Participants

Kristen Ghodsee²; Adriana Zaharijević³; Agnieszka Mrozik¹; Chiara Bonfiglioli⁴;  ¹ Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland;  ² University of Pennsylvania, United States;  ³ University of Belgrade, Serbia;  ⁴ University of Venice, Italy

Discussion

In a fraught contemporary moment marked by imperialist wars and resurgent threats to (or outright denial of) national sovereignty, various narratives of decolonization have rightly highlighted the need to reconceptualize outdated epistemic categories and reexamine historical processes of domination, subjugation, and “necropolitics” as they continue to reverberate in the world today. At the same time, however, narratives of decolonization can justify a particular form of “virtuous” nationalism and “virtuous” violence, which reifies and reinscribes ethno-national divisions and forecloses the possibility for political and philosophical projects aspiring to transcend traditional boundaries of ethnicity and nationality, as well as gender and class divisions considered natural. Movements which were once historically international in their forms of action and aims (i.e., socialism, feminism, or pacifism), have increasingly been discursively reduced to mere screens for colonial projects threatening the sovereignty of the nation-state, dramatically restricting any utopian horizon of hope. From this perspective, global socialism was always only a cover for Russian imperialism; transnational feminist sisterhood obscured white and Western intellectual colonialism; and committed pacifism empowered aggressor states. In the spirit of promoting dialogue and epistemic equality within increasingly competitive and neoliberalized academic environments, this roundtable interrogates the status of internationalisms old and new as political, philosophical, and historical projects capable of transcending identitarian divisions and creating renewed internationalist solidarities.