Description
calling out the Eurocentric, racialized, and gendered bias of mainstream approaches to International Relations (IR). As Fisher-Onar and Nicolaidis (2013; 2021) have argued, these blinders are not only normatively problematic but practically counterproductive in an age of “multiplexity” (Acharya 2017). The paper thus begins by parsing the added-value of “multiplexity” as a concept. It helps, I contend, to think critically through—but also beyond—realist and liberal conceptions of “global power shift,” “multipolarity,” and “international order” (all of which favor selfish and/or unidirectional readings of the world). Multiplexity, by way of contrast, impels the analyst to participate in relational learning across plural centers of global gravity or what I have called a “Venn diagram” image of IR as opposed to realism’s “billiard balls” and liberalism’s “concentric circles” (Fisher-Onar 2023). In other words, it fosters an openness to mutually transformative engagement which can help to navigate fraught negotiations of our differentiated to be sure, but also often overlapping interests in a world of many actors.
It follows that our multiplex moment offers opportunities for relational learning within the applied subfield of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). Towards this end, the article channels recent efforts to import Saidian “contrapuntal listening” into IR as method for listening simultaneously to multiple voices in foreign policy spaces rather than privileging a single or several registers (e.g. Chowdhry 2007; Bilgin 2016; Wolff et al. 2022). Laying out how to pursue the contrapuntal method within FPA, the article wraps with contrapuntal reading of the alleged “return of great power politics” to the geopolitical theater of Eurasia. Its finding: listening in plural shifts not only what we hear, but how we might practice international relations in and beyond greater Eurasia.
