In this incisive interview, Dr Madalitso Zililo Phiri dismantles the epistemic hegemony of Eurocentric International Relations theory and maps an emergent African IR scholarship that centres Ubuntu, reimagines sovereignty through communal ontologies, and interrogates the racialised exclusions baked into global multilateralism.

Spanning Pan-Africanism’s contemporary mutations, South Africa’s realist power plays, and the perils of essentialising an “African school,” Phiri advances a decolonial constructivism that insists Africa is not a peripheral case but a generative site for pluralising the discipline itself.

Madalitso Zililo Phiri is Post-Doctoral Fellow in the South Africa–United Kingdom Bilateral Research Chair in Political Theory, University of the Witwatersrand. A former Visiting Fellow at Cambridge’s Centre of African Studies and Wolfson College Research Associate (2023–2024), he was Carnegie Corporation Fellow (2014–2017) via the Social Science Research Council’s Next Generation of Social Science in Africa programme.

Current research examines the political economy of racialised welfare (South Africa and Brazil), the sociology of race, and Black political thought. He has taught African Studies, Sociology, Politics, and Research Methods at Cambridge, Wits, Pretoria, and Rhodes universities.

Content

00:00 – Introduction

02:05 – Does African IR Theory Exist? Epistemologies Beyond the West

06:27 – Ubuntu, Communalism, and Reimagining Sovereignty

10:45 – Applying African Concepts to Non-African Issues

15:01 – Authority Beyond the State: African Approaches to Power

19:48 – Africa's Exclusion from Multilateral Decision-Making

25:13 – Pan-Africanism in 2025: Dead or Evolving?

29:26 – South Africa's Power Politics Through a Realist Lens

34:24 – Liberal IR Theory's Historical Exclusion of Africa

37:46 – Constructivism: Opening or Limiting Space for African Voices?

41:22 – Postcolonialism and Decolonizing IR Theory

47:22 – Which IR Theory Dominates African Scholarship Today?

50:14 – The Risks of Essentializing "African IR Theory"

52:57 – Continental Focus vs. State-Centric Analysis in African IR

56:54 – Distinct African School or Contribution to Global Pluralism?

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