Description
Games abound in global politics. Games are metaphors and analogies to depict it; games serve to simulate possible interactions happening through it; games are used as formal models of strategic interactions conducive of it; games are conceptual tools to make sense and explain linguistic, regulative or normative lifeworlds populating it; finally, games are playful ways to fictionalize and represent it. All these significations do not refer to the same ‘object’, though some may be connected a way or another, yet the idea of ‘game’ renders something intuitive about what is structuring and what is happening when we would like to make sense of global politics. Players, whether they are states, corporations, organizations or individuals, are playing ‘games’ and are trying to do so according to certain rules, that they may be able, or not, to design, challenge or change. All these conceptions and significations of ‘game’ are however premised on the idea that the players of the game will play the game, consciously or not, intentionally or not, whether it is beneficial to them or not, whether they oppose it or not. But what if, the players of the game decided not to play? Ashis Nandy offers with his notion of non-players a concrete conundrum for the dominant utilitarian models in the field of IR (whether positivists or post-positivists, critically minded or not): what does not abiding to the game and its rules entail? Our answer lies in the form of a non-utilitarian social and political theory of the international. Mobilising Marcel Mauss’ notion of gift (‘don’) and more precisely Alain Caillé’s developments of a ‘basic grammar’ of lifeworlds, we hope to demonstrate how a non-utilitarian conception of the ‘game’ can enable to understand non-players when the dominant utilitarian conceptions in IR wouldn’t and thus to complement, if not altogether supplant them.
