Description
Social reproduction theory has been spearheaded by Marxist feminists to configure the myriad of gendered and racialised ways society is maintained over time. Yet social reproduction has seldom been applied to international relations, despite its analytical power to connect intimate practices of reproduction to systemic orders. This stems from misconceptions of the `international system' as a high-level, structural entity devoid of banality and mundane social processes. To refute these, often violent, assumptions, I argue for a social reproduction theory of/against international relations to unravel the ways in which naturalised orders in the discipline are perpetuated and sustained. By bringing an interdisciplinary conceptual analysis of social, cultural and ideational reproduction, I propose a theory of mutual co-creation that subjugate international relations as rigid in its world-making. This framework highlight the mechanisms of disciplinary maintenance on material and conceptual fronts, and how they mutually reinforce one another in order to perpetuate notions of order, sovereignty and security. Together, naturalised assumptions of the discipline, previously understood as immovable and stagnant, are interrogated to require labour that is often unequal and rife with unfreedoms to keep them conceptually and materially afloat. Simultaneously, foregrounding social reproduction not only exposes hidden underbellies that underwrite the discipline, but allows for envisioning ruptures in which alternative futures can be rehearsed, contested and struggled over. A social reproduction theory \textit{against} international relations calls for re-representing care, vulnerability and daily reproduction as a site of the international, and within that process, a beckoning for a politics of survival and relationality rather than preserving sovereign powers.
