Organised jointly between the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship and the Decoloniality Research Group.

This talk offers a conversation between the epistemic and political insights in selected works of Gloria Wekker, Sven Lindqvist and Charles W. Mills. The aim is to reflect on the extent to which they can help us theorise how to – in Toni Cade Bambara’s words – 'become unavailable for servitude', ie for the politics and epistemologies of White Ignorance (Mills) and Innocence (Wekker).

The paper is set against the concrete context of the public’s (re)discovery of racism in the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement resurgence and the creation of the Belgian Parliamentary 'Congo Commission' amongst other reactions and initiatives.

In contrast to Ignorance and Innocence, the talk engages Sven Lindqvist's insight that 'we already know enough, what we lack is the courage to work through the implications of what we know' as an anti- and decolonial invitation for our times.

About the speaker 

Dr. Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa (1979) is a Belgian/Rwandan International Relations scholar and former journalist. She is Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics and the BSc Sociology Programme Director in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK.

She holds a PhD in Political Science/International Relations from Ghent University (2013, Belgium), following the doctoral training programme at the European University Institute (2001-6, Italy) and internships at the European Commission in Brussels and the EU Institute for Security Studies in Paris (2003-4).

Before joining the LSE, Dr Rutazibwa was Senior Lecturer in European and International (Development) Studies at the University of Portsmouth. (2013-21, UK). She is a Senior Research Fellow of the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies (JIAS), South Africa and a member of the Critical Approaches to Political Science Lab at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea.

Her research and teaching focuses on ways to decolonise international relations solidarity. Building on narrative epistemic Blackness as methodology, she turns to abolitionist thought and recovering and reconnecting philosophies and practices of dignity and repair and retreat in the postcolony to theorise solidarity anticolonially.

She has published in various (academic) journals (Asian Journal of Women Studies, British Journal of Sociology, Foreign Policy, Millennium Journal of International Studies, Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, Postcolonial Studies, Ethical Perspectives, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, and Journal of Contemporary European Studies), is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics (with Robbie Shilliam, 2018) and Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning (with Sara de Jong and Rosalba Icaza, Routledge, 2018).

Dr Rutazibwa is the incoming (2026-29) co-editor-in-chief of the International Feminist Journal of Politics and sits on the editorial boards of International Politics Review and Review of International Studies. In 2021-22 she was the Section and Programme Chair of the Global Development Section of the International Studies Association.

She is the former Africa desk editor, journalist and columnist at the Brussels based quarterly MO* Magazine and is writing a non-academic monograph The End of the White World. A Decolonial Manifesto (in Dutch, EPO).

In 2011 she delivered a TEDx talk titled: Decolonizing Western Minds; in 2019 she had widely watched conversation on racism [Racism Serves a Purpose – in Dutch, subtitled in English] in the interview collective ZIGO [Zwijgen is Geen Optie – Silence is Not an Option].