Alternative Global Entanglements: ‘Detachment from Knowledge’ and the Limits of Decolonial Emancipation

Abstract

While the call for broader conceptions about the political in general, and International Relations in particular, points to the need to redirect attention to the entanglements of societies, species and environments, in this article I address the way in which this proposed shift might still be reproducing anthropocentric understandings of global politics if serious attention is not devoted to the ontological foundations of the discipline. To do so, I first engage in a problematisation of decolonial efforts drawn from the Latin American experience that stress knowledge diversification as a means to emancipation. I then attempt to demonstrate that an exclusive intellectual engagement with entanglements and detachments might also be misleading, for their conventional conception is dependent on certain ontological commitments inherent to knowledge production, namely mind-world dualism and the linear conception of time. I therefore propose the notion of ‘detachment from knowledge’ as an alternative ontological practice through which IR students can themselves grapple with the dualist and anthropocentric oppressor/victim logic at the root of any emancipatory project. Such practice, I finally argue, not only allows us to understand the ‘global’ as indivisible, but also to engage with it beyond the exclusive pursuit of emancipation through knowledge, however diverse or decolonial it might be.