Robbie Shilliam

Senior Lecturer

MA (Sussex) DPhil (Sussex)

Profile

I obtained my DPhil in International Relations at the University of Sussex, and was the Hedley Bull Junior Research Fellow in International Relations at the University of Oxford before moving to Victoria University.

Research Interests
I have an abiding interest in historical sociological investigations of modernity, and the contextualization of social and political thought within the processes that are purported to drive modernity. I take these two intellectual pursuits to be necessarily conjoined in so far as thought on modernity is always situated in particular concrete places and practices, hence, this thought is usually driven by a reflection on these practices as indicating the presence, absence or “corruption” of modernity. 

Previously I used this lens to investigate the rise and fall of a specific liberal project supported by influential German intellectuals from the French Revolution up to the rise of Nazism, and manifested in the political philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Max Weber, and Hans Morgenthau. I historically contextualised the thought of these influential authors from within the context of Germany’s comparative “backwardness” vis-à-vis republican France and capitalist Britain. More recently I have examined the broader Atlantic context of modernity, focusing especially on New World slavery and the implications for historical sociology of situating the epicenter of modernity within the slave-holding New World, rather than in “industrializing” and “democratizing” Europe. So far I do not think that the generative relationship between the socially differentiated constituencies of the New World and Europe has been adequately explained. Along with this I have considered how Caribbean traditions of thought provide novel and fundamental insights into a colonially induced modernity that are not immediately available amongst the usual European suspects. One major concern is the difficulty of adequately re-presenting slaves and descendents of slavery as subjects of modernity through social scientific tropes and narratives that do not take the construction of race to be congenital to modernity. Here, depersonalized historical sociology must be challenged by a poetics of racial situatedness that resonates globally. With this, I have recognized the importance of taking seriously the thought, philosophies and cosmologies of subjects that are rarely taken to be authoritative producers of knowledge of modernity.

Presently I am in the early stages of a project that will develop these considerations in a new direction. “Racial cosmopolitanism: the influence of Black identity politics upon the Māori renaissance” explores how the (for want of a better phrase) Black identity politics of the Americas influenced the modern Māori renaissance. In what ways and to what extents have these identity politics influenced the struggles over biculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand? From the early 1970s onwards, Māori have creatively adapted the political ideology of Black Power and the cultural values of Rastafari in their struggle for biculturalism. However, there has been inadequate academic investigation of these trans-national political and cultural linkages. Using the framework of "racial cosmopolitanism" my project will undertake archival work and interviews to illuminate this important, but under-examined, dimension of the Māori renaissance.

Publications

Books
(edited) Non-Western Thought and International Relations: Imperialism, Colonialism and  Investigations of Global Modernity (London: Routledge, 2010 Forthcoming)

German Thought and International Relations: The Rise and Fall of a Liberal Project (London: Palgrave, 2009)

(co-edited) Silencing Human Rights: Critical Approaches to a Contested Project (London: Palgrave, 2008)

Articles:
“A Fanonian critique of Lebow’s Cultural Theory of International Relations”, Millennium 38 (1) 2009 pp.117-136

“The Atlantic as a Vector of Uneven and Combined Development”, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22 (1), 2009 pp.69-88

 “The Hieroglyph of the ‘Party’: Contextualising the Agent-Structure Debate through the Works of Trotsky, C.L.R. James and Althusser”, in International Relations 22 (2) 2008 pp.193-219

"What the Haitian Revolution Might Tell Us About Development, Security and the Politics of Race", Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 (3), 2008 pp.778-808

“Morgenthau in Context: German Backwardness, German Intellectuals, and the Rise and Fall of a Liberal Project”, European Journal of International Relations 13 (3), 2007 pp.299-327

“What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the Transformation of Sovereignty Debate” in Review of International Studies 32 (3), 2006 pp.379-400

“Marx's Path to Capital: the International Dimension of an Intellectual Journey” in History of Political Thought 27 (2), 2006 pp.349-375

“Hegemony and the Unfashionable Problematic of Primitive Accumulation” in Millennium 33 (1), 2004 pp.59-88

Special issues:
(Co-edited with George Lawson) “Sociology and International Relations: Legacies and Prospects” in Cambridge Review of International Affairs (forthcoming)

 (Co-edited with George Lawson) “Europe and Sovereignty” in International Politics 46 (6), 2009

Book chapters:
“Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands Unto God: Garveyism, Rastafari and Antiquity”, in G.K. Bhambra, D. Orrells and T.Roynon (eds.), African Athena: New Agendas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), 14pp.

“Modernity and Modernization”, in Bertrand Badie, Dirk Berg-Schlosser & Leonardo Morlini (eds.), IPSA Encyclopedia of Political Science, 8 vols. (London: Sage, 2010)

 “The Drama Viewed from Elsewhere”, in Toni Erskine & Richard Ned Lebow (eds), Tragedy and International Relations (Palgrave, forthcoming 2010)

“Race and Development”, in Heloise Weber, (ed.), The Politics of Development (Palgrave, forthcoming), 22pp.

“The Intimate Other: Hegel’s Exploration of a European Self”, in Ritu Vij (ed.), Hegel and International Relations (Palgrave, forthcoming)

“The perilous but unavoidable intellectual terrain of the “Non-West”” in R. Shilliam (ed.), Non-Western Thought and International Relations (Routledge, Forthcoming 2010)

(co-written with Martin Munro), “Alternative sources of cosmopolitanism: Nationalism, universalism and Créolité in Francophone Caribbean thought” in in R. Shilliam (ed.), Non-Western Thought and International Relations (Routledge, Forthcoming 2010)

 “Jacobinism: the Ghost in the Gramscian Machine of Counter-Hegemony”, for Alison Ayers (ed.), Neo-Gramscians, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Palgrave, 2008) pp.189-208

“The 'Other' in Classical Political Theory: Re-Contextualising the Cosmopolitan/Communitarian Debate” in B. Jahn (ed.), Classical Theory in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) pp.207-232

Current Teaching
POLS/INTP 363 – Topic in Political Philosophy: Human Rights in Theory and Practice

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