Heba Youssef

Research interests

Heba’s research interests are in the fields of colonial, postcolonial and decolonial studies. Recent research projects have focused on the intersections between nationalism, colonialism and empire, and the racial capitalist configurations of nation-building projects in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work unsettles normative thinking about national movements, state-building and socialist-modernist development, through in-depth readings of Zionism’s early colonial interventions in Palestine. Her most recent projects also interrogate European diplomacy in the 19th and 20th centuries, as integral to the transit of European racial and colonial logics around the world. She is also currently co-leading a new book project on the ‘Abolitionist International’, funded by an ESRC grant.

Through Heba’s work leading several IR, Middle East and Postcolonial Studies networks, she has contributed exponentially to the field. Recent examples include creating the BISA Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group’s Early Career Paper Prize. Through the prize - which is a collaborative partnership with the Review of International Studies, one of the discipline’s most impactful journals - Heba has worked to professionalise critical and decolonial interventions in the field of IR, while ensuring and enabling a mentorship pipeline for emerging IR scholars. She is also the founding and lead editor for CPD’s new online journal project ‘Voices from BoisMitidja’ (Voices from BoisMitidja Blog), a creative platform for cultivating new thinking, practices and explorations of decolonial terrain.

Heba is interested in supporting PhD students to carry out research centred around coloniality, race-making and knowledge production, with a particular interest in projects that work from the lenses of marginalised and Global South communities. She is also invested in supporting students that work with decolonial and abolitionist theories, lenses and practices, seeking to shift the methods and approaches with which we understand global politics.  

She would welcome the opportunity to supervise research students investigating colonialism, racial capitalism, decolonisation, nation-building and their entanglements with ‘the international’, more generally.