Reflexive tension: an auto-ethnographic journey through the discipline of International Relations in Western academic training

ABSTRACT

Through two crossed auto-ethnographic works, this paper explores the ‘reflexive tension’ coming with the African identities in diasporic contexts and in Western academic training. As the authors have been socialized in their junior scholar careers in the literature of international relations, they revisit the aforementioned literature in light of the decolonizing literature about IR curriculum and the postcolonial literature. This article argues that it is possible to resist multiple conflicting worldviews, sometimes accept components of them, leaving some questions partly unanswered and living in the permanent tensions and interrogations of our positionality to remain open to alternative paths. To illustrate their emancipatory journeys, the authors present how their nuanced voices were completely silenced, or even inaudible, in the narratives framed by the West and their respective African communities when international events, like Charlie Hebdo shooting or the Rhodes Must Fall protest movement in 2015 affected them. This paper is an invitation to explore deeper the richness of African identities with a renewed auto-ethnographic engagement through ‘reflexive tension’ to regain agency and emancipation from the denial coming with binary narratives.

KEYWORDS:

• Auto-ethnography
• International Relations
• African identities
• reflexivity
• decolonization

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers. Our thanks go also to Rita Abrahamsen, Shingirai Taodzera, Dane Degenstein, Sabrina Marasa, Salma Moustafa Khalil and Leonardo Alfonso Villalón for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. Finally, the authors would like to thank Salma Moustafa Khalil, Sabrina Marasa, Leonardo Villalón and Mónica Villalón for copy-editing the different versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use the term ‘racialized identities’ in the development of this article instead of ‘racial identities’. The term highlights and helps us to insist on the social construction of racial categories and denounce the implied knowledge power, somewhat like Aimé Césaire’s concept of ‘négritude’ (Césaire, 2000).

2. As a reminder, in the Cambridge dictionary, ‘reflexivity’ is defined as: ‘the fact of someone being able to examine his or her own feelings, reactions, and motives (= reasons for acting) and how these influence what he or she does or thinks in a situation’.

3. A first version of this article has been presented at the 2016 Millennium Conference Racialized Realities in World Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). October 22–23, 2016, London, United-Kingdom.

4. We use this in the same understanding as Foucault (1980). That is knowledge and power are articulated in discourses.

5. See Grondin (2014) for an example of a reflexive academic account in the discipline of IR.

6. Although we trust that we are not alone, we do not claim to represent the various lived experiences of all Africans. Our approach sheds light on the many internal contradictions and formation of an African identity going through Western academia. We understand that there are varied experiences of immigration to the West as highlighted by Sajed (2013) or Run (2012), but the experiential transformation that a migrant might go through within his formative years has received less attention.

7. I do not mean to suggest here that my experiences compared to their pains, but only to insist on some gaps which were existing in our respective imaginaries.

8. See chapter 6 of Peau noire, masques blancs (Fanon, 2015).

9. The issue of inclusion of Tuareg communities in Mali and Niger are often called the ‘Tuareg question’. A conceptualization rooted in the French colonial administration. In my dissertation, I was going to demonstrate the multiple voices and political debates existing among Tuareg communities for their inclusion. One of the goals of my dissertation was to question the very framing of the ‘Tuareg question’ and to deconstruct this ‘groupism’ (Bencherif, 2019).

10. The references to the first author’s writings are deleted for the peer review process.

11. Even in a relatively dominated community in the West, you can find dominant actors silencing other voices within this community.

12. His novel was particularly well received and emulated debates in France, in French speaking countries, and among francophone intellectuals. Daoud had a strong impact at that time, and seemed to be emerging as one of the representative voices of the ‘Other’ in the West. As a result, his opinion in the Cologne affair would in turn provoke a lot of reaction.

13. In brief, it is about Western powers doing everything they can for non-Western countries to remain peripheral economies.

14. Recent protests regarding the #BlackLivesMatter movement attest to this relevance.

15. For an in-depth discussion of the various arguments of activists and preservationists, see (Chong-Ming, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/P008038/1] and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under the Postdoctoral Fellowship [number 756 2019 0594].

Notes on contributors

Adib Bencherif

Adib Bencherif is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Sahel Research Group at the University of Florida. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Ottawa. His dissertation compares the narratives of the Tuareg elites in Mali and Niger. He is a Research Fellow at the Centre Francopaix of the Raoul-Dandurand Chair at the University of Québec in Montréal (UQÀM) and with the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CÉRIUM) at the University of Montreal (UdeM).

Gino Vlavonou

Gino Vlavonou is a ABD PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Ottawa and is awaiting his dissertation defense. His dissertation focuses on the changing dynamics of violence in the Central African Republic and the implications for identity construction. He has previously worked as a junior researcher with the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Nairobi (Kenya) and a research associate with the Understanding Violent Conflict (UVC) program of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in Brooklyn, New York.