Rosalba Icaza published at E-International Relations, the book chapter "Decolonial Feminism and Global Politics: Border Thinking and Vulnerability as a Knowing Otherwise". In this chapter, she proposes re-thinking IR by considering how modernity (as an international regime of knowledge) and coloniality (as an international regime of power) are mutually constitutive.
Decolonizing IR, her contribution shows, would require a fundamental departure from Western epistemological paradigms such as the un-bodied rational choice actor, proceeding both from non-Euro-centric systems of thinking (i.e., Indigenous cosmologies) and different modes of knowing and being, such as the corpo-realities created through experiences of vulnerability. Following Maria Lugones, Icaza argues for ‘dwelling in the border,’ for ‘an emphasis on a knowing that sits in bodies and territories and its local histories in contrast to disembodied, abstract, universalist knowledge that generates global designs.’
Offering field notes from research trips along the Mexican migrant trail with her students, Icaza reflects on practical examples of such a decolonial approach to IR through the epistemologies of affect and the corporeal.
Rosalba's article is part of the open access book "Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics" edited by Marc Woons and Sebastian Weier, which can be accessed and freely downloaded at:
http://www.e-ir.info/2017/06/01/edited-collection-critical-epistemologies-of-global-politics/