Welcome!
I am Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University. My research focuses on Global South approaches to International Relations Theory, mega-infrastructure projects, postcolonial theory, the politics of the past, memory politics, and nostalgia. At Wake Forest, I teach classes on the Politics of the Global South, International Development, African in IR, and China and the Global South.
My book, Shaping the Future of Power: Knowledge Production and Network-Building in China-Africa Relations (July 2020 ), probes the type of power mechanisms that project, diffuse, and circulate China-Africa relations. The crux of the argument is that it is necessary to take into account the processes of knowledge production, social capital formation, networks, and skills transfers in Chinese foreign policy towards African states to fully understand how power permeates these encounters. The book was reviewed in over a dozen outlets and has been subject of several roundtables and podcast discussions. For more details, click on the Book tab!
My scholarship has been published in International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, African Affairs, The Review of International Political Economy, International Theory, Third World Quarterly, Ethics & International Affairs, Journal of International Relations and Development, African Studies Quarterly, Global Studies Quarterly among others. My research was featured and/or quoted in Foreign Affairs, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Le Monde, The Economist, BBC, The New York Times, CNN, Voice of America, Sputnik International, Mail & Guardian, The Diplomat, The South China Morning Post, The New Republic, SupChina, The Strait Times, and others.
I am in the process of completing my second book, which is titled Worldmaking by the Global Majority: Infrastructures of Nostalgia and Narratives of Selving. The book is a study of our current moment’s global order transition as it is ongoing. The question that this book asks is, in the first place, what are the building blocks, modalities, or mechanisms of worldmaking by the global majority? Should we assume that the same concepts, theories, and lenses we rely on to understand the hierarchies and power politics of the LIO are useful (or universal) to understanding worldmaking by the global majority?
This book argues that the concepts we rely on to understand the LIO are ill-suited to the current order transition and instead studies contemporary worldmaking by the global majority on its own terms. It looks at the concepts and tools, material and ideational, that the global majority is using during this time of transition. Looking at approaches from China, Russia, Türkiye, and India, among other places, this book theorizes worldmaking by the global majority as reliant on the mobilization of nostalgia in both narratives and material constructions, and as mobilizing that nostalgia through logics of sameness and Selving.
In addition to my scholarly research and teaching, I also regularly participate in workshops, roundtables, and consultation briefings that aim to bring academic communities and foreign policymaking circles closer. In September 2022, I joined the editorial board of PS: Political Science & Politics (an APSA journal) as a co-editor for a four-year term (renewed for two years).
Outside of work, I like traveling, eating new foods, and cycling. I, perhaps more importantly, enjoy a good cup of espresso ☕ I also collect Mao era propaganda posters and Soviet Union stamps.
Lina Benabdallah, Ph.D. 