African experiences and alternativity in International Relations theorizing about security KWAKU DANSO AND KWESI ANING * International Afairs 98: 1 (2022) 67–83; doi: 10.1093/ia/iiab204 © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Afairs. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com The processes of decolonization in Africa that transformed hitherto colonized societies into sovereign entities did not necessarily dismantle the hierarchical structures of knowledge and power that preceding relations of outright domina- tion embodied. On the contrary, the racial and cultural hegemony that cast black people as the ‘bottom marker’ of a ‘human scale of being’ inferior to white Europeans continues to inspire a colonial way of thinking about the postcolonial order and its associated notions of morality and community. 1 In this commu- nity, alternatively termed the international state system, the primacy of security is emphasized and projected as a critical category for understanding world politics and as a means to survival. 2 Just like the confguration of the international order, however, questions around security, what it entails, and how it is delivered and best assured, have been approached from Eurocentric perspectives linked to a mode of signifcation, or ways of making sense of the world, developed almost exclusively in and against the empirical backdrop of European and, for that matter, white experiences, and shaped by ‘specifc cultures of thought’. 3 * This article is part of the January 2022 special issue to mark International Afairs’ 100th anniversary: ‘Race and imperialism in International Relations: theory and practice’, guest-edited by Jasmine K. Gani and Jenna Marshall. 1 Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review 3: 3, 2003, pp. 257–337; Siba N. Grovogui, ‘Postcolonialism’, in Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith, eds, International Relations theories: discipline and diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 238–56. 2 Barry Buzan, Jaap de Wilde and Ole Wæver, Security: a new framework for analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), p. 21. 3 Tarak Barkawi and Mark Lafey, ‘The postcolonial moment in security studies’, Review of International Studies 32: 2, 2006, pp. 329–52; Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit, ‘Is securitization theory racist? Civi- lizationism, methodological whiteness, and antiblack thought in the Copenhagen School’, Security Dialogue 51: 1, 2020, pp. 3–22, doi: 10.1177/0967010619862921; Meera Sabaratnam, ‘Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace’, Security Dialogue 44: 3, 2013, pp. 259–78; Jana Hoenke and Markus-Michael Müller, ‘Governing (in)security in a postcolonial world: transnational entanglements and the worldliness of “local” practice’, Security Dialogue 43: 5, 2012, pp. 383–401, doi: 10.1177/0967010612458337; Amitav Acha- rya and Barry Buzan, ‘Why is there no non-western International Relations theory? An introduction’, in Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, eds, Non-western International Relations theory perspectives on and beyond Asia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), pp. 1–25; Gëzim Visoka, ‘Critique and alternativity in International Relations’, International Studies Review 21: 4, 2019, pp. 678–701, doi: 10.1093/isr/viy065. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 13 Oct. 2021.) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ia/article/98/1/67/6484838 by guest on 08 February 2022