Can International Relations (IR) learn? The politics of ‘doing understanding’

Abstract

This short response considers some challenges that may be faced by learners keen to engage with ‘Indigenous International Relations’ following the lecture by Mary Graham and Morgan Brigg. I sketch two such challenges under the headers of ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘misrecognition’. My aim is to disclose what have been persistent problems in IR when ‘new’ knowledges are tapped to inaugurate ‘turns’ or reinvigorations of conceptual inventories and conventions. I argue that the cognitive risk of misunderstanding the scope and differentiations that operate in Mary and Morgan’s account runs alongside the risk of misrecognition, and that the propensity to succumb to these risks is facilitated by an unreflective and often unacknowledged ‘bending back’ towards familiar, mainstay stories about inter-polity relations that have been extensively rehearsed in Western political thought. In closing, I indicate why I think that Mary and Morgan’s account provides strong clues on how to manage these risk enroute to ‘doing understanding’.