*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

‘Critical’ International Relations (IR) began as a strongly emancipatory and normative project. It sought to challenge the emerging neo-‘realist’ and neo-liberal hegemony in IR by contesting the nature of its ontological and epistemological claims which would serve to reify and reproduce existing power relations in a highly unequal world structured by capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and the nation-state. However, we argue in our recent article “Rethinking Emancipation in a Critical IR: Normativity, Cosmology, and Pluriversal Dialogue” that it seems to have lost its initial focus and risks forgoing its emancipatory  potential.

An integral part of recapturing emancipation is, however, an interrogation of normativity. This seems to be the condition of the possibilities for a post-western IR that views critical theorising not as an exclusive product of European thought, but identifies critical discourses in different cosmological traditions. Part of a more differentiated critique consists therefore in a re-conceptualisation of emancipation that does not reproduce a dichotomic opposition between those who would need to be emancipated and those who emancipate. Emancipation thus needs to be emancipated from the ‘self’/’other’ dichotomy. The de-essentialisation of ‘self’-’other’ dichotomies is crucial since the Western ‘self’ is historically constituted by relations of exploitation and hierarchy over that which it is not. Every language of a ‘self’ and ‘other’ that does not actively de-essentialise and de-construct its origins and legacies from a global perspective of difference(s), thus reproduces a certain, culturally specific (i.e., often liberal) subjectivity. It thus renders invisible the historical relations which made the exercise of liberal agency possible in the first place by downplaying the impact of colonialism in the historical construction of ‘post-western’ selves.

In order to recuperate an understanding of emancipation which avoids ‘ontological imperialism’ (i.e., imposing conceptions and understandings of the “Self” onto every “other” culture or individual; see Levinas 1989), we suggest the concepts of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ normativity. Thereby, we seek inspiration and intellectual guidelines within the Western philosophical tradition that itself must then be revised as every encounter with politically, culturally, or religiously different cosmological discourses points to the very limits of this tradition. Therefore, the concepts of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ normativity, giving initial orientation to approach and understand difference, must be amended in encountering different cosmological traditions in order to facilitate inter-cosmological understanding and exchange. For this exchange we suggest the term “plurilogue”. Plurilogue implies that there are more than two voices and perspectives simultaneously that are equally legitimate (and worthy of respect). Thus, plurilogue implies a deep commitment to perspectivity and inclusion.

The term “plurilogue” seems to be only rarely used and this without further specification or definition. It is thus far from being a concept. We suggest it as such but are aware of initial stages. Among the rare use of the term “plurilogue” is an article by Lucy Rykers on “Woman of Colour in Coalition: A Plurilogue with Lorde, Mohanty, and Lugones” which describes the underlying proposition of plurilogue as “theory is never produced in isolation, but exists within a broader corpus of knowledge from a multiplicity of social locations and perspectives”. In this understanding, Rykers draws upon an earlier paper by Shireen Roshanravan on “Motivating Coalition: Women of Color and Epistemic Disobedience”.

The term “plurilogue” is also used by Politics and Philosophy blog (http://irnrd.blogspot.com/p/plurilogue.html)........

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