Entanglements and Detachments in Global Politics

Abstract

The question of how we can grasp entanglements and detachments as researchers who are intimately entangled with the worlds we study was never solely an issue of academic curiosity. This past year we struggled to keep up with the shifting grounds as the global pandemic escalated political crises and generated ruptures and losses in our lives, societies and universities, in ways that touched some more than others. In the midst of this disorientation, we have grappled with and failed to make sense of the politics of the present. Having the space to think through these politics with you and with each-other has meant much more to us than an academic exercise. It has held the space for us to think, feel and make sense together, entangled within a power-laden and at times alienating university system that nevertheless contains the possibility for different, if not better, realities.The 2020 Millennium conference, 'Entanglements and Detachments in Global Politics', held online 22-24 October, was a rich and generative series of conversations, involving over 3,000 registered participants and 150 presentations. Our intention for the conference and this special issue of Millennium: Journal of International Studies is to intervene in debates on relationality, which form a necessary, although conservative, corrective to the atomic universe of traditional IR and its deadly international order. Where relational approaches often retain a sense of neatness and order, if not in theory, then in practice, we put forward the urgent need to move even further away from parsimony, into the complex and messy stuff that constitutes our worlds. For some, the entanglement of societies, species and environments has never been about making a comfortable theoretical point. They have always been aware that what is at stake in contesting separation is

Political ecology III: Praxis - doing, undoing, and being in radical political ecology research

“…Nevertheless, connection and disconnection may not be linear, which can assuage some anxieties given constraints identified above. Connection and intersubjectivity through processes of entanglement and detachment recur over time and space for different reasons (Engelhard et al, 2021). Relationality to microbes, plants, animals, and ecosystems can emerge, dissipate, mutate, and transform.…”