Olivia Rutazibwa, University of Portsmouth

23 January 2018

Building on insights from growing up as a visible minority in Flanders, Belgium, as well as from public debates on racism (e.g. Black Pete), Islam (e.g. the headscarf bans and the burkini), the refugee ‘crisis’ and international solidarity (development aid industry) there, the lecture seeks to formulate a decolonial answer to some of the main challenges and injustices in the industrialised West today by connecting it to the problematic of whiteness.

Olivia U. Rutazibwa is a Belgo-Rwandan senior lecturer in European and International Development Studies at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. Her research centres around ways to decolonise thinking and practices of International Solidarity by recovering and reconnecting philosophies and enactments of dignity and self-determination in the postcolony: autonomous recovery in Somaliland, Agaciro in Rwanda and Black Power in the US; a book on this is in preparation. She has published in Postcolonial Studies, Ethical Perspectives, Journal of Intervention an Statebuilding, and Journal of Contemporary European Studies. She is associate editor of International Feminist Journal of Politics. She is the former Africa desk editor, journalist and columnist at the Brussels based quarterly MO* Magazine for which she occasionally continues to write.