Workshop

Global South Perspectives, Theories, and Onto-Epistemics in Politics and International Relations

Date

Thursday 12 November 2026 - Friday 13 November 2026

Address

Wijnhaven
Turfmarkt 99
2511 DP The Hague

Room

Room 3.46

• Thursday 12 November, from 08:30 – 16:30 hours in room 3.46 Wijnhaven followed by a plenary roundtable from 17:00 – 19:00 hour in lecture hall 2.01 in Wijnhaven, The Hague.
• Friday 13 November, from 08:30 - 17:30 hours in room 3B. 56 Campus Spui, The Hague.

Workshop Description

Over the last two decades, the fields of International Relations (IR) and Political Science have increasingly reflected on the Eurocentric and Euro-American assumptions embedded in their foundations, theories, concepts, ontologies, epistemologies, methodologies, and narrated histories. This workshop takes these debates as a point of departure and asks a central question: What would International Relations and Political Science look like if we moved beyond the Euro-American experiences, concepts, sources, and histories that have traditionally been treated as universal? More specifically, how might the disciplines and our understandings of politics and international relations change if we took seriously the plurality of ways of knowing, being, experiencing, and interpreting global politics?

This workshop examines how Eurocentrism and West-centrism have shaped what counts as legitimate knowledge in IR and Political Science. The privileging of particular sources, objects, actors, historical experiences, and methodological approaches has often rendered other forms of knowledge invisible, marginal, or outside the boundaries of the discipline. In doing so, the universalization of Euro-American Political Science and IR has contributed to sustaining what scholars have described as the imperial-colonial-racial grammar of the disciplines. The workshop therefore explores not only what has been excluded from conventional understandings of global politics, but also what becomes possible when these exclusions are challenged. Building on the contributions of postcolonial, decolonial, Indigenous, intersectional feminist, and abolitionist scholarship, the workshop brings together scholars to explore how IR and Political Science can be further decentered and pluriversalized. Across a series of panels and roundtables, participants will examine alternative concepts, theories, methodologies, archives, sources, histories, and experiences, with particular attention to perspectives and intellectual traditions from the Global South and other historically marginalized actors.

The workshop is organized around five interconnected themes:

1. Deconstructing Eurocentrism and the Imperial-Colonial-Racial Grammar of IR and Political Science – How have Eurocentric assumptions and colonial, imperial, and racial hierarchies shaped the disciplines, and how can these foundations be critically interrogated?
2. Pluriversalizing and Decentering Euro-American Political Science and IR – What concepts, ontologies, epistemologies, cosmologies, methodologies, and theories emerge when we engage seriously with intellectual traditions and forms of knowledge beyond the Euro-American canon?
3. Experiencing and Understanding International Politics and IR Differently – How do perspectives and experiences from the Global South and other marginalized contexts challenge established understandings of international politics?
4. Subduing Eurocentrism: Alternative Sources, Objects, Archives, and Histories in International Relations – What happens when we broaden the sources, archives, actors, and objects through which we study international relations, and how might this change the histories of the international that we tell?
5. Decolonizing the Politics and IR Curriculum: Exploring Pedagogical Strategies and Praxis – How can these insights be translated into teaching? What can a more plural and decolonized Politics and IR curriculum look like in practice?

By bringing these questions into conversation, the workshop aims to provide participants with both conceptual and practical resources for thinking differently about the study and teaching of global politics. Visitors will encounter a range of approaches to questioning established disciplinary assumptions and will learn about alternative ways of conceptualizing, researching, teaching, and understanding international relations and politics. Importantly, the workshop is not premised on a single alternative framework or a shared definition of what “decolonizing” or “pluriversalizing” the disciplines must mean. Instead, it creates space to explore different approaches, experiences, and possibilities, including their tensions and limitations.

The workshop is therefore intended for anyone interested in critically reflecting on how knowledge about global politics is produced and taught and how global politics is experienced in the Global South. This includes students, scholars and PhD researchers in International Relations, Political Science, and other fields in the social sciences and humanities such as Sociology, Cultural Anthropology, Philosophy, (Global) History, Literature, Aesthetics, Art, and International Law.