Diorama of Merveille Sugar Plantation (1825) | Gerrit Schouten / Wereld Museum / CC0 1.0 Universal
For any honest student of history observing today’s global inequities, the legacies of colonialism are ubiquitous. However, just as the experiences of these legacies differ across nations, classes, and individual subjects, there are manifold theories of how colonial power structures have endured. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first post-independence president, diagnosed and waged a multi-front battle against neocolonialism, including state-led industrialization and advocacy of pan-African unity. Walter Mignolo called for epistemic disobedience and knowledge creation from the periphery. And Samir Amin, through Marxist political economy, emphasized the role of global monopoly capital.
Against this diverse intellectual backdrop, The Palgrave Handbook on Decolonizing International Affairs (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) offers a wide array of analyses that apply decolonial concepts and critiques to topics such as climate and ecology, international trade, global health, and academic disciplines themselves. In doing so, this open-source book hopes to give teeth to the initiative to decolonize international affairs.
The two editors of the book, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and Sean Jacobs, developed the project during their previous tenures as professors and directors of the Graduate Programs in International Affairs (GPIA) at The New School. In a conversation with Nolan Young, they talked about the place of the project within a wider pedagogical approach and the wider field of international affairs, as well as what the book hopes to accomplish.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nolan Young: What prompted you to develop this project? Was there a specific moment of frustration that made you feel like this sort of intervention was needed?
Sean Jacobs: This project is part of a longer history of international affairs at The New School, which starts in 2001 when Mike [Cohen] started the program. In that environment, the War on Terror was still the predominant political background, but the world had also somehow changed in a different way. There had been the rise of the Latin American “pink tide,” there were people clamoring for a reform of the UN, and in scholarship, there seemingly was a decolonial turn. There were people who said international affairs needed to be decolonized. In this way, some ideas from the middle of the twentieth century had come back into vogue. People are debating, discussing the same issues again.
What we can call a “decolonial” perspective became a more explicit part of the program in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, which we felt that the coursework needed to respond to.
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr: I remember one faculty meeting when you pointed out to everybody else that the Black Lives Matter movement is not just a US issue—it’s an international issue. To me personally, that was a turning point in realizing that really we had to develop a whole new program.
It was very clear that almost all of the American universities taught this thing called “international affairs”—or “global studies” or “public policy”—from a totally US-centric point of view. So international affairs degrees were about US foreign policy, military strategies, diplomatic history, trade and investment interests—totally serving and concerned with the interests of the United States in the world. And that wasn’t at all what we were.
From the very beginning, The New School’s Graduate Programs in International Affairs was not a standard US university international affairs program. It was much more global in perspective. We were a faculty who had been born in, studied in or worked in countries outside the US, which is very different from the typical American universities department, where international affairs academics are American born, American trained, and they go do research in India for six months or something.
To your question—I see the decolonial perspective as something that is both new and not new. There was all this postcolonial thinking and these anticolonial struggles. People like Sean, with experience with and knowledge of Global South social movements, don’t think of it as anything other than a continuum. But I see it as a decolonial turn in scholarship and discourse. And I see this project as part of that.
The whole thing about decolonizing is that it includes many different approaches. Some people who work more on questions of Indigeneity think that that’s the only way to think about decolonization, but I think that’s entirely wrong, because colonization was about creating a certain kind of world order.
Jacobs: To the point about how these ideas developed: In the US, Indigeneity becomes almost a default decolonial approach because it is a settler colony. But elsewhere in the world, in a place like Bolivia, for example, people who are Indigenous are the majority and are able to take power through the state in a way that is not possible elsewhere. Or Black South Africans’ political struggle for self-determination—for constructing a different kind of society—means taking the state. This local experience shapes their conception of what decolonization means. So one of the things we tried to do in our teaching and with this handbook was to take people through how various parts of the world—the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, various parts of Africa, Latin America—have grappled with this struggle to invent a completely different world.
Young: One could argue that the field of international affairs has absorbed waves of critical scholarship before—postcolonial theory, dependency theory, Global South critiques of international law—without changing its core assumptions. How do you see the different contributors of this book grapple with these inherited histories to talk about the present? And do you think there’s anything about the current moment that is different politically?
Fukuda-Parr: You know, this book is not a monograph with new theoretical frameworks. This is a compendium of more introductory theories that’s intended to be accessible. But I do think what is unique about this handbook is that it is edited and intended to address the present problems of the world order in their wide diversity. There are lots and lots of books about decolonizing political science, international relations theory, sociology, geography, or humanitarianism. But I think with this book you find this broad scope of particular issues in international affairs, including these practice fields.
Take global fashion, and its position as a part of global capitalism—how it relates to a Western-centric aesthetic and its interaction with the global market. It is this sort of specificity which makes the book valuable.
Jacobs: I think it’s useful to think about academia not just in a vacuum but in terms of its relation to the public sphere of ideas. I can see this book—if our contributors are able to publish versions of these ideas in other public forums—hopefully preventing this thing where international affairs absorbs critiques but doesn’t course-correct, and just stays on its journey while assuming it’s accommodating the rest of us.
I think in the public sphere, it’s much more difficult for international affairs to just pretend like, Okay, these people are here, we’ve made nice with them, and we’ll form another interest group for them inside the International Studies Association (ISA) or the American Political Science Association (APSA). I think outside of that kind of formal fora, in the public sphere, you can actually change this attitude.
I also think that the way we absorb knowledge and how people create knowledge has changed. So that’s where my hope is. I don’t have much hope for how the university operates. I think that universities and academic associations are very slow to pick up on change. We’re really interested in the public sphere. That’s why not everybody in the book is a dyed-in-the-wool academic. And I would say most of the academics that are in the book are also people who are really concerned about bringing knowledge to wider publics. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have published in this thing. They would have kept that stuff to put in a journal behind a paywall.
Young: One of the emphases of the book is that it’s addressed to researchers and intellectuals but also practitioners. So how would you see decolonial thinking translated to practitioners outside of academia—say, someone working at a development agency or a foreign ministry? How do you see these ideas being integrated or implemented by those people?
Fukuda-Parr: I hope that for people who have not thought in these terms before, reading one or two relevant chapters gives them a way of thinking about decolonization.That is, it’s about explaining today. Why do we have a refugee problem, where the world fails to help people who have had to leave their home countries or their homes? How do we think about it as a decolonial issue? To someone interested in these questions, they would immediately see by reading this chapter on refugee governance that from the very beginning in the mid-twentieth century, the international agreements and institutions that were organized to deal with this phenomenon of refugees only addressed Europeans. Or, for people who are concerned with vaccine access, you read the chapter on global health and you encounter the colonial history of this issue. In the eighteenth century, governments around the world negotiated international treaties for controlling infectious diseases, and it was basically racist. It was just assumed that you had to protect white colonizers.
The book talks a lot about neocolonialism—about how after formal independence, dependency is being written into international trade agreements—and how people like Nkrumah have been explaining this since the fifties and sixties. And we are still talking about this today, fighting for the need to change the rules of international tax corporations so that multinationals don’t avoid paying tax to countries of the South. So you understand tangibly why the inequalities and disparities that exist today are driven by historical legacies that have shaped the way that institutions are organized, the way that international law is organized, the way that international law defines problems and provides solutions.
What I really want to emphasize is that each of the chapters in this book tries to focus on the problems of today—but from the historic and epistemic perspective of colonialism.
Jacobs: Also, the book is free and open access. If you want to get debate into the mainstream, not just in the press and policy circles but have it discussed among practitioners, it helps to have them accessible.
