PhD (International Relations), McMaster University

MA (International Relations), McMaster University

MA (European Studies), Al.I. Cuza, Iasi, Romania

BA (Honours) (English and French Literature), Al.I. Cuza, Iasi, Romania

Courses

Undergraduate

ARTSSCI 1CO6 Global Challenges Inquiry (co-taught with Dr. Mat Savelli)

3LB3 - Globalization and World Order

3EE3 - International Relations: North-South 

4KB3 - Non-Western International Relations 

4AA6 - Contemporary Politics (Politics of Modern and Contemporary Middle East)

4GG3 - Conceptual Issues in Global Politics (Global Capitalism)

Graduate

767 (cross-listed with Globalization Studies) - Politics of the Global South: An IR Perspective

777 (cross-listed with Globalization Studies): Global Governance

717 (Winter 2018): Political Violence and Revolution 

Research Grants:

Third Worldism revisited: anticolonial connectivity and the politics of national liberation

SSHRC Insight Development Grant - CAD 65,712 (2018-2023)

Arts Research Board (McMaster) - CAD 5,590 (2016-2018)

While attention has been given to liberalism and Marxism in International Relations, there has been virtually no systematic investigation of Third Worldism, the political ideology that emerged during 1950s1960s decolonization struggles and which remained prevalent for two decades after. This ideology had a major impact on Western leftist intellectuals and movements, prompting vivid debates about colonialism, decolonization, the promised political alternatives offered by (then) ongoing decolonization projects, and the failures of leftist politics in the West. France, in particular, was arguably the most significant stage in the West where this debate unfolded. This project reexamines Third Worldism as a political ideology, with a view to understanding both the missed opportunities but also the complex context of decolonization in which postcolonial societies have acquired their independence.

This project pushes against a prevalent assumption (present in the literature on Third Worldism), which reduces Third Worldism to national self-determination. This assumption erases the multiplicity of political visions that inspired decolonization movements, and conceptualize Third Worldism, as an ideological orientation, as nothing more than an aspiration towards postcolonial national independence. This project, however, takes into consideration (Algerian) voices that push against the rigid boundaries of methodological nationalism, and provide a much more complex picture of decolonization as a deeply contested and fragmented political terrain. What is at stake then is understanding decolonization as an unfinished project whose current manifestations complicate our perception of contemporary political dynamics such as immigration debates, refugee flows, radicalization, and political violence.

 

Books:

	Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations. The Politics of Transgression in the Maghreb. Routledge, 2013. (Paperback, 2016)
	(with William D. Coleman) Fifty Key Thinkers on Globalization. Routledge, 2012.
	Randolph B. Persaud and Alina Sajed (eds). Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations. Postcolonial Perspectives. Routledge, 2018.

Podcasts:

(with Sara Salem, Adom Getachew, and George Lawson): Forum - Rethinking Revolution. International Politics Reviews (March 2021)

(with Timothy Seidel) Escaping the Nation? The East is a Podcast (July 2019)

Academic writing:

Alina Sajed, "'From what present are we historicizing the left?' Histories and silences of Arab Lefts." Legal Form, October 2021. Re-published by Monthly Review, November 2021.

Alina Sajed, 'From the Third World to the Global South,' E-International Relations, July 2020. Also translated into Turkish: "‘Üçüncü Dünya’dan ‘Küresel Güney’e," Sosyalist Kritik, September 2020.

Alina Sajed and Timothy Seidel, New Texts Out Now: “Escaping the Nation? Anticolonial Imaginaries and Postcolonial Settlements”, Jadaliyya, July 2019.

Special Issues:

(with Timothy Seidel) Anticolonial Connectivity and the Politics of Solidarity: Between Home and the World. Postcolonial Studies, 26: 1(2023). 

(with Sara Salem) Anticolonial Feminist Imaginaries: Past Struggles and Imagined Futures. Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, 9:1(2023).

(with Tarak Barkawi) Rethinking Revolution – George Lawson’s Anatomies of Revolution and Sara Salem's Anticolonial Afterlives. International Politics Reviews 9:1(2021).

(with Timothy Seidel) "Escaping the Nation? Anti-colonial Imaginaries and Postcolonial Settlements." Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 21:5(2019).

"Race and International Relations. A debate around John Hobson''s The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics." Postcolonial Studies, 19:2(2016).

Journal articles:

"'Claim No Easy Victories:' On the Political and Ideational Content of Liberation." International Politics Reviews (forthcoming, 2023) 

"No Longer in a Future Heaven? Women, Revolutionary Hope, and Decolonization." Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, 9:1(2023), 121-140.

(with Sara Salem) "Anticolonial Feminist Imaginaries: Past Struggles and Imagined Futures." Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, 9:1(2023), 1-8.

"Between Algeria and the World: Anticolonial Connectivity, Aporias of National Liberation and Postcolonial Blues." Postcolonial Studies, 26:1(2023), 13-31.

(with Timothy Seidel) "Anticolonial Connectivity and the Politics of Solidarity: Between Home and the World." Postcolonial Studies, 26:1(2023), 1-12.

"Rethinking Hegemony, Capital and Class-Formation in the Nasserist Project: Introduction to the Discussion on Salem’s Anticolonial Afterlives." International Politics Reviews 9:1(2021), 40-49.

"Decolonization and deconstruction." Radical Philosophy 2.06(2019), 94-98.

"Re-remembering Third Worldism: an affirmative critique of national liberation in Algeria." Middle East Critique, 28:3(2019), 243-260.

“How We Fight: Anti-colonial Imaginaries and the Question of National Liberation in the Algerian War.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 21:5(2019), 635-651.

(with Timothy Seidel) "Introduction: Escaping the Nation? National Consciousness and the Horizons of Decolonization." Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 21:5(2019), 583-591 .

"Interrogating the postcolonial: on the limits of freedom, subalternity, and hegemonic knowledge." International Studies Review 20:1(2018), 152-160. 

(with John M. Hobson) "Navigating Beyond the Eurofetishist Frontier of Critical IR Theory: Exploring the Complex Landscapes of Non-Western Agency." International Studies Review, 19:4(2017), 547-572.

"Race and International Relations – What’s in a Word? A debate around John Hobson''s The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics." Postcolonial Studies, 19:2(2017), 168-172.

(with Naeem Inayatullah) "On the Perils of Lifting the Weight of Structures: An Engagement with Hobson’s Critique of the Discipline of IR." Postcolonial Studies, 19:2(2017), 201-209.

"Peripheral modernity and anti-colonial nationalism in Java: economies of race and gender in the constitution of the Indonesian national teleology." Third World Quarterly, 38:2(2017), 505-523.

"Insurrectional politics in colonial Southeast Asia: colonial modernity, Islamic "counterplots", and translocal (anti-colonial) connectivity." Globalizations, 12:6(2015), 899-912. 

"Fanon, Camus and the Global Colour Line: Colonial Difference and the Rise of Decolonial Horizons." Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 26:1(2013), 5-26.

"The Post Always Rings Twice? The Algerian War, Poststructuralism and the Postcolonial in IR Theory." Review of International Studies, 38:1(2012), 141-163.

"Everyday Encounters with the Global Behind the Iron Curtain: Imagining Freedom, Desiring Liberalism in Socialist Romania."Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 24:4(2011), 551-571.

"Postcolonial Strangers in a Cosmopolitan World: Hybridity and Citizenship in the Franco-Maghrebian Borderland." Citizenship Studies, 14:4(2010), 363-380.

Chapters in edited volumes:

"Postcolonialism." In Richard Devetak and Jacqui True (eds), Theories of International Relations, 6th edition, pp. 60-76. (Bloomsbury, 2022).

(with Randolph B. Persaud) "Introduction: Race, Gender, and Culture in IR." In Randolph B. Persaud and Alina Sajed (eds), Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations. Postcolonial Perspectives (Routledge, 2018).

"Securitized migrants and postcolonial (in)difference: the politics of activisms among North African migrants in France." In Peter Nyers and Kim Rygiel (eds), Citizenship, Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement (Routledge, 2012).

"Waiting for the Revolution. A Foreigners Narrative." In Naeem Inayatullah, ed., Autobiographical International Relations: I, IR, pp. 78-92 (Routledge, 2011).

"Women as Objects and Commodities." In Robert Denemark et al., eds.  The International Studies Compendium Project.  Feminist Theory and Gender Studies. Vol XI, pp. 7513-7533 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

"Late modernity/Postmodernity." In Robert Denemark et al., eds.  The International Studies Compendium Project. International Political Sociology. Vol. VIII, pp. 4787-4805 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell; 2010).

Other peer-reviewed publications:

"Empire Writes Back: Between Dreams of Trespass and Fantasies of Resistance." Institute on Globalization and Human Condition. Working Papers Series, McMaster University, November 2006.

"Between Scylla and Charybdis: the Ethical and Moral Dilemmas of Humanitarian Action." Working Paper Series of the York Centre for International Security Studies. Working Paper no. 31, York University, January 2005.