Dr Meera Sabaratnam
What inspired you to become part of DPIR?
Just prior to joining DPIR in 2023, I spent a stimulating and enriching decade in the Politics Department at SOAS University of London where I was lucky enough to be part of some very forward-thinking conversations in my field. However, DPIR and Oxford offered an opportunity to put that thinking into dialogue with a wider range of perspectives and scholars. Alongside the outstanding colleagues and the unparalleled resources for research and teaching, it became just too good to pass up. It is also personally wonderful to work alongside Eddie Keene and Sudhir Hazareesingh - those who inspired me as tutors during my undergraduate degree here.
What do you enjoy the most about life at DPIR?
I find my intellectual life in Oxford delightfully diverse and varied across both the Department and the College. In DPIR, I am constantly impressed by the academic quality of the students and it is a blessing to teach and supervise here. The recent initiative of the DPhil students in putting together the Sovereignty And Its Discontents (SAID) seminar series has been a real highlight, and I hope it continues long into the future. I also am really enjoying the challenge of working in such a methodologically pluralist International Relations pillar, which is highly unusual in the field’s top departments around the world. It means we have to be thoughtful, collaborative, empathetic, disciplined and creative about how we put things together as a group, and also in how we support students working outside our own traditions. I am enjoying this process and I think it is making me a better scholar. I think it is also producing a uniquely rich set of training opportunities for our graduate and undergraduate students.
Can you tell us a bit more about your research?
The general puzzle I have been working on from different angles over the last 15 years is about how imperial relations may persist and be reproduced in a world in which has formally dismantled most empires. In the earlier part of my career, I zoomed in on specific sites of inquiry - international aid relations, scholarly methodologies and theories, and more recently accounts of World War One. However, I am now ‘zooming out’ and developing my own theoretical framing of how we can make sense of this all, through a framework that I call ‘Complex Indebtedness’. This begins from the idea that most politics is about the authoritative organisation of relations of indebtedness between people (which are both moral and material), and that these regimes of indebtedness persist and evolve within and between polities, in imperial formations and international ones. What is important about this framework is that it emphasises the underlying structures of power, violence and obligation that condition other more explicit interactions. It also gives us a framework for asking questions about whose debts are recognised, monetised or concretised, and called in, and who gets to deny or defer their debts. Unsurprisingly, this is where you can trace a lot of the imperial hierarchies (but not always). I am currently writing these ideas up in articles and a book.
What are your future plans—life and career goals?
I have really just got back to Oxford after 20 years away, so I am hoping and planning to stay around. I would like to write more, think more, and perhaps one day get really into hillwalking.
Earlier this year you were part of a team winning funding from the Czech Science Foundation for a research project – can you tell us a bit more about this project and its importance?
This initiative came from a wonderful team at the Metropolitan University of Prague, headed by Aleš Karmazin. The project is about looking at the conditions of what we are calling ‘post-colonial positionality’ - a historical situation that acutely and consciously influences many states outside the West in their interactions with each other and the international order. For me, the importance is really in challenging our idea of what a ’normal’ state is and what it does. International Relations as a field assumes that that the ’normal states’ are the Western ones, who in general were on the more powerful side of recent imperial relations, and who are able to downplay the importance of that in the present. But numerically, of course, that is not the case for both the numbers of states in the world and the number of people affected. From this angle, ’normal’ states have a conscious relation to their past and present domination by others, and this affects how they conceive of their political and economic situations, and what they do.
What piece of advice or message would you give to prospective DPIR students?
Read. Think. Trust your brain. Have something to say that is worth saying. I think the risk for even the most accomplished students is that they get very good at summarising and synthesising the views of others, but don’t take the risk of putting their own creativity, critical reasoning or voice into their work. This is a mistake - especially in the age of AI. After what can be automated, what is left is human judgement and reasoning, which will be a complex matter involving normative and evaluative dimensions that cannot be automated as such. Cultivating your own autonomous and authentic critical reasoning power through the work of figuring things out is the best thing you can do as a student or scholar at any age.