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Relational Indigenous systems: Aboriginal Australian political ordering and reconfiguring IR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2021

Morgan Brigg Open the ORCID record for Morgan Brigg [Opens in a new window] ,
Mary Graham Open the ORCID record for Mary Graham [Opens in a new window]  and
Martin Weber Open the ORCID record for Martin Weber [Opens in a new window]
Morgan Brigg*
Affiliation:
School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland
Mary Graham
Affiliation:
School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland
Martin Weber
Affiliation:
School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Ontological parochialism persists in International Relations (IR) scholarship among gestures towards relational ontological reinvention. Meanwhile, the inter-polity relations of many Indigenous peoples pre-date contemporary IR and tend to be substantively relational. This situation invites rethinking of IR's understandings of political order and inter-polity relations. We take up this task by laying out necessary methodological innovations to engage with Aboriginal Australia and then showing how conventional and much recent heterodox IR seek to create forms of ‘escape’ from lived political relations by asserting the powerful yet problematic social science mechanism of observer's distance. This demonstrates a need to take Aboriginal Australia as a system on its own terms to speak back to IR. We next explain how Aboriginal Australian people produce political order on the Australian continent through a ‘relational-ecological’ disposition that contrasts with IR's predominant ‘survivalist’ disposition. The accompanying capacity to manage survivalism through relationalism provides an avenue for engaging with and recasting some of mainstream IR's survivalist assumptions, including by considering an Aboriginal approach to multipolarity, without attempting ‘pure escape’ through alternative ontologies. We thus argue that while it is necessary to critique and recast dominant IR, doing so requires putting dominant IR and Indigenous understandings into relational exchange.

Keywords

Indigenous Political TheorySystemsAboriginal AustraliaRelationalism
Type
Special Issue Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 48 , Special Issue 5: Pluriversal Relationality , December 2022 , pp. 891 - 909
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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References

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17 By ‘political ordering’, we mean the organisation of human being together, from the interpersonal to the international to the cosmological.

18 Indicatively, see Kurki, International Relations in a Relational Universe; Blaney, D. L. and Tickner, A. B., ‘Worlding, ontological politics, and the possibility of a decolonial IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 45:3 (2017), pp. 293–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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20 Mulvaney, Encounters in Place, p. 2.

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22 Gerald Clair Wheeler, The Tribe, and International Relations in Australia (London, UK: Landmarks in Anthropology, J. Murray Johnson Reprint, 1910), p. 74.

23 Our terminology is also relationally inflected in other ways: the autochthony represented through terms such as ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Indigenous’, for instance, only gains purchase through the colonial encounter, and the adoption of collective pronouns for groups of peoples may be an effect of the coloniser's language structures. We also write in English rather than an Aboriginal language. For us this means that we – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – are related but it does not mean that Aboriginal political thought has been necessarily influenced by settler colonialism. We are, in short, together and different; ‘[t]ogether, but not mixed up.’ Miyarrka Media, Phone & Spear: A Yuta Anthropology (London, UK: Goldsmiths Press, 2019), p. 54.

24 ‘Regard’ as we deploy it here does not imply an absence of tension or conflict.

25 We reconstruct the premises of the constructive use of the concept of an ‘international system’ here, and limit our account of conventional IR to such usage. This implicates social theoretic approaches in IR that have enjoyed disciplinary dominance, such as neorealism in its various versions (see below), but also less dominant theoretical traditions, such as the English School. Indicatively, see Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012); Barry Buzan and Richard Little, International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000). For more recent attempts at embellishing IR systems thinking with more social theoretic supplements, see Albert, Mathias and Buzan, Barry, ‘On the subject matter of International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 43:5 (2017), pp. 898–917CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the purposes of our argument here, we set aside reconstructions of critical approaches to rethinking systemic theorising. Some such work, specifically with reference to complexity theory and open systems thinking (indicatively, Cudworth, Erika and Hobden, Stephen, ‘Complexity, ecologism an posthuman politics’, Review of International Studies, 39:3 (2013), pp. 643–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar) is to an extent cogent to our project, but not centrally relevant to the aims of explicating Australian Aboriginal ecological-relational multipolar inter-politics, as we will see below.

26 For an overview, see Richard Little, The Balance of Power in International Relations: Metaphors, Myths, and Models (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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29 Ibid.

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31 See Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968); a reformulation of the ‘differentiation’ story as a backdrop to answering the question of ‘what is IR [about]?’ is in Albert and Buzan, ‘On the subject matter’, pp. 905ff.

32 Waltz, Theory of International Politics; see also Barry Buzan, From International to World Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

33 See Bhambra, Gurminder K., ‘Historical sociology, international relations and connected histories’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 23:1 (2010), pp. 127–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004); De Carvalho, Benjamin, Leira, Halvard, and Hobson, John M., ‘The Big Bangs of IR: The myths our teachers still tell of 1648 and 1919’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39:3 (2011), pp. 735–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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35 See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), esp. pp. 1–16.

36 Wendt, Quantum Mind and Social Science.

37 Kurki, International Relations in a Relational Universe.

38 Indicatively, Kurki, International Relations in a Relational Universe; for an earlier version of a similar argument, see Heikki Patomaki, ‘Cosmological sources of critical cosmopolitanism’, Review of International Studies, 36 (2010), pp. 181–200.

39 Indicatively, Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Rojas, Cristina, ‘Contesting the colonial logics of the international: Toward a relational politics for the pluriverse’, International Political Sociology, 10:4 (2016), pp 369–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blaney, David L. and Tickner, Arlene B., ‘International relations in the prison of colonial modernity’, International Relations, 31:1 (2017), pp. 71–5Google Scholar.

40 We are cognisant that the broad gloss applied here necessarily understates important nuances in many contributions, including some that in many respects align with the approach we take. In the context of this Special Issue, see Navnita Chada Behera and Giorgio Shani, ‘Provincialising cosmologies: The relational cosmology of Dharma in a pluriversal IR’. More generally, the relational imaginary we present here resonates with some of the work in post-, de- and anti-colonial registers including indicatively Meera Sabaratnam, Decolonising Intervention: International State-Building in Mozambique (London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Rutazibwa, Olivia, ‘What's there to mourn? Decolonial reflection on (the end of) liberal humanitariansm’, Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, 1:1 (2019), pp. 65–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, or Robbie Shilliam, The Black Pacific: Anticolonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2015), and Decolonizing Politics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2021). This is particularly pertinent where such approaches index relational politics to ‘place’ (see Shilliam, The Black Pacific).

41 Troublesome in this context is that such approaches often overlook that ‘survivalism’ produced its own versions of the pluriverse. The ‘arch-catholic’ (and Nazi-sympathiser) Carl Schmitt uses this concept in what could well be a manifesto for survivalism, The Concept of the Political. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 53.

42 Though once again, see Behera and Shani, ‘Provincialising cosmologies’ for an approach to the observer's perspective that is quite close to the one we take here.

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46 W. Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe (New York, NY: Harper, 1958), ch. 6, pp. 144–79.

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51 Ibid., p. 91.

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53 For recent efforts in this direction, see Hayden King, ‘Discourses of conquest and resistance: International relations and Anishinaabe diplomacy’, in Randolph Persaud and Alina Sajed (eds), Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations (Milton Park, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2018), pp. 135–54; de Leon, Justin, ‘Lakota experiences of (in)security: Cosmology and ontological security’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 22:1 (2020), pp. 33–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 See Lightfoot, Global Indigenous Politics; Manuela Lavinas Picq, Vernacular Sovereignties (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2018).

55 Marcia Langton, Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television …: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and About Aboriginal People and Things (Sydney, Aus.: Australian Film Commission, 1993), p. 32.

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60 W. E. H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays, 1938–1973 (Canberra, Aus.: Australian National University Press, 1979).

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67 Brigg and Walker, ‘Indigeneity and peace’, p. 265.

68 Waltz, Theory of International Politics; Buzan, From International to World Society.

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