Cosmopraxis: Relational methods for a pluriversal IR

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.

Animalising International Relations

“…91 Following on from this, fifth, in an entangled and relational International Relations, more pluriversal understandings and practices are required. 92 These three latter possibilities, in our view, are all both necessary and interlinked. The pluriverse cannot be pluralist as not all words in the worlding world are equally nourishing of flourishing, or even, of survival.…”

Enacting the pluriverse in the West: contemplative activism as a challenge to the disenchanted one-world world

“…11 Our intellectual practice should entail that we engage in the world-making practices of our interlocutors, whose worlds find their expression in and as our textstexts that, as I have shown, put forward alternative worlds and simultaneously question the representational frameworks that underlie our common sense understanding. Worldmaking thus becomes an intellectual praxis not because we are somehow 'separate' from the 'worlds' out there, or because we are part of the (deep) relational entanglements (Blaney and Trownsell, 2021;Querejazu, 2021) or ourselves practice a 'spirituality of the Earth' (Escobar, 2018a), but because quite radically we are a part of their creation in, as and through our texts as we draw out how things could also be (Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017).…”

“…Such a single reality perspective is based on the ontological separation of nature and culture which underpins many Western discourses of science (Escobar, 2020; Latour, 1993; Viveiros de Castro, 1998). This single reality doctrine is beginning to be challenged both in and outside the discipline of International Relations (IR; Blaney and Tickner, 2017; Blaney and Trownsell, 2021; FitzGerald, 2022; Hutchings, 2019; Querejazu, 2016, 2021; Reiter, 2018b; Tickner and Querejazu, 2021). Critique has focussed on how alternative ontologies are reduced to merely different epistemological positions of what people perceive reality to be (Law and Lin, 2010).…”

‘We’ instead of ‘me’: How Buen Vivir Indigenous cosmopraxes allow us to conceive security differently and face insecurities together

“…57 Critical Security Studies seems more aligned with the first, which presumes that theories which emerge in powerful countries tend to be widely known and accepted, a notion that is based on the idea of 'self ' versus 'others' that reinforces a Newtonian cosmological base. 58 The second, which we use in this paper, is less conflictive and less deterministic. It accepts that there is room for other ontologies to contribute towards explaining social realities.…”