Multiplicity, group identity and the spectre of the social

Abstract

The recent renaissance of uneven and combined development (UCD) has generally followed Justin Rosenberg’s formulation of the ‘international’, conceived as the inter-societal dimension of sociohistorical development. But Rosenberg’s ‘international’ rests on the conflation of distinct concepts, thus occluding other consequential registers of multiplicity. This paper (1) disentangles the concepts ‘social’, ‘societal’ and ‘political’; (2) demonstrates, using recent archaeological research, that complex social definedness preceded the sedentarisation of human groups; and (3) argues that social multiplicity constitutes a distinct dimension of causality that is interrelated with but irreducible to the territorial logics of societal and political multiplicity. In order to do this, it examines the role of the social (as non-territorial group identification) in the rise of Hellenic nationalism in colonial Cyprus. The paper concludes by suggesting a new path for UCD research in order to explore the full significance of multiplicity for IR theory, thus moving further out of the ‘prison of Political Science’.