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Edited volumes/ Special Issues

2021 International Politics Reviews: book forum of Isaac Kamola’s Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (co-editor with Jonneke Koomen - 50%)

2018 Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics (co-editor with Robbie Shilliam – 50%)

2018 Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning, Routledge (co-editor with Rosalba Icaza and Sara de Jong – 33%)

Journal articles 

2024 ’ in

2024 . Asian Journal of Women Studies

2023 British Journal of Sociology

2021 ‘Reflections from the forum organizers’, with Koomen, J., International Politics Reviews (2021) online first.  

2020 ‘Hidden in plain sight. Race/ism and coloniality as far as the eye can see.’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48 (2), 221-241

2019 ‘What's There to Mourn? Decolonial Reflections on (the End of) Liberal Humanitarianism.’ Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 1(1)

2016 ‘From the everyday to IR: In Defence of the Strategic Use of the R-word’. Postcolonial Studies 19(2):1-10

2014 ‘Studying Agaciro. Moving beyond Wilsonian Interventionist Knowledge Production on Rwanda’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 8(4), 291-302

Book chapters

2021 Atuire CA & OU Rutazibwa (July 2021) “” in Human and Social Costs of Covid Response. UK Karunakara, P Chatterjee and AM Miller (eds.). Global Health Justice Partnership: Yale University, New Haven. 

2021 ‘What’s There to Celebrate? What’s There to Mourn? Decolonial Retrievals of Humanitarianism.’ in: Amidst the Debris. Humanitarianism and the End of Liberal Order. eds. Andrea Rigon, Rafia Zakaria, Juliano Fiori, Fernando Espada and Bertrand Taithe, pp. 369-376

2020 ‘Intermezzo I: Knowledge Orders, II: Methodology, III: Academia’ with Bhambra, G., Boatca, M., Hansen, P., Popal, M., Shilliam, R., Suarez-Krabbe, J. in: Ziai, A., Bendix, D., & Müller, F.  Beyond the Master's Tools?: Decolonizing Knowledge Orders, Research Methods and Teaching. Special book series Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Questions, London: Rowman and Littlefield International

2019 ‘Agaciro. Re-centering Dignity in Development’ with Eric Ndushabandi. in: Escobar, A., Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Acosta, A., Demaria, F. Pluriverse. A Post-Development Dictionary. New Delhi: Columbia University Press.

2019 ‘Who do we think we are?’ with Annick T.R. Wibben, Chapter 5 in: Global Politics. Third Edition, ed. Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss, London: Routledge 

2018 ‘On Babies and Bathwater. Decolonizing International Development.’ Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning, Routledge, eds. Rosalba Icaza and Sara de Jong, Olivia U. Rutazibwa 

2014 ‘Back to Basics: Decolonizing Democracy in Africa’, Africa South of the Sahara 2015. Routledge

Non-peer reviewed

2020  by Paul Gilroy, 18 October UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation podcast (interview)

“IR Should Abandon the Notion of Aid, and Address Racism and Reparations” Foreign Policy, 3 July 2020,   With Gurminder K. Bhambra, Yolande Bouka, Randolph B. Persaud, Vineet Thakur, Duncan Bell, Karen Smith, Toni Haastrup, Seifudein Adem (roundtable essay)

2019 . E-International Relations 28 October 2019 (interview)

2019 Zwijgen is Geen Optie (Belgium) ‘, (video/podcast interviewee)

2018 ‘ ISS (blogpost)

2015 ‘ review essay in The Disorder of Things (blogpost)

Olivia's research and teaching is oriented towards the comparative study of global (post)colonialisms. Her work also focuses on ways to decolonise (international) solidarity. Building on epistemic Blackness as methodology, she turns to recovering and reconnecting philosophies and practices of dignity and repair and retreat in the postcolony (e.g. autonomous recovery in Somaliland, agaciro in Rwanda and Black Power in the US, Tricontinentalism and the political thought of Thomas Sankara) to theorise solidarity anticolonially. Her work is informed by abolitionist thought, epistolary and narrative approaches in the social sciences, and seeks to contribute to the decentring of the West and Whiteness in global social inquiry.

She has published in various (academic) journals (British Journal of Sociology, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Foreign Policy, Millennium Journal of International Studies, Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, Postcolonial Studies, Ethical Perspectives, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, and Journal of Contemporary European Studies), is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics (with Robbie Shilliam, 2018) and Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning (with Sara de Jong and Rosalba Icaza, Routledge, 2018).  

She served as an associate editor of International Feminist Journal of Politics and sits on the editorial boards of International Politics Review and Review of International Studies. In 2021-22 she was the Section and Programme Chair of the Global Development Section of the International Studies Association (ISA).  

She is the former Africa desk editor, journalist and columnist at the Brussels based quarterly MO* Magazine. In 2011 she delivered a TEDx talk titled: ; in 2019 she had widely watched conversation on racism [ – in Dutch, subtitled in English] in the interview collective ZIGO [Zwijgen is Geen Optie – Silence is Not an Option].

Olivia is part of the Politics and Human Rights research cluster.

Olivia is BSc Sociology Programme Director and teaches on the MSc Human Rights and Politics programme. She teaches courses on Key Concepts: Advanced Social Theory and Reading Black Thought.