Description
More and more, contemporary critical IR literature invokes refusal as a mode of resistance to the structures of power of a seemingly all-encompassing world. Under labels such as Dark IR, scholars are increasingly exposing how emancipatory positionalities reproduce the deterministic teleological prospect of the future as the mechanism through which the residue of modernity endlessly perpetuates a present of exclusions, dispossession and violence. Against the assumption that an engagement with this world is given by default, this paper asks what kind of thinking and praxis can be enabled outside this suffocating web of totality. With the goal of addressing this question, the paper draws on the aesthetics of darkness as a tool to desediment the Judaeo-Christian En-light-ened pillars of a redemptive horizon and thus reimagine refusal as an enabler of alternative views on the link between political subjectivity and world(un)making. Inspired by the works of Claire Colebrook and Densie Ferreira da Silva, amongst others, this paper seeks to explore the contributions that Dark IR and the politics of refusal can make to topical disciplinary debates about the Anthropocene, the end of the world and relational ontologies, pluriversal cosmologies, etc. The dissection of the tension between ontologically refusing the all-engulfing world and unearthing political praxis without slipping back into its luring emancipatory dreams configures what is at stake in the present text.
