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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
152109
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| Summary/Abstract |
Fifteen years ago, Roland Bleiker’s profound and influential article outlined a research agenda for those who take seriously the nature of aesthetic encounters with the social world. A rich and sophisticated literature addressing theoretical and methodological aspects of visual research in IR has emerged through the ‘aesthetic turn’ in International Relations (IR) theory.1 Efforts to theorise, or represent, global politics that are inspired by an aesthetic approach do not seek to produce the ‘most accurate’ theory or representation. ‘Approaching the study of IR with an aesthetic sensibility encourages scholars to pay analytical attention to affect rather than reason, judgement rather than fact, sensation rather than intellectualism’.
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| 2 |
ID:
182451
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| Summary/Abstract |
While the call for broader conceptions about the political in general, and International Relations in particular, points to the need to redirect attention to the entanglements of societies, species and environments, in this article I address the way in which this proposed shift might still be reproducing anthropocentric understandings of global politics if serious attention is not devoted to the ontological foundations of the discipline. To do so, I first engage in a problematisation of decolonial efforts drawn from the Latin American experience that stress knowledge diversification as a means to emancipation. I then attempt to demonstrate that an exclusive intellectual engagement with entanglements and detachments might also be misleading, for their conventional conception is dependent on certain ontological commitments inherent to knowledge production, namely mind-world dualism and the linear conception of time. I therefore propose the notion of ‘detachment from knowledge’ as an alternative ontological practice through which IR students can themselves grapple with the dualist and anthropocentric oppressor/victim logic at the root of any emancipatory project. Such practice, I finally argue, not only allows us to understand the ‘global’ as indivisible, but also to engage with it beyond the exclusive pursuit of emancipation through knowledge, however diverse or decolonial it might be.
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| 3 |
ID:
156245
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| Summary/Abstract |
The multiplicity of sources of security and justice in post-colonial states are often categorized according to a series of fixed analytical binaries. Such reductive dichotomies often mask the fluid and evolutionary ecology of these highly networked actors. As a result, the ways in which they co-produce social order are seldom well-understood and the ramifications for peacebuilding remain underexplored. This article examines the relationships between myriad providers of security and justice. Using examples from fieldwork in West Africa, it presents a case for a relational approach to peacebuilding that introduces the concept of symbiosis to develop a framework for evaluating these relations. It argues that the framework and conceptual steps involved create important opportunities for both new research and emerging practices of peacebuilding.
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| 4 |
ID:
159963
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| Summary/Abstract |
Although the idea of the state pervades the scholarship and practice of international interventions, developing adequate knowledge of intervention contexts such as Solomon Islands requires decentring dominant perceptions about possible sources of socio-political order. In response, this article demonstrates the value of ‘relationality’ and ‘affect’ for analysing the diverse ways in which governance arises as an effect of social practice, without assuming that the state is unimportant or romanticizing statelessness. Giving conceptual priority to relations over entities while considering hitherto neglected affective forms of human interaction enables the identification of diverse micro-political forms of socio-political order and peace governance effects. An autoethnographic examination of relational-affective peace governance in post-conflict Solomon Islands shows that circulations of affect, feeling and emotion attach more strongly to customary and church institutions than they do to the state or to international interveners. This demonstrates the need to engage with unexpected sources of governance while the requirement to analyse findings within a broader historical frame signals the need to also engage with the state. A relational-affective approach, which has the potential for wider application, thus provides a way of analysing and engaging with diverse forms of political order in international interventions beyond the predilections of Northern scholarship.
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| 5 |
ID:
175128
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| Summary/Abstract |
Quantum physics is being positioned as a new archive for addressing major theoretical problems in the field of international relations. Two of the major proponents of engaging quantum thinking within international relations, James Der Derian and Alexander Wendt, have argued that quantum thinking offers the possibility of a major paradigm shift in the field. Before we determine quantum’s revolutionary potential, the persistent and most pressing question for me is how to position quantum thinking among other kinds of and claims to knowledge. I want to horizontalize where different kinds of knowledge sit within the renewed attention to quantum theory. Rather than just horizontalize or flatten ontology, I want to see what happens when we place scientific and philosophical inquiry in dialogue, and what that conversation does to the authority and value of quantum thinking for the social sciences. The article reconstructs the dialogue between the first generation of quantum physicists and the philosophers who informed them. Rather than make an explicit argument about the philosophical debt of physics, I argue that a broad and highly interdisciplinary set of questions drove both fields well beyond the specific areas of expertise of any of these thinkers. I believe this adventure of ideas followed by physicists, philosophers, and social theorists alike offers us a way forward as the complexity of our contemporary global challenges confront us now with the necessity to think well beyond our disciplinary expertise.
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| 6 |
ID:
187534
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| Summary/Abstract |
Bringing ontological questions back into IR has been key to opening discussions about plurality and difference in terms of the coexistence of related and plural worlds and realities, for example through notions such as relationality and pluriversality. The problem is that in trying to develop relational approaches as an alternative to the ‘Western/modern’ – atomistic – ontology, relationality, relations, and their meanings can become fixed, translating them into ‘things’. The article maintains that cosmopraxis – as a complex pluriversal, multidimensional set of experiences – not only illustrates how relations relate without fixing their meaning, but also provides us with relevant insights to contribute to think of a pluriversal and more plural IR.
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| 7 |
ID:
129484
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Some critical international relations scholars have adopted theories of governmentality both as a heuristic framework for exploring modalities and functions of power and as a descriptive tool to explore the oppressive effects of global liberalism. I argue that, as a descriptive tool, much governmentality literature remains rooted in the same substantialist ontology and epistemology as the liberal discourses it seeks to criticize. This ontological orientation especially has a bearing on conceptualizations of political agency, which remain confined to the liberal struggle of power and freedom. I suggest that reimagining political agency calls for a reorganization of the ontological and epistemological framework of international relations in non-substantialist ways. The analysis maps non-substantialist positions across disciplinary lines. By treating power and subjects as deeply imbricated, non-substantialist ontologies examine political engagements as processes of hybridization aimed at producing practical effects in specific contexts.
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| 8 |
ID:
159165
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| Summary/Abstract |
Conventional studies of Chinese aid to Africa typically neglect China's six decades of donor experience, and de-emphasize the distinct historical relationships that China holds with African countries and the ideological and geopolitical contexts in which these relations were built. Applying the framework of relationality that highlights the role of social relationships in defining rational actions, I provide an alternative perspective on Chinese aid by analyzing the ideological and Cold War dynamics that shaped China's early Mao era aid allocation and the impact of these initial ties on contemporary Chinese policymakers' choices about where to direct Chinese aid.
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| 9 |
ID:
182978
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the making and circulation of vlogs on the Chinese platform Douyin during the Wuhan lockdown. We specifically draw attention to vlogs made in mobile cabin hospitals. Constructed between February and March in 2020, cabin hospitals were part of the state’s isolation and quarantine efforts, and these hospitals created spaces of confinement within a city under lockdown. The vlogs that we refer to are often bursting with energy, optimism, and play, and seem to be expressive of new modalities of care and social relationality. But they are also appropriated by the Chinese state, who used them as examples of ‘positive energy’ (正能量), and to promote the collective commitment to contain the virus. Focusing on the videos, blogs, and narrative storytelling of Li Jing, we show how the state appropriated her work to further its attempt to control the meaning of life and death during the ‘people’s war’ on the coronavirus. These and other state appropriations must also be understood within the context of the state’s involvement in platforms such as Douyin and the ‘platformization’ of everyday life both before and during the Wuhan lockdown.
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| 10 |
ID:
183221
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| Summary/Abstract |
The article explores the Legon School of International Relations (LSIR) which is the research, teaching, and academic programming of International Relations (IR) at the University of Ghana, Legon. The LSIR came out of attempts to decolonise knowledge production, dissemination, and academic programing in Ghana in early 1960s. The article shows that the LSIR is decolonial in theoretical perspective, grounded in southern epistemologies, relational in ontology, qualitative in methodology, practice-based, and it is equity-oriented. Although the LSIR scholarship as a package is distinctive, some of its ideas overlap with the work of several contemporary IR communities in the West. The article highlights implications of the LSIR story for the IR communities in the West and the value of paying close attention to the works of IR centres of scholarship in Africa.
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| 11 |
ID:
168865
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| Summary/Abstract |
During the Iraq War, some US soldiers refused (re)deployment. While liberal states appear to protect individuals’ right not to fight against their moral convictions by allowing the right to conscientious objection, those whose objections do not align with the regulations have to break the law in order to follow their convictions. This article explores how the legitimation of liberal war is challenged when we listen to the stories such refusers tell. Focusing on the United States, it briefly sets out the normative context such soldiers faced, highlighting the distinction between permissible conscientious objectors and contemptible deserters. Drawing on Judith Butler, it then focuses on two refusers by reading their own accounts of themselves in their memoirs. Despite not being eligible under the regulations, both invoke their conscience to make their refusal intelligible. By listening to their detailed accounts, the article traces the production and disruption of their subjectivities in relation to the prevailing moral order. Although invoking conscience appears to provide the chance to embrace an authentic self in a bid to resist the problematic moral order, subjectivity remains fractured due to relationality. Put differently, the sovereign subjectivity required by liberal war is simultaneously undermined by it.
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| 12 |
ID:
184143
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines nalehmu, a set of informal relational practices for negotiating power across scales which have facilitated access and enforced accountability through mutually recognized norms and social sanctions in Myanmar. Like Asef Bayat’s “quiet encroachment” in the Middle East, nalehmu is Myanmar’s discreet and prolonged practice of agency that has enabled ordinary people to survive and better their lives despite the multiple ruptures in Myanmar’s history, as seen most recently in the February 2021 coup d’état. The paper analyzes how nalehmu serves as a hidden-in-plain-sight social infrastructure across three different scales: relations of mutuality, obligation, and reciprocity between individuals; implicit connections for accessing goods, services, and recognition; and a means of interacting with the state via the nalehmu economy. This analysis seeks to do more than add a different case to studies of urban Southeast Asia, but also to help produce further theorization that takes seriously the actually existing contexts and practices in the global South.
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| 13 |
ID:
179778
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| Summary/Abstract |
Arguing that studies of China must simultaneously be studies of East Asia, this article offers a philosophically critical reflection on the meaning of Chineseness in lieu of the theme of the special issue—East Asia. The two regions are reciprocally holographical of each other. The latter part of the article will further propose a research agenda of post-Asianness. I hope to convey a message that is hidden but strong: that East Asia is a redundant agenda and yet fungible at the same time. This ontological irony can be likewise applied to both Chineseness and Asianness. Ultimately, China, East Asia and Asia are mainly strategic agendas and identities. The critical reflections outlined in this article are intended to display, facilitate and complicate the pluriversality of all post-identities.
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| 14 |
ID:
187532
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article will attempt to ‘provincialise’ (Chakrabarty, 2000) the ‘secular cosmology’ of International Relations (IR) through an examination of the relational cosmology of dharma. We argue that IR is grounded in ‘secularised’ Judaeo-Christian assumptions concerning time, relations between self and other, order, and the sovereign state that set the epistemic limits of the discipline. These assumptions will be ‘provincialised’ through an engagement with dharma based on a reading of The Mahābharāta, one of the oldest recorded texts in the world. We argue that the concept of dharma offers a mode of understanding the multidimensionality of human existence without negating any of its varied, contradictory expressions. By deconstructing notions of self and other, dharma illustrates how all beings are related to one another in a moral, social, and cosmic order premised on human agency, which flows from ‘inside-out’ rather than ‘outside-in’ and that is governed by a heterogenous understanding of time. This order places limits on the state's exercise of power in a given territory by making the state responsible for creating social conditions that would enable all beings to realise their potential, thus qualifying the principle of state sovereignty that remains the foundation of the ‘secular cosmology of IR’.
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| 15 |
ID:
165122
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines kastom reconciliations as practiced in a Melanesian cultural context in the resolution of everyday disputes and as a means of peacebuilding after large-scale violent conflict. It explores Melanesian-style reconciliation in relation to the conventional international discourse on transitional justice, asking whether kastom reconciliations are – or can be – an alternative to, or a specific ‘vernacularised’ form of, transitional justice. Using examples primarily from post-conflict Bougainville and Solomon Islands, the article addresses some of the strengths and limitations of kastom reconciliation in comparison to those of transitional justice. In conclusion it is posited that protagonists of transitional justice could gain insights from the study of Melanesian reconciliations that would help them to reflect on their own taken-for-granted assumptions and consider avenues for developing the concept of transitional justice, making it more meaningful, effective and legitimate in a context such as Melanesia.
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| 16 |
ID:
187530
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| Summary/Abstract |
A pluriversal encounter that includes interlocutors from other ways of knowing and being requires recrafting how we commonly approach ontology in IR. Our shared ontological register only acknowledges separation as the fundamental existential assumption, and not all lifeways depart from this assumption. The article prods us to move beyond considering ontology as the study of being, a more substantialist reading, to include other fundamental existential commitments so that we can address how distinct presuppositions shape and are shaped by how we perceive and engage existence. With this reorientation, the article first establishes how even relational approaches in the discipline, including variations of constructivism, poststructuralism, and new materialism privilege separation as the primordial condition of existence to the exclusion of any other option. A conceptual toolset is then elaborated to examine how a singular commitment to separation constitutes an ontological parochialism that enforces reductionism, exclusion, and domination towards lifeways that embrace the interconnection as fundamental existential commitment. Even though more effective engagement across pluriversal worlds would be crucial for developing more complex tools for confronting the current planetary crisis, the discipline's reductionist concept of ontology itself keeps us quite far from effectively being able to engage in such an exchange.
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| 17 |
ID:
178181
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines how the growing complexity of peacebuilding settings is transforming the classic notion of purposeful agency into a non-purposeful, adaptive form of being in such contexts. Through an analysis of critical peacebuilding literature and a reflection on the UN’s peacebuilding practices in the field, the article first argues that complexity has been gradually replacing linear, top-down strategies with approaches seeking to draw attention to interdependencies, relationality and uncertainty. The article then suggests that engaging with complexity has critical implications for the traditional understanding of purposeful agency in the peacebuilding milieu that go beyond those of the governmentality critique, which conceptualizes the complexity turn as a strategy for extending control over post-conflict societies. Complexity is eventually conceived of in the article as a performative contextual quality that stems from the non-linear, co-emergent and unpredictable entanglement of interactions between actors in peacebuilding processes. This state of entanglement hinders the autonomous, purposeful agential condition of these actors in war-torn scenarios – in this article, peacebuilding implementers specifically – in which agency seems more and more restricted to its adaptive nature.
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| 18 |
ID:
145118
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| Summary/Abstract |
Culture matters in social theory construction because the metaphysical component of the theoretical hard core is primarily shaped by the background knowledge of a cultural community. Individual rationality, a key concept abstracted from Western culture, constitutes the nucleus for much of mainstream Western International Relations Theory. This article proposes a relational theory of world politics with relationality as the metaphysical component of its theoretical hard core. It conceives the International Relations (IR) world as one composed of ongoing relations, assumes international actors as actors-in-relations, and takes processes defined in terms of relations in motion as ontologically significant. It puts forward the logic of relationality, arguing that actors base their actions on relations in the first place. It uses the Chinese zhongyong dialectics as its epistemological schema for understanding relationships in an increasingly complex world. This theoretical framework may enable us to see the IR world from a different perspective, reconceptualize key elements such as power and governance, and make a broader comparison of international systems for the enrichment of the Global IR project.
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| 19 |
ID:
175365
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| Summary/Abstract |
The nascent spatial turn in peace and conflict studies is a promising development that expands conceptual resources and offers useful correctives to existing scholarship. However, the turn to space and place tends not to adequately emplace itself (including on its own European-derived terms) or sufficiently engage the socio-spatial difference of diverse peoples. Instead, a de-contextualised knower is invited to apply a new set of mobile scholarly tools in various settings without seriously considering diverse peoples’ conceptualisation and operationalisation of place in socio-political ordering. Long-standing Aboriginal Australian approaches to place, meanwhile, indicate the diversity and sophistication of approaches to space and place. They furthermore show that western political ontology – including the figures of the individual and the state embedded in much dominant scholarship – may not be relevant in many settings in which peace and conflict scholarship is undertaken. Realising the full potential of the spatial turn requires grappling with the relational emplacement of the knowing subject and the varied ways in which place configures socio-political order both for diverse peoples ‘in the field’ and in the centres of dominant forms of knowing in the Global North.
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| 20 |
ID:
161361
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| Summary/Abstract |
A wide-ranging conversation has been unfolding in the past two decades on the colonial origins and legacies of international relations (IR) and the ways in which these might be overcome. Critiques and counter-projects that draw inspiration from Latin American decolonial thinking have become an increasingly prominent part of this, particularly in the past few years. In this article, I offer an assessment of this nascent decolonial IR. I make two broad arguments: that dominant modes of decolonial critique in IR need to be supplemented by projects that unravel—that is, make sense of and disrupt—racialized power and knowledge relations as they play out across multiple political, economic, and epistemic sites; and that achieving this requires more nuanced and targeted decolonial methodologies than those that are currently available. This leads me to reframe coloniality in IR as a methodological problem, not to supplant questions of epistemology, ontology, or ethics in decolonial IR but to render them more amenable to empirical analysis. Illustrating my discussion through reference to the global governance of “traditional knowledge,” I sketch out a methodological framework for decolonial IR that is attentive to the slow, context-specific processes through which coloniality (re)emerges but is also reshaped.
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