Alina Sajed

After obtaining her PhD in International Relations from McMaster University in 2008, Alina took up the position of Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Hong Kong in 2010 (until August 2013). She joined the Department of Political Science at McMaster in September 2013.

Her core research interests lie in the areas of international relations theory, globalization and transnationalism, the politics of the Global South, and political violence. She is particularly interested in colonialism and decolonization, anticolonial theory and praxis, North Africa and the Middle East, political Islam, and postcolonial approaches to IR.

Her current project is entitled “Third Worldism re-visited: anti-colonial connectivity and the politics of national liberation,” and has received SSHRC funding. 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.