Abstract
ABSTRACT It has become expected of policymakers, pundits, and scholars to refer to a whole raft of dilemmas – from the economic downturn to climate change – as complex. The complexity of these challenges intimates a pattern of interactions marked by sharp discontinuities and exponential transformations triggered by incremental changes. How can one act ethically and politically in such a turbulent environment? Drawing on Complexity Thinking (CT), this article emphasizes the radical relationality of global life, which contests the Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism of International Relations (IR). The proposition is that the fundamental rift in IR’s inquiry is not merely about the divide between the domestic (inside) and the international (outside) as mainstream orthodoxies aver, but about the very context (around) in which such schisms are located and performed. The relational ethics of such a “complexified” outlook critique the atomistic individualism dominating IR and reimagine the international as a dynamic space for dialogical learning, which promises a world that is less hegemonic, more democratic, and equitable.
Highlights
Title: Inside/Outside and Around: Complexity and the Relational Ethics of Global Life. It has become expected of policy-makers, pundits, and scholars to refer to a whole raft of global dilemmas—from the economic downturn to climate change—as complex
The ethical understanding of political action on the world stage—both cognitively and affectively—is simultaneously shaped and mediated by ethical obligations and commitments to others, the structure and content of which is acquired through the very relationships by which ethical obligations and commitments are formed and justified
Regardless of their distinct theoretical commitments, International Relations (IR) scholars tend to subscribe to a ‘Newtonian’ vision of the ‘world out there’ as a closed system populated by states whose interactions are motivated by power-maximization in the pursuit of their own self-interest.[2]
Summary
It has become expected of policy-makers, pundits, and scholars to refer to a whole raft of global dilemmas—from the economic downturn to climate change—as complex.
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