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When the Omicron variant of the COVID–19 virus was identified in November 2021, western states responded by immediately imposing a travel ban on African countries in a bid to keep ‘the African virus’ out of their territories. Seen by some as a necessary step to protect western lives, the travel bans caused a visceral reliving among Africans of colonial-era experiences of shame, humiliation and degradation. We know that actors, during times of crisis, exaggerate identity borders between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and we can understand western reactions to the discovery of Omicron against this theoretical backdrop. What is not clear, however, is why the Omicron travel ban caused such a visceral reliving of a past trauma in the African collective. Supported by a qualitative analysis of news media, this research sets out to explain how travel bans imposed by western nations caused a re-traumatization of the African collective, arguing that narratives surrounding ‘Africa's Omicron virus’ are an extension of the ‘heart of darkness’ ideation that dominated imperial European discourse and practice. Deeper understanding of the many ways in which colonial subjugation persists today, the article argues, can help us better respond to similar future global crises.

The South African state considers its foreign relations as a means to an end. That end – the national interest – is articulated as developing the economy to address issues of poverty and un...

Building on established scholarship in international relations theory, notably Alexander Wendt's assertion that ‘states are people too’, this paper explores South African foreign policy decisions that are routinely dismissed as being ‘schizophrenic’, and makes two claims: first, that existing scholarship fails to adequately address causal factors of South African foreign policy and, second, that we need to turn to emotions and affect to do so. As such, the theoretical framework adopted for the purposes of the paper treats ‘state-level’ affect as a central explanatory factor, in contrast to established scholarship on emotion theorisation, which treats states as ontologically subordinate to their constituent members and thus subject to the private affects and cognitions of the individuals that make decisions on behalf of the state. Existing literature on collective emotion seems to support the possibility of state emotion. This notion of transsubjective emotionality facilitates the argument that sta...

Terrorism studies is one of the most popular sub-disciplines of Political Science and International Relations, yet scholars have criticised the theoretical vacuum at the heart of the field. Importantly, scholarship appears to be bounded by the argument that terrorism is a “micro-phenomenon” that can only be understood through an examination of the individual psychologies, agencies and decisions of a handful of “madmen.” By eschewing macro-level explanations of terrorism as a broader social phenomenon in favour of micro-explanations of terrorism as a series of unique and isolated events, we are limiting our capacity to explain the occurrence and recurrence of terrorism in international society. This is because terrorism cannot be disentangled from the state and societal structures that it seeks to disrupt and dismantle. This chapter therefore proposes an ontological security approach to explaining terrorism as a social phenomenon, and advances two major arguments: First, terrorism is but one of the strategies adopted to establish Self-Other boundaries that make it possible for individuals to maintain a coherent self-narrative in the face of the existential threat that globalisation and modernisation pose to both individual- and collective identities; and second, the act of terror itself should be understood against an underlying desire to maintain routinised enmity in order to maximise feelings of ontological continuity.