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Introduction to the Special Issue: Pluriversal relationality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2022

Tamara Trownsell Open the ORCID record for Tamara Trownsell [Opens in a new window] ,
Navnita Chadha Behera Open the ORCID record for Navnita Chadha Behera [Opens in a new window]  and
Giorgio Shani Open the ORCID record for Giorgio Shani [Opens in a new window]
Tamara Trownsell
Affiliation:
Estudios Internacionales, Universidad del Azuay, Cuenca, Azuay, Ecuador
Navnita Chadha Behera*
Affiliation:
Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India
Giorgio Shani
Affiliation:
Politics and International Studies, International Christian University, Mitaka, Japan
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Extract

Both relationality and separateness are aspects of our everyday lives. How we engage these phenomena hinges on the particular existential assumptions that we take for granted. Within the discipline of International Relations (IR), both relationality and separateness have informed how global politics is studied and practiced. How states and their relations are conceived has, for instance, varied by the distinct degrees of privilege given to separation and interconnection: from notions of completely autonomous units like billiard balls to always emergent phenomena co-constituted through relations. The plurality of trajectories that inform this Special Issue illustrate how much broader the spectrum of relational engagement can be when we are cognisant of the impact of these existential assumptions on forms of life, knowing, and knowledge production in International Relations. By highlighting a spectrum of relational engagement, we raise important questions about the way the various knowledge frames in IR are acknowledged, legitimised, limited, and reproduced.

Type
Special Issue Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 48 , Special Issue 5: Pluriversal Relationality , December 2022 , pp. 787 - 800
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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References

1 The Special Issue arose as a result of deliberations between specialists in different cosmological traditions who first met in January 2016 at a workshop called ‘Alternative Cosmologies and Knowledge Systems in IR’ in New Delhi, India and later at a workshop on ‘Doing IR Differently’, in Galapagos, Ecuador in July 2018.

2 Law, John, ‘What's wrong with a one-world world?’, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 16:1 (2015), pp. 126–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Space does not allow us to elaborate on the differences between these approaches. See inter alia Acharya, Amitav and Buzan, Barry, ‘Why is there no non-Western International Relations theory? An introduction’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 7:3 (2007)Google Scholar; Acharya, Amitav and Buzan, Barry, The Making of Global International Relations: Origins and Evolution of IR at its Centenary (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Behera, Navnita Chadha, ‘Re-imagining IR in India’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 7:3 (2007), pp. 341–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shani, Giorgio, ‘Toward a post-Western IR: The “Umma,” “Khalsa Panth”, and critical International Relations theory’, International Studies Review, 10:4 (December 2008), pp. 722–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Shilliam, Robbie (ed.), International Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity (London, UK: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar.

4 See Special Issue on ‘Race and imperialism in International Relations: Theories and practice’, International Affairs, 98:1 (January 2022); See also Behera, Navnita Chadha, ‘One world, many worlds: Globalization, de-globalization and knowledge production’, International Affairs, 97:5 (2021), pp. 1579–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, available at: {doi 10.1093/ia/iiab119}.

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7 Ibid., p. 287.

8 Jackson, Patrick T. and Nexon, Dan, ‘Relations before states: Substance, process, and the study of world politics', European Journal of International Relations, 5:3 (1999), pp. 291–332CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 293).

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10 For a succinct recent summary of the ‘relational turn’ highlighting both Anglophone and Sinophone scholarship in IR, see Astrid H. M. Nordin, Graham M. Smith, Raoul Bunskoek, Chiung-chiu Huang, Yih-jye (Jay) Hwang, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Emilian Kavalski, L. H. M. Ling (posthumously), Leigh Martindale, Mari Nakamura, Daniel Nexon, Laura Premack, Yaqing Qin, Chih-yu Shih, David Tyfield, Emma Williams, and Marysia Zalewski, ‘Towards global relational theorizing: A dialogue between Sinophone and Anglophone scholarship on relationalism’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 32:5 (2019), pp. 570–81.

11 For an account of this position within the constructivist tradition, see Jackson and Nexon, ‘Relations before states’. In the feminist tradition, see Stern, Maria and Zalewski, Marysia, ‘Feminist fatigue(s): Reflections on feminism and familiar fables of militarisation’, Review of International Studies, 35:3 (2009), pp. 611–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a seminal account, which has influenced the development of actor-network theory in post-structuralist IR, see Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar. Finally, for a decolonial approach of relationality, see Shilliam, Robbie, The Black Pacific (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 For an introduction to postcolonial approaches to IR, see the various contributions to Sanjay Seth (ed.), Postcolonial Theory and International Relations: A Critical Introduction (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2013).

15 See Blaney, David and Tickner, Arlene, ‘Worlding, ontological politics and the possibility of a decolonial IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 45:3 (2017), pp. 293–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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17 Cosmologies refer to sets of culturally specific ontological and epistemological propositions about the origins and the evolution of the cosmos and our position in it. See Milja Kurki and Georgio Shani and Navnita Chadha Behera (this Special Issue). Also Kurki, Milja, International Relations in a Relational Universe (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Behr and Shani, ‘Rethinking emancipation in a critical IR'.

18 See Yaqing, Qin, A Relational Theory of World Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018)Google Scholar; Kavalski, Emilian, The Guanxi of Relational International Theory (New York, NY: Routledge 2018)Google Scholar; and Nordin et al., ‘Towards global relational theorizing’.

19 See Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena, ‘Introduction: Pluriverse’, in A World of Many Worlds, ed. Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 1–23 and Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

20 See Milja Kurki and Amaya Querejazu in this Special Issue. Also see Kurki, International Relations in a Relational Universe.

21 See Kurki, Jarrad Reddekop, and Querejazu in this Special Issue.

22 Chaturvedi Badrinath, Dharma, India and The World Order, cited in Shani and Behera in this Special Issue.

23 This resonates with ecologically oriented posthumanist and other relational explorations in IR. See Reddekop in this Special Issue. See also Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden, ‘Complexity, ecologism, and posthuman politics’, Review of International Studies, 39 (2013), pp. 663–4; Kurki, International Relations in a Relational Universe, pp. 133–4.

24 Tod D. Swanson and Jarrad Reddekop, ‘Looking like the land: Beauty and aesthetics in Amazonian Quichua philosophy and practice’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 85:3 (September 2017), pp. 682–708.

25 See Tamara A. Trownsell, Arlene B. Tickner, Amaya Querejazu, Jarrad Reddekop, Giorgio Shani, Kosuke Shimizu, Navnita Chadha Behera, and Anahita Arian, ‘Differing about difference: Relational IR from around the world’, International Studies Perspectives, 22:1 (February 2021), pp. 25–64. See also Tamara A. Trownsell, Amaya Querejazu, Giorgio Shani, Navnita Chadha Behera, Jarrad Reddekop, and Arlene B. Tickner, ‘Recrafting International Relations through relationality’, E-International Relations (January 2019), available at: {https://www.e-ir.info/2019/01/08/recrafting-international-relations-through-relationality/}.

26 See Chih-yu Shih in this Special Issue. For further discussion on Tianxia as a pluriverse, see Chih-yu Shih, ‘Bound to relate: Retheorizing international order through Chinese culture of power’, in Huiyun Feng and Kai He (eds), China's Challenges and International Order Transition: Beyond the ‘Thucydides Trap’ (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2020), pp. 182–201.

27 Amaya Querejazu, ‘Encountering the pluriverse: Looking for alternatives in other worlds’, Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional, 59:2 (2016).

28 Arlene B. Tickner and Amaya Querejazu, ‘Weaving worlds: Cosmopraxis as relational sensibility’, International Studies Review, 23:2 (June 2021), pp. 391–408.

29 See David L. Blaney and Tamara A. Trownsell, ‘Recrafting international relations by worlding multiply’, Uluslararas Iliskiler, 18:70 (2021), pp. 45–62.

30 Behera, ‘One world, many worlds’.

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34 See Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (ed.), Race and Enlightenment: A Reader (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997).

35 Kant cited in Bryan W. Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2017), pp. 21–2. Kant's quote that ‘philosophy is not to be found in the whole Orient’, can be found in Helmuth von Glasenapp, Kant und die Relegionen des Ostens (Kitzingen Main: Holzner, 1954), p. 103. As cited in Bottici, Chiara, ‘Philosophy, coloniality and the politics of remembrance’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 41:1 (2020), p. 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Krishna, Daya, Civilizations: Nostalgia and Utopia (New Delhi, India: Sage Publications, 2012), p. 96Google Scholar.

37 For a collection of Hegel's writings on India, see Aakash Singh Rathore and Rimina Mohapatra (eds), Hegel's India: A Reinterpretation, with Texts (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017).

38 See Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982).

39 See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. by Hugh Barr Nisbet (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

40 See Aristotle (350 bc), Metaphysics, trans. by W. D. Ross (Moscow: Roman Roads Media, 2013), p. 66.

41 Badrinath, Chaturvedi, Dharma, India and the World Order: Twenty-One Essays (Edinburgh, UK: Saint Andrews Press, 1993), p. 54Google Scholar.

42 Badrinath cited by Shani and Behera in this Special Issue.

43 Badrinath, Dharma, India and the World Order, p. 163.

44 See Shih, this Special Issue. Also, Shih, ‘Bound to relate’.

45 Yaqing Qin as cited in Behera, ‘One world, many worlds’, p. 1592.

46 See Behr and Shani, ‘Rethinking emancipation in a critical IR’.

47 Alatas, Syed Farid, ‘On the indigenisation of academic discourse’, Alternatives, 18:3 (1993), p. 312CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 See Inayatullah, Naeem and Blaney, David L., International Relations and the Problem of Difference (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Strathern, Marilyn, ‘Losing (out on) intellectual resources’, in Pottage, Alain and Mundy, Martha (eds), Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 228Google Scholar.

50 Gow, Peter, ‘Helpless – the affective precondition of Piro social life’, in Overing, Joanna and Passes, Alan (eds), The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000), p. 48Google Scholar.

51 Behera, ‘One world, many worlds’, p. 1581.

52 Trownsell et al., ‘Differing about difference’.

53 Behera, Navnita Chadha, ‘State and sovereignty’, in Tickner, Arlene B. and Smith, Karen (eds), International Relations from the Global South: Worlds of Difference (London, UK: Routledge, 2020), p. 143Google Scholar. See also Behr and Shani, ‘Rethinking emancipation’ for a discussion of the Eurocentrism of critical IR.

54 Luis Enrique Cachiguango, ‘Asi nomas compartimos nuestras prácticas, saberes, sentires y conocimientos’, as cited by Querejazu in this Special Issue.

55 Bagele Chilisa, Indigenous Research Methodologies (London, UK and New York, NY: Sage Publications Inc., 2012), p. 109, as cited by Querejazu in this Special Issue.

56 de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, Epistemologies of the South (London, UK: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar.