Description
This paper develops the concept of an affective-relational ontology of peace as a new direction for rethinking the future of international studies. In response to BISA’s call to imagine what comes next for the discipline, it argues that the ontological and decolonial turns in peace and conflict studies open space for a fundamental reorientation of how we understand coexistence and ethics in global politics. While relational and hybrid approaches have challenged liberal peace frameworks, they remain limited by epistemological assumptions that treat relations as descriptive rather than constitutive. Building on feminist ethics of care and Southern relational philosophies (Ubuntu, Buen Vivir, Lulik, Talanoa), the paper advances affective relationality as both an ontological condition and an ethical practice of coexistence. Here, affect is not emotion but a generative force that binds beings through responsiveness, reciprocity, and responsibility. This reorientation shifts peace from a universal norm to a pluriversal ethos of becoming-with—an emergent mode of coexistence sustained through care and attunement across human and more-than-human worlds. In doing so, it proposes new thinking and methods for cultivating relational, ethical, and decolonial approaches in international studies.
This paper builds on ideas developed in an unpublished manuscript titled “Towards an Affective-Relational Ontology of Peace.”
