Non-Western Theory “Teaching Global South Theories through an Ethics of Understanding”

This chapter examines how Global South International Relations (IR) theories and concepts can be taught in a dynamic, interactive, and stimulating manner to students in an (inter)national classroom through the practice of an ethics of understanding. This teaching philosophy encompasses pedagogical strategies that nurture students’ affective competencies as well as their cognitive and analytical competencies enabling them to productively engage with encountered differences that unsettle their own worldviews and ontological security. The chapter outlines how through affective leadership, lecturers can nurture students’ empathy relationally and reciprocally through practices of decentering the self, listening intently, and engaging in respectful dialogue as a way of approaching, understanding, and engaging with difference in an open-minded, curiosity-driven, and reflexive way. This not only results in recognizing how global politics is experienced, understood, and theorized differently across the world, but it also facilitates the acceptance of a pluriversality of realities and life-worlds.