Ida Birkvad

I am a scholar of International Relations, International political theory, and colonial history, with a particular research interest in the international politics and theorisation of hierarchy and difference. I am particularly interested in theorising the historic imbrications of race, class, caste, gender, and sexuality, helping us to better understand the global contours of contemporary authoritarianism and fascism.

My current book, The Global Aryan: Transnational Hierarchies in British India, traces the idea of the Aryan race back to its imperial roots in the encounter between British imperialists and Hindu upper-caste elites from early colonisation in the eighteenth century to Indian independence in the mid-twentieth century. The book demonstrates the agential role of native elites in shaping a central concept of colonial modernity, analysing key ideas and infrastructures that has come to facilitate alliances between Western reactionary politics and Hindu supremacism.

My new research project, Romantic Authoritarianism, argues for the centrality of the Romantic movement to contemporary global politics. Interrogating Romanticism as a heterogenous set of global intellectual lineages exceeding the political spectrum as well as conventional notions of imperial metropole and periphery, the project homes in on the return of civilisational thinking, neo-feudalism, and the weaponisation of anti-colonial critique in the thought of authoritarian regimes in the Global South.