Alternative Global Entanglements: ‘Detachment from Knowledge’ and the Limits of Decolonial Emancipation

Abstract

While the call for broader conceptions about the political in general, and International Relations in particular, points to the need to redirect attention to the entanglements of societies, species and environments, in this article I address the way in which this proposed shift might still be reproducing anthropocentric understandings of global politics if serious attention is not devoted to the ontological foundations of the discipline. To do so, I first engage in a problematisation of decolonial efforts drawn from the Latin American experience that stress knowledge diversification as a means to emancipation. I then attempt to demonstrate that an exclusive intellectual engagement with entanglements and detachments might also be misleading, for their conventional conception is dependent on certain ontological commitments inherent to knowledge production, namely mind-world dualism and the linear conception of time. I therefore propose the notion of ‘detachment from knowledge’ as an alternative ontological practice through which IR students can themselves grapple with the dualist and anthropocentric oppressor/victim logic at the root of any emancipatory project. Such practice, I finally argue, not only allows us to understand the ‘global’ as indivisible, but also to engage with it beyond the exclusive pursuit of emancipation through knowledge, however diverse or decolonial it might be.

‘Wisdom for the Andean people is not associated with an accumulation of knowledge – to know a lot about many things – rather it is associated with the attribute of nurturing, where the sensitivity to know how to nurture is as important as knowing how to allow oneself to be nurtured. This reciprocal nurturing is what recreates life in the Andean world, and not the power-giving knowledge that one can have about others’ ¹

In a classical historical depiction of the initial encounters between the Spanish and Indians in the ‘New World’, Tzvetan Todorov ² provides an illustrative interpretation of how the processes of colonisation of pre-Columbian cultures unfolded after their histories and worlds became first entangled. In his account, not only does he provide key clues as to understanding the conquerors’ aversion to alterity, but he does so by exposing Columbus’ own contradictions in dealing with his knowledge about others. Specifically when it came to his encounters with the natives, for as Todorov details:

‘Either he conceives the Indians [. . .] as human beings altogether, having the same rights as himself; but then he sees them not only as equals but also identical, and this behavior leads to assimilationism, the projection of his own values on the others. Or else he starts from the difference, but the latter is immediately translated into terms of superiority and inferiority (in his case, obviously, it is the Indians who are inferior)’. ³

While this observation demonstrates a particular dynamic characteristic of such early colonial encounters, Todorov furthermore suggests that these two fundamental approaches in our experience with a ‘different other’ ‘are both grounded in egocentrism, in the identification of our own values with values in general, of our I with the universe – in the conviction that the world is one’. ⁴ Yet, what happens when our knowledge about the world is radically disrupted? For instance, what if instead of inhabiting a worldly universe, we are rather part of a larger pluriverse? Or relatedly, what if the worlds of both colonisers and colonised were already entangled even before they first met?

Instead of providing another revisionist historical account of colonisation, this article engages precisely in a disruption of knowledge. Yet, rather than an exploration of colonisation, it is concerned with the ‘material, intellectual, emotional and spiritual conditions shaped by [its] consequences’, ⁵ that is, with coloniality, ⁶ and its inherent link with knowledge generation practices altogether. Thus, focusing on the region in which the colonial encounters described by Todorov took place and later became known as Latin America, I argue in this article that the call for shifting towards entanglements/detachments in International Relations (IR) ⁷ might still be reproducing anthropocentric understandings of global politics unless serious attention is devoted to the discipline’s own ontological foundations. To illustrate what is at stake, I centre my attention on the notion of emancipation by engaging with a particular strand of literature advanced by decolonial thinkers from this region, who see knowledge diversification as an emancipatory political project. I do so, not only because this is a geographical and sociocultural context much more familiar to my experiences and own roots, but also because the provocation regarding the prior entanglement of the colonised and colonisers’ worlds is a suggestion that comes from their radically different ontological premises. Diverging existential premises that in turn allow for an alternative and multidimensional conception of entanglements/detachments, thereby exposing the limits of over intellectual decolonial ventures aimed at overcoming colonisation’s ongoing legacies.

In this sense, instead of reasserting established truths or concepts of IR – the subfield of Political Science most suited to deal with how different collective groups engage one another on a global scale – I draw from philosophical and cosmological insights that inform the lived political realities and ways of being of Andean and Amazon Kichwa communities to date to advance an introductory analysis that does not take knowledge for granted, but rather grapples with its limitations in confronting its own colonial legacy. That is, the limitations that knowledge itself poses in our encounters with different ‘others’, which seem to indicate that the colonial aversion to difference might not be a thing of the past, but rather a constant potentiality. After all, if knowledge is always imbricated with power, and if power is everywhere, ⁸ we might as well redirect our attention not only to the myriad of entanglements/detachments globally, but also to the very logics that sustain the desirability to further expand knowledge, be it in this or other directions.

Thus, to make this argument, I first problematise the calls for decolonising knowledge as a means to emancipation by showing how their focus on epistemological concerns that sustain them –while necessary to expose the limits of universality –, paradoxically reinforces subtle colonial dynamics rooted in an ontological incompatibility through which academic knowledge trumps over more relational ways of engaging existence. I then discuss the implications that such inattention might pose for the desired redirection of the discipline towards entanglements/detachments by arguing that, parallel to such intellectual efforts, we (IR students) ⁹ would also need an alternative engagement with our own ontological and disciplinary predispositions to come to terms with the interconnected nature of global politics. Specifically, I contend that the very desire to acquire knowledge about the world constitutes a particular ‘worlding’ ¹⁰ or way of being in the world, which rests on a configuration of two interrelated commitments at the core of knowledge production practices: mind-world dualism and the universal linear conception of time. These ontological commitments, which are not universal but have rather been universalised, I aim to demonstrate, run counter to Andean and Amazon Kichwa philosophical and cosmological orientations, which rather shed light on their shortcomings. That is, they help us to conceive of such commitments, philosophical in nature, as merely features of a Euromodern ‘one world’ ontology that deprives us from recognising our own deep entangled nature, thereby disciplining our engagements in any given encounter. Finally, the article provides the notion of detachment from knowledge as a practical means to redress such limitations, for it allows us to acknowledge the dualist and anthropocentric oppressor/victim logic at the root of any emancipatory project, and potentially opens up the conversation for broader conceptions of global politics.

International Relations and the Paradoxes of Overcoming Coloniality

Whether through efforts of vindicating the ‘Global South’ for more adequate theoretical reflections ¹¹ or, more broadly, through a whole revamping of the discipline’s shortsighted global scope, ¹² IR students have for some time now been engaged in confronting the specter of the discipline’s colonial legacies. Yet, efforts to redress such limitations run the risk of overlooking broader questions relating to the ways in which knowledge production practices have been organised, ¹³ which in effect render the issue of overcoming coloniality a complex task. Such a task, I argue, is not, and cannot be, a solely intellectual and critical endeavour. Indeed, as Çapan contends, ‘being critical of International Relations and wanting to change the field does not amount to wanting to ‘decolonise’ the field’. ¹⁴ In this section, I problematise thus the limits of decolonial moves centred on notions of knowledge diversification as a means to bringing about emancipation for the peoples and voices from the so-called Global South.

Certainly, discussions on coloniality and their concomitant decolonial responses to tackle its many-fold manifestations are not new. Yet, I focus here specifically on a strand of literature coming from Latin America, a context geographically linked to the Global South, for from this perspective coloniality and the ‘colonial matrix of power’ are concepts that indicate well-entrenched continuities of colonialism beyond the eradication of colonial administrations. ¹⁵ I engage such insights, however, through a sceptical, yet complementary approach. Namely, while sympathetic to their criticisms of the universal pretensions of a Eurocentric subjectivity ¹⁶ and the concomitant exposure of the colonial logics of ‘the international’ that they have enabled, ¹⁷ I take a different stance vis-à-vis some of these scholars’ deliberate normative arguments advocating for epistemological diversity in the hopes of a certain ‘vindication’ of the (Global) South. ¹⁸ Instead, I challenge their epistemological arguments with an ontological disruption afforded by recent relational work in IR, ¹⁹ which turns on its head the very logics of emancipation as a political project.

In Latin American academic circles, since Quijano’s seminal sociological reflections on the coloniality of modernity, ²⁰ contestation has materialised against a Eurocentric and hegemonic interpretation of knowledge. ²¹ By exposing modernity’s ‘darker side’, ²² coloniality is now seen as operating in tandem with the project of modernity based on the domination of Western philosophy and science since its foundation, ²³ which for Quijano constituted particular dynamics pertaining to what has come to be known as the ‘colonial matrix of power’. ²⁴ In his view, the colonial matrix of power is a global historical power structure that cannot be reduced to the economic sphere, but needs to be seen as rooted in the paradigm of rational knowledge that paved the way for the European colonial domination of the rest of the world. ²⁵ Indeed, as Grosfoguel puts it, ‘there is no overarching capitalist accumulation logic that can instrumentalise ethnic/racial divisions and that precedes the formation of a global colonial, Eurocentric culture’. ²⁶ From this perspective, then, while the struggle for economic control is certainly one of its key components, the colonial matrix of power perspective also includes the struggle for authority, the control of the public sphere and the control of knowledge and subjectivity. ²⁷ In fact, for Tlostanova and Mignolo, the latter constitutes the most important sphere of life that enables domination. ²⁸

What the foregoing highlights is how their initial emphasis on the link between modernity and capitalism was progressively superseded by their focus on knowledge and subjectivity. Indeed, as Taylor notes, ‘the coloniality of power perspective understands colonial domination to be not only one of physical control and exploitation but also an epistemological domination’. ²⁹ As such, it is not surprising that its underlying political commitment focuses on emancipation from the control of knowledge through decoloniality. As Mignolo explains, ‘emancipation and liberation are indeed two sides of the same coin, the coin of modernity/coloniality’, which is why ‘decoloniality is an even larger project that encompasses both [. . .] the colonized and the colonizer – and therefore, emancipation and liberation’. ³⁰ As such, this project places emphasis on ‘the struggle for epistemic decolonization’ ³¹ or what Dussel calls ‘transmodernity’, which refers to a decolonial project that promotes the epistemic diversity of the world, including the philosophies of the colonised. ³² The logic is straightforward: if knowledge is being used as a domination tool, the goal is to take it over to put an end to subjugation. In other words, if knowledge has been colonised, one needs to decolonise it as a means to liberation.

Notwithstanding their valid critiques, and given that these decoloniality scholars mainly focus on Indigenous experiences, I refuse to wholly buy into their call for more epistemic diversity. This is not to suggest that their contributions have not enriched intellectual reflections for overcoming coloniality. Quite the opposite. However, I consider their emancipatory quest to be based on an ontological reductionism, a peculiar phenomenon that arises when people who embrace the condition of separation are unable to grasp the robust relational nature of reality inherent in incommensurate existential commitments. ³³ By condition of separation, I refer to a specific commitment in terms of philosophical ontology which has been introduced in IR as mind-world dualism. ³⁴ This is so, for these non-Western philosophies depart from relational ontological suppositions that assume that the mind is always and already intertwined with the world, thus exposing the limits of academic knowledge as inherently partial and limited, an insight also stressed by recent relational work even from within the Western paradigm. ³⁵ Yet, given the foundational nature of the existential commitments at hand that ‘express how, at the most fundamental level, existence and that which exists, is conceived’, ³⁶ such ontological reductionism extends to the various methodological strategies also coming from academic ‘monist’ approaches, as they continue to reinforce an anthropocentric view through which humans alone are conceived as being able to apprehend reality. ³⁷ By advocating merely for epistemological diversity at the expense of broader existential concerns, in other words, such scholars fail to identify how they continue to advocate for an exclusive scientific engagement with ontology, a tendency which in itself has been ‘monopolized by the assumption of separation as the primordial condition of existence’, ³⁸ thus missing the full range of implications that ‘the philosophies of the colonised’ afford.

De Sousa Santos’ project for decolonising knowledge can serve as an illustrative example. ³⁹ According to him, and despite acknowledging the radically different nature of their ontological premises, when confronted with Indigenous ways of life ‘we are facing non-Western worldviews that require intercultural translation work in order to be understood and valued’. ⁴⁰ Yet, if one notes how the purpose of such enterprise is reduced to epistemological translations, then the advocated diversity becomes problematic. Not only for it sees the worth of these ontologies being dependent on intellectual transcriptions by bringing together different knowledges and epistemes, but because little to no attention has been devoted to issues of ontological translatability or the ability to move across differently enacted worlds. ⁴¹ This is indeed questionable given these communities’ ways of being, which rest on distinct existential suppositions among which their diverging conception of time, as I later explain, should be a paramount concern. Put differently, the unreflective call for decolonising knowledge merely denotes a particular ontological reductionism as this omits the realisation that academic knowledge itself rests on distinct existential assumptions, which does not force its proponents ‘to question their own existential suppositions, and this further reinforces epistemic violence, which can quickly transmute into political violence’. ⁴²

Looking closer at the implications of such ontological reductionism serves to clarify these points. In his rendition of a contrast between the Amazonian Kichwa ⁴³ term runa and our all-too-familiar notion of ‘human’, Reddekop succinctly provides a telling illustration of how such philosophies are not understood in their own terms. ⁴⁴ Although ‘human’ represents its widespread translation, according to him, it fails to denote how runa also pinpoints to an ontological disjuncture in terms of fundamental existential assumptions with profound implications on how the distinction and interrelation between ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ can be differently conceived and negotiated. ⁴⁵ That is, even though those terms might be pointing to the same thing, the intellectual commitment of discerning discrete entities (i.e. ‘humans’) for the sake of knowledge generation misses the point that even such an epistemological drive is sustained by an incommensurable ontology that presumes separation as its vantage point. ⁴⁶ An intellectual drive that simultaneously entails epistemic violence, that is, violence exerted in and through efforts to apprehend reality informed by ontologically incommensurable premises and logics by just assuming their compatibility. ⁴⁷ In this case specifically, such epistemic violence manifests itself through the way in which the term ‘human’ only reinforces an intellectual tendency to see humans as atomistic entities thereby colonising reality, ⁴⁸ as it were, as such depiction cannot grasp the whole relational picture by which Kichwa communities conceive ontologically of themselves (runa); namely, as deeply relational beings inhabiting a cosmos where no ontological separation as such is possible. ⁴⁹ In short, as Reddekop puts it, ‘in the gap of translatability between human and runa can be discerned a difference in fundamental ontological assumptions made about existence and about beings’. ⁵⁰

That Latin American decoloniality scholars, in their quest to decolonise knowledge, might contribute to epistemic violence might seem at first glance surprising. After all, their insights have been instrumental in pointing out what has been termed epistemicide or the extermination of knowledge and other ways of knowing. ⁵¹ Yet, their inattention to issues of ontology proper, I contend, has overlooked that, in addition to other forms of knowing, other forms of being or engaging with existence more broadly, not rooted in our intellect alone, are possible as the very philosophies they are so concerned to defend seem to indicate. In this sense, I consider their subsequent normative-political stance predicated upon an emancipatory notion of knowledge diversification as just a call for co-opting ontologically untranslatable ways of being in the world for the sake of an intellectual endeavour with at least two major limitations. On one hand, it does not resolve the problem of adequately representing the subaltern by letting them speak in their own right, ⁵² as it were, thereby perpetuating colonial dynamics vis-à-vis indigenous communities. And on the other, it does not reach the point of questioning the very ontological commitments inherent in knowledge generation, by lending instead support to anthropocentric views on politics based on dominant imaginaries around ‘human’, which themselves hail from a modern philosophical heritage. ⁵³ In short, by sidelining fundamental ontological assumptions, such a move unintentionally engages in a erasure of how different, yet legitimate, ways of conceiving reality and ‘navigating’ it indeed exceed the intellectualised terms privileged by Western thought. ⁵⁴

The question, of course, is how this epistemic violence might also translate into political violence. In the geographical location at hand, an ongoing pattern can be discerned whereby Indigenous communities continue to bear the burden of the alluded ontological reductionism. Since early colonial encounters, the most subtle, and yet latent feature of this might be the aversion towards their ways of being along with their ontological foundations. Indeed, such denigration, which Burman calls ‘the coloniality of reality’ as it exclusively privileges ‘scientifically’ grounded understandings of it, treats indigenous ontologies as ‘nothing but cultural (mis-)representations of the world’, ⁵⁵ thereby contributing to their delegitimisation and political exclusion. Moreover, a lack of a genuine interest for grappling such ontologies in their own terms is further demonstrated when it comes to their philosophical insights, for those are usually not considered philosophy at all ⁵⁶ and are even treated as mere myths or beliefs as they confront the core of the Western ‘one world’ prism. ⁵⁷ In the Latin American context specifically, visible consequences have materialised that illustrate the violent nature of such ‘coloniality of reality’ in perpetuating these communities’ exclusion. For instance, it is these communities, especially women that have been the target of state-led violence perpetrated through forced sterilisation practices with genocidal effects ⁵⁸ or their ongoing engagement with other beings such as spirits or animals that has often been misunderstood with detrimental political consequences for them. ⁵⁹

In the case of the decoloniality scholarship at hand, given that overcoming coloniality is framed as a counter-hegemonic intellectual effort with a clear future-oriented emancipatory potential, further ‘local’ and ‘global’ counterproductive consequences might also be at stake. On one hand, by simply reasserting the inherent value of knowledge reflected in their hopes for its diversification, their own ontological commitment to separation remains largely unquestioned. This intellectual commitment, as postcolonial thinkers have already pointed out, ⁶⁰ not only contributes to an ‘othering process’ of Indigenous communities and their ways of life. In the case in point, it also represents a manifestation of epistemic violence derived from an ontological reductionism through which any given ‘other’ is conceived in the first place, for only to the extent that one conceives oneself as an autonomous being can one consider ‘others’ as such. As a result, the loaded intellectual baggage underlying the calls for epistemic diversity might potentially be put to work even in ‘local’ encounters with such communities without taking note that epistemology itself is a quintessentially modern concern. ⁶¹ As Burman elaborates, epistemology represents a ‘modern business and nothing that Indigenous peoples have dedicated any significant intellectual efforts to come to terms with’. ⁶² In short, one would overlook how encounters and everyday interactions among such communities do not rely on a mediation through academic and abstract knowledge, as this would assume an ontological commitment to separation quite foreign to them.

On a larger scale, if one considers that decoloniality scholars place a geographical emphasis on the [Global] ‘South’, a further criticism can be added to their normative emancipatory stance. Namely, that such a locating move reinforces a hierarchical binary logic through which ‘the North’ is placed in a position of superiority that one needs to overhaul. Such a teleological approach for understanding the world reveals the limitations of attempting to diversify knowledge, for it seems to follow the same logic that sustains their diagnosis around a certain ‘subjugation’ through knowledge, as it does not question the articulation of such hierarchical dualisms upon which academic knowledge is built. Once again, while their insights have been key in exposing the relation between Western and non-Western forms of knowledge, ⁶³ and in concert with my main disagreement towards their normative stance, not engaging hands on with the incommensurable nature of such philosophies at the ontological level has overlooked certain paradoxical effects. Particularly, their continued insistence on emancipation of the (Global) South through southern epistemologies overlooks how such emancipatory project continues to define the ‘South’ in a negative relation to the ‘North’, and that implicitly the ‘non-West’ now becomes linked with ‘true knowledge’ and this geographical location (South).

While such a move can be understood as a way to ‘provincialise’ ⁶⁴ the West and thus further contribute to a decolonisation of knowledge, its counterproductive political effects might be underrated. In IR, for instance, the limiting nature of such binaries and hierarchies have and continue to be thoroughly exposed. ⁶⁵ In fact, whether one deals with the Global North/South dichotomy, or the West/non-West one, the limitations for broader and inclusive political dialogues, and in turn less conflictive conceptions of politics altogether, have also been unveiled. As Hutchings puts it:

Rather than opening up the conversation, these differences delimit potential dialogue in ways that may reinforce or reverse the predominant binary hierarchy, but which do not fundamentally provincialise it. To the extent that “non-West” necessarily carries a negative reference to Western thought, it always threatens to reinvent the binary oppositions that its use was intended to overturn. And as soon as “non-West” is identified with a “what” or a “where”, then dialogue becomes constructed in terms of a governing difference or sameness. ⁶⁶

Hence, taking note of the purpose of this conference to acknowledge different ways of being in the world, holding on to such logic while pursuing emancipatory visions exclusively reliant on knowledge can detrimentally backfire. That is, they further fuel and reify a confrontational view on global politics now anchored to these seemingly opposing poles (North/South), which delivers key and initial clues on the stakes of our all-too-comfortable anthropocentrism or the idea that human beings, along with their disagreements, are the most significant entities in the cosmos.

Taken together, the foregoing initial critiques to such intellectual ontological reductionism lead me to assert what might seem a controversial realisation. More specifically, that in their calls for decolonising knowledge as a means to emancipation, such scholars paradoxically reinforce the assumption that other ontological starting points can be easily extrapolated to the ontological commitments inherent in academic knowledge, thereby reproducing subtle colonial dynamics vis-à-vis more relational ways of engaging existence. Nevertheless, given my also complementary engagement with such literature, this should not be seen as a wholesale rejection of their insights, for there is also potential on what their critiques have concomitantly enabled. Specifically, the disruption of universal or ‘one-world’ logics that other Latin American thinkers have taken on when putting forward the idea of the ‘pluriverse’. ⁶⁷ In this sense, I turn now to a problematisation of the ontological foundations of universality, so as to better understand my related sceptical view on the limits that an exclusive intellectual shift to entanglements/detachments might entail for a renewed conception of global politics more broadly.

Alternative Global Entanglements: Disrupting ‘One-world’ Logics

While the need for more connected understandings of global politics might call for redirecting IR’s focus to the entanglements of societies, species and environments, let me now problematise the obviousness of such a move by paying closer attention to the unacknowledged entanglements and logics inherent in academic practices. I do so, for in much the same way in which the so-called decolonial emphasis on emancipation paradoxically reinforces coloniality, chances are the renewed focus on global entanglements and detachments might also encounter the same fate. This is not to suggest that this is not an enhanced attempt for a better appreciation of the complex interconnection of the world. However, what I argue instead here is that parallel to renewed intellectual efforts for understanding the interconnected nature of global politics, we (IR students) would also need an alternative engagement with our own disciplinary and academic predispositions by which other forms of worlding, and thus other ways of being, are being foreclosed. ⁶⁸

By framing the argument in such terms, however, a particular caveat is in order to better understand the sceptical, yet complementary approach through which I engage the Latin American decoloniality scholarship at hand, and by extension decolonial works in IR. Specifically, given that a key feature of the relational work I build upon is the idea of transcending the ‘either-or logic’ that sustains the hierarchical and exclusionary binaries already discussed by replacing it with a ‘relational both-and logic’, ⁶⁹ my intention is not to wholly displace decolonial insights. Indeed, decolonial works in IR have greatly contributed in exposing the fallacies of knowledge rooted in the white supremacy of modernity and thus fittingly exposed the ongoing effects of coloniality on a global scale. ⁷⁰ At the face of such insights, however, my emphasis is rather on how through a relational both-and-logic doing IR can indeed follow different pathways in addition to those opened up by decolonial thought. This argument should therefore be considered as just another ‘relational’ input for just doing IR differently, for as its proponents put it, the aim is not ‘to exclude previous traditions but to introduce alternative possibilities’. ⁷¹

Thus, it is in this sense that I refer to the notion of worlding, since it emphasises the diverse ways in which other collective groups outside the West both think and practice ‘the international’. ⁷² Yet, attentive to the pitfalls of the alluded ‘either-or logic’ quite common in discussion opposing the ‘West’ versus the ‘non-West’, ⁷³ what I rather pay attention to is the ontological decentring that this notion entails. That is, I point out how distinct forms of worlding around the globe are founded by ontological switches at the foundational level, ⁷⁴ and thus in fact provide distinct sets of tools for ‘doing IR differently’. ⁷⁵ Moreover, in addressing specific disciplinary predispositions and treating them as academic ontological commitments, I am intentionally trying to demystify the inherent value of academic knowledge as the sole means through which coloniality might be overcome, for the very predisposition to acquire knowledge about the world constitutes one type of worlding, among many others, that enacts and thus reifies the world in particular ways. ⁷⁶ As such, this broader critique, which concomitantly challenges the ontological foundations of our own academic discipline, should also be considered as responding to the call to forge broader reflexivity on the complex diversity in terms of ontological and cosmological orientations that characterises the world, ⁷⁷ and as such, as expanding cosmological insights in IR beyond the Western experience. ⁷⁸

Furthermore, to the extent that through the notion worlding we expand our conceptions of agency as ‘always “reverberat[ing]” with Others in a constant process of creating, articulating, and becoming’, ⁷⁹ such an alternative stance towards academic knowledge aims at pinpointing what in the context of IR has been deemed the discipline’s entrenched ‘problem with difference’. ⁸⁰ The same problem with difference that limits the range of ways in which actors broadly understood potentially constitute the field ⁸¹ and which dates back to the first colonial encounters in this region that resulted in many of the core concepts and ideas (sovereignty, just war, etc) in the discipline attaining an undisputed core status to date. ⁸² The distinction between IR and its field understood as the object of the discipline’s focus is therefore important, since ‘if we were to do away with the distinction, we would end up assuming that there is a direct read-across from the discipline to the interactions that constitute the real world of international relations’. ⁸³ That this intervention is directly rooted in the recent literature on relational IR from around the world is further justified then, for the goal is to re-orient how one perceives, interprets and engages the ‘different other’ as IR students directly immersed – and thus entangled – in the field itself. ⁸⁴ In this sense, I subscribe to Trownsell and Tickner’s call for altering our own and most basic existential assumptions as a way to get us out and ‘beyond the re-production of patterns to forging new pathways for doing IR and engaging difference and sameness differently’. ⁸⁵ In short, to also make way for alternative entanglements in global politics.

Hence, to avoid what Kamola has identified as the paradoxes of reifying the discipline, ⁸⁶ arguably the most important academic ontological commitment one needs to come to terms with relates to the realisation that in politics and IR, ontology is more than just identifying and debating over what categories exist, for this is preceded by prior assumptions about existence. ⁸⁷ This is so, for if left unquestioned, one would overlook how the existential assumptions pervasive in knowledge generation practices, including IR, presume separation as the fundamental condition of existence. ⁸⁸ This ontological commitment, which in our case in point would lead us to see ‘detachments’ or ‘entanglements’ as boasting existential autonomy for the sake of knowledge production, does not fundamentally break the pattern of how we as IR students also respond to our own entangled nature. Put differently, it would not allow us to recognise the kind of worldings that our academic practices enable and which in themselves foreclose less intellectual and alternative entanglements from emerging. Even more so, if considering that such a move would barely disrupt the familiar ‘one world’ framings enacted in IR that ultimately rely on an objective reality existing ‘out there’ and to which academic knowledge is entrusted to restlessly find correspondence. To be sure, an exclusive academic engagement with entanglements/detachments would fall short in capturing our own deep relational embeddedness in all our encounters – within and beyond academic circles – as we ‘navigate’ the very field we are supposed to study. ⁸⁹

Therefore, if the purpose of attuning our intellectual engagements to the entanglements of the messy, layered connections that constitute our world seems at first sight fitting, I base my scepticism of such a move on its unwitting reinforcement of an uncritical embrace of an external, human-observer assumption, but most importantly on the different nature that entanglements/detachments as such gain through a deep relational logic at the ontological level. After all, ‘to be entangled’, as Barad explains, ‘is to lack an independent, self-contained existence’. ⁹⁰ Building therefore on what seems to be the most basic insight from the new materialist literature that matter itself is ‘vibrant’ ⁹¹ and adopting a rather performative view of it ⁹² through which ‘the “past” and the “future” are iteratively reworked and enfolded through the iterative practices of spacetimemattering’, ⁹³ I draw the attention to the ever shifting (energetic) relations that constitute reality – encompassing thereby, of course, those that permeate through us humans – and which support what Blaney and Tickner suggest are ‘multiple-world realities’. ⁹⁴ Put differently, and based on theoretical propositions around entanglements which have already exposed the fragility of narratives ⁹⁵ – and with it notions of epistemic purity of categories ⁹⁶ – this is a deep relational view on entanglements that does not assume some sort of independency of units – all the way down to particles – which would make it impossible to get rid of the autonomous existential presumption of entities, however entangled they might be. By considering energetic relations as constitutive of reality, it rather points to the multidimensional nature of entanglements as they exceed the frameworks of a one-world ontology by positing instead the existence of an ‘infinite and non-totalizable multiplicity of worlds’, ⁹⁷ and as such allows one to acknowledge the fractal nature of what one experiences.

As proponents of such a relational perspective suggest ‘through fractality, difference and plurality do not only signify different ways of seeing the world or signal one world being approached in different ways; they actually include differently enacted worlds’. ⁹⁸ As such, this is simultaneously a relational take that transcends conventional understandings of the ‘global’ that, while admittedly beyond the scope of this article, further contributes to ‘problematise the global’ ⁹⁹ in current attempts to redress the discipline’s shortsightedness. The point to be made here, however, is that such an approach towards entanglements makes us (IR students) aware of the way in which our own existential assumptions sustain in turn worldings that give rise to distinct worlds, which dynamically coexist and overlap beyond the limitations and self-sealing logic of a ‘one world’ ontology. Given such differentiation, I consider entanglements/detachments as two sides of the same coin, for depending on the context, time and space at hand, not only is one deeply entangled from a relational standpoint, but also ‘detached’ if such relational ontological departure is displaced by exclusively insisting on the tangible material realm of particles that the ontological commitment to separation affords. In other words, what gets lost through such an either-or logic to grapple with existence is that both ontological departures can be seen as philosophically prior ‘moments’ ¹⁰⁰ that complement rather than oppose each other for difference and contrast are inevitable necessary to make sense out of this reality. As such, through relationality, entanglements/detachments are therefore always ‘emergent, momentary, and fleeting’, ¹⁰¹ and thus unintelligible in any comprehensible way despite the intellectual fictions that one can fully apprehend them.

Because of this, the challenge, as has been noted when Indigenous insights are brought into such discussions, is to avoid being ‘caught in inherited habits of description that produce spectator subjects and fail to robustly explore the range of possible reciprocal transformations of agents entangled in inquiry’, ¹⁰² and for that matter, in any given encounter broadly understood given the colonial legacies of research and scientific inquiries altogether. ¹⁰³ An ontological decentring of that kind, of course, would therefore focus on encounters, for as Querejazu elaborates:

Encounters shape life in anything but an ordered and tidy way, yet we often opt to simplify such messiness through knowledge, theories, and methodologies that attempt to capture reality in manageable and discrete categories and abstractions that can be systematized into binaries composed of opposite poles (good/bad, I/other, nature/culture). By focusing on the poles, we tend to look more at the results of the encounter, that is, what we are after the encounter has taken place. ¹⁰⁴

In this sense, if one places emphasis on encounters themselves, and conceive them as ‘relating processes of becoming’, ¹⁰⁵ the accompanying epistemological impulse that would have one look for their underlying causes and potential outcomes would be instead replaced by an acknowledgement of how encounters, of any kind, in and of themselves are dynamic (re)configurations of the kinds of worldings that sustain them. In other words, we too as IR students would start to reflect on our own participation in these co-becomings that, although seemingly ‘local’, are themselves part of the complexity of what makes up the ‘global’.

Certainly, such a shift in terms of our most basic existential assumptions speaks directly to another interrelated ontological commitment found in academic circles, and in IR in particular, which concerns the notion of time. While there have been attempts to situate IR’s temporal commitments ¹⁰⁶ and to problematise them from different vantage points, ¹⁰⁷ key theoretical insights from the so-called ‘temporal turn’ have already laid bare the overarching commitment in the discipline in privileging a timeless depiction of political reality and the constitutive role of time in IR theory itself. ¹⁰⁸ These insights, while epistemological in nature, not only corroborate the inadequacy of academic knowledge itself in trying to fully grasp the messiness of our ever changing realities as lived and practiced in all our encounters, but also point out further disruptions that a ‘one world’ ontology would need to come to terms with, namely the universal and linear conception of time.

According to Blaser, along with the interrelated features of seeing a clear distinction between Nature and Culture and treating difference in hierarchical terms, what characterises the Euromodern ‘one-world’ ontology is a clear dependence on a linear conception of time. ¹⁰⁹ The same temporal linear logic that sustains the assumption that academic progress will be made by ‘expanding’ the discipline’s focus on entanglements and detachments on a global scale. However, this assumption should be read as a broad academic commitment to this temporal linear logic, for it sustains and is sustained by a conception of knowledge as substantive, cumulative and subject to progress, features that are only possible by upholding not least than the very linearity in question. ¹¹⁰ Specifically, if our focus is to disrupt ‘one world’ logics, the linearity of time herein scrutinised encompasses a broad array of attributes such as its singular, universal, straight and flat character, whose common denominator is a neo-positivist orientation. ¹¹¹ Nevertheless, instead of directing the attention to neo-positivism as such, I shed light onto Jackson’s philosophically-informed case for foregrounding ontological issues in IR and place our attention on one of his key ‘philosophical wagers’, namely mind-world dualism. ¹¹² Not only since it sustains the alluded assumption about an objective reality existing ‘out there’, but ‘for it is arguably the most significant philosophical “wager” informing a neo-positivist approach’. ¹¹³ Contrasting such a dualist and quite familiar approach around time with other more relational conceptions thereof might help to better grasp the ontological commitment at hand.

Similar to the incommensurable nature between runa and its usual translation (human), consider now the Kichwa term pacha, which denotes simultaneously both time-and-space without an ontological disruption between both dimensions. ¹¹⁴ Such observation, which in addition to pointing out to a dynamic and cyclical conception of time-spaces from Andean Kichwa philosophy ¹¹⁵ and practices, ¹¹⁶ also denotes a present-tense predisposition for its experiencing. This is so, for such a dynamic conception of time(-space) (pacha) derives from a deep relational ontology in which the very separation between the mind and the world is no more, and most importantly for this elaboration, as it opposes a privileging of abstract thinking at the root of epistemological concerns. ¹¹⁷ In effect, as Jackson elaborates, ‘in the absence of a firm separation between the mind and the world, there would be no mind-world gap to bridge and, indeed, no “epistemology” as such’. ¹¹⁸ This alternative conception of time(space) (pacha), of course, is in stark contrast to the ontological commitment to separation inherent in intellectual practices in which time and space are conceived of as separable and separate dimensions for the sake of knowledge production. ¹¹⁹ In this sense, beyond mere epistemological constraints, the resulting timeless depictions of global politics in IR ¹²⁰ or the broader constitutive role of time in IR theory itself ¹²¹ can therefore be seen as also illustrations of these compromises at the ontological level.

Given the argument’s reorientation towards encounters, let us now see the implications of such contrasting temporal conceptions in order to clarify what is at stake when dealing relationally with entanglements/detachments. In any given encounter, whether it be within or outside academia, holding on to an exclusive universal and linear conception of time would come with an inherent emphasis on the encounter’s future outcome. Yet, such ‘transcending’ intellectual maneuver beyond the given time-space of the encounter itself, in addition to neglecting the myriad of entanglements/detachments that allowed for it to happen in the first place, would limit the scope of our own engagements within it by putting our own deep entangled nature with other beings to a secondary complementation. In other words, by ‘detaching’ ourselves intellectually from the encounter at hand, we would instantiate an ‘othering’ process that would prevent us from recognising our own participation in these co-becomings, as encounters are conceived from a deep relational standpoint. As such, this form of worlding dependent on a universal linear time conception would also fail to recognise that not everyone adheres to this linear logic, and that more ‘grounded’ experiences thereof may also be at stake when shaping how an encounter unfolds.

That such a dependence upon a linear conception of time characterises the Euromodern ‘one-world’ ontology is not new. In fact, as Friedland and Boden pointed out, ‘whereas peoples from previous epochs lived a present suffused with the past, moderns inhabit one bursting with the future and with the assumed rational ability to create that future’. ¹²² However, as the brief contrast provided herein, this Euromodern ‘one-world’ ontology is not upheld by everyone. In the case of Kichwa communities in the Andes, for instance, Lajo points out to the Andean cosmic dynamics of time-space conjunctions or pachas that further disrupt time’s usual linear conception. ¹²³ According to him, these broader cosmological dynamics comprise an ‘inner-minimum’ or Uku Pacha [‘future’], the ‘outside-maximum’ or Hanan Pacha [‘past’] and an intermediate one or Kay Pacha, ‘where the cyclicity of the previous ones cross’. ¹²⁴ In other words, the Kay Pacha is conceived as ‘the here-and-now, where we are captured by the “flow” of our collective consciousness’ and which gives us access to the other time-space conjunctions thus blurring the usual partitions between past-present-future. ¹²⁵ Noting, therefore, that other cosmological orientations, such as the one briefly described herein, disrupt our common sense picture of time as a ‘universal phenomenon’ – that is, ticking the same for everyone, everywhere – and with it open up ways for better capturing the multidimensional nature of entanglements, should help to distinguish more clearly the ontological academic commitment in question.

While there is certainly much more to learn, and even unlearn, through other cosmological orientations such as those from Kichwa communities, I can still contend that taken together both ontological commitments discussed (mind-world dualism and the universal linear conception of time) constitute a kind of worlding that deprives us (IR students) from realising the social phenomenon that our knowledge production practices collectively co-create. That is, an intellectually-driven phenomenon through which a particular view of the world as one structured entity is perpetuated and is seen as permanently waiting to be discovered rather than as the product of our own co-creations and multiple temporalities. Certainly, the predominance of such linear temporal – and even accelerating ¹²⁶ – logic and a certain dispositional estrangement or alienation (Entfremdung) ¹²⁷ that they engender in our daily encounters has led Rosa to qualify the modern conception of science and knowledge as about ‘systematically pushing the borders, increasing the volume of the known, transgressing into the yet unknown’, ¹²⁸ which seems to be the case even when scholars and students are confronted in any given encounter in the broader field of IR. Specifically, not seeing encounters as dynamic reconfigurations of our deep and multidimensional entanglements that we (IR students) ourselves help to co-create with any given ‘other’ might turn our academic predispositions for the sake of knowledge overly intrusive and transgressing. After all, what the referred ‘one world’ ontology under scrutiny, along with its ‘colonial science’ seem to overlook is that breaking off with it might entail the appreciation of temporal (re)orientations and the cultivation of different spatialities and relationalities that it has systematically ruled out. ¹²⁹

Hence, given these ontological commitments informing the very practices of knowledge production, advocating for an ontological decentring based on relational encounters as the centre of our attention should come as no surprise. However, such a move is not sustained by an intellectual desire to gain more knowledge about them, but, rather, to consider encounters as relational and spatiotemporal sites for reflectively realising such commitments and potentially engaging the infinite multiplicity of worlds and ‘others’ beyond a mere intellectual gaze. Ultimately, what is the point of knowledge diversification if the societal hierarchical differences between those ‘who know’ and those ‘who do not’ are not going to be revoked? Thus, I subscribe to Burman’s conviction that ‘there is no way we are going to intellectually reason our way out of coloniality, in any conventional academic sense’. ¹³⁰ Therefore, if the rationale behind a renewed focus on entanglements/detachments is to pave the way for more attuned understandings of the interconnected nature of global politics, perhaps ‘detaching’ ourselves from knowledge altogether might pave the way for alternative global entanglements, but more importantly for renewed conceptions of global politics more broadly.

‘Detachment from Knowledge’ ¹³¹ as an Alternative Possibility for Engaging the ‘Global’

While in the context of Latin America the discussed call for decolonising knowledge has been advocated as a means towards emancipation, I would like to detach myself from the usual connotations afforded by such term in light of this relational and multidimensional take on entanglements/detachments. Instead, given the limitations that the above mentioned ontological academic commitments pose for recognising our own deep entangled nature in any given encounter, I propose here a broader ‘detachment’ through which IR students can potentially engage the ‘global’ beyond emancipatory quests through knowledge, however diverse or ‘decolonial’ it might be. Specifically, what I contend in this last section is that rather than retreating behind our own habitual predispositions by which such commitments tend to be automatically adopted – thus reinforcing this excessively intellectual form of worlding – one could also consider engaging in a detachment from knowledge as a portal for opening oneself up for other kinds of worldings and thus other ways of being in the world. In other words, and in the spirit of the relational work I build upon, to consider detachments from knowledge as practical tools for ontological translation ¹³² and for boosting our ontological agility ¹³³ through which one may engage ‘others’ in any given encounter with a reflexive and decolonial sensitivity as a means to overcome the colonial aversion towards difference.

In the context of IR, the notion of emancipation as a political concept has already had a long tradition. Particularly when it comes to critical approaches, since “if there is anything that holds together the disparate group of scholars who subscribe to “critical theory”, as Devetak puts it, “it is the idea that the study of international relations should be oriented by an emancipatory politics”’. ¹³⁴ The vibrancy of critical IR approaches around such a notion, however, cannot be understood without the influential inputs of the Frankfurt School, whose members, according to Linklater ‘sought to recover the classical Greek idea that human reason is an instrument of enlightenment and emancipation’. ¹³⁵ Aware of their internal differences, however, I build the argument around such emancipatory commonality, for it is not only what links critical IR approaches to the Latin American decoloniality scholars in question, but also what exposes the limits of decolonial emancipation through knowledge and the quest for its diversification. Note, however, that while my main critical engagement in this section refers to critical approaches in IR – and therefore includes postcolonial and other more reflexive scholars – the intention here is to elucidate how the academic ontological commitments discussed might entail shortcomings for overcoming coloniality, which is why the criticisms advanced are applied not only but also – and even more convincingly so – to ‘mainstream’ approaches given the argument’s relational both-and logic.

With such a caveat in mind, let us consider critical IR scholars’ ontological commitment to separation and the universal linear conception of time as embodied in their quest toward realising emancipation. After all, it is their normative interest to bring about social transformation through a method of immanent critique that concerns us here, ¹³⁶ for it can be linked to the emancipatory potential that decoloniality scholars in Latin America see in their calls for epistemological diversity. While their dissatisfaction towards their ‘mainstream’ counterparts makes both of these approaches ‘critical’ and therefore ‘different’, the academic ontological commitment to separation remains quite consistent. This is so, for if taken at face value, such differences only deprive us from seeing how both group of scholars advance their corresponding insights aimed at criticising/changing a presumed objective reality existing ‘out there’, which in itself is an ontological supposition derived from a dualist perspective. ¹³⁷ In the case of critical IR scholars, that one sees a similarity with even their mainstream ‘opponents’ should come as no surprise when leaving aside mere epistemological differences. After all, arguably ‘the most significant implication of the disappearance of an explicit consideration of philosophical ontology within IR debates’, as Jackson argues, ‘is that mind-world dualism goes largely unnoticed and largely uncriticized’. ¹³⁸

As for the interrelated ontological commitment to a linear conception of time, the very concept of emancipation exposes such compromise, as it denotes a supposed future political goal to be attained. Yet, even though emancipation, in its conventional sense, indicates an act of freeing a person from someone’s control which in itself is not controversial, as I have already discussed there are certain limits to such commitments given their reliance on a ‘one world’ ontology in contrast to more relational approaches in terms of how one conceives of existence. Namely, that when used under the framings of a ‘one world’ ontology, emancipation as a political goal gets easily trapped in a universalising logic by which ‘subjugation’ or ‘control’ are directly transplanted as defining ‘global’ features to be overcome. Nevertheless, such ‘universal’ diagnoses of a supposed ‘subjugation’ and ‘domination’ by the North/West against the South/non-West, as with the case of the decoloniality scholars at hand, easily break up in turn into multiple examples in which those subjugating dynamics do not hold, let alone through a reified conception of knowledge as a mediating ‘subjugating tool’. Thus, it is in this sense that the calls for decolonising knowledge as a means to emancipation strikes me as limiting, for the teleological and universalising rationale of such observations, along with the hierarchical binary logics that sustains knowledge itself, remain largely overlooked.

That this argument is built around this broad scepticism towards academic knowledge, therefore, is aimed at pinpointing the broader limitation on the emphasis on emancipation through a ‘one world’ prism, which concerns the reinforcement of an anthropocentric conception of global politics altogether. Not only given the inherent human interest informing such a notion, but because the very possibility for considering oneself or ‘others’ as either victims or oppressors is based on human perception which, as I have suggested, exists within the alluded hierarchical binary logic that necessarily positions one category over the other. The same either-or logic and constraints of a ‘one world’ ontology that, as Rojas argues when exposing the colonial logics of the ‘international’, ‘have significant consequences that include a hierarchical ordering of human and nonhuman beings, and their exclusion from politics’. ¹³⁹ Admittedly, attention to such exclusionary views on politics in the region are not new. Latin American anthropologists, for instance, have consistently questioned the limits of anthropocentric understandings of politics that do not take into account how natural and spiritual beings do possess a capacity to engage in relations and thus manifest themselves politically. ¹⁴⁰ However, the potential of their insights – which are mainly drawn from Indigenous practices and understandings in the region – is being underrated when used to exclusively inform an emancipatory agenda ¹⁴¹ via knowledge diversification.

Such a sceptical stance, I insist, is based on the limitations that an over reliance on emancipation as a ‘universal’ political project entails. For instance, while ‘green’ emancipatory takes on politics have been advanced, ¹⁴² a common thread running through these works is the idea that a more attuned focus on environmental concerns might potentially ‘emancipate’ human and non-humans from degradation and subjugation, thus reinforcing the hierarchical and anthropocentric idea that humans alone can and should be masters of nature for their own sake. ¹⁴³ Yet, beyond this basic anthropocentric premise, I subscribe to a conception of anthropocentrism that simultaneously includes its effects, for as it has been argued, ‘anthropocentrism can also be understood as to constitute and compound the species boundary of politics in ways that bear negatively on both human life and nonhuman life’. ¹⁴⁴ In this respect, rather than denying the ongoing environmental degradation, what I point out here is that such views do not compel us to question our own existential suppositions and in turn do not disrupt such overly rational and universalising emancipatory drive through which interhuman relations are given priority as the standard of other types of relations. To be sure, even if one would restore a certain ‘political reason’ ¹⁴⁵ to non-humans and start considering other beings as political actors, one could still not attribute this same logic to their actions. For instance, one could not say that a mountain ¹⁴⁶ acts to the extent that it conceives itself as a victim in need of emancipation or as an oppressor in need of domination. In addition to referring to human concepts, chances are that all beings, human or not, might potentially be both and act accordingly given the circumstances or the specific encounter at hand, and it is such kind of ‘interspecies relations’, ¹⁴⁷ as Youatt calls them, that must also count as inhabiting and being part of the broader field of IR.

Given the attempt to contrast Kichwa notions as a way to expose their incommensurability with the frameworks of a Euromodern ontology, one last example can illustrate such subtle anthropocentrism and the prevalence of such hierarchical binary logics. Consider, for instance, the already widespread term Pachamama, which all-too-conveniently gets translated as ‘Mother-Earth’ or simply ‘Nature’. ¹⁴⁸ In light of the discussed cosmological orientation that the notion pacha entails (time-and-space), what gets lost in such intellectual translation is that such anthropomorphised depiction gets trapped in a troublesome linguistic equivalence game. ¹⁴⁹ In fact, as Lajo cautions, ‘the false content that some people give to the word Pachamama as simply Nature, can work with a Western logic and reintroduce it in the Andean world, like a Trojan Horse’. ¹⁵⁰ Moreover, given the Andean philosophical principle of complementary duality (yanantin) through which opposites are inextricably complementary rather than subsumed into teleological interpretations ¹⁵¹ – and which further justifies the argument’s reliance on a relational both-and logic – even the gendered (i.e. exclusively female) dimension of such depiction might also be problematic. ¹⁵² In broad strokes, this brief problematisation, of course, not only provides some clues as for its incommensurable nature, but also attests to the complexity in any given translation act. This is particularly the case in the Latin American context, a region in which Spanish and Portuguese, both Latin languages, have dominated knowledge production practices, and therefore monopolised intellectual representations of such communities’ ways of being, without coming to terms with the Judeo-Christian baggage, and therefore the teleological frameworks, that such languages invertedly lend to their interpretations. ¹⁵³ As de la Cadena speculates given its insertion within the Ecuadorian political constitution, for instance, such personified depiction of Pachamama ‘composes a culture-nature entity that, more complex than it seems at first sight, may belong to more than one and less than two worlds’. ¹⁵⁴

Such a guess on the complex nature of this term leads me to further justify why this relational and multidimensional take on entanglements/detachments places emphasis on encounters. However, in light of all the inadequacies in trying to find linguistic equivalencies as discussed with the other examples included herein (runa, pacha), a further clarification must be made to better grasp the ontological reductionism that even knowledge itself poses for recognising our own deep entangled nature from this relational perspective. Thus, I must reiterate that the relationality I subscribe to does not limit itself to questions of meaning or representation, for it also aims at transcending the alluded anthropocentrism. Hence, given my reliance on Andean and Amazon Kichwa philosophical principles and insights, the present argument is sustained by an ontological commitment that sees interconnection as the primordial condition of existence, and thus sees life as a constant energetic –and therefore deeply entangled – becoming. ¹⁵⁵ As such, this form of relationality is not dependent on human language, for this might only reinforce a supposed distinction – and thus an ontological separation – between humans and non-humans given their other defining faculties (reason, free will, etc). Rather, given the above-mentioned academic commitments that sustain the assumption that units/categories as self-evident, it starts from relations as constituting units instead of prioritising a supposed humanly constructed reality. Or as Trownsell et al. have succinctly noted, ‘it is not the same to state that reality is socially constructed than to say that relations constitute reality, or better yet, multiple realities’. ¹⁵⁶ In short, and following Andean and Amazon Kichwa cosmological orientations, a complex conception of multiple entangled worlds in which everything is alive and inextricably connected. ¹⁵⁷

In this respect, that the argument conceives of entanglements/detachments as always dynamic and fleeting should then be read as expressions of such relational commitment that posits the lack of any self-contained existence at the ontological level. Yet, breaking off with our own existential assumptions in such a ‘radical’ redirection is indeed no easy task. Especially for those of us schooled in Western/Westernised institutions that have become ‘disciplined’ into the existential anxieties of IR. Indeed, this becomes salient through a quick overview of any introductory course in IR, since the foundational existential assumption of the discipline sees ‘anarchy’ as the defining characteristic of ‘the international’ that needs to be overhauled, thus turning the binary opposition between ‘order’ versus ‘anarchy’ into ‘the discipline’s governing dichotomy’. ¹⁵⁸ Therefore, in order to better grasp the limitations of the dualist and anthropocentric oppressor/victim logic at the root of any emancipatory project, I would like to propose the notion of ‘detachment from knowledge’. Not only for engaging in such an intellectual detachment would help us overcome the limitations of the ontological commitments discussed, but because it can also potentially make us aware of the kinds of worldings that we as IR students are engaged in during any given encounter. After all, ‘relational encounters’, as Querezaju puts it, ‘are cosmopraxis (practice of being in and with the cosmos in relation with other times and other beings) or worldings’. ¹⁵⁹ Thus, building on suggestions that have been put forward to redress the temporal constraints of scientific knowledge practices, engaging in such a detachment from knowledge would entail adopting more ‘grounded’ ¹⁶⁰ or ‘resonant’ ¹⁶¹ predispositions not only with our surroundings but also with any given ‘other’, be it human or not.

Admittedly, similar dispositional attitudes have also been proposed by Latin American scholars as when a certain ‘slowing down reasoning’ ¹⁶² or a ‘thinking-feeling with the Earth’ ¹⁶³ have been advocated. Yet, considering that holding on excessively to the academic commitments discussed might necessarily entail an intellectual ‘detachment’ from the specific time-space at hand, the emphasis on relational encounters aims also at shedding light on the communicative and empathetic portals that engaging in a detachment from knowledge might potentially provide beyond the human realm. ¹⁶⁴ After all, while academic knowledge might help us get around among humans, what about our encounters with other beings? Once again, Reddekop’s rendition of the fundamental ontological differences among Kichwa communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon comes in handy, for as he notes, depending on the encounter at hand, non-human beings are also runas just like us. ¹⁶⁵ As such, ‘in their withdrawal, plants and animals transform into different bodies that, decoupled from old relations, develop new ways of intersecting with the environment: new ways of moving and eating and speaking, new modes of being-in-relation with others that compose how they now are’. ¹⁶⁶ The proposed detachment from knowledge, then, should furthermore be interpreted as a particular practice of being-in-relation with ‘others’, human or not. Not only would it dispose of the estrangement that an exclusive embracement of ontological separation instantiates, but it would also help oneself realise how one transforms and is transformed through all our relations including those from other beings. ¹⁶⁷

Furthermore, that I draw from Andean and Amazon Kichwa cosmological orientations aims at highlighting the temporal disruptions that engaging in a detachment from knowledge affords. This is so, for while an intellectual ‘detachment’ from the given time-space at hand for the sake of knowledge generation runs the risk of fueling a universal linear conception of time, breaking off with such intellectual gaze in any given encounter might potentially contribute to forging in ourselves more resonant susceptibilities. In fact, in the Andean context, this might help explain why the emphasis on the Kay Pacha (here-now) as the centre of our collective consciousness is privileged for more personal awareness and for expanding our own communicative sensitivities, for as Lajo elaborates, it ‘can eventually be expanded or reduced; but it reminds us that we must never ‘move away “the stomach” from the here and now’, because this error is the main source of imbalance and therefore of disease’. ¹⁶⁸ In this sense, engaging in a detachment from knowledge in any given encounter can serve a twofold purpose. On one hand, it can contribute to a better appreciation of the ‘temporal plurality’ ¹⁶⁹ that characterises global politics that the ‘one world’ ontology subsumes through its universalising linear logic. On the other hand it can help us grasp the indivisibility of what makes up the ‘global’ given this enlarged and pluriversal conception despite such different temporalities and relationalities that a mere intellectual predisposition would overlook. After all, and judging from the relational standpoint at hand, we are all deeply connected and relationally entangled beings.

In this respect, when fundamental clashes of ontological suppositions are at stake in any given encounter, especially by forms of worlding that radically diverge from our own by humans and non-human alike, what I ultimately propose here is just to consider an alternative that addresses knowledge’s own limitations to recognise our own deep entangled nature. For so doing, I contend, may potentially help us to engage ‘others’ and concomitantly the ‘global’ in a way that takes into account the diverse and multiple and deeply entangled worlds that compose it. Thus, if emancipation, in all its conventional connotations makes any sense to me, it should be directed towards our self-imposed human exceptionalism though knowledge, as it only reinforces a kind of worlding suffused with hierarchical and exclusionary dualities that just misses the point that we are all part of a multipliciplity of inseparable and dynamically interconnected worlds. Rather than emancipatory quests for decolonising knowledge with overly confrontational political implications (South vs North, West vs non-West, right vs left, etc), the call is made for considering engaging in a detachment from knowledge in any given encounter to better cope with the myriad of dissonances that a mere intellectual ‘one world’ focus on entanglement/detachments easily overlooks. After all, embracing such an enlarged and pluriversal conception of the ‘global’, as Hutchings puts it, ‘focuses our attention on what [it] means to live with others without subsuming them into one world or another’. ¹⁷⁰ In short, detaching ourselves from knowledge to encounter ourselves and ‘others’ in and despite all of our differences.

Conclusion

When accounting for the outcome of early colonial encounters, according to Todorov the destruction and colonisation of native populations in what we call Latin America today delivered ‘a terrible blow to our capacity to feel in harmony with the world, to belong to a pre-established order’. ¹⁷¹ Yet, how much of the natives’ purview has been lost in such a one-sided verdict if one takes seriously their provocation regarding the prior entanglement of the colonised and colonisers’ worlds? Based on this introductory exploration of radically different ontological and cosmological orientations that inform the worldings, or ways of being, of Andean and Amazon Kichwa communities, this article has advanced a relational conception of entanglements which takes into account their multidimensional nature – that is, one that cuts-across time and space – and in turn allows for such an alternative interpretation as it disrupts usual temporal partitions (past-present-future). That is, I propose a conception of entanglements that does away with the idea that those worlds were ever ‘detached’ from one another but rather always entangled beyond a ‘first’ worldly encounter. After all, ‘in relationality’ as it has been argued, ‘the limits between human and natural, life and death, present, past and future are blurred, and they coexist in a constant exchange and complementarity’. ¹⁷² To do so, I have tried to show how through relational existential premises that escape the frameworks of the one-world ontology from Western thought one becomes aware of the limits of the analytical purchase of entanglements/detachments, for even though they might denote opposing states of being, these distinctions become rather dissolved from an ontological vantage point that conceives of reality as a constant energetic – and thus deeply entangled – becoming, which leaves indeed no room for any sort of ‘detachment’ and with it deprives this notion from its conventional meaning.

However, through this relational argument I have been foremost interested in exposing the related limits of over intellectual decolonial ventures for overcoming coloniality by shedding light on the anthropocentric politics that such moves enable. In this sense, while there is indeed appeal to broaden our theoretical toolbox via a renewed focus on entanglements/detachments globally, this article has provided a rather sceptical take on such a move. It has done so by not taking knowledge for granted, but rather pointing to broader academic ontological commitments inherent in its production, which reveal the limitations that knowledge itself poses in our engagements with different ‘others’ – including interspecies relations beyond the human realm. I have shown this through a problematisation of the notion of emancipation as advanced by decolonial scholars from Latin America, who by advocating for a political project of decolonising knowledge paradoxically reinforce subtle colonial dynamics vis-à-vis more relational and non-anthropocentric ways of engaging existence. Thus, to the extent that the call for attuning our intellectual efforts towards global entanglements retains a similar emphasis on ‘decolonising’ or just ‘expanding’ knowledge as a way to do away with the lingering legacies of colonisation, such a move is doomed to reach a dead end. Namely, by not calling into question knowledge’s own colonial legacy as embodied in the academic ontological commitments discussed, such ontological reductionism forecloses other ways of being in the world and with it the prospects for alternative global entanglements that do not rely upon a temporal universalising logic that colonises realities and worlds enacted by different and relational ways of being. To be sure, while the decolonisation of knowledge, and IR knowledge in particular, is certainly one important and pressing task, overcoming coloniality cannot be reduced to a solely academic and intellectual endeavour, for it does not suffice to ‘be decolonial’ for the sake of knowledge alone. Rather, as IR students, the question that perhaps might also need as much attention should be how to become decolonial with others as we ‘navigate’ the broader field of IR that through our own academic practices we ourselves help to co-create and perpetuate.

As such, bearing in mind the argument’s relational both-and logic, this stance should not be seen as a wholesale rejection of academic knowledge. Instead, if one takes seriously the ontological alternative of conceiving relations as constitutive of multiple realities, then an important step to denaturalise it (knowledge) as a means to recognise our own deeply entangled nature could be to respect and take seriously what these different ontological premises might have in store for us. In the geographical context at hand, if one of the main lesson points to an enlarged and rather pluriversal conception of the ‘global’, then the challenge might be to take seriously what these peoples have been telling us all along. Namely, that ‘here [in the Andes] there is no world in itself differentiated from ourselves – unlike in the West where the whole is distinguished from the parts, or the contents from the container, and humans from nature – and about which one could speak in the third person: the world is this or it is that thing. No, here, the world is ourselves’. ¹⁷³ In this respect, instead of an emancipatory instrument for the so-called Global South or an attempt to broaden our ‘theoretical’ toolbox, engaging in a detachment from knowledge could be seen as a means to forge in ourselves a certain decolonial sensitivity, as it practically redirects our attention to us, IR students, so as to alternatively deal with the limitations that knowledge itself poses in how we engage with different ‘others’ in all our encounters. After all, it is up to us to avoid turning our encounters into colonial ones by conscientiously attuning ourselves to stop treating difference as a threat but rather embrace it to recognise ourselves in ‘others’. As the millennial wisdom from Andean and Amazon Kichwa peoples reminds us, what recreates life has barely to do with an accumulation of knowledge, but rather with a reciprocal sensitivity with any given ‘other’ which indeed opens up the possibilities and range of pathways for doing IR, and concomitantly engaging the global, differently.