Description
This paper aims to decenter the dominance of the ‘One World’ ontology that is underlying much of the thinking and doing of IR. Such a single-reality perspective underpinning many familiar Western discourses of science is beginning to be challenged in the discipline, as scholars aim to disrupt the coloniality of the Western ontology of ‘one nature’ and ‘many cultures’. Much of this decentering work draws on world-making practices in non-dominant worlds. This paper aims to expand this focus, by taking in alternative world-making practices that challenge the singe-world reality from within the dominant world, the ‘North’. Doing so not only avoids reestablishing familiar dualist and colonial boundaries of knowledge that locate strangeness and other ontologies in faraway and distant places but also draws our attention to the fact that IR would be better off not locating multiple ontologies geopolitically to begin with. The different worlds to which it needs to become attuned instead are generated through our intellectual encounters with the ‘fields’ we inhabit and/or study. IR thus needs to entertain a ‘world of many worlds’ as a theoretical engagement. The paper illustrates these points by drawing on conceptualizations of politics and subjectivity that follow from world-making practices of contemplative activists in Northern Europe. It argues that world-making as an intellectual practice allows the discipline to take non-scientific, non-dualist perspectives seriously as one possible way of doing IR differently. Ultimately, what (international) politics or subjectivity is needs to be ontologically plural as part of our research. It is by entertaining that possibility in and as our own intellectual praxis that the ontologies of international politics can actually be multiplied, and we can begin to undo the ‘One World’ world.
