Contesting Concepts - Epistemic Disobedience at the BCIS
The Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS) was 50 last year. It was a cause for celebration and spawned, among other things, the Festival of Ideas where BCIS created an open space for engagement with a wide range of new stakeholders. It was also the year that we applied for and successfully secured institutional accreditation with the Ministry of Higher Education and acquired degree awarding status. In 2025, one year into the next half century of our existence, we are working on creating opportunities for our students, our lecturers, our staff, our governing body members and our public constituencies, to become familiar with new, challenging trends in the global conversations around international relations. We are aiming to strengthen our capacity to re-examine some of the well-worn concepts of international relations theory, engage with global south perspectives and alternatives, decolonise our epistemological leanings, vary our pedagogical practice and create a dynamic, critical international relations community.
The importance of this endeavour cannot be underestimated. We are at a point globally where the conventional Realist concepts of International Relations predominantly defined through the vantage point of the state—state-centrism, anarchy, national interest, security, and power politics—are playing out in ways that increasingly disregard established international norms, and are losing their resonance in a context where technology, the climate crisis and other predicted and unpredicted anthropogenic factors, are influencing diplomacy, state relations, and peoples’ lives and livelihoods.
The 2025 International Conference on International Relations INCOIRe2025, organized by the Department of International Relations of the University of Colombo had, as its theme: the Global South in International relations: imperatives and impediments. Keynote speaker Dr Shweta Singh from the South Asian University argued very eloquently, as others have also done elsewhere, that we are currently in a situation where the old social, political and maybe even economic orders are on the decline, and new orders are yet to emerge. In what is essentially a period illustrative of Gramsci’s interregnum where “ The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ Singh called for “epistemic disobedience” or a challenging of the theories of international relations that emanated from and for the ‘great powers’ of the global north/the West/ the developed world.
A similar call for thinking and theorising in ways that challenged the hegemony of western frameworks formed the substance of a conference that IDEAs (the International Development Economics Associates) held in collaboration with the BCIS and Yukthi a few months ago. The Conference entitled 70 years after Bandung: Challenges and Struggles on the Road to Self-Determination and South – South Solidarity evoked that defining historical moment of the colonised world coming together in 1955. In Colombo in July 2025, Asian,African and South American speakers at the 70 years from Bandung conference questioned the validity of a rules based international order that is disregarded with impunity by those very states that were instrumental in its creation; critiqued an unequal global financial architecture that fosters wealth creation in some countries at the expense of debt and impoverishment in others; and evoked the alternative thinking of eminent scholars of the global south such as Samir Amin whose work on “delinking” provides an attractive alternative strategy to counter the inequality inherent in the global economic, political and social system.
At the time of writing this piece (September 2025) the Third Nyéléni Forum was taking place in Kandy. It is a global gathering of peasants/ family farmers, artisanal fisher-folk, indigenous peoples, landless peoples, rural workers, migrants, pastoralists, forest communities, women, youth, consumers, environmental and urban movements, convened by the international peasantmovement La Via Campesina and focused on food sovereignty. ‘Sovereignty’ is a core concept in the international relations lexicon, focusing on a state's independent authority over its internal affairs and its external independence from other states. By appropriating the word, La Via Campesina uses food sovereignty to emphasize the right of people producing food, communities and nations to define their own agricultural and food policies without being dictated to by the global market, WTO rules, IMF/World Bank policies; and their right to own their own means to produce food free from global agribusiness, and global finance dominance. It resists the unequal structural elements of the international system that benefit the global north through export-oriented agriculture, land grabs, and control over seeds. It goes beyond the technical and developmental issue of food security and expands the concept of the Right to Food by incorporating not just the right to have sufficient food to eat, but also the right to decide how food is produced and distributed.
I have heard it said that as a species human beings prefer to stick to well-grooved ways of understanding the world even when faced with clear evidence that the world is a very different place. It is important that as an international relations teaching and research community we transcend that human characteristic. The evidence for needing a different way of looking at international relations scholarship is irrefutable and in our face. Two issues are particularly egregious: the first is the undeniable scientific knowledge that we are going to stream past the 1.5 degree Paris Agreement target for rising temperatures, not least because governments and cooperations have no ‘political will’ nor any incentive for making disruptive changes to consumption patterns, emissions or the use of fossil fuels.
The second is humankind’s genocidal holocaust happening in Gaza.
Science tells us that temperatures at 1.5degrees will lead to severe heat waves once every five years for about 14% of the world’s population, and at 2 degrees the number can jump to almost 40%. At 2 degrees one third of the world’s population will experience chronic water scarcity, alongside the destructive impacts of more and more violent extremeweather events on homes and basic infrastructure, food security and livelihoods. Some unpredictable tipping points, such as changes in large ocean currents to transformation of the Amazon forest to the melting of massive ice sheets could exacerbate the situation. (https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/vital-signs/a-degree-of-concern-why-global-temperatures
matter/)
Climate change will impact on the way we conceptualise international relations praxis. It will be reflected for instance on how we address the issue of migration. The International Organisation on Migration (IOM) predicts that the number of people forcibly displaced will rise to one billion or more people by 2050, due to the interconnected impacts of climate change, nature’s collapse, and associated political, social, and economic instability. (https://www.iom.int/complex-nexus)The current humanitarian approach of keeping refugees ‘safe’’ pending repatriation or safe passage to a third country has already been brought to its knees if we consider that UNHCR statistics show that 66% of the refugees have been in exile in a host country for five or more years with no chance of repatriation or safe passage elsewhere (https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/insights/explainers/refugee-hosting-metrics.html)
Sea level rises and the potential disappearance of the physical territory of some Pacific Island states will pose a challenge to the Westphalian concept of state sovereignty which is conventionally characterised by territorial integrity and defined geographical borders. Crop productivity will be affected by global warming’s impact on soil quality, water availability and weather volatility leading to lower yields and lower nutrition. Food sovereignty imperatives are likely to erode the perceived value of global food trade. China is already pivoting towards domestically grown food and self-sufficiency. (https://www.world-grain.com/articles/18900-food-security-emerges-as-top-priority-for-china)
Suppose climate change forces us to rethink fundamental ideas and principles relating to migration, state sovereignty and food trade. Then the monstrous Gaza genocide must completely dismantle our understanding of a rules-based international order. We have heard the argument that the so-called rules-based international order is a completely Western tradition based on Western law, the European Enlightenment, and liberal democracy and that this order is predominantly US-centric – an order that was built, supported, and protected by the military, economic, and political power of the United States. The more generous expected that it would, as intended, even during the era of US unipolarity that followed the Cold War, prevent conflict and ensure that the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe or anything like it would never happen again. It is evident to everyone except the wilfully blind, that the genocide in Palestine is exposing the hypocrisy of the Global North and the invalidity of its blueprint for a peaceful world.
These and other contextual changes (such as the marginalisation of women’s voices, the disregard of queer rights, disability rights, indigenous peoples’ rights, the growth of social movements) demand that we rethink the future of the discipline of International Relations. The BCIS 2025 Emerging Scholars Symposium had this imperative as its theme: Rethinking the Future of International Relations. The 60 papers that were presented by the young authors at the Symposium discussed mainly how the thinking of international relations can (and must) be adapted to the technological advancements, changing power dynamics and state alignments in regional spaces, and how global institutions and processes can (and
should) navigate the emerging context. We need to examine in detail how the fundamentals of international relations theory and practice can support the survival of both people and the planet.
I suspect this will require considerable “epistemic disobedience” and the courage to radically deconstruct and dismantle the received wisdom and then reassemble a freshly imagined understanding of international relations. It would require a discussion on the contestation between hegemonic state-centric ideas, institutions, finance, and MNCs on one hand, and peasant farmers, women, fishers, pastoralists, indigenous people, students, working people, victims of genocides, immigrants, refugees, and citizens of small states on the other. We need to ask ourselves the question, are we about continuing to defend ideas and frameworks for the sake of a discipline or are we going to embark on a creative process that reimagines international relations scholarship in ways that are relevant to the majority
of the citizens of the Global South.
The newly designed modules in the BCIS’ certificate, diploma and higher diploma courses and a cutting-edge Master's in International Relations that will be launched in 2026, will lead us on this critical journey. Meanwhile, the BCIS will offer several short courses that will encourage deeper exploration of the issues we need to challenge, starting with Professor Kiran K Grewal six-part course on Decolonial Concepts and Theory, Decolonial Practice and Decolonising Institutions, this October through to November, and a series of public lectures on Democracy and Democratisation: conceptual trends and imaginations by Professor Shalini in November.
Watch this space – let’s do this together!!
(this blog was initially published in The Island newspaper on the 25th September 2025)
Image from https://best.nmsu.edu/programs/decolonial-methodologies.html
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