Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa

Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa (born 1979 in Brussels) is a Belgian-Rwandan political scientist specializing in international relations and a former journalist. She conducts research on human rights and politics at the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. work encompasses decolonial political theory, critique of racism and colonialism, as well as international solidarity and development policy. Quotes In order to decolonize global health, we must acknowledge colonial histories and their continuing impact. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) Decolonization efforts however should not be limited to verbal statements but must be strengthened by actions. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) We should stop thinking of emergency aid and development work as the principal solutions to global inequities. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) We often assume that colonialism is just about the literal presence in another place, like This is my country. I plant my flag. I’m going to rule over your land and your country and your people. But colonialism is not just that, the planting of a flag. It’s also about extreme power inequalities and all the institutions that exist to keep them in place. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) Even though countries in West Africa got their formal independence from France in the 1960s, France still dominates these countries militarily, culturally, and economically to this day. k The homogenizing imposition that is inherent to colonialism is evident in how one way of thinking about global health prevails. In most medical schools around the globe, Western medicine is being taught. In fact, it has been formalized to the extent that we don’t even have to say ‘Western’ when we refer to it – it’s just called medicine. So there’s very little variation. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) An important aspect of colonialism is the destruction of people, knowledge, and living environments, respectively genocide, epistemicide and ecocide. In the context of slavery and colonialism, millions of people died. Conjointly with their killing, their ways of thinking and sense-making were erased or marginalized, and their environments often destroyed or depleted through extraction. In that context, alternative forms of healing and of medicine have been discarded as not being significant or valid. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) The question that then comes up, is ‘Are they convertible?’. If the answer is ‘yes’, it means they are to be human, because they’re children of God. This in turn means that they have to be treated in certain ways, based on their humanity. But from this same logic it follows that if they are peoples without God, who cannot be converted, that they are not fully human. In this case they don’t have to be treated like humans. So people were dehumanized, or their humanity was made conditional. And this carried on throughout the enslavement of Africans and their kidnapping and transportation to the Americas. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) The civilizational ideologies of that time have passed through to the present. The underlying idea is ‘We can save those souls, but our presence is needed’. So we are going to teach them how to read and write, how to do medicine and how to be converted to Christianity. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) In a weird way, racist ideologies have always shifted between completely denying other people’s humanity or making their humanity conditional upon us converting them to something. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) We cannot detach the origin of wealth in the West from the origin of poverty in the rest of the world. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) The invitation to take history seriously is not just about studying it and mentioning it, but it’s actually trying to think about: ‘What are the consequences of the fact that I stop pretending that this never happened? Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) The problem with a lot of global health or international aid systems, is that emergency support has been confused with the real solution that brings about the correction or the justice. But it is nothing more than a band-aid. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) In mainstream conversations, we hardly ever seriously ask the question of whether a Western presence is something positive or negative. It’s assumed to be positive because the Global North has more money. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) But if you take a historical approach to this, there is very little evidence that Western presence aimed at ‘development’ ever brought something positive to the Global South. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) We should start addressing the whole setup of the global pharmaceutical industry for this explains much better why people don’t have access to whatever could cure them than anything else. We have to start thinking about prices, intellectual property rights and patents, all of that. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) I think the invitation that the call for decolonization brings, is to somehow expand our imagination of solutions and to understand that when you do fly out on an emergency mission, and you save peoples’ lives, that you understand that you’re not part of the full solution. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) But one of the things that acknowledging the past does, is that you come up with better solutions for the present as well. Decolonising Global Health: An Introduction by Olivia Rutazibwa. globalhealthperspectives.com (October 13, 2026) I find it exhilarating and even somewhat comforting to realise that a lifetime will not suffice to unearth all that there is to know. Interview - Olivia Rutazibwa. e-ir.org (October 13, 2026) All in all, joyfully accepting that there is so much out there we don’t know (yet) has had a liberating effect – most of the time. Interview - Olivia Rutazibwa. e-ir.org (October 13, 2026) I couldn’t understand how we had these supposedly superior human rights systems, but when people were being slaughtered en masse we didn’t just do nothing, we chose to actively leave them to die. Interview - Olivia Rutazibwa. e-ir.org (October 13, 2026) Diversity is often mistakenly understood as the goal. Instead it’s the tool and minimal rather than a sufficient condition to cultivate radically different knowledges. Interview - Olivia Rutazibwa. e-ir.org (October 13, 2026) When it comes to silencing, it would be helpful if we were to stop thinking about it as an issue of the under-representation of certain voices. Instead we are dealing with an over-representation of a tiny minority. Interview - Olivia Rutazibwa. e-ir.org (October 13, 2026) That’s why I’m trying think about decolonisation as a simultaneous engagement with “de-mythologising”, “de-silencing” and “anticolonial de-colonising”; it helps us think not only about the systemic blind spots and lies, not only about who is not around the table or does not have the microphone of expertise, but also why that matters. As such, decolonisation doesn’t only change the content but also the purpose of the conversation. Interview - Olivia Rutazibwa. e-ir.org (October 13, 2026) We should be humble enough to fail, and not look for a prefab uniform decolonial toolkit to replace the one we have at the moment. Interview - Olivia Rutazibwa. e-ir.org (October 13, 2026) I see a lot of anxiety around changing our ways in the absence of assurances that the alternative will be perfect or better. In reality, that anxiety has more to do with a potential loss of power. Interview - Olivia Rutazibwa. e-ir.org (October 13, 2026) The decolonial contribution here is a constant reminder that we do not just need to mitigate the fire, but simultaneously think about how we’re going to stop lighting it, again and again. Interview - Olivia Rutazibwa. e-ir.org (October 13, 2026) I have been growing up with a complicity almost in the normalisation of the figure of Leopold. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) This process of denaturalising their presence - in street names, square names, tunnels, statues, all of these things - it has been going on for a long time, mostly carried by peoples from the colonies, whatever generation they were, but a lot of us have been very late to the party. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) These little moments of joy when something is destroyed, I usually don't tend to have them but it was something very profound. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) More recently, it's an artist of Rwandan descent, her name is Laura Nsengiyumva, and she made a huge ice sculpture of the statue of Leopold, and so the whole installation was about it melting away and actually having it disappear. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) What we saw this summer was maybe the latest iteration where you see a larger participation of well-meaning white people joining into that conversation, making it hearable. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) So, I would say this summer somehow was kind of a culmination, but there's a lot to say of where this will go. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) My answer to this would be that it's not automatic, but it's possible. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Acknowledging that certain things become hearable that weren't before is a really important realisation that we then have to work with. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Radical activism needs to be really vigilant to keep the radicalness of it alive. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) You can have then the co-optation of it and making it so docile that it's not dangerous anymore, and that's why it's hearable. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) But the idea that they can just be gone because of the activists taking it down, establishment is still very squeamish about it. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) This is long term work that is important. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Don't just desire to be seen to do something very quickly. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) I think for me those are some of the dangers, where I'm happy we're starting to use the language of repair, reparations, recognition at least; but then it is done in a way that caters too much to the status quo. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) The mediocracy and incompetence sometimes is quite baffling. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) There is an incompetence within the political ranks at the moment to even kick start something like that. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) And I would say I'm in favour of using the language of Whiteness, with a capital W, and accepting that it manifests itself in slightly different ways; but it's not fundamentally different. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) In divided Belgium, I would say that racism - overt racism - is most rampant and in your face in Flanders, because there is this imagination like we were the underdog during the world wars and we were also not that bad in the colonies Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) So that's where we have to decide how we decide to look at it; is it these individual actors or not? Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) And then with the Métis children as well, again, it is seen as an isolated slight aberration of a colonial system we still refuse to know details about. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) When it's contained within existing legislation, and if it's seen to not cost the state or the church too much- it doesn't cost much to say 'I'm so sorry I kidnapped you from your mother'. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) We need to have [a conversation], and not just apologising for stuff that is easy to apologise for. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) We don't have to start with what happened in the past- literally, we know; everybody knows what happened. You can decide to teach it in school, that's something else; but you don't need a commission to investigate that. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) So if you were to turn it around and actually say let's have a commission of both internal affairs and external affairs that looks at racism today, and then works back to the colonies, it would be much more costly, but it would be much more honest. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) My approach was not that critical to the extent I just wanted to expose the hypocrisy; which is again not that difficult, you count when we say something, when we don't, when we punish, when we give gifts, any of these things. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) How can we understand that we have been trained to naturalise a completely historically ridiculous idea that a western presence tends to be positive for previously colonised peoples? Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) There is no historical precedence for that, and still the whole discipline of international development, and to a large extent international relations, is built on that idea. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) At no point do we seriously ask how fundamentally detrimental is our presence. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Today I think I'm at the point of trying to think about development as also an abolitionist term. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Once you do get rid of that then just the word 'aid' is so obscene that it actually opens avenues for just rethinking it. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) It's not about not thinking about solidarity, it's just refusing that aid and the idea of the linear development led by the west... is in any way something that we should accept ever. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) I often mention it because I think it's important sometimes to think why we are interested in something. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Seeing on TV what was happening in Rwanda during the genocide in '94, but mostly I guess seeing how life continued on; and it was only when I was with my Rwandan family that I could feel the weight of the horror that was unfolding. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) There is not one positionality from which we can answer the whole question. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) When people speak about de-imperialising solidarity, that for me is a specific task of a global North in how to think about it. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Again, how are we not cynical about it, on the one hand; but on the other hand, train next generations into people that are able to imagine this de-imperialised way of doing solidarity. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) The idea of repair, of retreat, and then also dignity, is something that we need to do from a western positionality; including the diasporas or somewhere in between there, but I could not speak of this from a position of innocence either. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) They're like we've moved on, we want a different relationship with the global North, and we don't want any handouts, so we'll just formulate for them what we need. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) There needs to be an end of some imposition before you can even try and rethink how we could enter in communion again; but without skipping that phase. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Today abolition and retreat help me to draw that line where I say as western actors let's stay in this lane for a minute, because we have not done the work yet. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Sometimes I am uncomfortable when in a western context this is what we might bring up to make sure we don't have to go through the painful recognition of the colonial guilt. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) A lot of work needs to be done on how to push back against the imposition but also the own participation of different African actors in their own colonisation on their own. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) So those are different conversations sometimes that should not be had by the same people with the same authority over all bits of that conversation. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) As analytical tools there are moments, especially when we speak from the west, that we do have to engage with the division between North and South because it's to speak to a history. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Mostly it's to speak to a history that we'd love to erase. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) The whole idea of using a lockdown as a way to mitigate something has been very much shaped on middle class life- average middle-class life in the western context. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) The whiteness of the world makes it so that it can be adopted from India to South Africa, for situations that are so radically different, and that the use of a lockdown then actually engenders many more deaths for many different reasons. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) That for me is the global colour line where it does not have to be experienced literally between white people and black people, but it's a continuation of an imagined white life having so much value that it can actually define or shape the understanding of life in general, even if all these other lives literally have a completely different experience. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) It's the absence of these imagined white lives being subjected to that that at no point was any of these diseases a global state of emergency. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) That for me makes it still useful to think even in black and white, but again not to describe literally what's going on, but to analyse the value of life and which lives can be prematurely endangered or ended. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Can we know for different purposes than we've done so far that tends to be control and discovery and extraction. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) So it's a part of the decolonial thought that I'm also attracted to, to have a radically different relation to knowing. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) I think there is something there that is part of that same activism that is about knowing differently and not just what do we know more or less. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) So, when they say in the US defund the police, I make it travel not to say let's defund the police as well, but what do we need to defund here. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) The archival work that you speak of needs to be either unearthed or it needs to be present or rebuilt as a systematic practice as well so that we know where to go and look for the answers. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) How can we cultivate more this idea of knowledge cultivation or generative readings of things. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Rather than having to either copy or reject; and that I find is also very limited and often has been seen as a colonial way of knowing. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Racism in international relations (IR) is absent, everybody is squeamish to use it. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) The thing that really disheartens me, to some extent, is that it's a ritualised consternation, and that is both in the public space and in academia, where people keep on discovering this topic of racism. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) How do we make sure that there are some fundamental steps that are done within international relations (IR)? And I think again it would come down to can we rethink what the purpose of the discipline is, rather than how many people use #race when they talk about international relations (IR). Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Having race and racism and colonialism and capitalism at the centre of international relations (IR) means to have a discipline that is supposed to do something else. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) When I'm most optimistic I would say it's a moving object of always going back to 'oh my God, racism is this bad, let's do something about it now'. It lulls and it comes back. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) Yeah, I'm optimistic as a political choice, because again I don't think we have the luxury of being paralysed somehow. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) That's a commitment rather maybe than a prediction, because with predictions sometimes I can feel the cynicism creeping in, but then on the other hand it's really about what actions do we decide to centre. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) How can we unearth and centre all these different ways of push back that we have been taught to forget so that everything remains the same. Transcript: In conversation with Olivia U. Rutazibwa. ucl.ac.uk (October 13, 2026) The book challenges our traditional (read: colonial) ways of doing research so convincingly and profoundly, that a conventional review would not do it justice. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Too many of our research ways continue to be concerned with the generalizable and the linear. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Divisive categorisations still play an important role and we end up with consumable knowledge at the service of the (oppressive) control of reality and peoples. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Too often then, academic conversations, ideally conceived as open spaces for dialogue, exchange and creation, ossify into zones of judgementality, oxygenised by a misguided belief that there are indeed some absolute truths out there. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) To me, it sang like Rebel Music at the heart of the (IR) academy and as such, it was a source of comforting discomfort. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Break with the myth of western knowledge production exceptionalism, in particular when it comes to self-reflexivity. The whole book testifies to the fact that other knowledge systems have it too. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) He reconnects the value of reflexivity to the need to cultivate – rather than produce – knowledge that allows for real change and deep relations, i.c. righting colonial wrongs, bridging its past and ongoing breaches. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Ways to go beyond the narcissistic when we seek to genuinely contribute to decoloniality. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) My thoughts here are preliminary, as they are merely a collection of personal reflections after a first (and a half) reading of a book that definitely deserves to be read more than once. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Simply deconstructing the discipline’s coloniality – the point where most of us pour the bulk of our energies into and often leave it at that. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) One way to understand it, is as a deep, global infrastructure of anti-colonial connectivity, rather than a random encounter. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Cultivate the ethical, spiritual, political and intellectual sensibilities needed to critically support, extend and renew this infrastructure. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Decolonial science is then about binding back together. Peoples and lands, but also the spiritual and the manifest. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) One cannot speak of a decolonial research project in the abstract but always through lived experiences, living knowledge traditions. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Building political commitment among intellectuals to deep relations a commitment to leave behind current academic endorsements of privileged narcissism. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Our academy, but also the conception of our ‘modern’ everyday, has indeed privileged the secular, self-identified with, glorified and dedicated itself to a very narrow understanding of rationality and reason. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Meaningfully inscribing the spiritual might indeed turn out to be one of the bigger challenges of decolonising knowledge production (into cultivation). Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) So far, most of our accounts manage to at best take the spiritual seriously as a topic of research, a realm that surely impacts our manifest worlds and therefore deserves our undivided attention. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Yet, as a constitutive feature of how we devise our research questions, develop our thinking and methods, the spiritual is clamorously absent, if not profoundly taboo. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) As a scholar of international (development) studies I have been playing with the idea that we need to find ways to seriously consider ethical retreat as a form of decolonial solidarity and desilencing. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) This concerns ceding spaces that we, scholars in/of the West, have disproportionally occupied – apart from materially, very much so epistemologically – by considering areas of study and places we are not the best positioned to focus on. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Shilliam folds first and foremost the non-academics into the family of legitimate knowledge cultivators. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) The question of 'who the appropriate guardians [of knowledge are], precedes the social science imperatives of how to extract knowledge. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Thinking about privileged positionality is not translated into a list of things we cannot do anymore, or a neatly packaged (not)-to-do list when embarking on writing about people and times far away. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) In this way, Shilliam speaks to Freedom (in) Writing, a writing oneself away from the colonial gaze. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) My cognitive, intellectual and academic thinking has been predominantly formatted by the Homeric Hermes. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) The acquired methods and methodologies that produce the seemingly unfalsifiable myths and lies about the international and the sustained silencing of the majority of the world’s population, are passed on as the necessary expertise to have the right to speak. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) Rather than feeling entitled to contribute towards a discipline that would accommodate others like me, I internalised the idea that it came down to a mere lack on my part to acquire the skills to get it, and get it right. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) The comforting bit is a rare moment of warmth in academia where one realises to be for once not only naturally included, but also put right at the centre of the conversation. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) As such The Black Pacific, passes on Maori insights on relationality and the possibility of self-sense and -determination that avoids essentialism. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) It is the moment when, as a child of Legba, you realise that the colonial (science) – the fractures, violence and exclusions that come with it – feels much more familiar to you than the radically different approaches and knowledges that would fit your appearance and origins much better. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) It shows a way to embrace creativity and the endless avenues of the possible in a critical space that too often seems to be centred around all those things we are not supposed to say or do anymore. Comforting Discomfort of Rebel Music: Some Diaspora Legba/Pākehā Reflections on Robbie Shilliam’s ‘The Black Pacific’. thedisorderofthings.com (October 13, 2026) External links fr:Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa de:Olivia U. Rutazibwa Category:Journalists Category:Living people Category:1979 births Category:Scholars and academics