Description
This paper articulates two inter-related arguments: first, that politics itself is about the authoritative organisation of relations of indebtedness, and second, that international ordering practices can be understood through the prism of ‘complex indebtedness’. The notion of ‘Complex indebtedness’ elaborates an alternative basis for thinking about the nature and form of ‘globalisation’, both in a historical and contemporary sense, better capturing the interplay between empire, sovereignty, capitalism and democracy than the liberal notion of ‘complex interdependence’. It speaks to questions within IR about how to theorise the nature of the ‘international’, which has for too long centred questions of multiplicity and difference over asymmetric interpellation and struggles against it. By centring relations of indebtedness as constitutive of political ordering both within and across national borders, we advance towards a more useful understanding of the origins and distribution of power.
