Contesting the Colonial Logics of the International: Toward a Relational Politics for the Pluriverse

Contesting the Colonial Logics of the International Toward a Relational Politics for the Pluriverse CRISTINA ROJAS Carleton University In this article I offer a critical historical analysis of modernity identifying tensions between logics of modernity that rely on premises of colonial and capitalist mod ernity as a universalizing project and those that instead propose an alternative decolonial project As part of the latter I outline the contours of an emergent and distinct political project premised on deep relational ontologies between humans and humans and nature I develop the analysis in three interrelated parts I begin by critically reconstructing the justifications for the universal project of colonial and capitalist modernity and the method of rule through which it has been realized In part two drawing on case examples primarily from Latin America I identify and discuss the opening toward an alternative political project of negotiating between worlds with the potential to challenge fundamentally the logics of universal modernity In part three I conclude with some critical insights into the colonial logics of modernity emphasizing that they have always been contested I argue that given the inequalities and crises of modernity there is an urgent need to reflect critically on the concrete possibilities afforded through an alternative political project at the core of which are struggles for social justice without natureculture distinctions Ultimately this project fractures the interna tional and instead aspires toward the pluriverse Prologue1 In a beautiful essay entitled Our Sea of Islands Hauofa 1994 152 stated that there is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as islands in a far sea and as a sea of islands The first perspective denotes dry surfaces in a vast ocean that are far from the centers of power The second is a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships Hauofa 1994 153 The first perspective explains Hauofa was introduced by Europeans and later on continental menEuropeans and Americansdrew imaginary lines across the sea making the colonial boundaries that confined ocean peoples to tiny spaces for the first time These boundaries today define the island states and territories of the Authors note I would like to acknowledge Heloise Webers generous and insightful contributions since the begin ning of the paper I have also benefited from fruitful exchanges with Marisol de la Cadena Mario Blaser Arturo Escobar HansMartin Jaeger and Ajay Parasman on this topic I further appreciate the editorial help of Fazeela Jiwa and the comments of the anonymous reviewers and the constructive support from editors of this issue Joao Pontes Nogueira and Jef Huysmans Any errors are mine This paper was funded with a grant from the Social Sciences and Research Council of CanadaSSHRC 1This prologue was prompted by recent encounters with Hauofas writing in two inspiring texts Robbie Shilliams The Black Pacific AntiColonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections 2015 and David Hanlons The Sea of Little Lands Examining Micronesias Place in Our Sea of Islands 2009 Rojas Cristina 2016 Contesting the Colonial Logics of the International Toward a Relational Politics for the Pluriverse International Political Sociology doi 101093ipsolw020 V C The Author 2016 Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association All rights reserved For permissions please email journalspermissionsoupcom International Political Sociology 2016 0 114 International Political Sociology Advance Access published November 11 2016 Downloaded from httpipsoxfordjournalsorg by guest on November 14 2016 Pacific I have just used the term ocean peoples because our ancestors who lived in the Pacific for over two thousand years viewed their world as a sea of islands rather than as islands in the sea Hauofa 1994 153 In identifying core contradictions integral to ordering social and political life through the modern international system Hauofa explicates much more than the fracturing effects of territorial demarcations he also identifies how colonial logics of the universal devalue and undermine ways of being and their connec tions including what he refers to as the ancient practice of reciprocity Hauofa 1994 157 And yet as Hauofa 1994 15455 notes The highest chiefs of Fiji Samoa and Tonga for example still maintain kin connec tions that were forged centuries before Europeans entered the Pacific to the days when boundaries were not imaginary lines in the ocean but rather points of entry that were constantly negotiated and even contested Hauofas rendition of these alternative social and political lifeworldsat odds with the ordering principles of colonial and capitalist modernityprovides us with an access point that captures the core of what I identify as an integral part of modernity As an ordering principle the project of capitalist and colonial mod ernity arrogates for itself the right to be the world subjecting all other worlds to its own terms or worse to nonexistence Escobar 2015 3 Yet as Robbie Shilliam 2015 7 argues in spite of the colonial project alternative ways of knowing and being have persisted as the living knowledge traditions of colon ized peoples who have retained a tenacious thread of vitality that provides for the possibility of a retrieval of thought and action that addresses global injustices in ways otherwise to the colonial science of the gaze In this article I offer a critical analysis of the colonial logics of capitalist mod ernity by examining its universal logic that eliminates entire lifeworlds declaring them noncredible alternatives The article examines as well the interruption of this logic and the increasing visibility of the lifeworlds denied by modernity It argues that this visibility inaugurates a pluriversal politics that claims a more just coexistence of worlds that exceeds what is possible under a colonial and cap italist logic In what follows I seek to explicate the contours of this politics both conceptually and with reference to some case examples Contesting the colonial and capitalist logics of the universal challenges the modern foundation of the international as a plurality of equivalent and unrelated units or dry surfaces in a vast ocean This paper shares with international political sociology the call to ana lyze boundaries and limits making visible the arbitrariness of separations and dif ferentiations Bigo and walker 2007 The paper suggests a decolonial impulse away from a sequential and linear process of ostensibly discrete units and toward living otherwiserelationally Following Verran 2012 144 cultivating a postcolo nial impulse involves learning to recognize difference learning to refuse the step that requires reducing this difference to a shared category and accepting that we are not metaphysically committed to a common world Colonial and Capitalist Modernity as a Universal Project In this section I reconstruct critical arguments about the colonial logics of mod ernitycoloniality in its pursuit of a universal project underpinned by three div ides the first establishes a division between nature and culture the second divides moderns from nonmoderns2 and the third establishes progress along a linear 2The term nonmodern is problematic but its use by Latin American scholars takes distance from the concept of premodern which indicates a progressive and linear concept of time The use of the term nonmodern ac knowledges the existence of worlds different from modernity without labeling them traditional or premodern and avoids seeing modernity as the only possible alternative Aparicio and Blaser 2008 63 2 Downloaded from httpipsoxfordjournalsorg by guest on November 14 2016 conception of time Latour 1993 Escobar 2008 de la Cadena 2010 2015 Blaser 2013 These divisions based on epistemic and ontological premises have signifi cant consequences that include a hierarchical ordering of human and non human beings and their exclusion from politics Thomas Hobbes was a central figure in creating the modern imaginary Hobbess concept of the state of nature places the savage people of America3 in proximity to nature declaring their lifeworlds as the negation of modernity In such condition the state of nature there is no place for Industry be cause the fruit thereof is uncertain and consequently no Culture of the Earth no Knowledge of the face of the Earth no account of time no Arts no Letters no society and which is worst of all continuall feare and danger of violent death And the life of man solitary poore nasty brutish and short Hobbes 1968 186 The state of nature endorses the ontological distinction between nature and cul ture by locating certain humans closer to nature and depriving their life of value On the contrary moderns are provided with the legitimate right to improvement and the right to destroy those that do not exercise this right which is seen as equivalent to their failure as humans In the words of Anthony Pagden on John Lockes understanding of this failure Since the right to unclaimed land was a natural right any attempt to prevent it from being exercised by vicious aboriginals constituted a violation of the natural law As such they could in Lockes celebrated denunciation be destroyed as a Lion or a Tiger one of those wild Savage beasts with whom Men can have no Society nor Security Furthermore it could also be argued that even if the aboriginals offered no opposition to the seizure of their lands by failing to exercise their nat ural rights to improvement they have also failed as people Simply the argu ments came down to the claim that those who do not have cultures which perform as we assume cultures should perform can be dispossessed by those who do Pagden 2003 183 The division of culture and nature accompanying the project of colonial and cap italist modernity is a universal project as it claims that the laws and forms of gov ernment of one European culture apply to people as distant as the natives of America Pagden 2003 17778 Explicating the universal logic of colonial and capitalist modernity Antony Anghie 1996 argues that Francisco de Vitoria 14861546 who was concerned with relations between the Spanish and the Indians wanted to create a system of law which could be used to account for re lations between societies which he understood to belong to two very different cul tural orders each with its own ideas of propriety and governance Anghie 1996 32122 Vitoria recognized that the Indians were governed by their own polit ical system and possessed reason Anghie 1996 3254 But even in such con texts it was held that indigenous peoples could only reach their potential by adopting Spanish practices which were understood as the standard of civiliza tion and therefore universal through these colonial logics the Spanish sought to justify a powerful right to intervention Anghie 1996 327 The concept of jus gentium assumes that all humans possess rights based on their humanity and at the same time claims that the Spanish must intervene to prevent the 3Hobbes clearly has in mind the savages of America when thinking about the state of nature For the savage people in many places of America except the government of small Families and concord whereof dependent on natural lust have no government at all and live at this day in that brutish manner as I said before Hobbes 1968 187 4The debate over the rights of the indigenous peoples was held between the Spanish colonists and theologians and the civilians of the School of Salamanca during the colonization of the Americas under Charles V the Catholic king of Spain who reigned also over the Netherlands FrancheComte parts of Germany and Italy and half of the American continent de Courcelles 2005 Downloaded from httpipsoxfordjournalsorg by guest on November 14 2016 4 violation of their rights by the indigenous peoples of America As Pagden 2003 177 argues this kind of cosmopolitanism implies the universalization of European rights For example the notion of a common human identity gave ori gin to the right to hospitality which granted Europeans the right to visit and travel in the Americas which under the jus gentiwm is a natural right thus in digenous Indians were obligated to love the Spaniards and when they pre vented the exercise of this right the Spaniards had the right to seize indigenous property and goods in compensation Pagden 2003 185 As Anghie demon strates jus gentitum naturalizes and legitimates a system of commerce and Spanish penetration and with that particular cultural practices of the Spanish assume the guise of universality as a result of appearing to derive from the sphere of natural law Anghie 1996 326 Any attempts to deviate from or resist their rights were declared by Vitoria to be acts of war Anghie 1996 32629 Anghie 1996 332 concludes that Vitorias work enacted a series of maneuvers by which European practices are posited as universally applicable norms with which the co 9 lonial peoples must conform if they are to avoid sanctions and achieve full g membership Central to colonial logic is the superiority granted to modern reason over pre B modern Western knowledge as well as knowledges of the nonWestern Seth os 2013 139 This privilege is founded on the divide between culture and na g ture which separates the subject that knows from the object to be known In this z division nature is the object to be known and truth depends on the accurate rep S resentation of a reality that is external to the subject that knows The existence of a nature that is out there makes possible the consideration of representational knowledge as universal since observers belonging to different cultures share a universal nature that guarantees the equivalence between different representa 5 tions of reality Blaser 2010 150 This representational knowledge undermines relational knowledges that do not abide by the natureculture divide what is na ture can be society as happens when nature or earthbeings are brought g into politics de la Cadena 2015 99 The interaction with nonrepresentational 9g practices is considered equivalent to absence of reason and especially of polit é ical reason de la Cadena 2010 344 Because of their closeness to nature indi 5 genous peoples are objects of study and not subjects of knowledge As Maori g anthropologist Linda Tuhiwai Smith 1999 25 states we could not use our 5 minds or intellects We could not invent things we did not know how to use g the land and other resources from the natural world By lacking such virtues we disqualified ourselves not just from civilization but from humanity itself The S epistemological hegemony that Europe abrogates for itself eliminates other ways of producing knowledge and makes possible the management of non Western populations and their territory Said 1979 CastroGomez 2007 433 Escobar 2015 The universality of modern reason also founded historicism by telling a story of how in the past things were wrong and in modernity they are right this point is summarized by Seth 2013 142 as the once was blind but now can see narra tive Chakrabarty illustrates this point using Lockes fable of the fraternal con tract where political freedom is reached when the brothers are free from the rule of the past or command of the father Lockes individual began life from a zero point in history as historical possibilities are created by reason alone Chakrabarty 2000 24546 Chakrabarty like Seth associates the neglect of the past with historicism as it regards rationality the spirit of science as the pro gressive part of modernity and as the weapon against premodern beliefs and superstition which are relics of another time that connote backwardness Chakrabarty 2000 23839 Moreover those in the past are declared in need of a period of preparation before entering into politics confining them to an im aginary waiting room of history Chakrabarty 2000 89 Contesting the Colonial Episteme Continued Political Struggles for Decolonization I have critically reconstructed the links between the colonial projectincluding its historicist dualistic and anthropocentric logicsand the declaration of non modern worlds as unacceptable alternatives to modernity In this section I invert the analysis to foreground thoughts and practices that fracture the modern epis teme and ontology Here I also consider the possibilities and limiting conditions that these struggles face by drawing on examples from the Latin American context Challenging the universal project of colonial and capitalist modernity has been a longterm aspiration of intellectuals and activists and an ongoing motivation for the everyday struggles of many indigenous and Afrodescendent peoples in the world In the Latin American and Caribbean regions dependency theory offered 5 early criticisms of the main premises of twentiethcentury capitalist modernity z including the concepts of an international empty space divided into separate a units and a linear progression of history that moves from tradition to modernity 5 These concepts have confined nonWestern countries to a waiting room of z history Kd Dependency theory emerged on the one hand in the context of the Cold War 3 the spread of national liberation movements and the penetration of American corporations and military interventions On the other hand the Cuban revolution provided a counter to such a climate and increased the hope for an independent S government facing the United States Slater 2004 128 Scholars focused on mak a ing visible relations between a powerful North and a dependent South The con g cept of structural dependency developed by Cardoso and Faletto 1971 1979 S xvi is one example of the identification of the relations between external and in oc ternal forces as forming a complex whole whose structural links are not based on g mere external forms of exploitation and coercion The critique of the dualist div 3 ide between modernitytradition was replaced by depicting Latin America as so Z cially heterogeneous given the coexistence of social relations Gonzalez Casanova 6 1965 between mestizo and indigenous communities Stavenhagen 1974 or modes of production Frank 1978 Without doubt dependency theory provides an opening for considering diver iS sity and connections that shed light on the relations of domination between na x tions in the center and periphery Despite this dependency theorys emphasis on economic issues and class relations overlooked colonial structures of domination colonialism if considered was reduced to a legacy from the past or interpreted within the narrow limits of the articulation of modes of production Moreover dependency analysis did not question whether modernity would beor even could bethe solution to the problems that modernity and capitalism created Marxism was questioned for its limited ability to understand the lifeworlds of in digenous and Afrodescendent communities and subsistence economies This criticism extends further to the undertheorization of the conditions of The struggles against colonialism and colonial logics are not local but global struggles For more on these struggles see Walker 1988 and Conway 2013 Please note that first names have been deleted in citations as per journal style for citations This approach ignores coloniality which is the continuation of colonial domination after the destruction of co lonialism Quijano 2007 169 as will be explained later For an excellent analysis of internal colonialism see Kay 1989 and for an internal colonialism perspective see Aymara sociologist Rivera Cusicanqui 1987 production of things that are not produced as commodities including nature human life and communal conditions of production and relations of care and re production Escobar 2008 93 Federici points out how Marxs concept of primi tive accumulation ignores the transformation that capitalism introduced in the re production of labor power and the social position of women in her view forcing women to do reproductive work was part of the process of capitalist accumulation Federici 2004 12 The same could be said for the imposition of slavery and forced labor on indigenous populations in the Americas Federici 2004 64 and the war fought against women accused of witchcraft aimed particularly at elimi nating their animist conception of nature that did not separate matter and spirit and their vision of a cosmos where every element was in sympathetic relation with the rest Federici 2004 14142 The failure to address the coloniality of modernity had detrimental political consequences as demonstrated by one of the most important revolutions in the twentieth century Bolivias Marxistinspired revolution of 1952 The agrarian re form and the universalization of citizenship transformed indigenous peoples into campesinos peasant farmers and Ayllus indigenous life worlds into state sponsored peasant unions As Aymara intellectual Rivera Cusicanqui contends Marxist intellectuals were as skeptical as liberals of the capacity of indigenous peo ples to lead a process of transformation Ayllus were perceived as archaic forms of organization to be swept away on the road to progress Rivera Cusicanqui 1987 93 they were transformed into trade unions and assigned a colonial civilizing mission geared toward a transition to citizenship conceived according to Western principles Rivera Cusicanqui 1987 19 In response indigenous leaders issued the Tiwanaku manifesto expressing that after twenty years of reform they still felt like foreigners in our own country quoted in Rivera Cusicanqui 1987 118 This section distinguishes for analytical purposes two different moments in the decolonial contestation of modernity the epistemic and the ontological The first targets the epistemic logic of modernitycoloniality by making visible the mechanisms through which modern rationality manages the world and legitimizes the universality of modern knowledge Scholars forming part of the modernity colonialitydecoloniality MCD8 research program commit to an other way of thinking that counters the main narratives of modernity Christianity liberalism and Marxism Escobar 2007 180 The ontological moment on the other hand aims to interrupt the modern commitment to the existence of one world In Latin America this interruption unlike the epistemic moment that is carried out in academic circles is voiced among others by indigenous men and women including the Zapatistas who call for a world where many worlds fit the indi genous and Afrodescendants who claim territory as a space for life and the World Social Forum which claims that another world is possible What is new here is the visibility of realities proscribed by modernity that provoke a rupture in the nature and culture divide calling for an otherwiseconversation between worlds Scholars working with a political ontology paradigm engage in such con versation by focusing on the conflicts and negotiation between worlds Fracturing the Modern Episteme Scholars committed to epistemic decolonization continue the world perspective proposed by dependency and worldsystems analysis They deviate from this per spective however in that they concentrate on the consequences of a world that has Europe as its geocultural center and knowledge as the main mechanism 8This research program is discussed in detail below 6 Downloaded from httpipsoxfordjournalsorg by guest on November 14 2016 through which twothirds of the world population are dominated An early cri tique of the colonial logic of the world system formulated by the Argentinian philosopher Dussel focuses on totalization as a category to apprehend the world 1999 14849 Dussel points to the inadequacy of Marxism for Latin America while it contributes to the analysis of the function of the capitalist sys tem Marxism is less adequate when it comes to thinking about the exteriority of this system For Dussel 2002 240 decolonial theorizing comes from this ex teriority which he defines as the place of the reality of the other This place is occupied by the proletariat the unemployed the marginal the pauper and the living labour not yet subsumed by capital Dussel 2002 24041 Consequently critical thought originates in the negativity negatividad of the victim the worker Indian African slave Dussel 1998 309 A similar criticism of totalization is charged against eurocentrism which in Dussels view gives origin to the myth of modernity According to this myth Europes modernity originates internally from their own history Based on this myth they claim to be the reflexive conscience of world history The myth of modernity explains the disdain that thinkers like Hegel felt for nonEuropeans a sentiment motivated by the thought that Europe has its own origin and conse quently has nothing to learn from other cultures Dussel concludes that the to talization of Western thought halts the possibility of an exchange of knowledges Moreover this myth hides the other side of history Europes central ity was built upon a colonial project premised upon conquest of the Americas and of course Africa and parts of Asia Accordingly there is no modernity with out coloniality Dussel further argues that the myth of the internal origin of modernity as a pro ject of emancipation covers encubre the violence that is integral to European ex pansion Dussel 1993 66 For Dussel modernity initiates with the Conquest of America and the I conquer precedes the ego cogito and the emergence of the bourgeoisie The I conquer naturalizes a nonethics of war which in turn naturalizes enslavement the use of rape as a treatment of sexuality and fem ininity and provides freedom for the exploitation of nature Maldonado Torres 2008 216 Lugones 2010 The enlightenment as an emancipatory pro ject authorized violence in the name of civilization Rojas 2002 xiii Pratt 1992 39 demonstrates how the planetary consciousness that looked at the world through science did not aim to discover new trade routes but rather was meant to conduct territorial surveillance and facilitate the appropriation of resources and the expansion of administrative control According to her the innocence of the naturalist shows the desire to escape the guilt of con quest Pratt 1992 57 In the contemporary context Eurocentrism is con nected with the fallacy of developmentalism which asserts that the path of Europes development must be followed unilaterally by every other culture Dussel 1993 68 Dussel argues that the cultures located in the exteriority of modernity survive to the present and give birth to a transmodernity that does not emerge within modernity but includes cultures from places other than North American or European modernity that is they emerge from modernitys exteriority or what modernity excluded denied ignored Dussel 2002 234 For Dussel these cul tures are not recent but are returning to their status as actors in the history of the world system Dussel 2002 224 He compares transmodernity to the variety and richness of tropical jungles these cultures would have immense capacity for invention that would be needed if humanity is to redefine its relationship with nature based on ecology and human solidarity Dussel 2001 235 The task is philosophical and political and importantly must entail a constructive dialogue Downloaded from httpipsoxfordjournalsorg by guest on November 14 2016 8 between the philosophies of formerly colonized peoples as well as European and North American modernity It is in this way that Arab philosophy for example could incorporate the hermen eutics of European philosophy develop and apply them in order to discover new in terpretations of the Koran that would make possible a new muchneeded Arab polit ical philosophy or Arab feminism It will be the fruit of the Arab philosophical tradition updated through interphilosophical dialogue not only with Europe but equally with Latin America India China etc oriented towards a pluriversal future global philosophy This project is necessarily transmodern and thus also transcapitalist Dussel 2009 514 italics original to the text Peruvian sociologist Quijano 2000 53334 also follows a worldsystems perspec tive in his concept of the coloniality of power to convey the idea of a system of global power that is sustained on and through racial classification and whereby race codifies the differences between conquerors and conquered and structures the system of labor subjectivities and knowledge This global model of power cov y ers the entire global population Z In the control of labour and its resources and products it is the capitalist enterprise zB in the control of sex and its resources and products the bourgeois family in the control of authority and its resources and products the nationstate in the control 5 of intersubjectivity Eurocentrism Quijano 2000 545 For Quijano 2007 169 coloniality is felt in the system of knowledges and in the g colonization of the imagination of the dominated as cultural Europeanization was transformed into an aspiration for the colonized who wanted to reach the same benefits and hold the same power as the Europeans by conquering nature and reaching development Quijano identifies how mechanisms of coloniality 5 change historically as evidenced in the use of systematic repression and the expro priation of knowledge in the case of mining and agriculture This was followed by g the imposition of the colonizers beliefs and images and their own patterns of pro g ducing knowledge and meaning European culture was made seductive and thus as 9g pirational for the colonized subsequently for Quijano 2000 170 coloniality con a tinues existing after colonialism as a political order is destroyed g Mignolo 2000 2122 introduces the concept of global designs to comple g ment the universalization that is central to the making of the moderncolonial g world These global designs emerge from local histories and are hegemonic pro e jects to manage the planet The three main global designs are the Christian mis z sion in the early colonization the civilizing mission in the nineteenth century and development and modernization after World War II Mignolo proposes to a build narratives from the perspective of coloniality that search for a different logic Santos 2006 15 further claims that what does not exist is in fact actively produced as nonexistent that is as a noncredible alternative to what exists His proposal is to move from a monoculture of knowledge to an ecology of know ledges this is a movement for social justice as it grants equality of opportunities to other knowledges creating broader epistemological disputes and maximizing their contributions to building another possible world Santos 2006 21 In this direction Icaza and Vazquez 2013 68485 rightly argue that struggles for social justice not only fight against economic or political oppression but against the knowledges that legitimize oppression Mignolo Quijano Dussel and Arturo Escobar united to formulate a modern itycolonialitydecoloniality MCD research program aimed at producing worlds The group also included Catherine Walsh Boaventura Santos Freya Schiwiy José Saldivar Nelson Maldonado Torres Fernando Coronil Javier Sanjines Margarita CervantesSalazar Libia Grueso Marcelo Fernandez Osco and Edgardo Lander and knowledges otherwise thereby changing the terms and not just the content of the conversation Escobar 2007 181 my italics This group specifically worked toward such ends by bringing critical theory to the negated side of the epistemic colonial difference Mignolo 2007 487 In this regard scholars like Mignolo distance themselves from the postmodernist internal critique of modern ity and call for an engagement with intellectuals from the south like Waman Puma de Ayala Amilcar Cabral Aimé Césaire Frantz Fanon Rigoberta Menchu or Gloria Anzaldtia Mignolo 2007 452 Equally important is their call to take seriously the epistemic force of local histories histories that include experiences of decolonization like the Tupac Amaru rebellion the Haitian revolution and the 1960 anticolonial movements Escobar 2007 18485 Notwithstanding its progress in bringing to the fore the importance of decoloniz ing knowledges and making visible alternative ways of knowing and thinking the MCD program reached an impasse which was in fact acknowledged in Escobars account of the research program as remaining a disembodied abstract discourse thereby affecting its treatment of gender nature and the environment and stifling g the production of new economic imaginaries Escobar 2007 192 This impasse I 2 suggest is a direct consequence of this line of inquirys neglect of the nature and 5 culture divide Specifically this research program neither questions nor challenges os substantially this binary In fact they remain on the side of culture and in so doing the program cannot effectively explain the relation between modernity and its ex terior as proposed by Dussel Escobar 2007 186 rightly claims that this exterior ity is not a pure outside untouched by the modern Yet at the same time he con 3 tends that exteriority does not entail an ontological outside but is constituted as difference by a hegemonic discourse Escobar 2007 186 Again one sees that here human knowledge trumps ontology This difficulty is compounded by the E challenge of explaining the existence and agency of alternative worlds in terms of B the self and other or inside and outside both of which are modern dichot g omous distinctions that rely on the nature and culture divide These scholars thus o still assume that the distinction is representational where a self generally provides 3 the reference of what is different and what can be recognized as its other 2 Second I consider the call to limit the engagement between Western and non s Western scholars to be problematic For example Mignolos initiative 2011 to ze bring the indigenous concepts of suwmak kawsay and suma kamana to nonindigen g ous readers takes for granted the difficulty of translating between worlds g Particularly the call for translating by identifying commonalities and differences as B sumes that concepts are cultural and partially equivalent Thus my criticism here is S not a call for the abandonment of translation rather my aim here is to move to a ward a different kind of translation to engage in translation as an activity of open ness to the other a displacement from ones location as in such a transaction identity and alterity are inevitably intertwined making the act of translating a pro cess of continuous dislocation Costa 2013 79 An additional problem is that without engaging in ontological conversation and therefore limiting the exchange to ideas we create what Rivera Cusicanqui 2010 65 denominates a political economy of knowledge akin to the global trade of commodities whereby ideas that are exported as raw material return regurgitated in a grandiose mix as a final product In her view this results in a re colonization of knowledge where indigenous peoples living in the South are cli ents of their counterparts in the North In the following and last section I point There is a broad controversy about the translation of this concept The most common is living well Mignolo suggests to live in fullness to live in plenitude to new ways forward by explaining how an ontological turn addresses the short comings of the MCD research program The Ontological Turn11 and Its Political Implications for the Pluriverse The ontological turn questions the existence of modernity as the only alternative possible Modernity is one way of enacting reality Alongside modernity there are other ways of enacting multiple realities a pluriverse For Blaser 2009 877 ontologies perform themselves into worlds This means that what exists is al ways the effect of practices or performances Latour summarizes how modernity is enacted in two great divides The Internal Great Divide between Nature and Culture accounts for the External Great Divide between Us and Them we moderns are the only ones who differentiate absolutely between Nature and Culture between Science and Society whereas in our eyes all the otherswhether they are Chinese or Amerindians Azande or Barouyacannot really separate what is knowledge from what is society what is sign from what is thing what comes from Nature as it is from what their cultures require Latour 1993 99 Indigenity is one of the realities constituted in this dividenot as the other of the modern self but as its radical difference which according to de la Cadena 2015 63 is a relation not a belief it is a condition that makes us aware of our mutual misunderstandings but does not fully inform us about the stuff that composes those misunderstandings For example she discusses a conversa tion that took place between hera Peruvian anthropologist born in Cuzco Peru and a professor of anthropology at the University of Californiaand Quechua Nazario Turpo The conversation happened when they attended a pro test against a mining operation that would destroy a mountain near Nazarios home de la Cadena 2010 339 Nazario expresses that Ausagante known as the mountain to de la Cadena does not want the mine Ausagante would get mad could even kill people In this conversation the mountain Ausagante enters into the political stage as an earthbeing and disavows the separation between nature and humanity that lies at the foundation of modernity and political theory de la Cadena 2010 342 In this case modern concepts are not sufficient to bridge the misunderstanding Nazarios story exceeds what is possible to think about within modernity Marianos use of the phrase not only challenges the limits of modernity and reveals that a modernity that sees itself as everything is insufficient de la Cadena 2015 15 This situation is similar to what Troulliot 1995 narrates about Haitis revolution led by slaves This revolution was per ceived by French intellectuals as a nonevent because it was beyond the limit of the thinkable The concept of the limit is taken from Ranajit Guha who defines limit as the first thing outside which there is nothing to be found and the first thing inside which everything is to be found quoted in de la Cadena 2010 14 De la Cadena concludes that radical difference is not something that people have because of the color of their skin or their gender but rather it is the rela tional condition that arises because of the equivocal condition of what is being en acted de la Cadena 2015 275 Through stories like these de la Cadena conveys the message that the concepts used to translate other concepts matter and have consequences That Ausagante gets mad is not a cultural belief it is a presence enacted through everyday prac tices through which runakuna12 and earthbeings are together de la Cadena 11This concept was suggested by Escobar 2007 in the context of decolonial debates in relation to the politics of development 12Runakuna are monolingual Quechua speakers 10 Downloaded from httpipsoxfordjournalsorg by guest on November 14 2016 2010 339 The condition of earthbeing being mad as not a belief is an equivocation which according to Brazilian anthropologist Claudio Viveros de Castro 2004 8 is a type of communicative disjuncture that occurs when two interlocutors using the same word are not talking about the same thing and do not know or realize this Equivocations should be taken seriously as they avoid transforming what is dissimilar into what is the same de la Cadena 2015 27 An ontological turn also reveals that the encounter between worlds is not be tween units constituted in discourse as self and other but instead they are that which takes place through partial connections a concept used by Strathern 2004 that understands entities not as independent but instead with relations integrally implied thus disrupting them as singular units de la Cadena 2015 3233 As explained by de la Cadena 2015 100 practices of runakuna Quechuas and tirakuna earthbeings are connected to modernity without being contained by the epistemic requirements of representation This view coin cides with Hauofas claim that in a relational perspective beings are seen in their relationships 9 An ontological turn differs from the MCD program in its conceptualization of z agents of transformation and politics As long as worlds are not outside modern g ity but rather enacted in relation with modernity agency comes from the excess e or the not only that is beyond the limit of a modernity that sees itself as every thing de la Cadena 2015 14 This is what happened in the territorial claims for territory in Bolivia when in 1990 the people marched demanding We dont 3 want land we want territory Struggles for territory like this interrupted the meaning of territory as commodified land territory became instead a place for c the social production of life This understanding of land in relational terms is o prevalent among indigenous communities like the Dene Nation in Canada as well as it encompasses people and animals rocks and trees and lakes and rivers 5 Coulthard 2014 61 A similar understanding is described by Escobar for the AfroColombian communities living along the Yurumangui River in the Pacific where the mangrove forest is intimately known by the inhabitants who traverse g with great ease the fractal estuaries it creates with the rivers and the always moving 99 sea Escobar 2015 5 Escobar refers to this dense network of interrelations as B a relational ontology which he defines as one in which nothing preexists the rela g tions that constitute it Said otherwise things and beings are their relations they do g not exist prior to them Escobar 2015 5 italics original to the text g The ontoepistemic perspective also engages with colonial knowledge however e this engagement is not about delinking from Western knowledge Instead it z sees such an engagement as an opportunity to challenge the limits of what mod S ernity can conceive of as within its limits De la Cadena borrows from Stengers a 2005 the invitation to slow down reasoning de la Cadena 2015 280 by creat ing a different awareness of problems A similar invitation was formulated in the Zapatistas call to walk at the pace of the slowest to give secure steps that take us further firmly so that each step would be a safe step quoted in Cecena 2010 874 Last but certainly not least de la Cadenas relational ontoepistemic approach opens the world to ontological disagreements and importantly calls for a politics contaminated by excesses that Europe could not recognize as fittingly political de la Cadena 2015 282 Delinking is a proposal for decolonization defended by Mignolo 2007 In Spanish caminar al paso del mas lento para caminar firmes para ir mas lejos con solidez para que cada paso sea un paso definitivo Conclusion Disrupting International Politics This paper calls attention to the coloniality of modern international politics The paper makes a call to replace the modern narrative of once was blind but now can see with the proposal that the modern world sits alongside other ones Seth 2013 150 Santoss 2006 21 ecology of knowledges is a way to chal lenge the violence of universal knowledges Escobars thinking otherwise means enabling thought to reengage with life and attentively walk along the amazing diversity of forms of knowledge held by those whose experiences can no longer be rendered legible by Eurocentric knowledge in the academic mode if they ever were Escobar 2015 1 Disrupting the familiar demands a process of unlearning that according to Chakrabarty is an invitation to learn to think the presentthe now that we in habit so to speakas irreducible notone At the core of this exercise is a con cern about how one might think about the past and the future in a nontotalizing manner Chakrabarty 2000 994 De la Cadenas proposal is about radical difference as a condition for disrupt ing the familiar and slowing down reasoning de la Cadena 2015 27577 Radical difference is not a condition attached to bodies marked by gender race or ethnicity it is a relation that brings disagreements into the conversation and forces the mechanism that proscribe from politics earthbeings and relational ontology to become visible de la Cadena 2010 346 2015 275 This politics does not require sameness but is underpinned by difference de la Cadena 2015 286 In this view practices of runakuna like the ones that Nazario describes pre sent an excess that challenges modern politics by including otherthanhuman beings They provoke ruptures within the world of modern institutions and reveal divergences between worlds de la Cadena 2015 282 Engaging in conversations between worlds offers hope for responding to the ur gent global problems that modernity has created and cannot solve including cli mate change monocrop agriculture perpetual accumulation and the will to progress at all costs As Shilliam has argued alternative ways of knowing and being have persisted as the living knowledge traditions of colonised peoples who have retained a tenacious thread of vitality that provides for the possibility of a retrieval of thought and action that addresses global injustices in ways other wise to the colonial science of the gaze Shilliam 2015 7 Shilliams project is precisely on rendering how colonized peoples have continued to cultivate know ledge sideways so as to possibly inform a decolonial project Shilliam 2015 3 As I have argued elsewhere bringing the pluriversal is an ethicpolitical project asking for subjectivities able to disidentify from capitalism and instead desire and create diverse worlds These subjectivities are enhanced through collective pro jects of solidarity new forms of sociability and alternative visions of happiness Rojas 2007 585 These approaches as they are oriented toward alternatives to colonial logics constitute a distinctively different 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