Description
The ontology of ‘the international’ has been a central object of debate in International Relations (IR). In attempting to grasp and define the substance of IR, scholars have often resorted to different and conflicting ideas and conceptions of the nature of the ‘international’ as a socio-political domain of reality. In this paper, we argue that the idea of ‘the international’ in IR theorisation has been largely associated with notions of movement, motion, and circulation, either implicitly or overtly. Engaging with different theoretical traditions in the discipline, we show that there seems to be an unspoken consensus that things, bodies, ideas, etc. need to somehow transgress and transcend the boundaries of locality and ‘circulate’ in order to be taken seriously by the discipline as essentially ‘international’ phenomena. Engaging with post/decolonial theory and critical race studies, we explore the theoretical and political limitations and consequences of this almost intuitive association of the idea of the ‘international’ with ‘circulation/movement’ in the literature. Our central argument is that the continuous conflation of ‘international’ and ‘movement’ erases colonial and racial underpinnings and hierarchies concerning ‘who’ and ‘what’ gets to move and circulate in international politics, reinforcing IR’s white and colonial locus of enunciation.
