Problematising the International: Ordinary Concerns about Ordinary Worlds

The field of International Relations (IR) has long privileged a particular way of imagining the international, what we could conventionally and rather uncontroversially call ‘the more than the local’, without excluding, and this is key, the latter as being constitutive of the former.

The field of IR has traditionally concentrated on states and diplomacy, national and international political, economic or intellectual elites, inter-state wars and formal international institutions as the principal sites through which international politics unfolds. Such a focus has undoubtedly generated important insights into the organisation of international life. Yet, as different contributions coming from different strands of feminism, post- or deco-colonialism, have early on noted, this focus has also contributed to consolidating a geopolitical imaginary of how the international works primarily through exceptional political events, strategic decision-making and institutional action. This short piece sought to briefly question this imaginary by asking a relatively simple question: what becomes visible when we approach the international through the practices, identities and lived experiences of ordinary people?

The argument running through this body of work is not necessarily that the everyday has always been absent from IR. Nor is it that elite politics should be replaced by the study of ordinary people. Rather, the broader objective has been to interrogate the assumptions through which the field of IR, turned ‘discipline of’ identifies its objects of enquiry in the first place. The everyday is therefore less an empirical scale opposed to the international than an analytical invitation to reconsider how the international has been constituted and how it delimits what counts as politics, as relevant agency and life in its study. Moreover, it is an analytical invitation to integrate into our analytical toolset not only questions about what the international is, the onto-epistemic fixations defining much of IR, than to wonder what it does to processes and dynamics that are as well of interest to our colleagues in history, political science, sociology, law, economics, geography or anthropology, to name the fields of study that have had historically the closest relations to IR.

Analytically, the international is not simply some external space or level that shapes our lives from above; it is as well something that we interpellate (as it interpellates us), negotiate, reproduce and at times challenge, as US philosopher Judith Butler reminds us, through the ordinary modes of being and action through which individuals make sense of themselves, of others, of the multiple worlds they inhabit and that surround them, as French scholar Michel de Certeauhas invited us to consider. For him, in fact, the everyday is always the ephemeral invention that escapes us as soon as we seek to pin it down, to analyse it. This echoes the fundamental insight from French philosopher and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, for whom the ‘real’ everyday, and I would argue in a mimetic manner the ‘real’ international, can only escape us as soon as we are trying to contemplate it. This is even more so I would say when this analysis is done by those of us having the privilege, time and paid vocation to do so. If the everyday is then a mirror of something, it may not be that of a dialectic it entertains with the international. Rather it becomes the mirror to the prescriptive reasons we chose to analyse it, or to discard it; it becomes a mirror to our ‘horizons of expectation’ to use the felicitous words of Uruguayan linguist Lisa Block de Behar.

This is not to say we should not have the normative commitments or political postures, nor that they should not drive our reflections and analysis; it is not to say either that we should live in their methodological denial. Quite the contrary, it is the invitation of an embrace but one that is cognisant of the duty to transparent, well-supported and rigorous scholarship we have as professional producers and communicators of knowledge. As teachers first and then as researchers, this duty is one we have towards our peers, our students, but also society at large.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Statecraft Institute.