Description
This paper explores international relations through the prism of care. It asks how international relations might look if we began from the proposition that the interconnections and entanglements which define the world are, in fact, forms of care? That is, how might our study of the world shift if we focus on care along with, or in spite of, other core concepts in the discipline? This paper narrows these questions via an extended examination of the connections between care and security. Both traditional and critical security scholars emphasize the exceptional qualities of security, invoking it as a last resort of violence, rather than a first image of care. From this perspective it is only when our security is obtained should we turn our attention to the provision of care for seemingly distant actors (human or otherwise). This belies an increasing realization that relational perspectives such as care can offer important insight into identifying and responding to complex and distributed forms of risk and harm. Care can compel us to see the world of security not as one built upon a violent estrangement between competing units, but of radical entanglement, requiring diverse forms of recognition and re-relating.
