Robbie Shilliam is a scholar of postcolonial politics and racial politics in the field of International Relations. He is co-editor of the Manchester University Press book series, Postcolonial International Studies (previously Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Question). Robbie  is a long-standing active member of the Global Development section of the International Studies Association,  and has served as the association's Vice President.

Robbie works with community and academic intellectuals and elders of the Rastafari movement to examine its impact on global affairs. Based on original, primary research, he helped to co-curate a history of the Rastafari movement in Britain, which was exhibited in Ethiopia, Jamaica and Britain and now enjoys an online presence as a teaching aid: www.rastafari-in-motion.org. Robbie is also a member of the grassroots initiative: School of the Sacrament Rastafari University (SOSACRU), which co-curates with community members webinars, summer schools and more.

Currently, Robbie is working on two strands of inquiry:  firstly, a collective project to rethink the discipline of Political Science as to expose its abiding racial logics, and, alternatively, to retrieve and build alternative approaches to the discipline that more adequately explain racial politics;  secondly, a critical consideration of the "free thinkers" of the Black radical tradition - especially Rastafari intellectuals - and their contributions to what we in academia call "political economy". A book - Move Outta Babylon: Rastafari Reason, Black Marxism and the Struggle for Global Justice - will be published with Penguin Books. 

Monographs

• (with Daniel Renwick) Squalor (London: Agenda Publishing, 2023) 176.pp
• Decolonizing Politics (London:  Polity Press, 2021) 192 pp.
• Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (London: Agenda Publishing, 2018) 192pp.
• The Black Pacific: Anticolonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2015) 249pp.
• German Thought and International Relations: The Rise and Fall of a Liberal Project (London: Palgrave, 2009) 251pp.

Edited Volumes

• (Co-edited with Olivia Rutazibwa), The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics (London: Routledge, 2018) 460pp.
• (Co-edited with Quynh Pham), Meanings of Bandung: Postcolonial Orders and Decolonial Visons (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016) 240pp.
• (Co-edited with Alex Anievas and Nivi Manchanda): Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (London: Routledge, 2014) 218pp.
• International Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity (London: Routledge, 2010) 268pp.
• Co-edited (with Gurminder Bhambra): Silencing Human Rights: Critical Approaches to a Contested Project (London: Palgrave, 2008)