Framing the Question
âWhat the map cuts up, the story cuts acrossâ, writes Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984, 130). Certeauâs remarkable words resonate with a number of efforts from inside and across the field of International Relations (IR) and IR theory which share the unease with the disciplineâs narrow, self-referential, and lifeless world, the same lifeless and limited Eurocentric view of modernity that Chatterjee (1993) is trying to grasp in his now classical The Nation and Its Fragments. With the declared task of rethinking knowledge frames such as the state-centric world that most IR students find in their first encounter with IR theory and historiography, the flourish of âcritical imaginationsâ in IRâto use MhurchĂș and Shindoâs (2016) terminologyâhowever indicates a continuous effort at exploring alternative ways of thinking and talking about the world.1 For quite a while now, it has been crystal clear that the statist logic of rigid borders and the understanding of the world as âmade up of bounded subjects within bounded political communitiesâ (MhurchĂș and Shindo 2016, 2) do not reflect the complexities of the overlapping voices, memories, worldviews, and political formations one may find when looking for stories instead of History, for the world instead of world maps.
The main general goal of this book is to explore âwhat it might mean to bring the world back into IRâ (Sajed 2013, 2). What happens if we fill the world of international and global politics with people with their everyday experiences of being in and acting upon the world? What if instead of states, systemic polarity, conflict, and competition, we rethink the world of IR in terms ofâsometimes conflicting, sometimes complementingâworldviews and peopleâs multifarious ways of thinking, narrating, and acting in front of what they immediately conceive as foreign, different, and not the same as âusâ? To paraphrase Naeem Inayatullahâs insightful words, it seems that peopleâs life trajectories are all far more complex than our IR theories, and our dominant myths about politics, collective identity, and belonging can permit us to make sense (Inayatullah 2011). This book attempts to start filling in this often taken-for-granted gap between the world of conventional IR theory and the world(s) of peopleâs everyday lives.
Some authors have already offered important hints in that direction. Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney (2004), for instance, not only traced the disciplineâs denial of its colonial character when dealing with difference but also argued for the reintroduction of the language of âcultureâ as a means to speak of difference. They suggest us to re-imagine IR as a site of âheterologyâ (a term they borrowed from Certeau), that is, âthe study of many modalities of differenceâ (Inayatullah and Blaney 2016, 71). The language of culture here points to a shared human condition, that is, our ability to construct, maintain, and transform âmeaningful and purposeful schemes of existenceâ, yet these schemes also appear âas multiple, diverse, and often competing human projectsâ (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004, 17). This reminds us that âhuman endeavours in meaning-making and world-making are multiple and diverse â and thereby partialâ (Inayatullah and Blaney 2016, 70); they are ongoing processes âexhibiting the varied possibilities admitted by cultural encountersâ, which include violence and silence but also learning and hope (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004, 17). Thus, culture points to commonality, but also to partiality and diversity of human experience and modes of thought. From this perspective, IR can be re-imagined as an encounter with difference. Here, difference can be translated in various ways, including what is beyond the language of otherness, intractability, and conflict.
Another important insight comes from Cynthia Weber when she suggestsâparaphrasing Clifford Geertzâthat IR theory can be conceived as an âensemble of storiesâ IR experts tell about the world (Weber 2001, 129â130). Seeing IR theory and the practice of theorizing in this way allows us to read the various approaches to IR as narratives mediating the world from specific standpoints rather than objective reproductions of an outside reality. Weberâs perspective makes visible the authorship to texts and turns the IR theoretician into a subject as much embedded in the world s/he claims to portray as the âcharactersâ (e.g. individuals, institutions, relations, states, etc.) in the narrative. Such a view contrasts with more conventional approaches to IR theory (and theorization) that claim to adopt a disengaged, objective view of an outside reality and portray and analyze that reality as they see it (see e.g. Morgenthau 1985; Waltz 1979). Rather than advocating that âto give meaning to the factual raw material of foreign policyâ the researcher âmust approach political reality with a kind of rational outlineâ (Morgenthau 1985, 5, emphasis added). Weberâs stance highlights that the researcher is a subject-position within the process of theorization, rendering him/her complicit with, rather than detached from, the world-making exercise that is knowledge production.
More recently, Aoileann NĂ MhurchĂș and Reiko Shindo advocated a re-understanding of IR as âa site where relations between various groups such as nations, states and political communities, have been imagined and reimaginedâ (MhurchĂș and Shindo 2016, 2). Besides the ethical and political motivations animating critical approaches to IR, MhurchĂș and Shindo follow Sungju Park-Kangâs insights when they highlight the epistemological value of imagination in carving out non-state-centric worlds and vocabulary within and across the field. Theirs is an effort to complicate commonsensical views on how global politics and its related categories and relevant actors have been evolving in a diverse and complex world.
I hereby highlight these three perspectives on how a âworldlyâ IRâto resort to Edward Saidâs (1983) terminologyâmight look like precisely because âencountersâ, ânarrativesâ, and âimaginationâ are key conceptualizations and analytical devices to my own efforts at re-imagining IR in the following pages. In emphasizing an alternative framework for looking at international relations in which the aesthetics of encounters are privileged over a state-centric logic of rigid borders, subjectivities, and geographies, I am not suggesting that the state is irrelevant as a political site or as a level of analysis in IR. It is rather an attempt to indicate that there is more to spatial, political, and subjective formations that are relevant to world politics than a state-centric grammar would allow us to see. Fortunately, I have not felt alone since I started this endeavor. There are a number of referential works in IR exploring international and global relations from the perspective of encounters to which I am in great debt.2
The locale I chose to engage with, the Maghreb, is a region located between many âworldsââAfrican, Occidental, Oriental, Mediterranean, pan-Arab, Islamic, and so on. Thus, not surprisingly, it is permeated by a number of depictions and narratives trying to capture and make sense of such diversity and the types of encounters it generates. This becomes implicit in the very meaning of the word âMaghrebâââplace where the sun setsâ, that is, the Westâusually defined in opposition to Mashreqââplace where the sun risesâ, that is, the Eastâand the many geo-cultural senses this may evoke (Maghreb Studies 2003). In Walter Mignoloâs words, the âgeo-historicalâ location of this region is precisely what turns it into a sort of âcrossing of the global in itself â or a âcrossingâ instead of a âgrounding (e.g. the nation)â (Mignolo 2012, 69). In addition to the Orientalist lens through which the Maghreb has been portrayed in European literature since nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century travelogues (Mortimer 2001)âby that time particularly famous in the former metropole, Franceâwe now have a renewed wave of stereotypical understandings highlighting the regionâs political, economic, and social inadequacy, and...