloniality is not restricted to critiques of global capitalism. “Decoloniality means projecting decolonial thinking over the colonial matrix of power.” 2