Can International Relations (IR) learn? The politics of ‘doing understanding’

ABSTRACT

This short response considers some challenges that may be faced by learners keen to engage with ‘Indigenous International Relations’ following the lecture by Mary Graham and Morgan Brigg. I sketch two such challenges under the headers of ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘misrecognition’. My aim is to disclose what have been persistent problems in IR when ‘new’ knowledges are tapped to inaugurate ‘turns’ or reinvigorations of conceptual inventories and conventions. I argue that the cognitive risk of misunderstanding the scope and differentiations that operate in Mary and Morgan’s account runs alongside the risk of misrecognition, and that the propensity to succumb to these risks is facilitated by an unreflective and often unacknowledged ‘bending back’ towards familiar, mainstay stories about inter-polity relations that have been extensively rehearsed in Western political thought. In closing, I indicate why I think that Mary and Morgan’s account provides strong clues on how to manage these risk enroute to ‘doing understanding’.

KEYWORDS:

• Relationism
• international political philosophy
• learning
• Indigenous Australian philosophy
• diplomacy and inter-polity relations

Mary Graham and Morgan Brigg offer a carefully crafted account of Australian Indigenous political theory and inter-polity practices that is designed to de-centre the routines on which analysts, commentators and practitioners of ‘international relations’ have come to rely. In the process they ask profound questions about whether these commonplace routines can actually be considered fit for purpose. Listeners of their lecture or readers of its transcript cannot be left in any doubt about the scale, depth and significance of what their sketch of a ‘long-term experiment in human order-making’ (Graham and Brigg 2023, 591) conveys in the context of the present ‘omnicrisis’ (Williams 2023).

It may thus be reasonably expected that what they have to say meets with highly receptive audiences or readerships. The promises of learning about how it may be possible to traverse the terrains of political conflict, autonomous regard, belonging, authority and lawful conduct under conditions of multipolar plurality grounded in place(s)—Country in the Australian context—are so rich, vast and enticing that I expect all but perhaps a very few would want to join the trail. However, there are some cautionary notes in their account, and here I focus on one in particular concerning how the promise of their offering is bound up with the question—and challenge—of learning.

In the opening parts of the lecture, Mary observes that ‘we’re only at the beginning of knowing what underpins the doing, of learning and having conversations about the foundations of how Europeans and Indigenous peoples everywhere structure political order and inter-nation relations’ (Graham and Brigg 2023, 591). Agreeing fully with this, I outline some of the potential obstacles that may present themselves for those keen to learn. I use the subjunctive (‘may’) with full intent here: You, dear individual listener or reader, may not encounter all, only some, or even none of the obstacles I outline. But I nonetheless do have a sociological basis for my account of how individuals tend to experience the encounter with accounts of political difference such as that presented by Mary and Morgan.

I base my analysis on years of experiences in teaching heterodoxies in international political theory, as well as on observing how frequently IR scholarship faces and then assimilates difference through new or innovative ‘turns’. As well as this, I should add, I also draw on my experiences as a learner. Learners, keen to embrace new ways of thinking, approaching, interpreting and evaluating, may apparently engage with and ‘see’ difference through various cycles of enthusiastic exchanges, discussions and mutually enriching elaborations. Yet just as often as ‘different worlds become possible’ (per the World Social Forum slogan) through such engagements, such possibilities are all too commonly ‘bent back’ (sometimes in complicated ways) towards the very mainstays that were to be suspended in encountering difference. Upon such bending back, the mainstays then tend to appear once again as inevitable, necessary, compelling or in other ways marked as immutable and probably beyond revision.

Beginning to learn

Consider what is at stake in coming to an understanding, and thus beginning to learn about what is at stake in one of Mary’s (Graham and Brigg 2023, 595–96) profound observations about multipolarity with Aboriginal characteristics. One thing to note is that the account she offers here, based on the templating of nations related with one another, constitutes a carefully marked effort at translation (understood figuratively). The idea is to relay for listeners and readers who are likely to be steeped in what Mary and Morgan describe as ‘survivalism’, how inter-polity order-making and maintenance work occurs through Aboriginal Australian thought and practices by invoking an adjacent concept with which listeners and readers are perhaps at least somewhat familiar: Multipolarity (2023). The accompanying phrase ‘with Aboriginal characteristics’ likewise invokes familiar mental imagery, associated as it is in public and academic publications with discursive markers around China’s contention for ‘great power leadership’ in international affairs. Mary’s use of the phrase is a carefully crafted invitation to learners to take steps towards understanding in what ways Aboriginal Australian inter-polity ordering has come to be elaborated over a very long time to produce systems of political thought, law, autonomous regard and mutual obligations that are simultaneously cognisant of human eccentricities and dedicated to containing these through a relational ethos.

This style of invitation, however, comes of course with the risk of misunderstanding, perhaps leading to or already couched in misrecognition that is in part a feature of highly asymmetrical settler-colonial relations. This risk runs along a spectrum that includes at one end potentially interested, non-Aboriginal (white or other settler community) members of the public at large to, at the other end, academic and other public experts. While misunderstanding involves the cognitive dimension, misrecognition is the relational dimension of this risk. Sketching these dimensions indicates some of what is involved in entering into, in Mary and Morgan’s terms, ‘beginning of knowing what underpins the doing’ (Graham and Brigg 2023, 591).

Obstacles to understanding

Cognitively, the listener or reader may grab hold of ‘multipolarity with Aboriginal characteristics’ to reference meanings and implications connected with how they already understand the phrase in accordance with already familiar practices, problems, and outlooks. When this happens, ‘multipolarity’ is swiftly identified with a map of polities, bordered against each other as territories, outwardly pursuing the collective self-interests associated with the common will (however conceived) of an internally integrated population held together by unique laws and customs. This is the ‘international system’ imaginary in IR. The phrase ‘with Aboriginal characteristics’ may then equally swiftly be identified with the familiar trope of superior organising power of one ‘polity’ that entrusts itself with the authority to ‘run’ multipolarity for the others—the ‘great powers’ imaginary in IR. Cognitively, then, multipolarity with Aboriginal characteristics becomes identified in terms that leave significant aspects of familiar conceptual and institutional knowledgeable practices unperturbed.

The extant IR ‘map’ thus provides a template according to which the potential learning effect of Mary’s offer slips into the background as a function of misunderstanding. Familiar markers are used to fit the ‘lesson’ into a well-known and well-rehearsed story about political competition, one to which ‘Aboriginal characteristics’ supply some additional and perhaps slightly heterodox material. With the best of intentions, this type of misunderstanding can take forms such as anticipating correctives for contemporary deficiencies in normative theorising (see Erskine 2021) or a gathering up of ideas about how to retrofit current diplomatic practices with some new principles that promise the weight of over 65,000 years of experience (e.g. Griffiths and Russell 2018). In either form, ‘Aboriginal characteristics’ are assimilated within an IR universe which is imagined to be larger, already existing, and settled.

In other forms of misunderstanding, also assimilatory yet more pernicious, a reader or listener may find themselves musing about the tragedy of how ‘survivalism’ came to overcome ‘relationalism’, alongside the slow and messy emergence and consolidation of the present international world system wherein multipolarity is always merely a preliminary to hegemony (see e.g. the justification of a sovereignty-determined [and survivalism-inflected] contemporary order in Lechner and Frost 2018). Here, with this ‘tragic’ outlook, the cognitive aspect connects with the relational one; misunderstanding fuses with misrecognition. The tragic view, comprising a lament for turns in history not taken (for a version, Lu 2023), cognitively apportions to the past the ‘sadly done and dusted’: Unfortunately, survivalism took over, and governs the international system while containing relationalism as nothing more than subaltern possibilities. Notably, under this imaginary, an account of relational possibilities and practices can be proffered, albeit one that is highly truncated from the perspective of a relational containment of survivalism as put forward by Mary. Such a truncated ‘relationalism’ arises through the piecemeal sub-narratives that abound about the ameliorating effects of international law, treaties, and agreements, or through ‘institutionalism’ and ‘liberal world order’. These do evince elements of relationalism, however only for the latter to succumb to self-interested survivalism once a great or aspiring power decides to pursue its interests otherwise, per the overall narrative.

Misrecognition of course plays its role here too in that the Aboriginal multipolar system that Mary describes still exists, even if it has been exposed to untold colonial cruelties and violence, as Mary and Morgan alert us to in their talk (Graham and Brigg 2023). Any elision of the reality of this continuous presence is a consequence of the cognitive partitioning of past and present (at the hands of ‘philosophy of history’). Misrecognition here attaches to the correlating yet fallacious inference that ‘Aboriginal Australians’ have been robbed or deprived of politics, law, philosophy, and science with the practical consequence that only some kind of archaeology of knowledge can restore smidgens of what once was for the purpose of present reform and reflection (for a parallel account of the problem with such ‘history’, see Fasolt 2004).

Within this imaginary, Aboriginal multipolar ordering of the continent and relations with its neighbours sits in the past. The ‘lessons to be learnt’ are thus conceived of as ones to be drawn from ancient wisdom, remote in time from the present that it may inform by feat of knowledge-archeological retrieval efforts. ‘Recognition’ of ‘past achievements’ by Aboriginal Australians, for the purposes of learning to change the present, thus becomes the misrecognition of the real continuity of Aboriginal Australian politics, political thought, philosophy and practice. Adding insult to injury, this form of misrecognition conspires, purposively or not, to recruit ‘Aboriginal achievements’ to purposes and problems already understood very well by experts (academic and otherwise) in their own terms.

In the moment of this particular gesture of embrace, the hierarchies between ‘settler-selves’ and ‘colonised-others’ are thus re-enacted, revealing the ‘embrace’ as a one-sided, violent act. The critique of such politics of recognition, articulated elsewhere by Mary and Morgan (Brigg and Graham 2023), but also in the works of Indigenous scholars and sympaticos elsewhere (among others, Watson 2014; Coulthard 2014; Markell 2023; Simpson 2014; Alfred 1999, squarely identifies the problem). In a way, it highlights a particular conceptual conceit familiar from the political theories underpinning what Mary has usefully framed as survivalism (Brigg, Graham and Weber 2022, 5ff.): The ‘learner’ (a collective or individual ‘subject’) occupies the vanishing point from which information is accessed as a resource, and then actively processed in light of what is already known by this figure.

Beyond self-authorised survivalism?

The longstanding reliance on self-authorisation in the social sciences that Descartes provided a formalised account of—and against which Husserl staged a struggle on behalf of phenomenology and intersubjectivity (Husserl 1960) that he nevertheless lost (Theunissen 1986)—is central to the deeply entrenched idea that ‘recognition’ depends on the ‘cognition’ of the ‘recogniser’. Structurally, that harks back for instance to the king’s dab of the sword, an elevation of the ‘recognized’ enacted by a single source of authority and agency—the recognisee kneels passively to receive a title (for a critique, see Weber 2020). That ‘learners’ may end up reproducing such practices is thus not necessarily primarily an effect of intent or bad faith, but instead a result of their unreflected enmeshment with the very coordinates and conceptual premises that Mary’s pitch about ‘multipolarity with Aboriginal characteristics’ (Graham and Brigg 2023) was supposed to help them interrogate and perhaps move sidewise from in favour of disclosing other possibilities. To put it differently, the lesson in political philosophy that sits behind an invitation like the one to consider ‘multipolarity with Aboriginal characteristics’ can only be learnt in dialogue, relation and through levelling with one another.

Where the vanishing-point figure of the singular ‘learner’ appears as an appropriator of resources ‘for instruction-purposes’, we are thus pulled back towards the paragon of survivalism, the ‘self-ruling’ individual (collectivised in the equally singular sovereign or sovereignty) at the centre of survivalist political imaginaries. Hence, when Mary asks us to consider whether ‘domination may have a use-by date’ (Graham and Brigg 2023, X), this very rich question touches on whether we have begun to put the figure of the individual in its more appropriate place among others and alongside ‘place’ itself.

Mary and Morgan’s talk itself presents as a dialogue, in which they also converse with others not present. Seen, read and heard as a ‘whole package’ it contains a template for how to avoid the risks of misunderstandings and misrecognitions that I have sketched above. Despite the prevalence of misunderstandings and misrecognitions, multipolarity with Aboriginal characteristics is clearly unlike the multipolarity taught in IR departments, and in order to be reminded to not read the former ‘through’ the latter, one would have to heed the caution on domination’s use-by date. The work of learning about what underpins the doing of inter-nation and international relations can, if individuals choose and commit, proceed relatively safely and productively according to the relationalist approach that Mary and Morgan model or to other similar models. It is a lot of work, though, and must be done together rather than in survivalist isolation.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Weber

Martin Weber’s main research clusters are in International Social and Political Theory, in (International) Environmental Politics, and in PE/IPE. His work has focussed on contributions that Critical Theory can make to developments in normative International Political Theory, and to the ‘social turn’ in IR theory in general. It is also concerned with limitations and lacunae in critical theoretic approaches, and how these may be addressed. These theoretical interests are complementary to the more empirically oriented other clusters, informs these, and are in turn informed by them (see articles in European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, Alternatives, Globalizations, as well as in contributions to edited volumes). In Environmental Politics, and PE/IPE, his work has focussed on the political analysis of global governance, and in particular on global health governance and global environmental governance.