Abstract
Should we be writing at a time like this? In this short reflection for the 25th anniversary of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, I argue that for the journal to remain relevant in an age of perma-crisis, those of us who read and publish in it need to adopt an abolitionist approach to our research, teaching, and praxis. I outline the contours of an abolitionist approach to political science and international relations, and argue that if we are a community who aims to understand, explain, and address the issues and crises that face Britain and the globe today, then our disciplines of political science and international relations may themselves not be up to the scale and seriousness of the challenges we face. Instead, abolition can provide a pathway to overcoming harms and injustices, and offers us a future of care, community, and public safety.
Oh shit,
Should I be joking at a time like this?
Since I first sat down to watch Bo Burnham’s Netflix musical comedy special Inside in 2021, I have thought about it quite a lot. In ‘Comedy’, the second song of the hour-long show, Burnham addresses the issue of making a living from telling jokes at a time of perma-crisis. Referencing climate change, war, ‘systematic oppression’, ‘income inequality’, and ‘the other stuff’, Burnham says ‘The more I look, the more I see nothing to joke about’, before asking ‘Should I be joking at a time like this?’ In response, Burnham (2021) mocks himself, ironically stating that he is: Healing the world with comedy, Making a literal difference, metaphorically
As a lecturer in international relations (IR) who makes a living researching, teaching, and writing about the ills and injustices that plague the planet, Burnham’s song struck a nerve. As the state of British and global politics seems to worsen every year, and as the world burns and wars rage, what am I doing publishing articles in academic journals? What am I doing standing in front of undergraduates each week telling them about the intricacies of IR theory? What, ultimately, is the point of political science and IR?
In this short reflection for the 25th anniversary of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (BJPIR), I reflect on these questions and what they mean for the future of this journal and its associated academic disciplines of political science and IR. I argue that for BJPIR to remain relevant in an age of perma-crisis, those of us who read and publish in it need to adopt an abolitionist approach to our research, teaching, and praxis (see Acheson, 2022; Davis et al., 2022). For if we are a community who aims to understand, explain, and address the issues and crises that face Britain and the globe today then our disciplines of political science and IR may themselves not be up to the scale and seriousness of the challenges we face.
‘The world is so . . . fucked up’
In 2010, Stephen Chan drew upon the work of Susan Sontag to critique the discipline of IR. ‘Who are we to write about the world in conflict?’ (Chan, 2010: 379) Chan asks us, before enquiring: How dare we – a discipline reclining in front of screens and books and mirrors like an Odalisque painted by Ingres – the Sultan’s luxuriant concubine, well-fed and watered, anxious to please, saying the right words from time to time, but not really getting in the way? (2010: 379)
Over a decade later, Chan’s questions still resonate. They rang loud in my mind in November 2023 as I learned about how an Israeli airstrike killed an alumnus of the university I work at. Her name was Dima Alhaj, and she was a young woman who finished her studies and worked for the World Health Organization in Gaza. She was killed alongside her 6-month-old son Abood, her husband Mohammed, and her two brothers. This happened after they had fled their home to a supposedly safe area in the south of Gaza. In one of her last messages to friends in Glasgow, Dima had sent a picture of Abood, accompanied with the message that ‘I hope he lives to see better days’ (BBC News, 2023).
Dima’s story hit me hard. Her son was a few months younger than one of my daughters. Perhaps if she had stayed in Glasgow her son and my daughter would have played together at the University nursery, and Dima and her family would still be able to hold him, look into his eyes and gaze in wonder at his smile.
The deaths of Dima and her family are several among seemingly countless horrors that have been inflicted by Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza in the past few months, but her story is one that grabbed me by the collar and has since refused to let go. Who am I to be earning a living writing about the world in turmoil and teaching the bright young minds of tomorrow about it when former students are being killed by weapons that are designed, produced, and sold by companies based in Britain? What is the point of scholarship, even that with the prefix ‘critical’, when many universities – my own included – invest millions in arms companies whose equipment brutally reconfigures Gaza into a mass grave of rubble? Every single one of Gaza’s 12 universities has been destroyed by Israel’s bombardment following Hamas’s attack on October 7. At the time of writing, over 33,000 Palestinians have been killed. Of these casualties, 4327 of them were students, 231 were teachers, and 94 of them were our colleagues in higher education (Desai, 2024). Yet few universities here in the United Kingdom or the broader ‘West’ have acknowledged the brutality of this destruction and our complicity in it, let alone called for any measures to stop Israel from causing further harm to the people of Gaza such as a ceasefire or an end to the occupation.
It was not until the morning that I learned of Dima’s death that I truly understood what Chan (2010: 379) meant when he referred to IR, and our community of IR scholars as ‘the Sultan’s luxuriant concubine, well-fed and watered, anxious to please, saying the right words from time to time, but not really getting in the way’. Despite all the critical scholarship of our disciplines, the paeans to progressive efforts to rethink security, the calls to move away from war as a solution to political problems, to open up our studies to intersectional perspectives, to be reflexive, interdisciplinary, to foster impact and tackle global challenges, to emancipate, to decolonise, and so on, the state of global politics deteriorates every year.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza is just one contemporary horror in an almost endless list. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. War in Sudan, Yemen, and Myanmar. The catastrophic effects of climate change and the inability of state leaders to deal with it effectively. The profits of fossil fuel companies. COVID 19. The cost-of-living crisis. The rampant wealth inequalities of neoliberal capitalism. The rampant misogyny that women everywhere face. The popularity of Andrew Tate. Racism. Police brutality. The culture war. Transphobia. Austerity. Brexit. The Rwanda deal. The Conservative party’s inability to govern a country, and the Labour party’s milquetoast vision of change. Elon Musk and his far right shitposting. Jeff Bezos and the Amazon warehouse next to a slum. Mark Zuckerberg and his Hawaiian bunker with wagyu beef ranch where the cows are fed a diet of beer and macadamia nuts to the tune of between $180,000 and $360,000 per cow per year (Rainey, 2024). The persistence of populism, authoritarian states and their leaders. The return of Donald Trump. Joe Biden’s failure to convince Americans that he is a better alternative (Lowrey, 2024), and his foreign policy that has ‘intensified the very crises of American hegemony he sought to resolve’ (Beck, 2024: 9). I could go on, but these are just several symptoms of our broken global politics. As Bo Burnham (2021) puts it in his comedy special: ‘the world is so . . . fucked up’.
Reflecting on what he can do about the ills we face today, Burnham (2021) mocks his own subjectivity and agency: And there’s only one thing that I can do about it While – While being paid and being the center of attention Healing the world with comedy Making a literal difference, metaphorically
Such words should stand as a provocation not just for comedians but for us ‘serious’ scholars too. Despite there being decade-old critical turns in political science and IR scholarship, nothing seems to be getting better, and every year things seem to get worse. Wheras the one thing Burnham does about it is tell more jokes, for us, the one thing we seem to do about it as scholars of political science and IR (while being paid and being the centre of attention) is to carry on as usual by writing papers, publishing them, teaching students, applying for grants, and conferencing. Continuing on like an academic version of the cartoon dog drinking coffee saying ‘this is fine’ as the world around us goes up in flames. Healing the world with scholarship? Making a literal difference, metaphorically. Or to paraphrase Marysia Zalewski’s words from 1996 (3 years before the first issue of this journal went to print!), we have all these political scientists and IR scholars but the bodies keep piling up (see Zalewski, 1996). What then, is to be done?
Abolish political science and IR!
In the wake of our general inability to influence the world for the better or to live up to the emancipatory promises of critical political science and IR scholarship over the past three or four decades, I argue – following Black feminist activists and the feminist/post/decolonial scholars who have begun to bring their work into our own field (see Acheson, 2022; Chandler and Chipato, 2021; Machold and Charrett, 2021; Manchanda, 2021) – that abolition provides a clear pathway for enabling us to address the challenges we face today. In the spirit of abolition, I propose then that if we are to address and overcome these challenges, we need to abolish political science and IR.
As four of the world’s most prominent abolitionist activist-scholars – Angela Y Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie – state ‘abolition has become a twenty-first century term defining the standpoint of many radical activists involved in global justice movements’ (2022: 54). It is an approach to thinking about, and acting in, the world in a way that recognises that the harms and injustices that haunt modern societies – carcerality, sexism, racism, militarism, borders, and capitalism – cannot be addressed through reforming the social, political, and economic institutions that create and exacerbate these things. Instead, abolition is concerned with ‘producing social order outside of the logic of capital and private property, state violence, and racialized subjectivity . . . abolition is a liberatory tendency immanent in all social movements to challenge and dismantle the resultant coercive systems’ (McQuade, 2018: 5). According to Adam Elliot-Cooper (2023: 112), abolitionism offers a ‘vision that incorporates community-led forms of care and safety in order to reduce society’s reliance on police and prison power’ as well as other forms of state violence operationalised in the name of our safety and security such as war, nuclear weapons, borders, and surveillance (see Acheson, 2022).
Abolition is not simply about destroying the institutions around us and leaving a vacuum. It is in McQuade’s terms productive, or as abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us ‘about presence, not absence. It’s about building life affirming institutions’ (quoted by Davis et al., 2022: 52). In their current form are political science and IR life-affirming institutions? Or do they contribute to the harms we see around us, even in their critical guises? If so, according to the abolitionist activist and author Ray Acheson (2022: 131), ‘we must break free from the idea that tweaking the system can bring justice, security, or equality, and instead think about what new systems are needed to achieve real change’.
Abolitionism is guided by several principles, and these may help us in fomenting an abolitionist approach to politics and IR. Davis et al. (2022: 55–56) state these core principles to be: ‘(1) taking leadership from those who are most directly impacted, so that the work incorporates the perspectives of the system’s direct targets and not simply the more comfortably situated defenders; (2) calling for dismantling institutions that are overtly causing social and civil death; (3) broadening, the liberatory agenda to include apparatuses of oppression beyond those that are specifically understood to be carceral; and (4) linking contemporary abolition praxis – or theory, plus action, and reflection – to questions of racial capitalism’.
Ultimately, abolitionism is ‘not simply about what communities do not want’ (Davis et al., 2022: 75) whether that be prisons, police brutality, or military violence. Instead, abolitionism centres on ‘what people need and want to be safe’ such as investments in public resources that reduce harm, build community, foster care, and create ‘authentic public safety’ (Davis et al., 2022: 76).
Only relatively recently has abolitionist thinking and practice been brought into the field of political science and IR, and the time is high that we centre this work. The central contributions of abolitionist insights in political science and IR to date include the demonstration that our disciplines, theories, and methods are grounded in colonialism, racism, sexism, and white supremacy (see in particular Machold and Charrett, 2021; Manchanda, 2021), studies of abolition in theory and practice across different contexts (Bell, 2014; Egeland, 2022; Kim, 2016; Mayblin, 2013; Ray, 1989), alongside detailed explorations of how contemporary injustices and global harms are interconnected and intersectional (Acheson, 2022). As some abolitionist thinkers have recently noted, ‘perhaps the only possibility of a truly novel and ethical future lies in abolition of the entire intellectual, institutional, ontological edifice that critical [scholarship] is embedded in’ (Chandler and Chipato, 2021: 66).
So then, a future political science and IR that works for the majority of people on the planet and not a minority of rich white Westerners, which creates community and authentic safety for all, cares for the planet and the species on it, prevents war, and stops interpersonal and state violence lies in the abolition of these disciplines as they are currently practised. This is quite the provocation to write in the BJPIR, yet it may be necessary. If we are to keep researching, writing, and teaching at a time like this we need drastic change. Following others, in the age of the Anthropocene and its concurrent crises, our disciplines may be better replaced by an approach to ‘planet politics’ (Burke et al., 2016). Indeed, as the brutal crackdowns on peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Universities across the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe in the Spring of 2024 have made explicitly clear, the modern neoliberal university and current modes of knowledge production are not emancipatory endeavours. Instead, they reify and contribute to the carceral, racialised, capitalist, violent crises of today.
Even so, in the absence of the immediate abolition of the modern academy and the disciplines of political science and IR, those of us who read and publish in this journal can place abolitionism at the heart of what we do. Following from abolitionists (Acheson, 2022; Davis et al., 2022) and others who have examined the politics of knowledge production both outside and inside of our disciplinary boundaries (see for example Ahmed, 2007; Cohn, 1996; Krishna, 2001; Manchanda, 2020; Said, 1978), these steps can be the immediate actions we take towards an abolitionist global politics. We must centre and take leadership from marginalised communities and those most impacted by local, national, and global injustices and harms. We must recognise that we ourselves as political scientists and scholars of IR are complicit in causing social harms, and that we therefore need to work towards building ways of researching, teaching, writing, and having impact that cause no harm, build community, and engender care. We must work towards thinking, writing, and doing politics otherwise by focusing on reparative scholarship, activism, liberation from oppressions, challenging and overturning injustices, and preventing harms. Should we be writing at a time like this? Yes, if we are willing to confront the world with an abolitionist ethos and praxis.
The urgency and scale of the crises the planet now faces demand that we face up to the limitations of traditional disciplinary boundaries and ways of being. Long has political science and IR been critiqued for being Eurocentric, elitist, and complicit in the sustenance of violence, inequality, and oppressive power structures. While critical work has challenged the status quo, the persistence of so much horror and our descent into an apocalyptic nightmare of multitudes suggest that something more radical is needed. Incremental reforms to our research, teaching, and practice do little to make the world a better place and can contribute to the harms they seek to address (see Abu-Bakare, 2022; Gani and Khan, 2024). We cannot continue business as usual. As Audre Lorde (2018: 19) put it, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. Abolition offers us with an alternative that might.
