Inaugural Lecture of Professor Vishwas Satgar

The Coloniality of the Planetary Crisis – Possible Emancipatory Politics and Futures.

The discipline of International Relations has not kept its promise of securing world peace and neither can it grasp the destruction of the planetary commons. It is also steeped in a Western conception of ‘Westphalian’ politics such that it thinks the ‘international’ in ways that perpetuates imperial asymmetries. This critical and decolonial lecture will highlight scalar levels of crisis that take us beyond the ‘national’ and  ‘global’ and will challenge the normalising of planetary crisis by failing power structures and Anthropocene discourses. To meet the challenges of planetary crisis the ‘political’ has to be rethought. This lecture will  highlight the urgency of emancipatory political imaginaries and praxis to secure planetary life.

Dr. Vishwas Satgar is a Professor of International Relations, editor of the democratic Marxism series and principal investigator for Emancipatory Futures Studies in the Anthropocene.