Zubairu Wai

Zubairu Wai is Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Development Studies. He is the author of Epistemologies of African Conflicts: Violence, Evolutionism, and the War in Sierra Leone (2012), which won the ATWS Toyin Falola Africa Book Award for 2013, and co-editor (with Marta Iñiguez de Heredia) of Recentering Africa in International Relations: Beyond Lack, Peripherality, and Failure (2018). His research takes up epistemological questions regarding the nature, conditions, and limits of disciplinary knowledge and practices in International Relations, Development Studies, Conflict and Security Studies, and African Studies. Specifically, he focuses on how the intersections of power and coloniality frame the discourses and political economy of knowledge, violence, conflict, development, and state formation in Africa, and the Global South more broadly. His most recent manuscript, Thinking the Colonial Library: Mudimbe, Gnosis, and the Predicament of Africanist Knowledge, which interrogates the contaminating vectors of the colonial archive and its implications for epistemic decolonisation, will be published by Routledge early next year.

Teaching Interests

• POLC80H3: International Relations of Africa
• IDSB07H3: Confronting Development’s Racist Past and Present
• POL2408H: Political Economy of International Development

Research Interests

• Knowledge Production
• Political economy of violence, conflicts, and development.
• Postcolonial and decolonial approaches
• African Politics and systems of thought.