Description
This paper researches how ideas about world order are shaped through discourses conflating conspiracy theories and spirituality, also known as 'conspirituality'. Through digital ethnography, it teases out how conspiritualism challenges the modern institutions of religion and science underlying both the international order and knowledge in IR. Conspiritualism puts forward a conceptualization of world order based on occultism, spiritual warfare and intergalactic power relations. The paper highlights how in response to this conceptualization, conspiritualism actively re-orders the international by reinterpreting political subjectivity (what it means to be human) and politics as a post-political space. The paper argues taking such interpretations of world politics seriously allows us to gain insight into how people construct alternative knowledges of international order and politics 'outside' these modern institutions albeit not without raising some ethical questions that are relevant for this kind of interpretive research.
