Difference, a central concern to the study of international relations (IR), has not had its ontological foundations adequately disrupted. This forum explores how existential assumptions rooted in relational logics provide a significantly distinct set of tools that drive us to re-orient how we perceive, interpret, and engage both similarity and difference. Taking their cues from cosmological commitments originating in the Andes, South Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East, the six contributions explore how our existential assumptions affect the ways in which we deal with difference as theorists, researchers, and teachers. This initial conversation pinpoints key content and foci of future relational work in IR.
The contemporary IR craft homogenizes a pluriverse of time-spacescapes as if it were a “one-world world.” We propose a strategy of recrafting to engender a nimble discipline for actively encountering ‘the world multiply’ and a generation of scholars capable of engaging various forms of knowing/being/sensing/doing. Worlding multiply requires: (1) taking seriously the plurality of worlds that emerge through distinct existential assumptions and (2) learning how to translate/read across time-spacescapes built through incommensurate ways of doing/being without reducing one to the other. We suggest conscientiously developing tools—new skills, concepts, ways of being—for encountering complexity in both pedagogy and scholarship.
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.
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.
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