Description
The discipline of International Relations (IR) faces a crucial test: its capacity to explain future international praxes — or to understand the past as it is reborn within them — depends on its ability to remain pluriversal without lapsing into relativism that undermines ethical and political judgement. This challenge is especially urgent in an era when much of global politics stems from non-Western resistance to Western imperial dominance, yet such resistances often reproduce their own authoritarian, fascist, colonial, and imperial logics, while US imperialism and inter-imperial rivalries further occlude the agency and responsibility of non-Western actors. What this signals is a plurality of international imaginaries and the ethical and political sensitivity of their interpretation — yet IR, oscillating between ontological reductionism and epistemic relativism, remains ill-equipped to provide responsible interpretation.
This paper argues that a key obstacle lies in IR’s persistent reliance on a “dualist imaginary”, resulting from the projection of the Cartesian subject–object dichotomy onto the world of politics, which produces three interrelated problems: the atomisation of “others” that renders all as others of the West; the mutilation of imagination; and the identitarian categorisation of time. These issues pervade both mainstream and critical theories and methodologies. To address them, the paper proposes a methodological shift in three steps. First, it recovers the neglected potential of Cornelius Castoriadis’s theory of the social imaginary to revive imagination and rethink time in world politics. Second, it integrates Karen Barad’s relational “onto-epistemology” and “entanglement” to address Castoriadis’s neglect of societal multiplicity in shaping the imaginary signification of time and societies’ being-in-the-world. Third, it formulates “self-comparison” — the process through which agents act in the world through relationally formed international imaginaries — the result of this internationalisation of social imaginaries and a key methodological tool to overcome the dualist imaginary in IR and beyond.
