Political ontology and international relations

Abstract

This chapter juxtaposes political ontology to recent discussions of ontology in International Relations (IR). As a decolonial approach, political ontology exposes a pluriverse of different worlds (understood as performative ontologies and stories) beyond IR’s universe of modernity or mere societal and cultural multiplicity. Drawing on actor-network theory and other posthumanist social theories and philosophies as well as Rancière’s conception of politics, political ontology highlights the performative (or processual-relational) and political character of ontologies often elided in scholarship on ontology in IR. The present intervention addresses three aspects of political ontology with relevance to IR; broadly, its underlying conception of politics, a certain form of self-reflexivity, and the potentials for a universalism and cosmopolitics of a different kind. First, it shows how Rancière’s politics of disagreement, equality, and alterity may inform political ontology. Second, it suggests that the move from a universe to a pluriverse of ontologies (including non-modern ones) also implies a “deconstructive self-estrangement” of Eurocentric ontologies/modernities (for instance, by attending to their stories or by understanding these through political theology). Third, it provokes the (Schmittian-derived) notion of the pluriverse by pointing to Sergei Prozorov’s “void universalism” as a possible ante-grounding for cosmopolitics within a pluriverse.