I. A global ontology of ‘intra-action’

In his signature piece on Global IR, Acharya (2014: 657) intends to create a ‘vibrant innovative and inclusive enterprise that reflects the voices, experiences, interests and identities of all humankind’. There is much in the piece to admire, from the emphasis on a grounding in world history, to eschewing exceptionalism and recognising multiple forms of agency beyond material power. In this article, we raise a question about what it would mean to construct conversations that include the voices, experiences, interests and identities of all humanity, while also pointing to the obstacles inherent to such a process. While Acharya sees the need to address diversity, he is not very explicit about what this means in practice. International Relations itself is constituted in a language, and that language plays a role in setting the parameters for what can and cannot meaningfully be said or thought, as well as who can and cannot be heard. But perhaps the biggest issue, once one moves beyond monolithic categories of states, nations, regions or cultures, and representatives thereof, is what conversation is, why it is needed and who the subjects of a global conversation would be. In what follows, we seek to explore the idea that a conversation is an exchange between multiple parties that changes all who are involved. It is an ‘intra-action’, to use Karen Barad’s (Reference Barad2007) term, that transforms the boundaries of difference and the world. As such, a conversation can be distinguished from dialogue, negotiation, and argument, as more established modes of thinking about communication within IR. Crucial to this shift is the distinction between an individualist ontology and a relational one.

The critique of the absence of non-Western influences on IR begins with a claim that scholars located in one corner of the world have narrated the rest of the world based on their own assumptions and categories, much as earlier colonisers wrote over cultures, subjects, etc. For instance, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s, In the House of the Interpreter (2012), an autobiographical novel set in colonial Kenya, reveals the process of ‘writing over’. Part of the author’s childhood is spent at the coveted English School, ‘Alliance’, where the intention is to provide the selected Kenyan children with an ‘English’ education, while the world outside the school can only be defined as one of colonial violence and ‘terror’. Ngũgĩ’s classroom experience is one of the wholesale negation, even by the African teachers, of Kenya’s landscape and the experiences of its inhabitants. As he states:

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s reflections within the walls of the schoolroom were, as he puts it, framed by the ‘imperialist point of view’, of history, literature and geography, while outside the perimeter fence and back in the village, the colonial authorities forcibly removed populations from their ancestral lands, while the ever-present watchtowers and checkpoints policed the population and governed the space and time of conversation and its potentiality for resistance. The ‘epistemicide’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni Reference Ndlovu-Gatsheni2018: 3) of ‘other’ cultures derives from ontological hierarchies drawn in racialised terms. This implies a monologue where West not only speaks to the rest, with little dialogical exchange, but defines the parameters of the world within which they silently move. But if this were to change, who is the subject to be engaged? A concept of ‘global conversations’ raises the question of who speaks.

When Spivak (Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988) asks, ‘can the subaltern speak?’ her intention is to critique those who claim to speak for the voiceless, the subaltern. While recognising the continuing importance of Spivak’s question, Acharya (2014: 652) states that there are examples of the ‘sub-altern’ speaking, as well as resisting and acting, and that Global IR would open a central space for perspectives from this position. However, to invoke the ‘global’, as will be argued, does not in itself bring an equalisation of the discursive practices within the discipline, nor of the practices that are its subject matter. Subjectivity becomes crucial in this instance as it does in any understanding of conversation or dialogue. While pointing to the potential for more voices, including voices of resistance, there is a danger that culture or region, in the process, is treated as the property of discrete cultural identities, and representatives of these cultures as the bearers of these properties.

The answer does not lie in shifting to an emphasis on individuals. In a highly mobile global context, it is difficult to think of either individuals or states as containers of culture. Global mobility and migration mean that any one individual may be the product of multiple cultures, whether historically or in the present. The global context is replete with multiple and intersecting cultural manifestations that are apparent in practices from the Saudi who prays kneeling toward Mecca before boarding an airplane to the incorporation of Tai Chi or Yoga in the healing of PTSD in the US military or in Brazilian prisons. The point is that practices originating in different cultures find expression in ‘modern’ society. As Shilliam (2015: 13) notes, even beneath the wounds of coloniality, which has tried but never entirely succeeded in separating peoples from their pasts, there is something to be retrieved. Cultural references, as realms of meaning, knowledge, and affect, are mobilised in encounters with others and the world, inform identities and practices of identification, and can express solidarity or adversity.

Engaging with the practices of another culture can be an act of resistance and dangerous, which is a subject to which we will later return. The central point here is that culture is neither static nor contained. Culture cannot be possessed or owned, but is an ongoing and changing performance in relation to others.^{Footnote 1} Discursive practices are imbued with the not so easily captured aspect of lived experience, namely the emotional lives of participants in conversation; and particular words and forms of expression that change as they travel. Patterns of speech and silence are emotional, embodied, and bound up in historical patterns that form the backdrop of conversation, which raises an important question of how assumptions of race, culture or gender become bound up in the power dynamics of speech.

Culture is more often a product of narration than a container of properties. One might speak of cultural practices, which have their historical origins in particular places, but this too is somewhat murky. If Buddhism, for instance, is taken as a practice, its origins would go back to the Buddha in India, but that which is referred to as Buddhist practice, can be quite different in the context of Tibet, Thailand or China, given that this philosophy travelled along the Silk Roads, merging with other practices, related for instance to Daoism in the context of the latter. Or, as John Hobson (Reference Hobson2004) has explored, a range of technologies and practices were first discovered outside the West before travelling there, after which they acquired new ownership. The problem of how one studies culture, and how it changes as it travels and merges with other cultures, is complex. It suggests the challenge of bringing culture in and what it means to speak from a position outside the existing academic discourse of IR.

The Global IR literature begins with an important critique that thinking about the International has been heavily framed in one cultural location. The latter is based on a language and assumptions that have often marginalised insights from other corners of the world or orientalised them as romanticised folklore, which, it is often assumed, we can dismiss before looking. In this respect, a body of literature that has constituted IR, and which claims to say something about how the world works is very much an ethno-centric discourse (see e.g. Booth [Reference Booth1979] 2014), which is limited by its indebtedness to a particular notion of science and assumptions of universality. These assumptions rely on a very contained understanding of history, which usually begins in Europe in 1648. The idea that the unitary approach to science, developed in one corner of the world, is uniquely capable of capturing ‘truth’, thereby making other approaches inferior – for instance, reflectivist, interpretivist – has its roots in a way of thinking that cannot be said to celebrate diversity.

The problem lies less with science itself than an approach to science that relies on particular metaphysical assumptions that equate it with the only approach to truth, or that fails to recognise the historical contributions of other cultures. For example, in the tenth to eleventh-century Islamic world, we see conversations focusing on the theme of science and religious belief, a relationship that preoccupied the then Asian and Eastern worlds, and one that emerges and re-emerges up to the present. A specific conversation of interest in this context has been revealed in the correspondence between Ibn Sina (980–1037) and al-Biruni (973–1048), in central Asia, which anticipated evolutionary geology and was concerned at the same time with how their scientific deliberations related to matters of faith (Starr 2013: 296–302). One might also explore the thought of the Arab Scholar Ibn Khaldun, who created a dynamic model of economic development, articulating ideas that were similar to those of Adam Smith, yet preceded him by hundreds of years (Oláh Reference Oláh2017).^{Footnote 2} Further, while universal concepts of dignity and rights are often identified with Western thought, one might explore the origins of the concept of ‘dignity of persons’ with the Haitian and anti-colonial revolutions, which have been considered to be insignificant politically (Grovugui Reference Grovogui2001: 437).^{Footnote 3}

While most social scientists probably embrace the importance of multi-culturalism, the resistance to diversity beyond Western academic practice, or the tendency to marginalise or not even consider scholarship that has emerged from other corners of the world, or during different historical eras, reinforces a West/non-West binary. Global IR seeks to transcend this distinction, however the danger of reconstituting the discussion around cultures or regions relies implicitly on an individualist ontology by which parts exist in separation from other parts, and where difference becomes a matter of logical contradiction and hierarchy. In this respect, we wish to push beyond Hellman and Valbjorn’s (Reference Hellmann and Valbjorn2017) call to ‘recalibrate’ the ‘inter’ in international relations, as part of a shift from interaction to ‘intra-action’.

II. A relational epistemology of conversation

The call for a pluralisation of the discipline is captured in works that advocate a ‘comparative’ and a ‘dialogical’ perspective.^{Footnote 6} The latter assumes the potential for dialogue across difference. The ‘comparative tradition’, as Shilliam (Reference Shilliam and Shilliam2010: 3) highlights, is one that concerns ‘engaging with – rather than ignoring – non-Western political thought in a manner that is not beholden to colonial ideologies that drain the non-Western world of all significant content for the study of modernity which is now, and perhaps was always, integrally global’. The effort to ‘provincialise’ IR (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2000), assumes a comparative and a dialogical perspective that does not subsume non-Western discourses, nor render them amenable to the discipline’s epistemological and ontological limits.^{Footnote 7} The ‘comparative tradition’ moves us away from the pitfall highlighted by Chakrabarty, whereby the ‘empirical domain’ (that of ‘other’ cultures’) is considered subordinate to universalising ‘theory’ that is seen as the remit of the Western academy. However, as emphasised in our argument, what is considered to be ‘knowledge’ of the world, its epistemological framing, is itself constituted by contingent and relational structures and dynamics that inform being in the world. As indicated above, definitions of what is considered relevant or even legitimate rest on hierarchies, dominated by the West. Our focus on global conversations, reveals these assumed hierarchies, as discussed in the next section, but goes beyond both critique and pre-inscribed versions of dialogue.

While existing models of ‘dialogue’ assume rules and norms of valid communicative practice, they are often so abstracted from lived experience that their candidacy for global conversation is questionable. The concept of ‘dialogue’ is itself contested (see, e.g. Valbjorn Reference Valbjorn2017), but the point here is to move beyond prescriptions of what constitutes ‘ideal-typical dialogue’, towards a recognition of conversations (plural) as open-ended relational wholes, the constitution of which might be revealed through the method we present. Habermasian discourse ethics, which seeks agreement based on assumed universal rules of validity (Habermas Reference Habermas, Lenhardt and Nicholson1992) is one ideal-typical model and an example of what we wish to move away from. Habermas recognises, in response to critics, that participants in dialogue come with ‘hermeneutic starting points’, albeit ones that could be put aside as participants move beyond these in their ‘rational’ effort to reach normative agreement.^{Footnote 8} This ‘putting aside’ fails to acknowledge the rich and diverse sources of knowledge, reflection, and awareness that might be mobilised in a relational understanding of conversation. Edward Said (1993: 336) reminds us of the ‘silences’ that permeate some strands of critical theory. As he states, ‘we have today’s leading Frankfurt theorist, Jurgen Habermas, explaining … that the silence is deliberate abstention: no, he says, we have nothing to say to “anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles in the Third World”, even if, he adds, “I am aware of the fact that this is a euro-centrically limited point of view”.’ Said wants to highlight the internal contradiction of this admission. A conversation here does not seem possible.

A method of global conversations draws attention to practices of language use, interpretation, and the mobilisation of situated knowledges as not only philosophical, but crucially ‘anthropological’ (Latour: 1993), or sociological (Hamati-Ataya: 2018).^{Footnote 9} It suggests liberating epistemology from prescribed edicts that claim the universality of validity and criteria of judgement, as well as from ‘standpoint’ epistemology, where the subject invoked is somehow predetermined in gender, class, or cultural terms.^{Footnote 10} Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018: 3), writing in the African context, speaks of ‘epistemic freedom’, or the ‘right to think, theorize, interpret the world, develop own methodologies and write from where one is located and unencumbered by Euro-centrism’.

In seeking what he refers to as a ‘cross-cultural orientation’, Fred Dallmayer (Reference Dallmayr2004) highlights hermeneutics and phenomenology as distinctly dialogical. As shown by political theorist, Hwa Yol Jung (Reference Jung2002), the hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions might be engaged in conversation with, for instance, the Latin American Enrique Dussel or the Vietnamese philosopher, Thich Nhat Hanh, to the end of unravelling what a ‘relational ontology’ might mean in a political theory and how these inform practices of knowledge production and relationality that are closer to lived and embodied experience. Particular modes of conversation or conversational style cannot be privileged over others, nor is it possible, in a relational model of conversation, to advocate what Iris Marion Young (1996: 124) has referred to as ‘dispassionate and disembodied’ speech. Articulations of knowledge, their idiom and style, are as significant as the contingencies of experience and the rich fabric from which and within which frameworks of knowledge and understanding emerge.

To invoke idiom and style in our understanding of conversation is to suggest a move away from the boundary between practical/moral reasoning and aesthetics that Habermas defines as the condition for universality. If anything, such a boundary imposes limits on conversations that are imbued with experience and context and hence with creative potentialities. There are styles of conversation and what Christopher Norris refers to as the ‘expressive surplus’ of language.^{Footnote 11} These cannot be tamed by a priori rules of communication, but emerge in unfixed and unpredictable forms (see Norris Reference Norris1996: 100), raising the question of how such surplus might be captured across different languages. Gayatri Spivak (2000: 15) writes of translation as ‘necessary but impossible’; necessary in the sense that we seek some kind of generality in communication across difference, and yet impossible in that capturing the other’s idiom must always remain a ‘conscientious approximation’. The specificity of idiom holds any effort at translation to account. To capture idiom is to reveal something of the lived context from which and within which it has meaning; a literal translation of Rumi’s poetry, for example, would miss the idiomatic expressions that derive from a sense of place, background texts, or even social mannerisms.^{Footnote 12}

As Spivak highlights, English is always assumed to be the generalisable semiotic of the public, while idiom is the particular or the historically private, and this to her, as the writer who translates, constitutes the political violence that is the potentiality of translation, but also its moment of ethical responsibility: ‘No speech is speech if it is not heard. It is this act of hearing-to-respond that may be called the imperative to translate’ (Spivak Reference Spivak2000: 22). Spivak reflects on ‘translation’ and claims that speech is always co-present with hearing. Yet the latter is never in a position to finally determine or fix in meaning that which is articulated in conversation. Conversation is thus constituted in language, and depends on the very potentiality of language, but such potentiality cannot be governed by universal rules. As Spivak suggests in her engagement with the question of translation, the challenge is to ‘hear’ the particularity of the idiom by giving it priority; placing it before the ‘generality’ of semiotic rules.^{Footnote 13} Such reversal has the consequence not just of placing the uncertainty of meaning (Derrida in Bernstein Reference Bernstein2008: 580) centre-stage in conversation, but would constitute an acknowledgement of the situated and lived aspect of conversation, its worldly reference points.

A conversation neither requires consensus, nor does it dispense with opposing points of view. One meaning of the root ‘converse’ as a noun or adjective points to the role of opposites. So, for instance, a claim that ‘if culture is properly global, then the converse is also true: the global is properly cultural’, draws on the root converse to point toward an opposition. Or as an adjective, ‘the only mode of change will be the slow process of growth and the converse process of decay’, again points to an opposition.^{Footnote 14} If one looks to the origins of the term (‘to live among, be familiar’ in late middle English, or to keep company, in the Old French converser), the emphasis shifts to being a part of each other, similar to the intra-action, where that which divides, and constructs opposites, happens within relations of parts to a whole. The intention is neither to eliminate difference, as difference is necessary for an interesting conversation; nor is it to achieve unity. The intention is rather to place the relational dynamic within a whole where the parts do not exist in total isolation and alienation, and the conversation is ongoing.

Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1958) speaks of the difficulty of finding one’s feet in another culture, where one does not speak the language, a point that is illustrated by Clifford Geertz’s (Reference Geertz and Geertz1973) famous example of the Balinese cockfight. How would we as outside observers begin to make sense of this practice in the absence of some knowledge of the cultural rules by which its meaning is constituted? The example points to the difficulty of conversing with someone who speaks a different language and comes from a very different culture. You can actively wave hands at an other, pointing to objects, miming subjects, but the conversation will be limited. But, of course, at the international level we all speak English and any IR scholar is familiar with the categories of IR in English, so problem solved! Problem reproduced, more likely. While British colonisers, among others, often legislated against the use of local languages, not least in Ireland and Scotland, this was not first and foremost about making society function more smoothly. It was about making society function according to a set of externally imposed rules, which reinforced the power of the imposing party on that society. In this respect, the language within which a global conversation takes place is a container of power in itself, which both makes the conversation possible while communicating who is in charge. Hierarchies are embedded in language itself, including the kinds of assumptions that are made, prior to any kind of opinion (see, e.g. Said Reference Said1978 on Orientalism), which shape notions of entitlement and who can speak, who is heard, and who is silenced.

Questions of entitlement to speak arise not only from positioning in First World or Third, but also constitute the position of authorities, and not least academic experts, vis-à-vis others, which may start with the authority of the Western ‘scientist’ vis-à-vis non-Western scholars, but extends further to the ‘scientist’ vis-à-vis the ‘shaman’ or ‘Buddhist monk’. To what extent are the assumptions of Western science so engrained, even among critical scholars, that talking to other traditions of thought or even engaging with academics outside the US and UK, is problematic, given assumptions regarding the superiority of Western institutions and the scientific method?

III. Emotional obstacles along the way

Arguably, much of the work needed for a more equal conversation to be possible is of an emotional nature for it is not merely that assumptions embedded in language often form hierarchies of one kind or other, but that these have been historically embodied, shaping a global emotional landscape.^{Footnote 15} Along this landscape, those who speak do so from the mountain top, while those who are not heard have been pushed into the valley, which is not merely a function of West and non-West but race and gender as well. The main point is that hierarchical patterns of speech are inseparable from and enable historical practices which have made some bodies, more than others, susceptible to exclusion, violence, bondage or dislocation. The memories of these experiences persist, as do the practices, and are embodied as well. In this respect, a ‘conversation’, while among the most fundamental or primordial forms of intra-action, is more than just the exchange of language. As Katz (2012: 27) notes, lived experience is a three-dimensional reality and ‘If we are to understand the rise and fall of emotions in social life, we need to keep the moving line of intertwining between self and other (or world) at the centre of our investigation.’ This returns us to Barad’s (Reference Barad2007) point about intra-action, that is, that the ‘cut’ by which difference is produced represents not a complete separation but an intertwining, an entanglement, which is material as well as discursive.

Within this three-dimensional reality, embodiment, emotions and speech are all related areas, which, in the case of conversation, will be part of a relational intra-action. For instance, how one reacts emotionally to what is said registers in the affect of the body. How one communicates, how the body is held or how the other is embraced or not are shaped by culture. An interesting programme (Going International 1983), used in the cross-cultural training of diplomats and businessmen and women in the 1980s, demonstrates various forms of embodied communication that can throw a cross-cultural conversation off balance, from the Western businessman who in a meeting with Arab counterparts, displays the soles of his shoes while sitting on the floor, to the American manager, who, in the collegial environment of Japanese business culture, elevates a single worker but cannot then understand why the team thereafter became less productive. Both are emotional encounters that shape the potential for conversation. The main point regards the importance of sensitivity to and respect for cultural difference and of making an effort to acquire knowledge of basic principles of social interaction within a culture that is not one’s own.

But the problem goes much deeper if one considers the day-to-day intra-actions that have shaped the ‘cuts’ by which entire societies are defined. One thinks here of comments by African-American residents of Charlottesville, Virginia, in the aftermath of the highly visible display of white male power in August 2017. Residents of Black Charlottesville said they had ‘seen it all before’ (Newkirk Reference Newkirk2017). The activities of white supremacists were a reflection of attitudes that continued to impact on the day-to-day experience for many in a country that has not reconciled with its history of slavery. The example raises a question about the emotional impact of the everyday bullying of particular groups of people over a long historical period. Or the impact not only on bodily health, but on social communication, of continuously being lowered and how this can limit the potentials of a category of people long beyond any formal institutions of slavery, or other institutional forms that deny autonomy have ended.

A brilliant example, explored in some depth by Sarah Ahmed (2004: 53), comes from the African-American feminist Audre Lorde, who provides an account of her encounter as a child with a white woman on a train to Harlem. During the encounter the white woman stares at the black child and, as her gaze drops down to the space between them, the child’s gaze also follows, while the woman pulls her coat closer to her. The child, wondering about the source of this response, imagines a cockroach in the space separating them, as the horror communicated by the woman suggests a very bad presence. So the child too pulls her snowsuit closer, but then realises that there is nothing there and that it is she rather than anything on the seat that the woman doesn’t want to touch. The child is confused and doesn’t understand the women’s flared nostrils, or her hate, but never forgets it.

In Ahmed’s (2004: 54) argument the white woman’s refusal to touch the black child does not simply stand for the expulsion of blackness from white social space but actually re-forms that social space by re-forming the apartness of the white body. As such the skin registers the threat posed by the bodies of others to bodily and social integrity, and comes to be felt as a border through the violence of the impression of one surface upon another (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004: 56). In this respect, emotions are not purely psychological dispositions but involve an investment in social norms, raising a question of how subjects and others become invested with these norms and how they come to be experienced as both meaningful and natural, thereby shaping the space of intra-action. It is not only that the black body, in Lorde’s story, is pulled down to the white woman’s gaze; it is also transformed into an object of its own gaze. As Ahmed (2004: 59) states, ‘the hated body becomes hated, not just for the one who hates, but for the one who is hated. She comes to recognize herself as the object of the woman’s hate.’ The hate becomes, so to speak, ‘sealed’ into the skin, thereby assuming the character of the negative. As the signs are repeated in intra-action after intra-action, they become the effects of histories that remain open.

As the hate is sealed into the skin it may take less than conscious form. This goes beyond the question of whether one can ever be ‘heard’ by the other, to the ability to speak at all. Damasio (Reference Damasio2000) makes a distinction between emotion that is unconscious and present at all times and feelings that represent an awareness and conscious understanding of emotion states. The distinction for him is fundamental as it is only when an individual comes to feel a feeling that emotion begins to emerge into conscious awareness. Catherine Theodosius (2012: 78–83) recounts the case of an aid who is bullied at work. She experiences emotions in response but suppresses them because it would be inappropriate to express them. As a result, the body undergoes a physiological change. She attempts to cover over the feelings but they are visible in the way that she carries herself, the creases in her face, and the non-verbal communication processes in her body, all of which provide evidence to the nurses that their action has been effective. An awareness of unacknowledged shame due to the bullying, also isn’t recognised as such but rather as feeling unwell. To manage and make sense of her feelings, the aid stokes and successfully induces anger, while also having to suppress that anger. Nonetheless, the minute physiological changes produced by the unconscious are on display, so too are the ‘hidden’ feelings of shame and anger. The aid then actively embodies her subordinate place among her colleagues, simultaneously inducing, expressing and suppressing emotion. Although she is not entirely cognisant of her emotional state, her anger has a physical expression, which is acted out along with unacknowledged feelings of shame, both of which become central to the social intra-action. As the aid becomes increasingly unable to manage the emotions, she experiences an outburst of anger, and feels different. The outburst is triggered by a discussion about the people who have been bullying her, by which she makes a conscious connection between the bullying and her belief in her nursing abilities and the shame and distress this elicited in her. While she had doubted herself, she makes a narrative link that allows her to acknowledge the impact of the bullying, thereby making sense of the feelings this produced.

The point of recounting this one incident in some detail, is to raise a question about the impact of an ongoing experience by entire populations of being bullied, whether in the context of colonialism, slavery, or other structural forms of violence, and its potential impact on the ability to speak and subsequent behaviour not only historically but on successive generations. The literature on historical trauma has highlighted the negative health consequences on successive generations of, for instance, Native Americans, as well as the persistence of structural violence against these communities (e.g. Brave Heart 2000; Gone Reference Gone2013; Maxwell Reference Maxwell2014; Prussing Reference Prussing2014). Conversation requires acknowledgement of these dynamics and some attempt to address them, along with the structural violence.

Understanding the workings of affect in the personal experience and in the construction of distinctions sheds light on the question of whether the subaltern can speak, or for thinking about the significance of silence in a conversation. The latter can refer to being silenced, to not being allowed to speak or use one’s voice without severe consequences, or not being heard or acknowledged. But silence may also be deliberate, a decision not to engage or an act of resistance. Sein Fein, as a Republican political party in Northern Ireland, participates in the elections for Westminster but does not send elected officials to Westminster to speak, an act that communicates their ultimate identification with the Republic of Ireland rather than the UK. Remaining silent might thus be a deliberate and conscious act of defiance, but it may also be a consequence of force; imposed externally or as a product of ‘internal’ or even private acknowledged or unacknowledged dynamics related to historic trauma. As the above indicates, both aspects of silence are evidently also ‘of’ conversation, in that both invoke forms of communication. Emotionality, like idiom and style, are as much aspects of conversation as are words and modes of expression. All are in turn articulations of subjectivity, providing clues to the form that such articulation takes, and how this relates not only to the embodied subject but historical relations of power and domination.

IV. A relational ethos and method

What emerges from our discussion so far is a commitment to relationality as constitutive of the global, even when on the surface it appears to constitute separation. It further recognises the damage that has been done by the prevailing ontology of separation and with it, epistemological assumptions regarding universal truth, associated with a particular part of the world. What Shilliam (2015: 13) refers to as ‘deep relations’ would seek to repair colonial wounds and bind together people’s lands and pasts, and not least the ‘manifest and spiritual domains’, which includes ‘sophisticated practices of relating – and valuing relations – that are firmly embedded in particular locales and people yet at the same time proffer general principles of engagement, without laying claim to abstracted universals’. Such a commitment suggests an ethos of ‘epistemological compassion’ and a methodology that enables a turning of the epistemological gaze towards the creative potentiality of what we refer to as global conversations. The ethos that underpins our concept is best captured by Ling (Reference Ling2018) when she states that epistemological compassion ‘embraces a “thousand” ways of knowing and being but still affirms our world-of-worlds as a totality’. However, this ‘world-of-worlds’, we suggest, is itself constitutive of global conversation and is reproduced and constituted in turn by such conversations as these occur in situated practices. There is here a triangle wherein each element is constitutively related not just to the other elements but to the whole; a relational ethos that recognises difference in the constitution of being, a methodology that turns the gaze to instances of global conversation and their generative potentiality, and a constitutive relational ontology/epistemology that both render global conversations possible and is constitutive of the totality that is our ‘world-of-worlds’.

The three legs of the triangle are as follows: Global conversations require a normative ethos of ‘deep relations’ or ‘epistemic compassion,’ as suggested above. Conversations aren’t won and lost but involve a more open-ended exchange that is receptive to difference and by which difference is continuously transformed, which links to the second leg, highlighting that conversations are constitutive of difference. Far from a static exchange between a priori identities, conversation shapes and reshapes difference and being along the way. In this respect, a shift from the focus on inter-relations to intra-relations is important. Finally, difference is constituted within relationships and belongs to a relational whole, which in this case is global. The three points are interlinked in so far as the normative is itself constitutive of practices from which different forms of global relationality then emerge.

There is a multiplicity of sites where conversations take place and the research agenda we are advocating would seek to uncover the extent to which such sites impact on the form that conversation takes, the terms of intelligibility, as well as expressions of emotion and embodiment. There is, for example, a difference between a conversation on social media as opposed to stealing a conversation in a UN corridor or sitting in a meeting room in Dubai or Paris. These in turn differ from the intellectual and pedagogical conversations that emerge from a comparative and dialogical approach to systems of knowledge. Having explored a number of obstacles to a global conversation, we want to focus on how it might be possible to move beyond these obstacles, to move from the emotional recognition of difference, for instance in responses to racism, to its excavation, for this is what would be required of ‘deep relations’. What makes global conversations different than what cosmopolitan elites, and not least academics, already do, flying around the world to conferences and meetings in different local spaces? What are the implications for further research?

The first component of a research programme regards the construction of conversations around conceptual concerns at the heart of global politics from a range of disciplinary, geographical and cultural perspectives. In this respect, global conversations, as both a concept and a method, involves revisiting the universalising assumptions of international relations in order to begin to engage with conceptual systems that have emerged in other times and places. This has already been manifested in a workshop in Taiwan as part of the World International Studies Conference (2017),^{Footnote 16} which brought scholars from a range of different geographical, cultural and academic perspectives together to discuss the concept of global conversations, which was an important impetus for this article. A further example was published in a special issue of Global Constitutionalism (2017), which examined the meaning of ‘independence’ in an entangled world, against the backdrop of the Scottish Independence Referendum, but including perspectives from Catalonia, Kosovo, Colombia, and four struggles for independence within China. All of these claims to independence take place within a global legal infra-structure, but are informed by more historically and culturally specific assumptions and circumstances.^{Footnote 17} The central point of the conversation in this format is to begin a rethinking process that is more inclusive and is enriched by a multiplicity of historical experiences and knowledge systems, many of which have long been buried.

A second crucial component of a research programme would involve the mapping of conversations that are manifest as intra-actions in a shared global space, to explore how intra-actions work ontologically in the construction of difference and the epistemological significance for how they are studied. The mapping might be more thematic, e.g. relating to conflict, violence, human security, climate change. An illustrative example points to the ongoing conversation between Indian and Swiss scientists, as well as local communities, on the problem of melting glaciers (in the Himalayas and the Alps).^{Footnote 18} The mapping would allow us to see how local knowledge and applications in Nepal, for instance, are mobilised in conversation with ‘science’ to alleviate a shared global problem. Further, a project led by Lily Ling (Reference Ling2018), before her tragic death, sought to explore the relationship between the historical Silk Road ethos, and the emerging local practices along this ancient route in the context of the Chinese ‘One Belt, One Road Policy’.

The third component of our research programme, an ‘ethnology’ of global conversations, emerges from the mapping of assemblages of conversations, and reveals the embodied relationalities that are inter- and intra-subjective, and in relation to milieu that include places, architectures, and objects.^{Footnote 19} The mapping might involve sites of observation, from the impact of race and gender on patterns of valuation, speech, silencing, listening, interruption or destabilising interventions, in the space of meetings of different kinds, to how the spatial arrangement of private and public spaces impact on the expression of emotion, how people interact and converse with their environment, to the multi-perspectivity of different ‘cuts’ (e.g. Soviet Russia as the friend of India, or the enemy of the US), from the intra-state to the individual. These might bring insight into the global processes and patterns by which the international and local become interwoven.

These various approaches might reveal the power dynamics between speakers and hearers, the embodied and emotional dynamics, the corporeal manifestations of inclusion and exclusion, and the spatial and temporal aspects of conversation. In this respect, the object of excavation is both the subject of conversation and the means by which patterns of power that stand in the way of the latter might begin to be broken down. The retrieval of multiple knowledge systems, historically and their continuing impact on the present, might provide points of reflection on what we assume and who we are. The relationship between speech and bodily comportment is constitutive of the form that conversation takes and the subtle exclusions manifest in the play of power; the direction of the gaze, the looking away or the turning of the back against an ‘other’; actions often informed by discriminations relating to gender and race. Form is also expressed through the rules of language use, assumptions about what constitutes a ‘universal’ language, how its rules relate to the particularities of distinct languages, their idioms and styles.

The arts, including film, literature, photography, and the fine arts are also locations of global conversation. All genres of aesthetic practice evoke the inter-textuality that bears witness to the production of something new that emerges from systems of knowledge, reference points, and forms of expression mobilised in particular work. Global conversations are at once textual and visual and many worlds can be brought into the one, revealing both tensions and potentialities. An example might be the work of the Palestinian artist, Mona Hatoum, Measures of Distance, where the themes of exile, the body, subjectivity, language (English and Arabic) and gender are all present in the plural conversations taking place in this video installation (Jabri: 1999). Alternatively, the Uganda novelist, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) brings worlds into conversation, tracing the experience of two African sisters, one sold into slavery and the other married off to a slave trader, and the reverberation of this separation across generations.

A further component regards the implications of a shift from an individualist to a relational ontology for understanding strategies that might contribute to the transformation of power hierarchies that limit conversation. From this perspective, greater consciousness of the past, and prior framings of who can and cannot speak, provides the point of departure for listening and learning how to engage in new ways. One important historical example is that of non-violent strategy, which has been closely bound up in practices of resistance. Gandhi’s Satyagraha, which rests on a relational ontology (Chacko Reference Chacko, Nyman and Burke2016), assumes that non-violent strategy has the potential to transform rather than destroy relationships between self and other, placing them on a more equal playing field. Speaking from a position that recognises one’s dignity as a sentient being is itself an act of non-violent resistance, at least in a context where this possibility has been denied, and as such is likely to invite an aggressive or violent reaction. But the hope, whether looking at Gandhi or any number of other examples across the globe, is to create the conditions for a conversation to replace a monologue of hierarchical violence, which often holds the boundaries of difference in place. Violence is an intra-action that seals a boundary of hate and separation, and thus reinforces an individual ontology which becomes self-reproducing.

From this perspective, starting a conversation can be a non-violent assertion of identity within difference that is also an act of resistance which transforms the boundaries of self and other. The context of conversation highlights non-violence as a communicative strategy that deliberately brings difference into a confrontation with power, to the end of exposing the structural violence that confines the space for speaking freely (Steger Reference Steger2006) and bringing contrasting ontologies into conversation. At the intra-state level, one can see the juxtaposition of individualist and relational ontologies in former colonial states that have been socialised into the Westphalian tradition of diplomacy, while also being informed by ancient traditions that are more indigenous, as noted by Datta-Ray (Reference Datta-Ray2015) in his analysis of the influence of the Mahabharata (and Gandhi) on contemporary Indian foreign policy, or of the Confucian tradition of Tianxia (‘all under heaven’) on Chinese policy (Wang Reference Wang2017) or Daoism on Chinese military strategy (Sawyer Reference Sawyer2008); or the impact of Ubuntu on, among others, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Norval Reference Norval1998; Mkhwanazi Reference Mkhwanazi and Ajei2017).

Ubuntu suggests the potential that we become more human in recognising the humanity of others, which, as Ngcoya (Reference Ngcoya2015) notes, provides a point of departure for a more emancipatory cosmopolitanism. While conventional cosmopolitan conceptions of IR have a hard time engaging with world views and conceptions of indigenous peoples, the latter come into focus, he argues, with a more emancipatory cosmopolitism ‘from below’, which rebalances by accounting for the diversity of social and cultural forces in a globalising world. While this ontological conversation suggests yet another either/or choice, it highlights a different approach to difference which pushes beyond post-structuralist debates on the topic. While sharing a family resemblance in destabilising the identity/difference relationship as hierarchy, a conversation with, for instance, a Daoist understanding of difference might bring the further insight that opposites, like yin and yang, are always mutually implicated. LHM Ling (Reference Ling2013b) applies a Daoist approach to identity and difference to an examination of the relationship between the US and China. The China threat thesis presents China in mutually exclusive terms, as a potential regional or global hegemon that seeks to replace the US in this role. Ling argues instead that it is important to see u.s. in China and china in U.S. By this she means an attentiveness to the multitude of different ways in which the being and history of opposites intersect rather than being necessarily at odds and mutually exclusive.^{Footnote 20}