Enacting the pluriverse in the West: contemplative activism as a challenge to the disenchanted one-world world

Abstract

Within IR, scholars are starting to consider difference on the level of ontology rather than epistemology. Other worlds are introduced into IR’s political pluriverse, however, these are often encountered in faraway places, thereby playing into the colonial narrative that ontological difference does not exist in the ‘West’. This paper introduces another real from within the ‘disenchanted North’ that is shaped by contemplative activists: people using contemplation as a form of protest. An engagement with contemplative activism challenges our commonly held assumptions about what contemplation and social change are, thereby undermining the institutions of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ underlying the universe. It argues that the project of political ontology in IR should consist of two moves: drawing in other, in particular spiritual, realities into the political imaginations of IR and challenging the ontological assumptions underpinning concepts. Consequently, it suggests that the pluriverse in IR should be a methodological rather than an ontological commitment.