Description
Recent works in international studies have reveal the Eurocentric nature of International Relations (IR) alongside postcolonial and decolonial critiques of the 'coloniality of power.' European political theory and philosophy inundated our thinking about peace, making it near-impossible to think beyond the liberal peace that does not fall back into a continuation of the European post-Enlightenment project even within more critical approaches. Consequently, the dynamically lived worlds of peoples are folded into a secular liberal nation-state as a solution to conflicts, which acts as a problem-solving solution to the question of difference rather than to seriously consider what an ontologically plural world should entail. I argue that a cosmological approach to looking at (IR) - one that examines the ontological and epistemological assumptions of lived worlds including the origin and evolution of the universe, the nature of time and humanity's role within the cosmos - holds promises for uncovering and relaying subaltern voices that can get us closer to a pluriversal peace. Accordingly, I read Ishimure Michiko's 苦海浄土 or Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow - an account of the lived world of victims of Minamata disease in Japan's Southern island of Kyushu - so as to reveal a cosmologically different way of thinking about peace beyond the cosmology of secularized European thoughts.
