Re-Imagining IR Through the Anti-Imperialist Archives of the South of the World

Abstract

Since the 2000s, recurrent calls have been made to de-provincialize, globalize, and decolonize International Relations. While such increasing awareness within the scholarly community has led to a considerable wealth of knowledge production, the scope and scale of this turn remain nonetheless very debated. Centring an archival methodology, the article contributes to these debates through the insights and praxes of socio-political formations confronting US-led imperialism. The article draws on the case of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and focuses on the internationalist newspaper, al-Zahaf al-Akhdar (The Green March). It argues that Zahaf is an example of how the anti-imperialist archives foreground an ethos of resistance whose conditions of articulation stem from the pursuit of sovereignty, national liberation and internationalist unity against imperialism. It concludes reflecting on how the materialist analyses that these archives develop force us to re-imagine the contours of IR, at a time of increasing US-led imperialist violence.

Keywords

decolonial IR anti-imperialist archive Libyan Arab Jamahiriya imperialist library global South

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