Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui
Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui is a leading scholar of international relations theory and law. His work focuses on African contributions to global debates on the nature of politics in the national and global orders.
Siba Grovogui was born in Guinea, where he received his early education and attended law school. After serving as a law clerk, judge and legal counsel for the National Commission on Trade, Agreements and Protocols in Guinea, he received a master’s degree in political science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1984. He received a PhD degree from the same university in 1988. He was a DuBois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellow from 1989 to 1990 at the University of Michigan.
Siba Grovogui is currently a professor in the Africana Studies and Research Centre at Cornell University. Before joining Cornell, he worked as a professor of international relations theory and law at Johns Hopkins University. He is recipient of several honors and fellowships including, the Nelson Mandela Professorship at Rhodes University in South Africa, Distinguished Scholar in the Theory Section and the Global South Caucus of the International Studies Association, and the Social Science University Professor at the University of California, Irvine. Besides, he has been invited as a visiting professor at several prestigious universities worldwide. He is presently serving as the President of the International Studies Association.
He is the author of Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law (University of Minnesota Press 1996), which made a paradigm-shifting contribution to understanding the character of African self-determination and national sovereignty. His second book, Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Institutions and Order (Palgrave, 2006), examined the Eurocentrism of the international order from the perspective of non-Western knowledge and experiences. He is also the co-editor of Governance in the Extractive Industries: Power, Cultural Politics and Regulation (Routledge 2017). He has recently submitted his manuscript, The Gaze of Copernicus: Postcolonialism, Serendipity, and International Relations, and is working on a companion book, tentatively titled ‘Quilombo’s Horizon: Moral Orders and the Law of the Commons’. Besides, he has also authored several articles and book chapters.
Siba Grovogui has delivered numerous distinguished lectures and keynote speeches worldwide. Some of these include the 2019 Imber Lecture at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, the 2021 Nelson Mandela Lecture at Rhodes University, the 2023 Africa Day Lecture by the Thabo Mbeki Foundation, and the keynote address to the 2024 annual conference of the Turkish Academy of Sciences. He has also served as an editorial board member of several journals, including the European Journal of International Relations, International Political Theory and Journal of African Elections. He is also a member of the advisory board at the Transnational De-Colonial Institute as well as the Program in the Teaching of Africa at Rhodes University.
The interview with Siba Grovogui was conducted by Professor Sundhya Pahuja and Dr Christopher Gevers in Budapest in July 2023.
