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AbstractThis paper uses the 20th anniversary of the founding of the African Union (AU) to examine the role of race and identity in Pan-Africanism, from the perspective of International Relations (IR). Pan-Africanism played a crucial role in the decolonization of the African continent and remains the ideological basis for the AU, which leads on issues of continental governance. The paper examines the development of Pan-Africanism, and foundational ideas of race, modernity, and identity that remain as important elements of some strains of the ideology. This is further explored by examining the relationship between these ideas and the rise of nativism, demonstrating the ways that essentialist conceptions of African identity can justify violence and authoritarianism. Finally, the paper stages an engagement between Pan-Africanism and Afropolitanism, examining the ways that Afropolitan approaches provide an important critique of nativist forms of Pan-Africanism, as well as offering more productive ways of engaging with African identity. This is important both for theoretical debates around identity in IR and for the future of the AU, as the institutional home of Pan-Africanism. The argument takes both Pan-Africanism and Afropolitanism seriously as approaches to IR, focusing on the ways that Africa and African ideologies can be viewed as central both to the formation of modern political thought and to conceptualize the future of international politics and global order.

Race in the Anthropocene provides a radical new perspective on the importance of race and coloniality in the Anthropocene. It forwards the Black Horizon as a critical lens which places at its heart the importance of ontological concerns fundamental to problematising the violences and exclusions of the antiblack world.

Abstract
This article explores the importance of what we call "decolonial deconstruction" for contemporary global politics and policy discourses and develops a critique of this approach. "Decolonial deconstruction" seeks to keep open policy processes, deconstructing liberal policy goals of peace, democracy, or justice as always "to come". It emerged through a nexus of postmodern and decolonial framings, well represented in the critical Black studies tradition, where theorists have focused upon identity construction, rejecting static conceptions. These approaches have increasingly been taken up in international policymaking approaches and International relations theory, particularly in the field of peacebuilding and the broad policy approach of resilience. After highlighting the ways that processual understandings of deconstruction have transformed these policy areas, we suggest an alternative deconstructive approach. In doing so, we draw upon the critical Black studies tradition but emphasize the need to critique underlying ontological assumptions about the world. We heuristically set out this approach as the "Black Horizon."

The contemporary era of the Anthropocene has undermined linear views of progress and development. In its wake, alternative futural imaginaries have become central to critical and decolonial accounts in the discipline of International Relations. We argue that radical imaginaries of alternative non-modern futures risk failing to account fully for the ongoing violence and exclusions of modernity. We identify two strands of Anthropocene work: firstly, the critique posed by 'posthuman' ontologies of relation and entanglement, seeking new modes of governance in the face of climate catastrophe; secondly, decolonial affirmative ways of being, drawn from the experiences of the dispossessed in modernity. Both these approaches to futurity seek to move beyond a modernist world to new futures. In our argument, we set out an alternative perspective, the Black Horizon, which rejects the call to imagine new productive futures, and instead focusses on the deconstruction of modernity, in search of ending the current world of antiblackness, rather than critique or affirm its existence. Thus, even though contemporary critical and decolonial approaches stress the attention to ontology, alterity and difference, in their attempts to ground alternative worlds in existing practices or knowledges, they offer salvific alternatives, whilst leaving the foundations of our current world intact.

Abstract
Long considered peripheral to both international affairs and the discipline of international relations (IR), Africa is increasingly at the center of global politics and academic debates. Global powers are competing for economic, political, and strategic influence on the continent, while Africa itself has emerged as an increasingly powerful and confident actor on the world stage. In large part, this is due to the leadership of the African Union (AU), which since its founding twenty years ago has embarked on an ambitious agenda inspired by Pan-Africanism, seeking to create an Africa that is a "Strong, United, and Influential Global Player." Following the AU's twentieth anniversary, this article and Special Forum situate the AU within recent debates in IR about non-Western agency and the contributions of the global South to world politics. Focusing on the role of the AU and Pan-African ideology in shaping Africa and its international engagements, we argue that an analysis of the AU and the influence of Pan-Africanism is crucial to an understanding of Africa's actions and positions in contemporary world affairs. We conclude that the heightened geopolitical rivalry following Russia's invasion of Ukraine threatens to undermine two key aspects of the AU's Pan-Africanism, namely its commitment to democracy and human rights and its ambition to speak with a united voice on the world stage.