We cannot carry the debate about racism & decolonial scholarship in IR forward if we continue to rely on problematic yet endemic rhetorical strategies & misrepresentations. Some reactions to the letter by feminist scholars are a case in point 1/10 https://twitter.com/DrLeeJones/status/1263753916036120576

Unlike suggested here, the letter in question affirms the obligation to uphold scholarly standards by upholding the right to a rejoinder. It merely criticizes the derailing strategies of the reply, which has foreseeably enabled & mobilized broader misogynistic backlash 2/10

To me, the claim that researchers use Critical Race Theory (CRT) in an unscientific and ideological way that postulates a single truth unavailable to falsification & hence prevents scholarly debate is misplaced for three reasons 3/10

1) Even a superficial glance at CRT scholarship reveals that much of its ‘critical’ thrust comes from being grounded in everyday experiences and therefore from *rejecting* the essentializing move of universalizing truths 4/10

2) Arguing that CRT is anti-pluralist also ignores the continuous & often generous engagement of decolonial scholarship with dominant schools of thought. Just listen to @RobbieShilliam's fantastic exposition in the recent @whiskeyIRT episode 5/10

3) Proponents of many other theories, especially those that operate on the level of philosophy of science & ask fundamental epistemological questions, have also used them consistently as their preferred way of accessing reality... 6/10

Yet I can’t recall anyone accusing constructivists of ‘colonizing’ (really bad choice of words, by the way) IR by insisting that international politics is socially constructed 7/10

We must avoid repeating the mistake of policing a narrow understanding of what constitutes valid knowledge in IR, which made it so hard for feminist scholars to assert themselves in the 1990s 8/10

It should give us pause that this kind of devalorization seems to be launched primarily against theories that are not just deemed unconventional but also promoted by marginalized voices... 9/10

... especially as IR theory has benefited greatly (though not always knowingly) from their contributions 10/10