About Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD)
Over the past eight years, the CPD-BISA Working Group has become an established community of scholars drawn from within and beyond IR – this interdisciplinarity has enriched the work and activities of the community as a whole. Our annual workshop is our most important event and provides a vital space for early career scholars to connect with more established academics working through the colonial question in their research. As in previous years, this will be an innovative and participatory event with a range of heterodox sessions. We also submit panels to various conferences and we build relationships between our membership and cognate inter-disciplinary research centres across the world.
Our activities in the working group are not delimited by allegiance to any one set of concepts (e.g. neo-colonialism), methodological tradition (e.g. postcolonial thought), or ethics (e.g. decoloniality), nor to any particular time period or substantive area of inquiry. Instead, what draws us together as a research community is the positing of the colonial question as fundamental to inquiry. We are especially interested in supporting early career scholars as well as facilitating engagements between academics and third sector organisations.
Our members currently engage with the colonial question across numerous debates in the field of IR, for example: culture, civilization and war; multiculturalism, liberal governance and domestic security; the liberal peace and humanitarian intervention; globalisation, development and neo-colonial economies; neo-imperialism and empire; South-South relations and new regional groupings; post-positivist theories, including values, norms, subjectivity; and the disciplinary history of IR itself.