A pluralistic feminist international relations: lessons from memory studies

Abstract

What counts as political knowledge, and who decides? This article takes this question seriously by examining how Sudanese women’s practices of remembering wartime sexual violence, such as oral testimony, collective witnessing and storytelling through grief, have been systematically treated as threats to national stability rather than as essential foundations of democratic life. We show that this omission is not incidental but structural and follows from international relations’ (IR’s) inherited commitment to a Westphalian state-centric ontology that renders community ways of knowing illegible. Rather than ‘adding’ Sudanese voices to an existing theoretical scaffolding, we submit that taking the survivors’ practices seriously requires reconfiguring mainstream categories. Weaving together decolonial feminist thought, relational ontologies and memory studies, we sketch out a pluriversal framework in which remembering is understood as an irreducibly inherently political act: an enactment of democratic consciousness that persists where formal mechanisms have failed. The state’s demand to forget grievances, whether through diplomatic timelines or transitional justice procedures, is understood not as a pragmatic necessity but as a continuation of colonial violence. Sudan is our generative site. From the ethnic cleansing campaigns in Darfur to the revolutionary uprisings of 2019 and the 2025 International Criminal Court conviction of war criminals, each moment illuminates how women’s memory-making practices constitute counter-archives that the discipline, for the most part, has not yet learned to read or recognize. Beyond any local context, a pluriversal IR attuned to lived experiences and grounded narratives must unlearn the conditions that make so many harms and injustices invisible in the first place.