Seeing the ecosystem in the international: Ecological thinking as relational thinking
Seeing the ecosystem in the international: Ecological thinking as relational thinking

Summary/Abstract: As I sat down to ponder, at New Perspective’s prompting, a relational international relations (IR), the undertaking initially struck me as slightly absurd. Is ours not the social science that bears relationality in its name? I certainly fell for this promise as a graduate student who, like many of my peers in an age of accelerating globalization, felt that ‘the international’ was an important space to engage with, and who left behind a beloved Humanities in the hope of understanding the ‘relations’ it was made of. Then I remembered how little relationality I did, in fact, find. And that the reasons for this absence have occupied quite a bit of my scholarship. Absurd yet necessary, I concluded, and I readily took up the journal’s challenge of continuing to find new ways of speaking and doing a relational IR. I have taken this invitation as an occasion to reflect upon what relationality has sparked in my work rather than to comment on that part of the discpline self-labelled ‘relational IR’.

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