Robbie Shilliam

Decolonizing Politics: An Introduction takes the standard undergraduate syllabus in political science and asks where its categories came from. Robbie Shilliam works through sovereignty, citizenship, representation and the state, arguing in each case that the concept was formed in colonies as much as in Europe and that the discipline forgot the colonial half. Polity published it in 2021 as a teaching book rather than a monograph. Shilliam is professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins, having taught at Queen Mary in London and at Victoria University of Wellington before that, and he co-founded a network on colonialism in the discipline. His other books include The Black Pacific and Race and the Undeserving Poor. The field he writes in is actively contested, and he writes as a participant in that argument rather than a surveyor of it.