Differing about Difference: Relational IR from around the World

Abstract

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.

Rethinking China–Taiwan relations as a yin – yang imbalance: political healing by Taiwanese Buddhist organisations

“…Rather than calling on the disputing parties to construct a Kantian 'culture of anarchy' (Wendt 1999) on the basis of a friend identity (which reproduces the us-them dichotomy), this research has maintained that what is at stake is a deep 'ontological switch' (Agathangelou and Ling 2004) enabling us to appreciate that those opposites are complementary and both-and, ultimately interconnected as an indivisible whole. This dao/EAM-informed engagement with relationality resonates with such cosmological notions as dharma, ayni, ubuntu and advaita (Trownsell et al 2021;Ncgoya 2015;Shahi 2018), pointing to a feasible way to decentre Westphalian IR presumptions about existence, both geoculturally and ontologically.…”

Working on relationalism

“…Examples of this latter include cashing out interconnectedness in terms of Daoist yin-yang (Ling 2013), African ubuntu (Battle 2009; Ngcoya 2015), the Chinese-Confucian guanxi or “balance of relationships (BoR)” approach (Shih 2020; see also Qin and Nordin 2019), and Japanese Buddhist engi (Shimizu 2021); attention to global “cosmological commitments” also participates in this approach (Kurki 2020; T. A. Trownsell et al, 2021). In all of these cases, theory and methodology go hand in hand, and reinforce one another: “pure” dualist approaches maintain and uphold strict distinctions that “pure” nondual/incarnational approaches muddy and abandon even as they walk away from linear nonparticipatory notions of causality.…”

Alternative Global Entanglements: ‘Detachment from Knowledge’ and the Limits of Decolonial Emancipation

“…Namely, while sympathetic to their criticisms of the universal pretensions of a Eurocentric subjectivity 16 and the concomitant exposure of the colonial logics of 'the international' that they have enabled, 17 I take a different stance vis-à-vis some of these scholars' deliberate normative arguments advocating for epistemological diversity in the hopes of a certain 'vindication' of the (Global) South. 18 Instead, I challenge their epistemological arguments with an ontological disruption afforded by recent relational work in IR, 19 which turns on its head the very logics of emancipation as a political project.…”

“…68 By framing the argument in such terms, however, a particular caveat is in order to better understand the sceptical, yet complementary approach through which I engage the Latin American decoloniality scholarship at hand, and by extension decolonial works in IR. Specifically, given that a key feature of the relational work I build upon is the idea of transcending the 'either-or logic' that sustains the hierarchical and exclusionary binaries already discussed by replacing it with a 'relational both-and logic', 69 my intention is not to wholly displace decolonial insights. Indeed, decolonial works in IR have greatly contributed in exposing the fallacies of knowledge rooted in the white supremacy of modernity and thus fittingly exposed the ongoing effects of coloniality on a global scale.…”