In this blogpost, Srishti Malaviya, a scholar of International Relations (IR) theory, examines how conventional ideas about inclusion and emancipation can sometimes unintentionally reinforce exclusion, and explores Dark IR as an experimental way to understand and navigate the politics of today’s global crises.
“To respond with critique that tries to weave everything back into a shared story of connection or unity is to risk repeating the very gesture that produced exclusion in the first place. It assumes that the world’s fractures can be healed through togetherness, without asking whether that very idea of togetherness rests on unequal terms — who gets included? And at what cost?”
Srishti Malaviya
Do ‘Dark Times’ Demand Dark Critique?
We are living in a time of unending catastrophic crises from climate destruction, war, and forced migration, often described as an age of ‘dark times.’ This framing invokes an unsettling paradox of modernity – one in which the integration of diverse peoples, species, and spaces become increasingly absorbed into the violent colonial logics embedded in global flows of capital, technologies and discourses. These entanglements produce severely unequal and disproportionate distributions of harm and surplus, where excessive consumption patterns in the Global North generates extreme climate vulnerability in regions of the Global South.
Amid these complex and paradoxical conditions, an important critical question emerges – how does the continued political emphasis on inclusion and inclusive frameworks help us address these crises that endanger life, health, and livelihood? Critical approaches in International Relations (IR) have worked to make global politics more inclusive through greater representation, visibility and inclusion of marginalised voices. These approaches remain extremely valuable in exposing the deeply unequal foundations of global political practices and discourses. However, in doing so, they often place an overt emphasis on inclusion as the primary pathway to emancipation, and that incorporation into existing structures as the most effective or promising route to meaningful political transformation.
Motivated by this ongoing conversation and debate, my co-author Ignasi Torrent (of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) and I have recently been exploring the possibility of alternative methods of critique and practice under the rubric of what we call ‘Dark IR’. Our aim is to create a space for perspectives that question the discipline’s continued belief that the global crisis can be solved through inclusive frameworks that promise liberation.
Dark IR begins with the idea that this critical tendency often co-opts and reproduces the very structures that it critiques. For example, projects that call for the inclusion of marginalised voices in global governance often leave intact the systems and structures that decide which voices count as legitimate in the first place. Similarly, efforts to “decolonise” international institutions often end up seeking a seat at the same colonial tables rather than questioning why those tables continue to exist.
“Similarly, efforts to “decolonise” international institutions often end up seeking a seat at the same colonial tables rather than questioning why those tables continue to exist”
Srishti Malaviya
Dark IR is Not a Framework, Yet
Dark IR is not yet a framework, but an emerging conversation within the field. It represents an initial set of gestures toward rethinking critique and practice in International Relations. It draws together shifting strands of thought from different disciplines, regions, and philosophies that share a common skepticism toward the discipline’s enduring faith in progress, affirmation and emancipation.
At this early stage, we are particularly interested in developing Dark IR alongside recent debates on negative positionality within IR, especially those articulated in Black and Indigenous critiques that unsettle the discipline’s attachment to affirmation, visibility, and inclusion as primary markers of critique. For Dark IR, mobilising the negative means recognising that violence is not a reformable defect of the international order, but a constitutive feature of it.
From this starting point, Dark IR asks whether politics of “better futures” are even possible within the very structures that continually reproduce harm – reframing the question from “How do we cure this world of its problems and issues?” to “How might we think about the world, beyond affirmation and resolution?”
These early explorations informed the two Dark IR panels we organised at the European International Studies Association (EISA) conference in Bologna, Italy, in August 2025 as part of the ‘Thinking with the Negative’ section.
Thinking with the Negative at European International Studies Association (EISA)
The Dark IR panels at EISA brought together a range of different critical, theoretical, and practical perspectives that explored the many complex and often conflicting realities of our world that cannot easily fit into one simple or unified way of thinking. The panels featured scholars Debbie Lisle, Matthew Gravlin, David Chandler, Harshvardhan Bhatt, Pierre Parrouffe, Farai Chipato, Maja Kantar, and Louiza Odysseos, whose work draws on diverse conceptual and empirical orientations.
Together, these conversations explored diverse themes, such as how ruined or abandoned places reveal the lingering effects of empire, to how the monsoon disrupts technologies and systems that try to predict it. Other themes included frictions implicit in ideas of otherness, how academic disciplines absorb and assimilate alternative perspectives, the resurgence of Indigenous knowledge, the failures and limits of state-led knowledge production, and the possibility for hope that can emerge in moments of uncertainty or emotional pause.
This dense swarm of ideas led to further open-ended conversations on the nature of the darkness being invoked – for instance, who does it benefit? And what futures might it produce?
Across many different perspectives, whether theoretical, methodological or experiential, one point became clear – the fractures and differences shaping our political world cannot be resolved just through fixed ideas of interconnection. If there is a collective “us”, it cannot be stable, or enduring. Instead, it emerges within moments, when experiences and lives intersect in unexpected ways that cannot be predicted or predetermined.
In other words, doing Dark IR means embracing this uncertainty. It requires us to accept that the world and its processes are always partly shaded or obscured, not only because we don’t yet know everything, but because some things might never be fully knowable.
What Becomes of “us” in a Pandemic?
The COVID-19 pandemic, often described as a collective global moment of vulnerability perhaps best exemplifies the illusion of a well-defined, collective universal “us”. While humanity faced the threat of a new, untamed virus, it quickly became evident that consequences for individuals were inherently uneven, shaped by people’s economic, social, and geographic status.
We were not all threatened by the pandemic alike, nor did the crisis manifest in the same way across the globe. As the virus spread and strained global health systems, the harm it caused affected people differently.
Global health policy emphasis on social distancing used a threadbare or fragile notion of ‘us’ or ‘we’. It asked everyone to carry an equal burden of responsibility, despite the fact that some people were living in vastly unequal conditions. In many cities across the Global South – from Nairobi’s Kibera to Rio’s favelas – “staying at home” was an impossible directive, as overcrowded housing and precarious livelihoods made this requirement life-threatening rather than protective.
In India, the sudden and extreme nationwide lockdown in March 2020 left millions of people within the country’s large informal daily wage workforce in urban areas abruptly dispossessed. India’s economic development has long been dependent on extremely cheap informal labour sector and its continuous migrant mobility, but at the outset of the pandemic these workers were left without their income or future guarantees for sustaining themselves. With all public transport being cut off, they did not have the means to travel back to their home states. A substantial portion of the country’s population found itself completely stranded and dispossessed, at a time when ‘stay at home’ was being championed as the ultimate protection against infection.
By creating policies including everyone in a shared structure of risk and responsibility, the national lockdown exposed how exclusion can be produced precisely through the language of collectivity. By framing the lockdown as a shared national effort – one in which everyone was equally responsible for managing collective risk – the Indian government revealed how exclusion can be produced through the very language of unity.
What happened next exposed the deep flaws of implementing a sudden, countrywide lockdown. The millions of migrant labourers, displaced within their own nation, were left without options, and so, they moved. They moved on foot and bicycles, by cart and other informal means and routes of transport, travelling thousands of miles in the extreme heatwaves of summer in India. They had little recourse or access to medical facilities, food or water and along the way faced starvation, disease, and even death. The scale of this movement was so vast that it has been compared with the exodus of the Indian Partition of 1947, which was the largest mass migration in human history. This humanitarian crisis eventually compelled the Indian central and state governments to restart special migrant transport services and offer meagre financial packages and promises of economic relief.
This moment in history can not be described as either opposition, resistance or even peoples’ victory. Migrant workers moved in defiance of state power, yet their movement itself came out of sheer helplessness. They moved in resistance, but the form of resistance came with its own incredible violence and inherent brutality.
Their collective movement did not ‘resolve’ their exclusion by returning home, nor did it restore security or belonging, as poverty and unemployment followed them back to their villages and families. Yet, their mass migration represented something more powerful: a moment and emergence of a spontaneous collective that came together towards an uncertain future. In doing so, they created a fleeting but significant space of negotiation and political action, one that sought neither resolution nor emancipation, but instead affirmed a radical act of participation in the world where options had collapsed and the government had failed to act.
Going Forward with Dark IR
The variations that shape our collective experiences today reveal the deep-rooted violence of the modern world, a violence that can not be resolved merely through more inclusion, more representation, or more optimistic reimaginings of political order. What it demands is a willingness to rethink structural unevenness, fractures, and unknowabilities (or uncertainties) that define our present day.
The examples from the Covid pandemic point towards a recurring pattern: that violence, exclusion, and precarity are not exceptions within politics, they are central to how it functions. To respond with a critique that tries to weave everything back into a shared narrative of connection or unity is to risk repeating the very gesture that produced exclusion in the first place. It assumes that the world’s fractures can be healed through togetherness, without asking whether that very idea of togetherness rests on unequal terms – and who gets included, and at what cost.
At the same time, Dark IR invites us to question how the present moment itself comes to be labelled as “dark.” The notion of ‘dark times’ carries the inherited logics of colonial modernity where uncertainty and indeterminacy are cast as dangerous and dark, in need of a positive resolution. While the urgency of current crises pushes us to rethink the relations of the present in a critical light, equating darkness with crisis risks reinforcing a colonial way of seeing the world, one that relies on rigid, exclusionary categories.
Dark IR, begins by rejecting this moral geography of light versus dark. It does not seek to cure or illuminate the world, but to instead trace how hierarchies of “positive” and “negative”, and “good” and “bad”, have shaped the ways in which we know and act. To think with darkness is not to give into crisis, but to unlearn the colonial framing or grammar that influences our understanding of “darkness” in the first place.
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About Srishti Malaviya
Srishti Malaviya is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of political philosophy and international political theory. Her work is animated by an interest in everyday affects, and how these allow different methodologies of thinking about questions of space, security, and relations.
