1181610

review-article2023
IPT0010.1177/17550882231181610Journal of International Political TheoryJabri

Review

Journal of International Political Theory

Ontology, relationality and

1­–8
© The Author(s) 2023

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‘difference’ sagepub.com/journals-permissions
https://doi.org/10.1177/17550882231181610
DOI: 10.1177/17550882231181610
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Vivienne Jabri
King’s College London, UK

Abstract
The article engages with Maggie Fitzgerald’s Care and the Pluriverse: Rethinking Global
Ethics. It focuses primarily on Fitzgerald’s ontoepistemological reading of relationality
and difference, suggesting an alternative reading of both concepts, one that is keeping
with a more open, plural and therefore critical understanding.

Keywords
critical theory, difference, onto-epistemology, relationality

Critical social and political thought is centrally focused on operations of power, the com-
plex of practices, both discursive and institutional, that shape subjectivity and lived
experience, that point to the conditions of possibility for these very operations and for the
potential and realisation of resistance. This intellectual backdrop is a rich tapestry of
debate and contestation, on matters relating to ontology and epistemology, on the para-
doxes of modernity, on the colonial legacy and ultimately on the relationship between
critique and emancipation. Both these latter concepts assume the possibility of political
discourse and political institutions that both recognise and transcend difference; that sig-
nifying and material bordering practices do not fully capture the subject; that there is an
imaginary where the subject of politics is at the same time a desiring subject, with a
capacity for a critique of the present and investment in alternative futures to come. This
understanding of emancipatory politics comes up against the charge of being in hoc to
western modernity and its discourses, that it is universalising and dominating. The ques-
tion of difference is hence core to debate relating to emancipatory politics and to ethical
discourses in International Relations. How is difference conceptualised, and how does its
conceptualisation enable and foreclose this debate?

Corresponding author:
Vivienne Jabri, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK.
Email: Vivienne.Jabri@kcl.ac.uk
2 Journal of International Political Theory 00(0)

Maggie Fitzgerald invites us to reflect on ethical and political considerations in a

world of difference, where identities, precarities and vulnerabilities are subject to opera-
tions of power globally. In keeping with recent calls for the ‘provincialisation’ of IR’s
discourses, postcolonial, decolonial, global, the call is for a ‘pluriversal’ understanding
of ethics and politics, where the former in particular is conceived in terms of care ethics,
championed in our discipline through feminist voices (see, e.g. Robinson, 2011). Maggie
Fitzgerald draws on care ethics and on decolonial discourses from Latin America in par-
ticular, to argue the case for a relational understanding of global ethics, one that champi-
ons care as its central trope.
The call for care ethics in the context of a pluriversal understanding of the ‘global’
does not, at first hand, seem controversial, particularly in a contemporary disciplinary
context where postcolonial, decolonial, feminist and critical perspectives have provided
an effective critique of Eurocentric domination in the discipline. At the same time, ethi-
cal perspectives in International Relations remain wedded variously to a cosmopolitan/
communitarian divide conventionally presented in somewhat misleading oppositional
terms and are so formulaic in their rendition that they appear abstracted from the actuali-
ties of politics, and specifically how we might analytically, ethically and politically con-
ceptualise difference (see Hutchings, 2018 for a critical overview).
The question of the conceptualisation of difference reappears in critical perspectives
where oppositions such as rationality and emotion, the universal and the concrete, per-
form a discursive reversal where the second term is conferred primacy; respectively, the
emotional and the concrete in the oppositions mentioned here. In this discursive milieu,
and writing in the disciplinary domain of developmental psychology, enters the discourse
of care ethics, attributed primarily to feminist psychologist Gilligan (1993), in her cri-
tique of what she saw as the universalisation of a distinctly gendered theory of moral
development. The rich debate that ensued is not for this piece, but what is worth a men-
tion in our immediate context is that (gender) difference is suggested to impact on articu-
lations of moral agency, conceived in terms of ‘care’ for the ‘concrete’ other as distinct
from abstract calculations of duty to universally applicable rules. This emphasis on the
‘concrete’ of course has a genealogy that far precedes feminist discourse, appearing in
virtue and communitarian ethics and also in critical attempts that seek to reconcile the
concrete with the universal (see Benhabib, 1992).
Pluriversal perspectives seek to move beyond what are seen as western, rationalist,
liberal, universalist, dominating discourses that variously preclude frameworks of
knowledge that are local, indigenous and culturally or historically distinctive (Mignolo,
2000). Any decolonising discourse on global ethics would similarly seek to locate moral
agency within the contingencies of what are interpreted to be ontological differences.
The core question of concern to this forum contribution, therefore, relates to how ‘differ-
ence’ is understood and how this understanding then comes to be the basis of a theory of
global ethics. Is difference being understood as constructed and produced in the contin-
gencies of discursive and institutional practices, as we might find in, for example, Michel
Foucault’s lectures on the ‘abnormal’ (Foucault, [1999] 2004), and relatedly, in Butler’s
(1993) conceptualisation of sex and gender, or on the other hand, whether we attribute
ontological weight to difference, to the extent that knowledge and moral agency, come to
be seen as a product of that ontology? Maggie Fitzgerald seeks to ground her global
Jabri 3

ethics of care in this latter ‘onto-epistemological’ understanding, where difference is

understood in terms of a ‘deep ontology’ underscored by a pluriversal vision of the
global. The element that Fitzgerald seeks to incorporate in this metaphysics of difference
is an ethic of care, challenged as it is interpreted to be by a ‘world of many worlds’. Any
reference to universality is critiqued as a product of ‘modernity’, and any suggestion of
‘human rights’ as the basis of a global ethics is dismissed as a universalising product of
a modernist, rationalist ontology. Fitzgerald enters the terrain of ontology so that she can
engage with the question of how it is that we can extend care to those who are not ‘like
us’. Where ‘modernity’ is seen to have produced a universalism of domination, the onto-
epistemological bases of difference suggest a pluriversal world that is concrete and rela-
tional rather than dominating or obliterating of difference. The core question for
Fitzgerald is: ‘how might we care for worlds that are not our own, and that are, therefore,
to some degree, unknowable to us.’ (italics Fitzgerald p.9).
As can be discerned from the above, there are a number of contentious claims relat-
ing to difference that call for particular attention and raise questions relating to the pos-
sibility of politics, judgement and even critique in a world clearly constituted by plural
positionalities. The lens in this discussion falls on three inter-related areas that emerge
from Maggie Fitzgerald’s book: the conceptualisation of ‘difference’; the assumed
dichotomy between the ‘pluriversal’ and the ‘universal’; and the political implications
of the turn to ‘deep ontology’ and the seeming rejection of ‘dialogue’ and the possibility
of conversation, with particular reference to struggles for rights. Core to each of these
points, as will be shown, is the problematic conception of the onto-epistemological
understanding of difference on offer and the suggestion that this form the ground upon
which a global ethic of care can be based. The critique provided is not a rejection of
ontological inquiry as such, in that the intention is to provide an alternative, distinctly
relational understanding of difference, one that does not render difference immutable
and static, but a product of practices. Core to the critique provided here is firstly, that
difference is a construct and not a ‘property’; for Fitzgerald and aspects of the literature
she uses, difference is indisputably read in terms of the latter. Secondly, and relatedly, I
aim to question the dichotomous representation of the ‘pluriversal’ and the ‘universal’,
suggesting instead an understanding of both as political declarations, in a way that
might, for instance, be found in Balibar’s (2006) writings. Viewed as declarations, each
concept can be appreciated as strategic and political, thereby allowing a strategic uni-
versality to economic, political and social rights, while constitutively recognising the
right to recognition as one such right.

Conceptualising difference
There is no singular world as such, but multiple worlds of experiences and positionalities,
historically and in the present, where the colonial legacy and its associated violence and
dispossession, continue to bear their imprint on the life chances of populations across the
world, their access to goods and services, their experience of the postcolonial state and its
capacities or lack thereof. Difference can be conceived in multiple ways, evidently so in
relation to structurated positionalities relating to this colonial landscape, but also, in a late
modern socio-political and socio-economic context, to positionalities relating to structures
4 Journal of International Political Theory 00(0)

that are both symbolic and material, relating as they do to symbolic, material and normative
power (Jabri, 2013). Far from reducing difference to the category of culture, this under-
standing points to the complexities of subjectivity and the form that its articulation might
take. Differences of positionality in relation to structures of domination are constituted by
a complex topography of access to resources, proximity and vulnerability to harmful prac-
tices, the absence, presence or adequacy of public infrastructure and public institutions, and
access to the public sphere and political institutions. There is a tendency in IR to reduce
difference to ‘culture’, but such differences generative of different vulnerabilities are
apparent in any neighbourhood of cities across the world, just as they are across different
communities and their lived experiences in multiple sites of exploitation, displacement,
discrimination and dispossession (Wacquant, 2016).
Difference cannot simply be assumed as given ontologically, in some sense pre-
defined, but is articulated, by the subject, but also by a wider milieu of discourses and
institutional practices that, to use an Althusserian term, interpellate the subject, as Butler
has shown, thereby creating or producing a landscape of difference that is at once both
strategic and political. Articulation and interpellation are both dynamic, changing pro-
cesses, so that we all come to inhabit different worlds at different times and spaces,
though such movement is itself imbued with inequalities and is therefore unpredictable.
The subject, as can be found in Foucault, and relatedly, Butler, negotiates the contingen-
cies of symbolic, normative and material constellations of power, of inherited narratives,
traces of memory and a normative order that differentially enables and constrains.
Another conceptualisation of subjectivity also suggests a ‘world of many worlds’ within
the subject as such, emergent as the subject articulates and negotiates the contingencies
of life; the subject ‘in process’ to draw on Kristeva (1991 and cf Jabri, 1998).
Conceived in global terms, this understanding of a relational ontology of the subject
raises a number of questions relating both to the form and content of relationalities and
their associated differential vulnerabilities, just as it does in epistemological and ethico-
political terms. Let us take, as example, the deforestation of the Amazon. This, by over-
whelming global consensus, is a set of practices that have and continue to produce harm,
to local communities in the form of displacement and dispossession and to the world as
a whole in terms of its monumental and irreversible contribution to the climate crisis. If
we were to map the assemblage, to use a Deleuzian term, implicated in the production of
such harms, the lines of flow between the elements of the assemblage would indicate a
complex cartography of complicity, complacency, but also of solidarity. Knowledge sys-
tems held by the local communities in relation to the protection of the forest would be
paramount and would, indeed do, form the basis of the conversations constitutive of the
politics of solidarity that exist across the world. As indicated in Fierke and Jabri (2019),
‘a conversation is an exchange between multiple parties that changes all who are
involved. It is an ‘intra-action’, to use Barad’s (2007) term, that transforms the bounda-
ries of difference and the world.’ The concept of ‘intra-action’ challenges the idea of
immovable identities and markers of difference, just as it reveals the power dynamics
that are implicated in the violence of non-recognition of difference.
Taking the example of the assemblage drawn out above, all involved know that the
local communities of the Amazon are immediately impacted in a number of ways that
threaten their lives and livelihoods, their relation to the materiality of their lived spaces.
Their articulations of harm are paramount in the generation of the frameworks of
Jabri 5

knowledge constitutive of the epistemic element of the assemblage. Such articulations,

along with others, come to be the basis of the socio-political and socio-legal conversa-
tions that come to form the grounds upon which global solidarities emerge and come to
be instituted, regionally in the countries involved and globally in the challenges pre-
sented to our global institutions. This conceptualisation suggests not so much a ‘pluriv-
erse’ of interconnected singularities, each with their own truth claims or confined cultural
horizons, each with their assumed properties, but a complex and unpredictable world of
relations, where ‘relationality’ is conceived as being productive and as such generative
of new potentialities in the form of epistemological and political horizons that are neither
unidirectional nor dominating, but mutually reinforcing and transformative. The onto-
epistemology suggested in this conceptualisation of relationality points to the impor-
tance of both the recognition and exploration of how practices of knowledge production
relate to differential structures of power, but also the dynamics of encounter; the episte-
mologically productive space that conversation enables.
This alternative understanding of relationality is political through and through, in that
it understands difference as construct; a product of practices that generate the divisions
of social and political life, divisions that can be deconstructed and hence challenged.
Such deconstruction is not simply a product of an intellectual exercise, but is revealed in
every instance of resistance and conflict within ascribed boundaries. Consider the women
of Iran protesting the violent imposition of the veil as the marker of culture. Every
instance of such protest and resistance reveals the uses of culture as a technology of
control and in doing so enacts a deconstruction of ascribed boundaries. At the same time,
articulations of difference can also be emancipatory, challenging practices that seek to
diminish modes of articulation seeking recognition. Anti-colonial struggles of past and
present are precisely based on such articulations of distinctiveness, the right to history
and political subjectivity. The crucial term here is ‘right’, as expressed in all such strug-
gles. The right has come to historically be recognised universally, and is hence subject to
political contestation and indeed conflict. We are witnessing such resistance and conflict
in our time in relation to Ukraine, the Palestinian territories, the calls for indigenous
rights to self-determination, and also calls for women’s rights to their own bodies and
against discriminatory and exclusionist practices. What is the ground on which we politi-
cally recognise such right and distinctly, the articulation it is given in such struggles and
the solidarities that emerge globally? In asking these questions, my aim is to show that
the assumed dichotomy between the ‘pluriversal’ and the ‘universal’ is itself subject to
critique. The next section provides such a critique by turning to Balibar’s (2012) under-
standing of difference and the politics of ‘equaliberty’, while the final section takes us
back to the question of ‘right’ or rights in the plural, distinctly, the right to political sub-
jectivity where invocations of the ‘universal’ must remain the basis upon which global
claims to rights in the face of state and non-state violence, are both recognised and acted
upon in the name of a global politics of solidarity.

The ‘pluriversal’ and the ‘universal’

There is an acknowledgement in the above discussion that the ‘world’ we inhabit is in
fact a ‘world of many worlds’. For Mignolo and others, there is no singular articulation
of the ‘universal’, but multiple such articulations that, in ‘modernity/coloniality’ have
6 Journal of International Political Theory 00(0)

been rendered variously invisible or inferior to western epistemological schema. The

modern rationality of the latter, with its ‘Christian’, ‘liberal’ and ‘Marxist’, narratives is
viewed as constituting an ontological commitment to a singular world, whereas ‘pluriv-
ersality’ aims to both reveal the colonial implications of universalist discourses while
conferring ontological status to different worlds. Where modernity’s ontological com-
mitment is to a singular world, external to the subject, that comes to be known to the
subject through scientific discovery and ultimately control, the pluriversal is a domain of
different worlds, each with their own world-making capacities, including a pluriverse of
epistemologies. This understanding of the pluriversal is taken further by other authors
drawn upon in Maggie Fitzgerald’s understanding, where ‘difference’ comes to be under-
stood in terms of ‘deep ontology’.
A number of questions emerge from this understanding of the pluriverse. The first and
most consequential ethically and politically relates to the ontology of being that informs
Maggie Fitzgerald’s justification of a global ethic of care. What does it mean to refer to
a ‘deep ontology’? How is such a ‘deep ontology’ recognised epistemologically without
the internal contradiction that so obviously emerges from a reference to it as if it derives
from an epistemologically different and external vantage point? The point of these ques-
tions is to suggest that the assumed ‘deep ontology’ forecloses the very possibility of a
relational understanding of subjectivity, one that accounts both phenomenologically and
structurally for the inequalities that must remain the ultimate focus point for a politics of
solidarity and indeed care for a world shared across difference. Do we really need a turn
to ‘deep ontology’ to know that indigenous knowledge is as vital to care for this world as
is ongoing scientific knowledge relating to the climate crisis? What is the reach of a
‘deep ontology’ and how does it account for differences within, of hierarchies based on
gender, sexual orientation or the mere desire to escape? The internal contradictions are
multiple and, once considered, begin to challenge oppositional representations of the
pluriversal and the universal. The point of such political considerations is to ask how
difference is constructed strategically in the legitimisation of exclusionist and discrimi-
natory practices or in the mobilisation of resistance.
The alternative relational ontology proposed in the first section suggests different
positionalities in relation to symbolic, normative and material continuities that differen-
tially enable and constrain, that generate inequalities in life chances, in discriminatory
practices and so on. These are different worlds and yet they are also of one world where
all within that world are impacted, but not equally so, and where the subject is also impli-
cated in the production and reproduction of the one and the many. The point of this
relational ontology is that it is not static but recursively moveable and moving, where
one framework of knowledge is or can be available to others through conversations that
change all involved. There is no suggestion of a reification or even naturalisation of pre-
given cultural identities in that these as well as other positionalities are not static, clearly
bordered lines of difference, but are products of construction. As such, they can also be
products of deconstruction, as highlighted by Balibar (2006) and Mercier (2019), both
drawing on Jacque Derrida. Mercier in particular provides a devastating critique of what
he refers to as the ‘ontological turn’ in ‘pluriversality’, particularly where difference is
conferred a Schmittian translation to ‘political ontology’.
I also want to also elaborate on excess and negativity in conceptualising political and
indeed ethical subjectivity. Maggie Fitzgerald recognises the ‘excessiveness’ of worlds
Jabri 7

and their ‘worldmaking’ capacities. At the same time, to invoke ‘excess’ seems to contra-
dict the positive iteration of identity/difference that underpins her suggested ‘deep ontol-
ogy’. Balibar (2020) makes the point in the distinction he suggests between
‘anthropological difference’ and ‘ontological difference’. As is evident from the under-
standing of a relational ontology I provide above, the subjectivity that emerges is univer-
sally applicable, pointing to the ‘fact’ that we are all differently positioned in relation to
structures of domination and legitimisation, and hence differentially vulnerable to the
ways in which difference comes to be historically ‘naturalised’ and hence taken for
granted. This dynamic, as Balibar (2020) states, ‘confers upon universality itself an anti-
nomic character’ (p. 10–11). Overcoming this antinomy, as Balibar (2020) and before
him Fanon have highlighted, through political efforts at challenging discrimination and
power relations produced through the naturalisation of difference may itself ‘reproduce
the roots of domination indefinitely.’ (p. 11). More saliently still, ‘there is, or can be, as
much violence in the project of neutralising anthropological differences as there is in the
project of deciding forever and for all what constitutes the difference, which marks of
difference are to be upheld, and which are to become silent or suppressed.’ (Balibar,
2020: 14). Balibar suggests there are no ‘generic terms’ that can capture or assign proper-
ties to categories of population, invoking ‘stable identities’ or ‘clear boundaries’. There
remains a negativity to anthropological differenc; that which exceeds capture through
signifying practices and structures of domination. As Balibar (2020) states in elaborating
on ‘ontological difference’, this means moving away from assigning properties to sub-
jects, but turning to ‘an ontology in which it is the relation itself that has to be endowed
with a certain modality of being – or perhaps better, a certain modality of changing,
becoming and oscillating.’ (p. 18). This understanding places the lens on the indetermi-
nacy of the relation or ‘relating to’ as to its generativity. What does a relation produce and
what are its conditions of possibility?
The negativity through which the subject of politics is here defined (and, constitu-
tively, of ethics) is clearly present in Frantz Fanon’s (1967) evocation of the subject in
anti-colonial struggle. Fanon provides us with a way of escaping the dualism that
Immanuel Kant recognises as a challenge to our conceptualisation of the subject; between
the ‘autonomy’ of self-legislation and the ‘heteronomy’ of external forces; for Balibar the
‘dialectical relation that has no synthesis’ (see discussion in Jabri, 2013: 69). Thus, in
making the claim to politics, the subject of colonial domination is herself transformed,
emerging, as Homi Bhabha suggests in reading Fanon, in ‘another time and another
space, the ‘no longer and not yet’, a time and place of ‘negativity’ (Bhabha, 1994, quoted
in Jabri, 2013).
It seems that an emancipatory politics and ethics has to be driven by Fanon’s negativ-
ity, where the subject of politics emerges despite the odds, but in so becoming generates
another time and another place, both having the promise of the new, yet that which is
created, indeed founded, remains cruelly indeterminate. In this conceptual schema, there
is no room for a conceptualisation of difference that confers metaphysical status to
boundaries of difference. As Balibar (2020) highlights, Derrida’s ‘quasi-transcendental
concept of differance’, with an ‘a’, refers to the indeterminacy of ‘becoming’, a ‘suspen-
sion of the determination of differences’. And perhaps in keeping with our present delib-
eration, Derrida’s differance suggests ‘a difference that is always already affected by
another difference.’ (Balibar, 2020) Perhaps this is the relationality that we can point to
8 Journal of International Political Theory 00(0)

as constitutive of an emancipatory politics, one that understands rights in terms of the

claim to politics, or the right to politics. We have witnessed the claim to such a right
across the world manifest, to name just two examples, with the women of Iran or the
democracy movement in Myanmar.

ORCID iD
Vivienne Jabri https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3383-3012

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Author biography
Vivienne Jabri is professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies at King’s
College London and is Principal Investigator on the project, Mapping Injury, funded by UKRI
(Horizon Europe Guarantee).