It appears that the so-called “shift to the East” in global politics has laid bare the difficulty for mainstream social scientific inquiry to foster different ways of seeing and encountering the world. As a result, there is an urgent need for a change in perception that can help uncover new modes of thinking and doing social scientific research, while – at the same time – transcending established paradigms and practices. A major part of such rethink of the disciplinary purview has been its worlding. More than a mere call for interdisciplinarity, worlding entails the development of strategies for going beyond the Eurocentric frame of the social sciences both by decolonizing their analytical framework and by widening the set of actors whose agency it can meaningfully explain and understand. Glossed as global life, the worlding endeavour discloses a multitude of ever-changing and polyphonous worlds As such, the relational knowledge-production underpinning the worlding of the study of global life mandates tolerance of at least as much diversity and contradictions as is evident in the social relations being narrated. It is therefore not surprising that in the context of the growing prominence of Asian actors – in particular, China and India – many have begun enlisting histories, traditions and ideas from Asia to rethink the understanding of global life.

In spite of the diversity of experiences and practices that such worlding has uncovered, it seems that the Asian contributions to worlding have been drawing attention to the radical relationality of global life. Such relationality contests simultaneously the Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism informing mainstream accounts of global life. The books by Philip Ivanhoe, Oneness and by Tansen Sen, India, China, and the World contribute actively to the worlding endeavour by making available much-needed vocabularies and optics for engaging phenomena, practices and dynamics that cut across the turbulent pluriverse of global life. It appears that a shared point of departure is the recognition that our understanding is marked by a poignant lack of ontological, epistemic and ethical pluralism. Thus, both of them embark on offering a more “complex” picture of the world. For Ivanhoe, such complexification entails a recognition of the “extensive ways in which we are connected to and inextricably one with the rest of the people, creatures, and things on earth” (p. 33). For Sen, the complexity of global life is uncovered by the numinous interactions among “multiple meanings, categories, and forms of knowledge… circulating across the Afroeurasian world” (p. 122). In this way, both of them suggest that global life resonates with and through complex and interpenetrating presences whose sociability is infused with the contingent opportunities inherent in the encounter with the other.

According to Ivanhoe, relational knowledge production facilitates a dialogical encounter with and between pluralities of different perspectives and experiences. In his case, the modality which allows him to disclose this mode of inquiry is oneness. Drawing on neo-Confucian sources, oneness tackles primarily the ethics of anthropocentrism dominating mainstream accounts of global life. As Ivanhoe notes, “neo-Confucians developed a more robust and dramatic sense of oneness as a kind of identity between self and world” (p. 22). At its most basic, oneness relates to the intricate entanglements between people, environments, objects and living beings. Framed in this way, oneness is a utopic, yet pragmatic “stance and attitude towards the world, perhaps as the expression of an ideal of what human being can be” (p. 27). Ivanhoe, thereby, hopes that “we might draw upon and employ neo-Confucian conceptions of oneness as a model and guide for fashioning a plausible and attractive modern version of the oneness hypothesis and make use of it as a source to develop a corresponding ethic” (p. 33). The very claim that the world is populated by and emerges through the continuous interactions between plentiful varieties of life and matter calls for the positing of alternative ontologies that exceed what is possible (and imaginable) under the established (largely, Newtonian) metanarrative of global life. In neo-Confucian scholarship the emphasis on oneness is premised on a holistic worldview distinct from the Western dualistic opposition between self and other, on the one hand, and self and the world, on the other.

In fact, Ivanhoe lambasts the hyper-individualism lauded in current versions of Western neoliberal thought as “wrongheaded beliefs and practices, debilitating habituation, or the general ill effects of socialization” (p. 107). As such, the myriad entanglements of people, powers and environments stimulates an awareness of the dynamically-intertwined contingencies through which different paradigms have come to be articulated and assembled. In neo-Confucian thought such ontological difference pivots on the contrast between relational and autonomous self. It is the co-constitutive dynamics of interaction and actorness that reveal the transactional capacity to play different roles in the context of circumstantial and contingent interactions. It is not so much the subjectivity of the self and other that are reflected in the ontology of relations, but the roles that they play over time with one another. The normative point is that while oneness might have different interpretations and may take different forms across multiple time-space continuums, its “most viable and attractive forms will engage and enlist particular features of the world and use these to support a larger vision of our intricate and inextricable connection with other people, creatures, and things” (p. 30). Hence, the attentiveness to oneness makes a powerful case both for envisioning the fluid iterations of social transactions that percolate and gain salience in the context of ongoing interactions and for creating ethical openings to reimagine the complex webs of encounters framing global life.

It is to be expected that any relationship – be it bilateral or multilateral – will seek to utilize the experience of its interlocutors. India and China are no strangers to this trend. Thus, time, history and memory tend to be deployed as important dimensions of national self-perception that draw attention to the multiple currents of distinctive (and oftentimes disparate) flows underpinning both India's and China's international interactions. At the same time, foreign policy-makers in New Delhi and Beijing often resort to linking the past and the future in the contextual exigencies of the present. The discussion of the past thereby becomes a prologue for the contemporary modalities of India's and China's outreach. Yet, as Sen eloquently demonstrates, such foreign policy articulations are profoundly and irreparably flawed because of their misguided point of departure – namely, the recent, yet overwhelming experience of national statehood. History, in this setting, becomes a powerful ideology for the consolidation of a conflict-ridden domestic political stage through the projection of strategic fantasies and dreams into the past. Meaning – in particular, national meaning – is created by choosing what to remember. Prior historical experience therefore morphs into a potent cognitive strategy for the ongoing re-articulation of India's and China's perceptions of each other, international order, self-identity and global roles. In contrast to this tendency to project the present into the past, Sen offers a refreshing account of Sino-India relations, by consciously seeking “to delink the contemporary nation-states from the historical interaction that took place between the two geographical regions” (p. 14).

Therefore, Sen goes back to uncovering the interactions between the geohistorical domains over which the contemporary states are located. In fact, Sen refers to India and China as two porous circuits. And within each of these two circuits “there were several types of networks that connected South Asia and China” (p. 122). Connectivity therefore is not merely associated with commerce or infrastructure projects as it tends to be interpreted today. Instead, “most of Asia was integrated into networks that connected South Asia and China through the movement of people, the translation of texts, the use of medical and astronomical knowledge, the re-imagination/reinterpretation of knowledge and long-distance commercial activity” (p. 106). At the same time, a connected history is necessarily a global history. It does not involve merely the individual protagonists on whom his research focuses, but a much wider web of participants, relations and experiences that makes it possible for these protagonists to engage with one another (p. 108). Sen's understanding of connected history simultaneously backstops and encourages the cultivation of relational practices and nuanced adaptations sensitive to the emergent, historically-contingent and self-organizing character of global life.

It seems that an unintended outcome of the turbulence that marked the post-Cold War period has been the gradual shift in the focus of world affairs to the East. Thus, while in the early 1990s commentators were pondering how far Western norms would spread in an environment marked by “the end of history”; today, the debate tends to be about how far Asian ideas will reach. In this setting, the preceding sections have undertaken a parallel assessment of some of the key notions provoked by the rise of Asia – the concepts and practices of connectivity and oneness. In this setting, relational modes of theorizing offer practices, figurations and optics for thinking through the paradoxes of modernity, the limits of knowledge (and its production) and the contingency of global life. It is in this setting that both Ivanhoe and Sen posit that social scientific enquiry must be contextual, incoherent and socially-mediated – just like the everyday patterns and practices of the global life it intends to explain.

The contention is that the relational knowledge-production suggested by Ivanhoe and Sen offers opportunities for a thorough reconsideration of the understanding of global life. Such endeavour is not intended to brandish relationality as either a panacea for the crises plaguing the global condition or the flaws of the social scientific mainstream. Instead, relationality offers a range of alternative stories that need to be heard. It is integral to the project of producing “worlds and knowledge otherwise” by actively seeking to change “the terms and not just the content of the conversations” (Emilian Kavalski, The Guanxi of Relational International Theory, Routledge, 2018). Such decentring of the notion and practices of global life resonates with the emancipatory mutuality of many different ways of knowing and being in global life. In this setting, the relationality lens helps outline the contested terrain of social scientific inquiry as a space for dialogical learning, which encourages engagement with the possibilities afforded by the interactions of multiple worlds and privileges the experiences and narratives of neither of them. The point here is that such knowledge-production becomes a relational process of irruptive translation that brings in dialogue the form and substance of the languages and experiences of diverse and complex worlds. It is these considerations in Ivanhoe's and Sen's work that disclose alternate ways of discovering, questioning, and reflecting about existence, normative problems, and the nature and meaning of events.