Description
The ontology of ‘the international’ has been a central object of debate in International Relations (IR). In grasping and defining 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 largely has been associated with notions of movement, motion, and circulation, either implicitly or overtly. We engage with theoretical approaches such as International Political Sociology (IPS) and Global Historical Sociology (GHS), showing that there is an unspoken consensus that bodies, ideas, and knowledges 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 IPS and GHS. Our central argument is that the continuous conflation of ‘international’ and ‘movement’ erases colonial and racial hierarchies concerning ‘who’ and ‘what’ gets to move and circulate in international politics, reinforcing IR’s white and colonial locus of enunciation.
