As part of the Fighting Racism lecture series, we are honoured to have Olivia Rutazibwa who will give a lecture on the decolonization of International solidarity.
Dr. Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa (1979) is a Belgian/Rwandan International Relations scholar and former journalist and Senior Research Fellow of the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies in South Africa. She holds a PhD in Political Science/International Relations from Ghent University (2013, Belgium), was Senior Lecturer in European and International (Development) Studies at the University of Portsmouth (2013-21, UK) and now joins the LSE Department of Sociology as an Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics.
Her research and teaching focuses on ways to decolonise (international) solidarity. Building on epistemic Blackness as methodology, she turns to recovering and reconnecting philosophies and practices of dignity, repair and retreat in the postcolony (e.g. autonomous recovery in Somaliland, agaciro in Rwanda and Black Power in the US, Tricontinentalism and the political thought of Thomas Sankara) to theorise solidarity anticolonially.
She is the former Africa desk editor, journalist and columnist at the Brussels based quarterly MO* Magazine and the author of forthcoming non-academic monograph The End of the White World. A Decolonial Manifesto (in Dutch, EPO). In 2011 she delivered a TEDx talk titled: Decolonizing Western Minds; in 2019 she had widely watched conversation on racism [Racism serves a purpose] in the interview collective ZIGO [Zwijgen is Geen Optie – Silence is Not an Option].
