Description
An implicit feature of International Relations (IR) scholarship since Hobbes, the concept of state personhood acquired an explicit vocabulary 25 years ago when Alexander Wendt argued that “states are people too”. While still contested, theories building on the idea that states can be treated like persons have proliferated over the past two decades. Though marked by significant epistemological divergence, these approaches assume – to some degree or another – ontological flatness between states and their constituents. The move has been both productive and contentious: while it has enabled novel articulations of state agency, it has attracted critique for erasing power hierarchies embedded in social and political life. Grounded in dualist metaphysics where ontological unity is assumed to erase difference, these critiques commit an important category error: through a read of Advaita Vedanta, Daoist cosmology, and the philosophy of Ubuntu, the paper demonstrates that difference is not subsumed by unified ontologies, but constitutive of it – saturating being with form and texture. Seeing state personhood through this lens allows IR to retain the concept’s analytic power without sacrificing sensitivity to the inequalities of social relations. This (re)opens space to think through international politics unconstrained by the problematic dualisms that have long structured the discipline’s epistemic imagination.
