Belonging, Identity, and Decolonizing from Within – Zulfia Abawe
Today, we are learning from Zulfia Abawe.
Zulfia is a lecturer in Global Business and Cohort Lead in the MBA Global Program at the Faculty of Business and Creative Industries at the University of South Wales (Zulfia Abawe — University of South Wales). Holding three post-graduate degrees, including a Masters in Public Policy, LLM in Human Rights, and a PhD in Law and Democracy, she has extensive experience in political and legal analysis, with a particular focus on Afghanistan’s legal pluralism and political institutions. Her PhD dissertation examined Afghanistan's legal pluralism from a gendered perspective and its reflection, or lack of, in the 2004 Afghan constitution.
Currently, she is exploring relationality and decoloniality as an analytical and theoretical framework to study foreign interventions in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, emphasizing decoloniality, local practices and decolonial knowledge production in legal and political developments.
Let's get started...
In this conversation with Zulfia Abawe, I learned:
00:00 Intro - how to pronounce Afghanistan and the decolonization of the IDGs
03:40 - Explaining the work that Zulfia does at the University of Wales
04:30 The research work of Zulfia on international relations, decoloniality, relationality, and foreign interventions in Afghanistan.
05:20 Looking at colonisation not only from a North-South or East-West perspective.
09:15 The symbolic elements of the various accents and how they form me.
11:00 Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires.
13:20 Challenging the victim-savior approach from the Western world towards Afghanistan.
16:05 You have to get as much education as possible, and books are your best friends - her mother always reminded her.
19:18 Bring in your lived experiences, especially in the era of AI.
23:50 We hoped that access to more information would make people smarter, but it often works in the opposite direction, and critical thinking is lacking.
30:25 The definition of leadership by Northouse misses the non-human relationships.
34:55 Acquiring knowledge by taking time to think about the question.
38:45 Going in and experiencing the similarities by being a part of the culture.
41:05 Decolonisation is the process of reflecting and questioning the things that I need to change within myself.
42:35 Knowledge is produced by the mind, the soul, the heart and desire. (Plato)
45:20 Using intuition from your own experiences and the lived experiences of your forefathers in your decision-making.
46:00 Looking for explanations of intuitive capabilities in the work of Jung and Frankl.
56:40 The intention behind the question and stepping onto the cultural island.
59:45 Zulfia is looking for co-authors for the book she is writing on foreign interventions—both military and non-military—from a gendered perspective and micro-resistance.
More about Zulfia Abawe:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zulfia-abawe-ph-d-16861819/
https://zulfiaabawe.blogspot.com
Resources we mention:
Learn more about Afghanistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan
A connecting perspective on colonization – Rukmini Iyer
Peter Guy Northouse - Leadership theory and practice
Book Sophie's World - Wikipedia - Jostein Gaarder
Dan Ariely - Wikipedia - Dan Ariely: Misbelief (website)
Thinking, Fast and Slow - Wikipedia - Daniel Kahneman (Dutch book review)
Predictably Irrational - Wikipedia - Dan Ariely Intuitions -- do we have good intuitions? (YouTube)
Carl Gustav Jung - Wikipedia
Man's Search for Meaning - Wikipedia - Viktor Frankl (Dutch book review)
Socratic questioning - Wikipedia - (Dutch book review on Leer denken als Socrates – Donald Robertson #boekencast afl 127)
The union for working animals - Vakbond voor dieren
Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory - Wikipedia - The 6 dimensions model of national culture by Geert Hofstede
Everyday resistance - Wikipedia by James C. Scott
Video of the conversation with Zulfia Abawe
https://youtu.be/5rrd0SNTOjc
Watch the conversation here https://youtu.be/5rrd0SNTOjc
Transcript
[00:00:00] Erno Hannink: Hello and welcome at episode 482 of the Decide for Impact podcast. Today you are listening to the conversation with Sophia Abawe.
Welcome in a new podcast episode Today, I'm, [00:02:00] I'm talking to Zulfia Abawe Welcome.
[00:02:05] Zulfia Abawe: Thank you.
[00:02:05] Erno Hannink: I'm trying my best to pronounce your name right, but I also understand now I'm pronouncing the country where you come from. Wrong. How do you pronounce it? Afghanistan, Afghan, how do you pronounce it?
[00:02:17] Zulfia Abawe: It's I call it a Afghanistan.
[00:02:19] Erno Hannink: A Afghanistan.
[00:02:20] Zulfia Abawe: Yeah. Because with them, yeah, we have a little bit the truth use, it's the language itself. Afghans call it a Afghanistan, so that's why otherwise in the west they call it Afghanistan.
[00:02:31] Erno Hannink: The Dutch also have these, this g in the back of Yeah. we ha we should be able to do that, right.
If we know how to pronounce it, we should be able to do it right. I have got in contact with you after a session with Ru Minnie, who had three sessions on decolonizing the inner development goals. And if you want to learn more about that, you have to, I, I have an episode with Minnie in the podcast.
I will link to her in the show notes. You can listen to that. It's [00:03:00] a very interesting podcast. But we after to have a very interesting conversation too about colonization, decolonization, let's start with. Where you work, because I think, you have a not so typical, background from my regular guests. So where do you work?
What do you do?
[00:03:15] Zulfia Abawe: I'm a lecturer at the University of South Wales. it's very interesting because my research focus and my teaching focus, it's distinct. I lecture in organizational behavior, human resource management and leadership, and I will be, focuses more on multinational businesses.
But then, I've been offered another module, which I'm gonna teach next semester, and that's more public services, and organizations in a public service. And I'm also cohort lead, which means that I'm leading a group of, a cohort of students who come from different parts of the world, ensuring that their journeys, students are very smooth, a different person to help them when they come over to the uk.
We are working with a lot of international students from Southeast Asia. That's my, teaching side of work. And then the [00:04:00] research is more focused on international relations, decoloniality relationality, looking into foreign interventions in Afghanistan and how it can be seen in, in analyzed in the, from a different perspective, mostly driven from decolonial approach.
And I don't know if, I wanna give a caveat here because the word decoloniality carries a lot of sensitivities, especially when, when I interact with people from different backgrounds. And some people might think that I'm it employs a binary of north and global North and global South or east and west.
And that's something which I'm not working on. It's more of extension of the way we look into reality, extension of the way we understand things and allowing different types of systemologies come to come to the surface. it's absolutely not creating a binary, it's more extension of what we already know and the frameworks we have and challenging some of them.
[00:04:57] Erno Hannink: I think there's an interesting [00:05:00] point here and it related to a post you wrote about your visit to a, a summit you were and about your accent. I think it has a lot to do with where you have been living for longer periods of your life. You've been living in Germany, of course, in Afghanistan, but also in Germany, in the US and UK and Wales.
So there's a lot of, mixture of cultures that you have been part of and interacting with and picking up their. Accents as well, of course in the way that you talk right now. And I think that's very connected to me. It sounds very connected to looking at colonization as, you know, what are the words that we are using, how are we looking at this?
'cause if you look at from north and south or east and west, that's a very vesting view in general. That's how we in the Western world look at these issues. But I can imagine if you live, for example, in [00:06:00] Africa, you, you look completely different. Or if you look in, if you live in Afghanistan, you look completely different at this topic.
So it has a lot to do with the culture, where you come from, how you, where you've grown up, what, what you bring with you in your history and how you think about these topics. And you have such a wide variety of this that I can imagine that you have a very different perspective on how you could look at this.
[00:06:28] Zulfia Abawe: thank you so much for bringing that up because I agree with you. So I have lived in the Pakistan, Afghanistan, and I lived in Germany. I came to the uk, I went to the US to do a PhD, educated in five different education systems. I'm a multilingual and as much as I, I'm, I don't wanna put my research in a shelf.
So every day research I do, it I reflect how it's changing things for me, how I see my everyday experiences. It changes the whole thing for me. And I also see it more of a change in character and the mindset and perspective and the more I [00:07:00] lived in different societies. And I remember first time when I went to Germany, I was way too conservative.
I was very shy. I wasn't open to engaging with even talking to people from different cultures. But then I know what the experience had changed. It doesn't, it doesn't change based on my lived experience and how I interact with people now,
Netherlands