1031983

research-article2021
MIL0010.1177/03058298211031983Millennium – Journal of International StudiesBehr and Shani

Original Article

Millennium: Journal of

Rethinking Emancipation in
International Studies
2021, Vol. 49(2) 368­–391
© The Author(s) 2021
a Critical IR: Normativity, Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Cosmology, and Pluriversal DOI: 10.1177/03058298211031983
https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298211031983
journals.sagepub.com/home/mil
Dialogue

Hartmut Behr
Newcastle University, UK

Giorgio Shani
International Christian University, Japan

Abstract
This article seeks to reconceptualise emancipation in critically theorising International Relations
(IR) by developing ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ versions of normativity and applying them as conditions for a
pluriversal dialogue between different cosmologies. We start with the premise that ‘critical IR’ is
both Eurocentric and a-normative, and argue that a normative engagement with critical discourses
both inside and outside the West is necessary to recapture its emancipatory promise. Drawing
on the work of Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Derrida, we develop ‘thin’ and
‘thick’ versions of normativity. The former, we argue, operates as a critical corrective of thick
normative positions, reclaiming their openness to difference, while not making substantive moral
or political claims itself. We then apply these version of normativity to examine the possibility of a
global pluriversal dialogue between different cosmologies. Cosmologies, we argue, refer to sets of
ontological and epistemological claims about the human condition that are inherently normative.
‘Thin’ normativity applied to the ‘thick’ claims of cosmologies prevents the essentialisation
and hierarchisation of cosmological difference(s) by revealing and de-constructing the latter’s
potentially discriminatory, exclusionary, and violent tendencies. In so doing, it facilitates a global
inter-cosmological dialogue which we regard as the objective of a post-western, critical IR.

Keywords
Critical IR, normativity, emancipation

Corresponding author:
Giorgio Shani, Politics and International Studies, International Christian University, 3-10-2 Osawa, Mitaka,
Tokyo 181-8585, Japan.
Email: gshani@icu.ac.jp
Behr and Shani 369

Repenser l’émancipation dans les relations internationales critiques:

Normativité, cosmologie et conditions d’un dialogue global
Résumé
Cet article cherche à reconceptualiser l’émancipation en théorisant de manière critique les
relations internationales (RI) par le développement de versions « fine » et « dense » de la
normativité, comme conditions d’un dialogue pluriversel entre différentes cosmologies. Nous
commençons par suggérer que les « RI critiques » sont euro-centrées et a-normatives, et
soutenons qu’il est nécessaire de s’engager de manière normative dans des discours critiques au
sein de l’Occident comme en dehors pour retrouver leur promesse émancipatoire. Mobilisant les
travaux de Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse et Jacques Derrida, nous développons des versions
« fine » et « dense » de la normativité. Selon nous, la première sert de correcteur critique à
des positions normatives denses, s’appropriant leur ouverture à la différence, sans pour autant
formuler elle-même des énoncés moraux ou politiques substantiels. Nous appliquons ensuite
ces versions de la normativité pour examiner la possibilité d’un dialogue global pluriversel entre
différentes cosmologies. Ces dernières renvoient à des séries d’affirmations ontologiques et
épistémologiques sur la condition humaine qui sont intrinsèquement normatives. La normativité
« fine » appliquée aux affirmations « denses » des cosmologies empêche l’essentialisation et la
hiérarchisation de différence(s) cosmologique(s) en révélant et en déconstruisant leurs tendances
potentiellement discriminatoires, violentes et d’exclusion. Ce faisant, cela facilite un dialogue inter-
cosmologique global, envisagé comme étant l’objectif des RI critiques et post-occidentales.

Mots-clés
relations internationales critiques, normativité, émancipation

Reconsiderar la emancipación de unas relaciones internacionales críticas:

Normatividad, cosmología y las condiciones para un diálogo global
Resumen
Este artículo trata de reconceptualizar la emancipación en la teoría crítica de las relaciones
internacionales, desarrollando una «versión fina» y otra «versión densa» de la normatividad
y aplicándolas como condiciones para un diálogo pluriversal entre diferentes cosmologías.
Empezamos con la premisa de que las «relaciones internacionales críticas» son a la vez
eurocéntricas y anormativas, y sostenemos que un compromiso normativo con los discursos
críticos, tanto dentro como fuera de Occidente, es necesario para recuperar su promesa
emancipadora. Apelando al trabajo de Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse y Jacques Derrida,
desarrollamos una «versión fina» y otra «versión densa» de la normatividad. La primera, según
defendemos, opera como correctivo crítico de las posiciones normativas densas, reclamando su
apertura a la diferencia, sin reivindicaciones sustantivas morales o políticas propias. A continuación,
aplicamos estas versiones de la normatividad al examen de la posibilidad de un diálogo pluriversal
entre diferentes cosmologías. Las cosmologías —argumentamos— hacen referencia a un
conjunto de reivindicaciones ontológicas y epistemológicas sobre la condición humana que son
inherentemente normativas. La normatividad «versión fina» aplicada a las reivindicaciones de
«versión densa» de las cosmologías evita la esencialización y la jerarquización de la(s) diferencia(s)
cosmológica(s) revelando y deconstruyendo las tendencias potencialmente discriminatorias,
exclusivistas y violentas de esta última. Al hacer esto, facilita un diálogo intercosmológico global
que entendemos como el objetivo de unas relaciones internacionales críticas posoccidentales.

Palabras clave
Relaciones internacionales, normatividad, emancipación
370 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49(2)

在批判性国际关系中重思解放：规范性，宇宙学，及全球对话的条件

关键词
批判性国际关系，规范性，解放，后西方国际关系，宇宙学

本文针对规范性进行“薄”与“厚”两种不同版本的诠释，并将它们作为不同宇宙学之间产生
多元对话的条件，从而试图在批判性国际关系的框架中重新定义“解放”这一概念。我们首
先从批判性国际关系的理论体系既是欧洲中心主义又是不规范的这一前提出发，提出其与
西方境内外的批判性话语的规范性交流是兑现其解放性承诺的必要条件。再次，通过借鉴
马克斯•霍克海默，赫伯特•马尔库塞，雅克•德里达的理论，我们对规范性这一概念提出“
薄”、“厚”两种版本的诠释。 我们认为“薄”版本的规范性对“厚”版本的规范立场起到批判
纠正作用，能在不提出重大道德和政治主张的同时重新认领“厚”版本对差异的开放态度。
我们接着审视是否有可能通过运用这两个版本的规范性建立不同宇宙学之间的多元全球对
话。我们指出，宇宙学意指针对天性规范的人性条件的一系列关系其本体论与认识论的主
张。将“薄”版本的规范性运用到“厚”版本对宇宙学的主张可以揭示和解构后者潜在的歧视
性，排他性，和暴力倾向，并防止对宏观世界间存在的差异进行根本化和阶级化。“薄”版
本的规范性也以此促进多宇宙间的全球对话，实现被我们视为是后西方批判性国际关系的
目标。

Outline of a Research Programme for a Critical IR

General Problematic
‘Critical’ International Relations (IR) began as a strongly emancipatory and normative
project.1 It sought to challenge the emerging neo-‘realist’ and neo-liberal hegemony in
IR by contesting the nature of its ontological and epistemological claims which would
serve to reify and reproduce existing power relations in a highly unequal world struc-
tured by capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and the nation-state. In so doing, it high-
lighted the impossibility of separating ‘what is’ from a normative analysis of ‘what ought
to be’.2 However, it recently seems to have lost its initial focus and risks forgoing its criti-
cal potential. We argue that therefore ‘critical’ IR is currently not in a good position to
realise its emancipatory promise due to its predominant a-normative orientation.
Emancipation, however, as Mustapha Kamal Pasha reminds us, is the raison d’être of a
‘critical IR’.3 Thus, in order to realise the emancipatory promise of ‘critical’ IR, the con-
cept of emancipation itself needs to be reconceptualised, a task for which explicit norma-
tive engagement, emphasised for example by Friedrich Kratochwil, is necessary in order
to ‘rethink and reconceptualize praxis’.4

1. See for example the emancipatory and normative claims in the early writings of Richard
Ashley, Robert Cox, Cynthia Enloe, Kimberley Hutchings, Andrew Linklater, and RBJ
Walker.
2. As prominently emphasised already by Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919–
1939 (London: Macmillan and Co. 1940), 13.
3. Mustapha Kamal Pasha, ‘The ‘Secular’ Subject of Critical International Relations Theory’,
in Brincat, Lima and Nunes (eds.) Critical Theory in International Relations and Security
Studies, 108.
Behr and Shani 371

Posing the diagnostic question: ‘Why has critique run out of steam?’,5 Bruno Latour
argues that critical scholars have become accustomed to engaging in wars against each
other and against science.6 Also, in the study of international politics, dissatisfaction
with critique is not new. Some suggested that radical critique in IR had become indiffer-
ent to political concerns and contributed to the fragmenting and depoliticising of real-
world agendas.7 Others remind us that critique of international politics should address
problems people face in their everyday lives in situations of precarity, exclusion, or
extreme violence, suggesting critical theorising remains too abstract to make proper con-
nections with urgent crisis in world politics. More recently a new round of this debate
seems to be taking shape, not suggesting the exhaustion of critical theory, but problema-
tising the critical nature of scholarship produced under that heading. The very possibility
of producing a ‘critical’ IR discipline is put in question by many who consider from a
‘post-critical IR’ perspective the discipline’s irrevocably conservative nature given its
constitutive premises of sovereignty, territoriality, and statehood.8
This article takes a different perspective and proposes that because of the problem of
normativity and the resulting abandonment of emancipation, ‘critical’ IR is politically
conservative, reifying political reality (or what it observes as such) and exhausting the
potential of what critique could be by regressing into cynicism9 or a mere intellectual
reaction against positivism and technocracy in the Anglosphere.10 An integral part of
recapturing normativity is, however, the examination of the possibilities of a global IR.11
Rather than viewing critical theorising as an exclusive product of European thought,
critical discourses in different cosmological traditions can be identified. And these dis-
courses are critical in the sense that they are (self-)reflexive and contest the conventional
wisdom of hegemonic traditions within themselves and beyond but do so from within

4. Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Looking Back from Somewhere: Reflections on What Remains

‘Critical’ in Critical Theory’, Review of International Studies 33, no. 1 (2007): 25–45, 25.
5. ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical
Inquiry 30, no. (2005): 225–48.
6. Important interventions also by Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 2015); Daniel Levine, Recovering International Relations. The Promise of
Sustainable Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
7. Milja Kurki, ‘The Limitations of the Critical Edge: Reflections on Critical and Philosophical
IR Scholarship Today’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40, no. 1 (2011):
129–46.
8. Inter alia Jonathan L. Austin, ‘We Have Never Been Civilised: Torture and the Materiality
of World Political Binaries’, European Journal of International Relations 23, no. 1 (2011):
49–73.
9. See for example, the debate on critical thinking without hope (https://www.brainpickings.
org/2015/02/09/hope-cynicism. Last accessed 12 November 2019.
10. See Srjdan Vucetic, The Anglosphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). See also
in this regard Johannes Angermueller, Why There is No Post-structuralism in France. The
Making of an Intellectual Generation (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005).
11. We differentiate a global discipline of IR from a narrow engagement with ‘global IR’. For
a discussion of the latter, see Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, The Making of Global
International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
372 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49(2)

different cosmological traditions themselves in terms which may be radically different to

Western epistemologies. However, much of ‘critical’ IR fetishises the language of ‘other-
ness’, framing cultural and cosmological difference according to the imagination of a
‘self’ and thereby objectifying it according to Eurocentric terms.12 ‘Critical’ IR, in seek-
ing to inculcate an ideological rather than normative understanding of what it is to be
critical, appears, therefore as continuation of a civilising mission which seeks to ‘eman-
cipate’ and educate an ‘other’. Rather than seeing the/an ‘other’ as an integral and rela-
tional part of a post-western ‘self’, it constructs the ‘other’ as the ‘local’ in opposition to
the ‘international’.13
Part of a more differentiated critique consists therefore in a reconceptualisation of
emancipation that would be free of oppression14 in that it does not reproduce a dichotomic
opposition between those who would need to be emancipated and those who emancipate.
Emancipation thus needs to be emancipated from the ‘self’/’other’ dichotomy. The de-
essentialisation of ‘self’-’other’ dichotomies is crucial since the Western ‘self’ is histori-
cally constituted by relations of exploitation and hierarchy over that which it is not. Every
language of a ‘self’ that does not actively de-essentialise and de-construct its origins and
legacies from a global perspective of difference(s), thus reproduces a certain, culturally
specific (i.e., often liberal) subjectivity. It thus renders invisible the historical relations
which made the exercise of liberal agency possible in the first place by downplaying the
impact of colonialism in the historical construction of ‘post-western’ selves.15
This ‘post-western’ critique can be epistemologically supported with Emmanuel
Lévinas’s critique of the Western philosophical tradition that would be underpinned by a
conception of knowledge that imperialises the other.16 He identifies the underlying belief
that there is a relation between knower and the-thing-to-be-known (between noesis and
noema). Lévinas argues that knowledge thus understood always includes an act of vio-
lence as it presupposes certain qualities in the object that could be known. Knowledge
such understood is seizure. It turns something or someone to be known into an object. It
likewise disempowers ‘the object’ and subjugates it to assumptions of the ego that pre-
sumes to be in a position of knowing. Thereby the ‘other’ would become reduced to the
Self and its experiences. This is a reduction which is itself the result of Western

12. John M. Hobson and Alina Sajed, ‘Navigating Beyond the Eurofetishist Frontier of Critical
IR Theory’, International Studies Review 19, no. 4 (2017): 547–72.
13. See for instance Roger MacGinty and Oliver Richmond, ‘The Local Turn in Peace Building:
A Critical Agenda for Peace’, Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013): 763–83.
14. Ernest Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 2006), 1.
15. For our conception of ‘post-western’ see Giorgio Shani, ‘Towards a Post-Western IR: The
Umma, Khalsa Panth and Critical International Theory’, International Studies Review 10, no.
4 (2008): 722–34.
16. Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, The Levinas Reader, eds. Sean Hand and
Basil Blackwell (:Oxford 1989), 75–87. See also Donna Harraway, ‘Situated Knowledges.
The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives’, Feminist
Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99; Susanne Hoeber-Rudolph, ‘Imperialism of Categories.
Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World’, Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 1 (2005):
5–14.
Behr and Shani 373

essentialist ontologies which Lévinas calls ‘ontological imperialism’ and ‘egology’,17

i.e., an explanation, exploration, interpretation (‘logos’) of the ‘other’, and acting upon
the world from the vantage point of the Self/the ‘ego’.18 If the ego is upheld as the sole
determinant of difference – i.e., if dichotomies become affirmed – then the relations
between difference are seized by the idea of identity (or ‘selfsameness’, as Heidegger
says19) and becomes totalitarian and violent.

Our Argument in a Nutshell

In order to recuperate an understanding of emancipation which avoids the ‘ontological
imperialism’ of much of what is termed ‘critical’ IR, and much of the Western philosophi-
cal tradition upon which it is based, we will introduce the concepts of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’
normativity.20 Thereby, we seek inspiration and intellectual guidelines within the very
philosophical tradition that we then (self-)critically reflect and revise, pointing to the very
limits of the Western philosophical tradition in encounters with political, religious, and
cultural differences. We will then apply revised concepts of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ normativity
to different cosmological traditions in order to facilitate inter-cosmological dialogue. We
will not, however, elaborate on specific cosmological traditions or the attempt to concep-
tualise such dialogue since this would be beyond the scope of this article.

Thin and Thick Normativity21

Two Versions of Normativity and their Interrelation
In the following section we aim to develop two versions of normativity, ‘thin’ and ‘thick’.
Each version has its own role as well as they are interrelated. While ‘thin’ normativity

17. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity (The Hague: M. Nijhoff Publishers, 1979).
18. For a discussion of his criticism of Western philosophy, see also ‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’
(1951), Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, Robert
Barnasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 1–10. For a discussion of
Lévinas, see also Hartmut Behr, Politics of Difference. Epistemologies of Peace (London and
New York: Routledge, 2014).
19. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1962 [1927]); see
also Martin Heidegger, ‘Identität und Differenz’, esp. ‘Der Satz der Identität’, Gesamtausgabe,
I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften, Band 11 (Frankfurt/M: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006).
20. Our terminological differentiation of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ draws inspiration from Andrew
Linklater’s discussion of cosmopolitanism in The Transformation of Political Community
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). Whereas ‘thick’ cosmopolitanism offers a ‘substantive
vision of the good life’, ‘thin’ cosmopolitanism ‘defends the ideal that every human being has
an equal right to participate in dialogue to determine the principles of inclusion and exclusion
which govern global politics’ (Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community, 107).
However, whereas Linklater upheld a singular conception of universality, we base our argu-
ment on the existence of a plurality of different, and potentially competing, notions of univer-
sality. Thus, our argument cannot be dismissed as consistent with the universalist aspirations
of Liberalism.
21. Methodological remark: Our following reading of Derrida for developing ‘thin’, and
of Horkheimer and Marcuse for developing ‘thick’ normativity does not claim to present
374 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49(2)

describes the norms behind deconstruction and critique, ‘thick’ normativity describes the
norms behind active political and moral propositions. Both versions of normativity are not
only always present in a political actor’s and analyst’s worldview and actual practice –
whether, or not, conscious and pleasing – but are indeed necessary to understand, explain,
and engage critically, i.e., emancipatory, with different positions, politically and theoreti-
cally. ‘Thin’ and ‘thick’ normativity thus each have their own significance and role in
practice and in theory. They are co-constitutive and co-original in a Habermasian sense.22
This irreducability is important especially due to and in the course of their interrelation
that is important for two reasons: first, ‘thick’ normativity is required to leave the circle of
critique and to advance from the ethics of critique to political practice, re-articulating
agency. Following deconstruction, we need reconstruction. Critique and deconstruction,
however, do not provide the normative orientation necessary for action and the creation of
political order. We must formulate actionable norms even if they are contestable; and they
will always be contested in a pluralist world, thus global, pluriversal dialogue, openness
to, and empathy for difference(s) are indispensable. Such a reconstructive moment, how-
ever, will not be prescriptive. It must account for the plurality of theoretical and practical
worldviews. And it is exactly this moment of correction that describes the second relation
between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ normativity: ‘thin’ normativity functions as critical corrective,
claiming openness to, and the de-essentialisation of, difference(s) in case ‘thick’ norma-
tivity goes ‘wrong’, i.e., if political and moral narratives foreclose the empathy for
difference(s) and thereby indeed undermine plurality and perspectivity.23 Then, ‘thin’

coherent, exhaustive, or holistic interpretations of their oeuvres or legacies thereof. Our

concern is not their ‘rights’ or ‘wrongs’. Indeed, we think that any assumptions about defi-
niteness in analytical judgements is counter to the very nature of their writings, which are
exactly characterised by a querying character. Rather we see their oeuvres as an inspira-
tion for our own questions and concerns that provide orientation for possibilities to recover
emancipation and normativity in a critical IR. To read texts and authors in relation to their
questions and epistemological framework for engaging these questions corresponds to the
method of ‘symptomatic reading’ in Louis Althusser (Lire le capital, Paris: Maspero 1965;
see also Thomas Lemke, Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft – Foucaults Analyse der mod-
ernen Gouvernementalität, Berlin/Hamburg: Argument 1997). Symptomatic reading aims at
the reconstruction of a certain problematic as it exists in a text to unleash the epistemologi-
cal framework in which this problematic has been expressed and formulated, including the
terms and concepts of its discussion. Consequently, we are not interested here in the history
or legacy of Derrida, Horkheimer and Marcuse or in the traditions that arose from their think-
ing, i.e., Frankfurt School or ‘Derrideanism’, but in certain figures of thought that we identify
in their work and that are interesting for us as they resonate with, and respond as inspiration
to, questions we raise ourselves. For further discussion of reading methods, see also Behr,
Politics of Difference, pp. 13–23.
22. See Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); Jürgen
Habermas, Konstitutionalisierung des Völkerrechts und die Legitimationsprobleme einer
verfassten Weltgesellschaft in Rechtsphilosophie im 21. Jahrhundert, eds. W. Brugger, U.
Neumann and S. Kirste (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 360–79.
23. See for further discussion of this argument, Hartmut Behr, ‘Towards a Political Concept of
Reversibility in International Relations: Bridging Political Philosophy and Policy Studies’,
European Journal of International Relations 25, no. 4 (2019): 1212–35.
Behr and Shani 375

normativity as deconstructive normativity comes into operation to correct and critique

respective narratives because when and if essentialising moral or political claims these
narratives always are totalitarian and violent as critiqued with reference to Lévinas (as
above), regardless of their geographies, actors, political histories, or cultural heritages.

The Thin Normativity of Deconstruction

Deconstruction entails always a strong affirmative moment and normative commitment
which have theoretical and practical consequences, which the theorist should be aware of
and which need to be reflected, even though this aspect and its consequences are not
made explicit by Derrida and Francois Lyotard as the two major thinkers on deconstruc-
tion.24 The normative aspect of deconstruction consists in its dis-unifying, disrupting,
and temporalising character that takes place against the background of two norms: (a)
that unpacking political disunities is better than unifying and homogenising identities;
and (b) that temporalising ontology is superior to essentialising ontologies.25 We con-
clude from this a ‘thin’ normativity as the permanent advocacy for the defence of social
and political spaces that make possible, and allow for, critique. The purpose of critique
in Derrida is thus not to dismantle and critique as of right any kind of politics, but rather
to emancipate politics into its genuine vocation as potential guarantor of freedom, soli-
darity, and diversity.26 The ‘thin’ normativity of deconstruction points out the inner con-
tradictions of politics in order to procure for the precariousness of political order against
(possibly self-induced) failures and complacency. In this regard, Derrida is a normative
theorist opposing totalising narratives which do not allow for the articulation of critical
discourses.
This becomes most obvious in Derrida’s notion of the ‘advent’ that is most explicit in
his writings about democracy and Europe.27 In both cases, the (what he calls) ‘event’ –
i.e., democracy and/or Europe – is not something we possess or that we should ever
claim to possess. It is, in his language, ‘not yet there’, but something ‘that remains to be
thought and to come’.28 Derrida uses the French ‘àvenir’ to describe this situation of ‘yet

24. See for example, ‘Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Richard Kearney, ed., Dialogue
with Contemporary Continental Thinkers. The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2004), 105–26; Francois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne
(Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979). See also Jonathan Blair’s account of deconstruction as
political and as a means of giving rise to a new reality (‘Context, Event, Politics: Recovering
the Political in the work of Jacques Derrida’, Telos, no. 141 (2007): 149–65).
25. For further discussions of temporalised ontology, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time;
William E. Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
26. On the normative framing of critique, see further Hartmut Behr, ‘Conditions of Critique and
the Non-irreversibility of Politics’, Journal of International Political Theory 13, no. 1 (2017):
122–40.
27. Especially in Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading. Reflection on Today’s Europe
(Bloomington: Indiana State University Press, 1992).
28. Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 19; see also in Jacques
Derrida, Psyche. Inventions of the Other, Volume I (Stanford: Stanford California Press,
2007), 24.
376 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49(2)

to be’. The special meaning of ‘àvenir’ is that politics contains sudden, unexpected, and
unpredictable incidents, or better: the political is such an incident itself, and therefore its
precariousness needs our permanent vigilance and care through de-essentialising critique
to keep it open for the sudden, unexpected, and unpredictable to happen. To foreclose the
openness of political spaces of the event to appear and to happen, would mean ‘to total-
ize, to gather, versammeln’.29 It would be a form of ‘monogenealogy’30 and reproduce
the ‘contagious or contaminating powers of a reappropriating language’.31 Therefore, to
preserve openness and differentiation is key to avoid totalising politics.32 However, to
preserve this kind of openness and to be aware of its necessity for critique in the first
place depends on the normativity inherent in deconstruction. We call this ‘thin’ normativ-
ity that consists of the political demand to defend and keep open those spaces where
deconstruction and critical discourses take place. And we call this ‘thin’ normativity
because the norm of deconstruction, as important as it is, does not enable us to think
emancipation as building and reconstructing a (new) political order to emancipate from
respective status quos, but ‘only’ to dismantle and deconstruct an ‘old’ order. As eman-
cipation, however, requires heuristic and political orientation and guidelines,33 ‘thin’ nor-
mativity must be complemented with what we call ‘thick’ normativity to which we turn
now.

Thick Normativity: Dialectic Negation and the Role of Values and

Imagination
The Reflective and Imaginative Character of the Theorist and the Concept of Negation. In
addition to ‘thin’ normativity we suggest the notion of ‘thick’ normativity. ‘Thick’ nor-
mativity is important for the engagement of norm- and value-oriented proposition of
different ontologies in a global perspective as it allows us to engage in questions of
political agency and political order whereas thin normativity is pervaded ‘only’ by the
normativity inherent in deconstruction. We develop the notion of ‘thick’ normativity
from the writings of Horkheimer and Marcuse where we identify intellectual figures that
are driven by the same concern that we share about the requirements of critical theorising
and normativity inherent in that enterprise.
For Marcuse and Horkheimer, the task of critical analyses is not alone the analysis of
how a certain order has become naturalized through ideology. Critique must be directed
also against the way in which an order is relativized. Not only naturalising, but also rela-
tivising belief needs to be a central concern for critical theorising, including the theoreti-
cal and political emancipation from both. In the Introduction to One-dimensional Man

29. Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell. A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 13.
30. Derrida, The Other Heading, 10.
31. Derrida, Psyche, 155.
32. Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 14.
33. Those guidelines must be open for contestation and reformulations in a critical engagement
with different normativities, not least they receive correction through thin normativity.
Behr and Shani 377

Marcuse describes critical theory as the attempt to elaborate historical alternatives to

actual pathways of societal developments;34 and in Negations, he writes:

Through [critical theory], given facts are understood as appearances whose essence can be
comprehended only in the context of particular historical tendencies aiming at a different form
of reality’.35

To find out those historical alternatives and possibilities of its realisation, including the
reasons why certain pathways of historical development have dominated over others,
historical inquiry is linked to the ideas of emancipation and liberation. Marcuse argues
here that the finding and exploration of historical alternatives need comprehension of
what alternatives could have been, i.e., alternatives depend upon ideas that emancipate
thinking from the factuality of here and now. This again requires imagination. Such an
imagination and political idea is liberation. The awareness and elaboration of historical
alternatives and potentialities thus underline human beings’ potential role as creators
of their social, political, and economic conditions (see more on this and the role of
value judgements below). Also, the power of imagination is introduced here into criti-
cal theorising; or, as Horkheimer calls it, ‘constructive thinking’ and ‘phantasy’36
which go beyond conceptual thought and could, in surpassing the present and actual
sociological formations of knowledge, anticipate the future. Most importantly, it arises
from the interrelation of historical observations with each other and with the hegem-
onic ideologies of an epoch. This is done in order to then embed, contextualise, and
evaluate them within a comprehensive theory of man, society, and history, inorder
‘really to know them’.37
Yet, the idea of dialectic negation not only relates to materialistic, historical events,
but also and importantly to the awareness and consciousness of the theorist. The theo-
rist not only studies historical ‘realities’ and ‘potentialities’, but needs to be aware of,
and to build-in their analysis, a dialectic of the argument. The relation between thesis
and anti-thesis and their permanent progression are of both a materialistic and intel-
lectual character. This means that we as researchers and political actors need to be
always aware of the potential and actual negation of our own argument and should
even push and develop our own arguments towards their limits and finally their own
negation. In ‘Traditional and critical theory’, Horkheimer reflects on the role of the
theorist:

34. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London: Routledge, 2002).

35. Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London: MayFly Books, 2009), 52.
36. Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 221, 113.
37. Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 270. Marcuse writes: ‘Materialist theory (. . .) transcends
the given state of fact and moves towards a different potentiality (. . .). [A] real antithesis
(arises) from the particular historical structure of the social process of life. (. . .) At the same
time, however, appears the possibility of negating this (. . .) history that which could be.
This antagonistic character of the historical process (. . .) turns the opposition of essence and
appearance into a dialectical relationship (Marcuse, Negations, 49).
378 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49(2)

(The person of the theoretician) exercises an aggressive critique not only against the (. . .)
conscious defenders of the status quo, but against distracting, conformist, or Utopian tendencies
within his own household.38

However, the reflection on the role of the theorist goes further. Marcuse argues that the
theoretician is also in a position to experience historical potentialities that had never been
realised. This envisioning seems supported by the self-reflective dialectical development
of an argument and analysis that negate themselves as soon as they are made. And indeed,
this seems the idea when Marcuse writes: ‘Reality is overcome by being comprehended
as the mere possibility of another reality’.39
We emphasise that the notion of dialectic negation engenders the theorist’s aware-
ness of the permanent negation of both politics and history and of the possibility of
counterarguments. This notion therefore includes the necessity of constant self-reflec-
tivity and criticism (as either a concurrent aspect within, or procedural aspect subse-
quent to, one’s own argument and action).40 The reflective and imaginative character
of the critical theorist as well as of the concept of negation result in a thick political
normativity that is seconded by the following three principles that we find in
Horkheimer and Marcuse: (1) critique embraces certain values; (2) critique distin-
guishes different forms of knowledge; and (3) critique and its envisioned alternatives
are generated from historical judgment.

Critique Embraces Certain Values

Critique embraces a series of values in order to achieve its genuine purpose to make
transparent predominant constellations of rationality and irrationality in a given soci-
ety and to elaborate historical alternatives. Thus, critique is based on value
judgements.41
These values include the epistemological commitment to perspectivism, accounting
for the pluralism of interests and including self-criticism of critical theorising as well as
of the social forces which impact on it according to the maxim of the mutually constitu-
tive influence between theory and society.42 And an incremental aspect of perspectivism,
self-criticality, and reciprocity between theory and society is the further normative com-
mitment to dialectical thinking as discussed in the previous section.
Another condition for critique, however, which might come as a surprise for many, is
the appreciation of elements of what Horkheimer calls ‘traditional theory’.43 Since

38. Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, 216.

39. Marcuse, Negations, 61.
40. On the permanence of critique in Critical Theory, see also Shannon Brincat, ‘Dialectics and
World Politics: The Story So Far’, Globalizations 11, no. 5 (2014): 587–604.
41. See Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 248.
42. See for example Horkheimer, Critical Theory, Preface; Marcuse, Negations, 109.
43. See ‘The Future of Humanity Depends on the Existence Today of the Critical Attitude, Which
of Course Contains Within it Elements from Traditional Theories’ (Horkheimer, Critical
Theory, 242).
Behr and Shani 379

theoretical and practical judgement are conditioned by their relation to history, political
theory must be critically examined in its historical dimensions as well as our own judge-
ment subjected to historical contingency.44
Next to these epistemological commitments and values, there are political ones,
namely freedom and happiness. Horkheimer and Marcuse understand them as ‘basic
universal concepts’.45 Horkheimer notes that they function as a general basis to
derive all further theoretical and practical statements which develop their ‘impetus
(. . .) precisely from their universality’.46 This points to another thick normative
proposition, namely an anthropological grounding, not of the nature of ‘man’ though,
but of human potentialities.47 Such potentialities include first of all the possibility of
freedom.

Critique Distinguishes Different Forms of Knowledge

In order to reflect on the possibilities for freedom, critical theory would aspire a ‘critical
knowledge of truth’;48 and Horkheimer candidly states that ‘(s)ociology is not sufficient’
to identify such knowledge.49 But what is the reference for knowledge from beyond
society? Here, Horkheimer’s and Marcuse’s understanding of ‘ideology’ and their dif-
ferentiation between different forms of knowledge becomes important. While ‘ideology’
as the title for all knowledge which is derived from and linked back to social forces
would be important, it would not be ‘enough merely to correlate (. . .) ideas with some
(. . .) social group, as that sociological school does’,50 because:

The stereotyped application of the concept of ideology to every pattern of thought is (. . .)

based on the notion that there is no philosophical truth, in fact no truth at all for humanity, and
that all thought is seinsgebunden (situationally determined).51

Rather than deriving all knowledge about society from society and social forces, history
and historical inquiry lead to what Marcuse and Horkheimer term ‘true’ knowledge. As
the latter states: ‘We must penetrate deeper and develop [knowledge] out of the decisive

44. As exemplary elaborated by Marcuse in Chapter 1, ‘The Struggle against Liberalism in the
Totalitarian View of the State’, in Marcuse, Negations; also Horkheimer, Critical Theory, ix.
45. Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 230.
46. Marcuse, Negations, 122.
47. See Marcuse: ‘What is man? The answer (. . .) is conceived not as the description of human
nature (. . .) but rather as the demonstration of (. . .) human potentialities’ (Marcuse,
Negations, 108).
48. Ibid., 83.
49. Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 264.
50. Ibid., 263, referring critically to Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge as ontologically
not grounded (enough) and as thus providing no normative orientation, but only insights
that are floating with and depend on social contexts. Horkheimer argues that this would be
an important insight into the analysis of the status quo of societies, but would not go deep
enough to provide orientation for emancipation from status quos.
51. Ibid., 264.
380 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49(2)

historical process from which the social groups themselves are to be explained’.52
Marcuse refers back to Aristotle and Horkheimer to Plato for their distinction between
ideology (i.e., ‘seinsgebundene’ [situationally and context-related] knowledge claims)
and ‘true knowledge’.53 While ‘true’ knowledge would enable men to see ‘the relation-
ship between his activities and what is achieved thereby, between his particular existence
and the general life of society, between his everyday projects and the great ideas which
he acknowledges’, ideology, i.e., ‘seinsgebundene’ and mere sociological knowledge
would ‘discourage thought from its practical tendency of pointing to the future’, i.e., to
be emancipatory.54 Knowledge that enables emancipation thus needs to go beyond the
social, political, and cultural contexts of its production, but must reflect on the human
condition55 more generally that becomes tangible for Horkheimer and Marcuse through
the study of history. ‘True knowledge’ makes normatively thick claims.

Critique and Its Alternatives are Generated from Historical Judgment

Thus, emancipation needs normativity, and the normativity of social and political theory
is crucially a question of historically informed political judgement which is, as
Horkheimer notes, ‘conditioned by its conscious relation to the historical practice of
society’.56 Similarly, Marcuse formulates: ‘Critical theory must concern itself to a hith-
erto unknown extent with the past – precisely insofar as it is concerned with the future’.57
As we are not concerned here with the content of Critical Theory’s historical analyses,
but rather with the statement of the normativity of this commitment to such an analysis,
it may suffice here to summarise that the possibility to suggest future, alternative goals
and strategies of how to achieve them fundamentally depends on and, as Horkheimer
says,58 derives from, historical analysis. And again, as above with regard to their norma-
tive commitment to universalism and an anthropologically grounded potential and long-
ing of humans to be free, there seems to be some kind of ontologically grounded trust
because the goals of human activity are said to be immanent in, and to be contained by,
this activity itself. They ‘just’ need to be elaborated and made visible. However, the ques-
tion remains how future political and social goals, i.e., alternatives to the status quo, and
respective strategies of their achievement, can be derived and generated from such

52. Ibid., 263.

53. See Marcuse, Negations, 65; Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 265.
54. Ibid., 265.
55. We use here the language of ‘human condition’ to signal that, on the one hand, we suppose
the universal of humans’ search for meaning of their existence and its political and social
conduct; a search that is, however, expressed in many different ways, thus plurality and dif-
ference are key elements of the human condition. But just as much as difference needs a
tertium comparationis that is common and shared between differences, the human condition,
in all its different and pluralist manifestations and symbolisations, is informed by the joining
and inter-connecting search for, and narrative construction of, meaning. See below under our
discussions ‘Cosmologies and the Reformulation of Thick Normativity’.
56. Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 234.
57. Marcuse, Negations, xxi.
58. Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 213.
Behr and Shani 381

historical analysis. The argument here comes back to the importance of imagination that
is outlined above in the beginning of this subsection. Imagination and its normativity
engage and guide the generation of alternatives that emancipate from the status quo as
well as possible social and political strategies of their achievement. Because of this com-
plementary interrelation between imagination – including the role of theory and of the
theorist that involves negation – and the normativity criteria of the embrace of certain
values, of the assumption of ‘true knowledge, and of the possibility of the veracity of
historical judgment we speak of thick normativity. This goes beyond the notion of thin
normativity that we develop from Derrida in that it not only includes the defense of
spaces for critical thinking, but also a reflection and guidelines for the construction and
development of those spaces, even if those guidelines are always contested and contest-
able in a pluralist, global word.

Reconceptualising Emancipation in Post-Western IR

Having suggested criteria for critical theorising, we now turn to the question of the appli-
cation of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ normativity to the (global) study of critical discourses. Rather
than viewing critical theory as an exclusive product of European thought, critical theoris-
ing in different cultural traditions can be identified. And it is precisely the normativity of
the language used to express claims of emancipation which qualifies them as critical.
However, the criteria of ‘thick’ normativity outlined above cannot be applied directly to
different cultural traditions outside of the West and need to be rethought. They must be
revised as they are predicated on the modern Western separation of the ‘self’ and ‘other’
and ‘sacred’ and ‘temporal’ which is absent in other traditions. Talal Asad sees the emer-
gence of the concept of ‘religion’, responsible for the latter dichotomy, as inextricably
linked to developments within Christianity and particularly its relationship with political
power. He has persuasively argued that there can be no transhistorical and universal
understanding of religion.59 And secularism, as he60 and also José Casanova61 have
pointed out, can only be understood with reference to ‘religion’.
It is here where the secular nature of critical theorising needs to be interrogated to
reconceptualise emancipation in plural cultural contexts. Although critical theorists were
deeply critical of Enlightenment values, which led not only to emancipation within the
West, but also to colonialism and the camps,62 emphasising their consciousness of what

59. Talal Asad argues against a ‘universal definition of religion, not because its constituent
elements and relationships are historically specific, but that every definition itself is the
product of [culturally specific and thus cultural limited] discursive processes’; see Talal
Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reason of Power in Christianity and Islam
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 29.
60. See here foremost Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003).
61. See José Casanova, ‘The Secular, Secularizations, Secularism’, in Rethinking Secularism,
eds. Craig Calhoun, Mark Jürgensmeyer and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 54–75.
62. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, [1968] 2007), 253–63. This
382 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49(2)

Walter Mignolo has termed The Darker Side of Western Modernity’,63 they did not
engage explicitly with other cultural traditions. Consequently, critical theory can be seen
as Eurocentric.64 In this section, we will examine the applicability of the concepts of
‘thin’ and ‘thick’ normativity to different cosmological traditions in order to reconceptu-
alise emancipation from a post-western perspective. Before doing so, we need to clarify
our understanding of ‘cosmology’.

Cosmologies and the Reformulation of Thick Normativity

Cosmologies refer to sets of culturally specific ontological and epistemological proposi-
tions about the origins and the evolution of the cosmos and our position in it.65 These
propositions evince and provide responses to existential questions concerning the basic
parameters of human life including existence and being, finitude, and the experience of
difference.66 Whereas modern science offers an explanation of the material origins of the
universe,67 cosmologies link theories of origins with a set of normative political and
moral claims which offer the possibility of going beyond what is and of constructing
meaning through notions such as salvation, moksha or nirvana. Such normative claims
correspond with our understanding of ‘thick’ normativity.
Cosmology can be applied to categorise different cultural traditions which encompass
notions of the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’. All cosmologies have a notion of the sacred as well
as the profane, thus there are no exclusively ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ cosmologies.
Examples include explicitly ‘religious’ cosmologies such as those found in Abrahamic
traditions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), dharma68 and karma in the Indic traditions,
Confucianism and Daoism in the Sinic world, Ubuntu in African societies, and Buen
Vivir, Minobimaatisiiwin69 and Sentipasar in the Americas.70 The concept of cosmology,

book was introduced and edited by Hannah Arendt who similarly drew attention to the ‘darker
side of Western modernity’ in Origins of Totalitarianism. See also Horkheimer and Adorno,
Dialectics of the Enlightenment.
63. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2010).
64. See Giorgio Shani, ‘Provincialising Critical Theory: Islam, Sikhism and International
Relations’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 20, no.3 (2007): 417–34.
65. David Blaney and Arlene Tickner, ‘Worlding, Ontological Politics and the Possibility of a
Decolonial IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45, no. 3 (2017): 5.
66. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 47.
67. For an analysis of the impact of scientific cosmologies on IR, see Bentley Allan, Scientific
Cosmology and International Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
68. See Navnita Chadha Behera’s contribution, ‘Teaching a More “Rooted” IR!’; Tamara
A. Trownsell et al., ‘Differing about Difference: Relational IR from Around the World’,
International Studies Perspectives 22, no. 1 (2021): 25–64.
69. See https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/mino
bimaatisiiwin-good-life
70. We thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to these ‘non-religious’ cosmolo-
gies from the Americas.
Behr and Shani 383

therefore, has the advantage of parochialising71 the western distinction between the ‘reli-
gious’ and the ‘secular’ domains. It can be differentiated from ‘culture’ which refers to
those cosmological fragments which remain after colonisation has reduced living worlds
to essentialised, ahistorical objects for study through a process of de-sacralisation; and
from ‘religion’ which refers to notions of the ‘sacred’ severed from living cosmologies
so as to constitute a distinct domain from the ‘profane’ which does not exist in the eve-
ryday lived practice of many peoples throughout the world. Examples include G.W.F.
Hegel’s dismissal of non-Western populations as ‘peoples without history’72and his cat-
egorisation of Indian culture as inherently ‘dream-like’, hierarchical and religious in
contrast to the dynamic, logocentric ‘secular’ West.73 Similarly, John Locke’s depiction
of the Americas as a primeval state of nature inhabited by ‘noble savages’ – a term
widely yet mistakenly attributed to Jean-Jaques Rousseau – reduced the indigenous peo-
ples of the Americas to ahistorical caricatures.74
Finally, an emancipatory dimension can be identified which includes the transcend-
ence of any ‘self’ beyond and above its eventual essentialisation. Such transcendence
would permit different cosmologies to engage with one another, opening-up the possibil-
ity of a ‘global’, post-Western IR based on an inter-cosmological dialogue ethic whose
conditions will be explored in the next section. We argue therefore that instead of trans-
lating cosmological claims into a universal secular language, an attempt should be made
to understand these claims in their own terms.75 Sensitised to cosmological difference,
post-western understandings of emancipation should permit the articulation of multiple
claims to freedom without first, categorising them according to a ‘secular’/’religious’
divide; and second, without prioritising any one tradition as having a monopoly over
defining emancipation. This brings us to the problem of how to deal with multiple and

71. Our understanding of ‘parochialising’ draws on Chakrabarty’s concept of ‘provincialising’.

Whereas ‘provincialising’ highlights the simultaneous indispensability and inadequacy of cat-
egories derived from Europe to understanding the politics, histories and cultures of non-West-
ern societies, we suggest that the religious/secular divide is specific to a particular cosmology
and is consequently unable to capture the more nuanced relationship between the sacred and
the profane in the lived experiences of non-Western peoples. It is, therefore, inadequate yet
not indispensable. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought
and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). We thank an anony-
mous reviewer for pointing this out. For an early attempt to ‘provincialise’ Critical IR, see
Shani, ‘Provincializing Critical Theory’, 417–34.
72. See Eric Wolf’s seminal, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982).
73. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans.
Hugh Barr Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). For a collection of
Hegel’s writings on India, see Aakash Singh Rathore and Rimina Mohapatra, eds., Hegel's
India: A Reinterpretation, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
74. For Locke, ‘In the beginning all the world was America’. John Locke, Second Treatise of
Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 29.
75. For an application of this argument to ‘human security’, see Giorgio Shani, Religion, Identity
and Human Security (London and New York: Routledge 2014), pp. 40–61.
384 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49(2)

potentially competing thick normative claims. It is here where an engagement with ‘thin’
normativity is necessary.
Whereas ‘thick’ normativity proposes ontological and epistemological worldviews
and moral claims of cosmologies themselves, ‘thin’ normativity defends the spaces for
dialogue and openness and thus operates as a critical corrective of thick normative claims
potentially foreclosing through essentialisation of those spaces that make critical theory
and practice possible. Theorists, we argued, must be aware furthermore of the permanent
possibility of counterarguments. A dialogue between different cosmological traditions on
the meaning and importance of emancipation and on the normative orientation of and for
politics then represents a thick normativity. The characteristics of a ‘thick’ normativity
for a post-western critical IR can thus consist in a re-formulation of criteria (1)- (3) fol-
lowing Horkheimer and Marcuse as discussed above as follows: (1) critique embraces a
plurality of values; (2) critique distinguishes between different forms of epistemological
claims which may correspond to different forms of knowledge; (3) critique and its envi-
sioned alternatives are generated from historical judgement and imagination influenced
by and specific to different cosmologies.

The Application of ‘Thin’ and (Reformulated) ‘Thick’ Normativity to

Selected Cosmologies
Such a reformulation would entail an engagement with the normative propositions – both
political and existential – of different cosmological traditions. If we were to focus on
explicitly ‘religious’ cosmologies, for instance, normative propositions are clearly codi-
fied in the Holy Books of the Torah, Bible and Qu’ran, yet are contested within the tradi-
tions themselves in regards to doctrinal and schimatic disputes which have, at times, led
to sectarian contestation and conflict. Whether one regards Judaism, Christianity and
Islam as separate ‘religious’ traditions or as part of a wider ‘Abrahamic’ cosmological
tradition, there are profound similarities (notwithstanding differences) between the nor-
mative propositions codified in the Holy Books which contrast with other cosmological
traditions. These normative propositions have often influenced the development of ‘sec-
ular’ values. Since, according to Christian theology, we are all made in the image of God
(imago dei), it follows that we have a duty to respect others and treat them as ends in
themselves which forms the basis of the Kantian ‘categorical imperative’ and has, since
Vatican II in 1962, been the justification for the Catholic Church’s commitment to the
protection of human rights. However, an insistence on the universality of human rights
would constitute an example of ‘thick’ normativity, and their application to different
cosmological traditions may foreclose the possibility of dialogue with these traditions
which would be in keeping with a ‘thin’ normativity.
In Islam, a space within the jurisprudential tradition of Shar’ia Law is allowed for
itjihad or critical reasoning which has stimulated the development of ‘critical’ branches
of political Islam opposed to fundamentalist iterations. Although ijtihad, to ‘secular’
observers, may appear to be ‘conservative’ in that this reasoning takes places within the
confines of a tradition prescribed by the Shar’ia, it is critical in the sense that it can be
asserted by the individual believer reflecting on the limits of the tradition, and, as such,
Behr and Shani 385

may challenge the more orthodox interpretations offered by the ulema.76 Ijtihad here is
made possible by a commitment to a ‘thin normativity’ which qualifies the ‘thick norma-
tivity’ of the Shar’ia.
In Indic cosmologies, normative propositions have been similarly codified but can-
not be captured in written texts, whether noted by monks or Brahmans, since cosmic,
social and moral order is provided by Dharma which governs not only ‘spiritual’ but
also ‘temporal’ aspects of existence, including politics (artha).77 Dharma provides a
‘thick’ normativity which is specific to each varna (social order). However, dharma
cannot be applied to those outside of the varna order. Therefore, in contrast with
Abrahamic religious cosmologies, there is a greater tolerance of cosmological differ-
ence and a commitment to a plurality of values which is in keeping with a ‘thin’ nor-
mativity.78 Despite the seemingly hierarchical nature of varna, there is also an
emancipatory dimension to dharma in the form of moksha, liberation from suffering,
which cannot be translated into the secular language of freedom without de-sacralising
its meaning. This is more pronounced in Buddhism since nirvana (liberation from suf-
fering) is possible through individual meditation irrespective of varna or as part of a
community, sangha, and has a social dimension. In East Asia, Buddhist cosmological
ethics have been incorporated into a normative framework influenced by Daoism and
a Confucian emphasis on social harmony to form ‘popular religions’ which at times
reinforce, but often challenge official state discourses (as in the People’s Republic of
China,79 or in Japan). The fusion of Buddhist and Daoist philosophy and a Confucian
social order constitute a ‘thick normativity’ made possible by a commitment to a ‘thin
normativity’: an openness which was conducive to dialogue and co-learning before the
coming of modernity.
In cosmologies that we find on the African continent, ‘thick’ normative propositions
can be discerned in the dialogic concept of ubuntu which follows a ‘bottom-up emanci-
patory logic’ which takes the creation of a new human being as the beginning and end of
political processes: umuntu umuntu ngabantu (‘a person of a person because of, by, and
through other people’).80 Although this can be classified as a ‘secular’ cosmology
(according to criteria derived from a different cosmological register), it invests in the
concept of the ‘new’ human a sacred dimension which again parochialises the religious/
secular dichotomy which can be seen as a legacy of colonialism. Colonialism, further-
more, complicates the very articulation of ‘African’ cosmologies. For Mudimbe, Africa

76. See Ziauddin Sardar, Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures: A Ziauddin Sardar Reader,
eds. Sohail Inayatullah and Gail Boxwell ( London: Pluto Press, 2003), 27–8; also Shani,
‘Towards a Post-Western IR’, 728.
77. Behera, ‘Teaching a More “Rooted” IR!’, 50.
78. This may explain the syncretism of South Asian cosmological traditions and the porous qual-
ity of ‘religious’ boundaries before the imposition of colonial rule. See Harjot S. Oberoi, The
Construction of Religious Boundaries (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994).
79. See Adam Chau, Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary, China
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
80. Mvuselelo Ngcora, ‘Ubuntu: Toward an Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism’, International
Political Sociology 9, no. 3 (2015): 260.
386 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49(2)

as an ‘idea’ or a ‘concept’ has been ‘invented’ within a colonial archive as a ‘paradigm of

difference’. Notwithstanding the invention of Africa, Mudimbe introduces the concept of
gnosis which refers to a ‘structured, common and conventional knowledge’ which results
from the translation of African cosmological insights into the alien conceptual categories
of the modern social sciences and humanities and can be seen as an articulation of a ‘thin’
normativity.81
There are many parallels with the notions of Buen Vivir and Sentipasar which grew
out of indigenous struggles over land in Latin America. Defined as a ‘holistic view of
social life that no longer gives overriding centrality to the economy’, Buen Vivir consti-
tutes an alternative to development and challenges the ‘one world’ ontology of Euro-
modernity.82 In so doing, it may be seen as a ‘secular’ cosmology, albeit one infused in
the Andes with a spiritual attachment to Pachamama, the Inca earth Goddess akin to
‘mother nature’. This produces the ‘thick’ normative proposition that, instead of objecti-
fying nature, we should learn to sentipensar con la Tierra (‘feel-think with the earth’).
By so doing, humans and the planet Earth can begin to coexist in mutually enhancing
ways and engage in a dialogue made possible by a commitment to ‘thin normativity’
(which is complicated by the colonial legacy).83
In short, the application of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ normativity to different cosmologies
necessitates both a revision of our understanding of ‘thick’ normativity as formulated by
(European) critical theorists in the previous section and an engagement with the ‘thick’
normative claims of these traditions as illustrated above. Such an engagement, however,
is only made possible through a commitment to ‘thin’ normativity, understood as a com-
mitment to openness and dialogue that prevents essentialisations, their totalisation, and
their translation into rigid social hierarchies. We consider both ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ norma-
tivity as conditions for a possible dialogue between cosmologies as will be examined in
the next subsection.

Thin Normativity as a Condition for a Global Pluriversal Dialogue

The identification of ‘thick’ normativity in different cosmological traditions facilitates the
dialogue between different cosmologies. This dialogue would necessarily be pluriversal. A
pluriversal dialogue takes place between, within and across a range of existing cosmolo-
gies and takes ‘seriously as sources of knowledge those individuals and communities that
have been on the receiving end of colonial domination’.84 A pluriverse is based on the
premise that we inhabit different cosmologies, each with their own understanding of uni-
versality. These cosmologies – and their universes – collide, intersect, and become
enmeshed with one another. We live in a pluriverse of entangled universes rather than in

81. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
82. Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2020), 77.
83. Ibid., pp. 31–45.
84. Robin Dunford, ‘Toward a Decolonial Global Ethics’, Journal of Global Ethics 13, no. 3
(2017): 390.
Behr and Shani 387

one ‘universe’.85 For Mignolo, ‘pluriversality as a universal project is not aimed at chang-
ing the world (ontology) but at changing the beliefs and understanding (gnoseology), which
would lead to changing our (all) praxis of living in the world’.86 Thus, pluriversality points
to an inherently emancipatory project: it seeks to liberate different conceptions of univer-
sality from one particular understanding of universality which has been reified as the uni-
verse, in order to envision a collaborative ‘decolonial’ future made up of multiple,
interrelated and enmeshed universes. This has implications for our argument as it means
that, once liberated from Universality (i.e. once multiple conceptions of universality are
recognised), different cosmologies may relate to one another and engage in a dialogue of
‘thin’ and ‘thick’ normativity in order to arrive at this ‘decolonial’ future. In so doing, cos-
mologies construct different, and non-totalising, understandings of emancipation. Western
conceptions of emancipation, as represented here by the ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ normativity
derived from the Horkheimer, Marcuse, Derrida and Levinas, thus coexist, and can poten-
tially participate in a dialogue, with other conceptions of emancipation without seeking to
impose their understanding of emancipation on other worlds. This satisfies the first condi-
tion of critique outlined above, namely that it should embrace a plurality of values.
However, a pluriversal dialogue between different cosmologies is rendered diffi-
cult, but not impossible, by the legacy of colonialism and power asymmetries in the
post-colonial world. In the first place, colonialism erased many cosmologies from
history, reducing a world of many worlds, to one world. This makes it difficult for
cosmologies to be understood in their own terms87 from the ‘outside’ (i.e., by Western
audiences) since they are included in a unitary ontology which assumes that the world
is one and can be discerned within a single epistemology. Even when colonialism did
not directly lead to genocide or the destruction of indigenous cultures, it led to a thin-
ning out of cosmological traditions and their insertions into a (Western) secular nar-
rative of modernity. It did so by forcibly separating ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ dimensions
of human existence which are inextricably intertwined in daily life.88 Thereby,

85. See Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena, ‘Introduction: Pluriverse’ in A World of Many
Worlds, eds. Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018),
1–23 and Arturo Escobar Pluriversal Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).
86. Walter D. Mignolo, ‘On Pluriversality and Multipolarity’, in Constructing the Pluriverse, ed.
Bernd Reitter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), x.
87. A distinction here is necessary between ‘in their own terms’ and ‘on their own terms’. By
in their own terms, we are not arguing that cosmologies, which have their own understand-
ing of time, exist outside a shared inter-subjective understanding of time influenced power
relations arising from the transition to colonial modernity which permits them to relate to
one another. For the distinction between ‘in their own terms’ and ‘on their own terms’, see
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014), 40. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for drawing
our attention to Fabian’s work.
88. In Mircea Eliade’s classic work the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ constitute ‘two modes of being
in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in his history’. Mircea Eliade, The
Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (Orlando Harcourt
Inc, 1959), 14.
388 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49(2)

colonised societies became trapped in what Annibal Quijano termed a ‘colonial matrix
of power’ which continues to be reproduced on a global scale. This matrix had four
interrelated dimensions or vertices: control of the economy (capitalism); control of
gender and sexuality (the bourgeois family); control of authority (the nation-state);
and control of knowledge and intersubjectivity (Eurocentrism).89 For Quijano, ‘col-
onality’ is reproduced not only through exploitation by imperial powers, but also by
the ‘colonisation of the imagination’ of the colonised as what we may term cosmo-
logical thickness (i.e. the richness and internal complexity of the ontologies and epis-
temologies of the colonised) which is premised on the belief that difference must be
replaced by an aspiration for sameness: to reach the same levels of material develop-
ment as the coloniser by ‘conquering nature’ and separating the material and spiritual
realms.90 Coloniality, therefore, continues after colonialism and lives on in the imagi-
nation of the colonised, making it difficult for subaltern subjects to ‘speak’ without
ventriloquising the voices of the (white, male) colonisers.91
However, colonialism also brought these multiple worlds into contact with one
another, paradoxically initiating a pluriversal dialogue in the first place. Given the deep
interconnections and enmeshments of cosmologies, they are not totally inaccessible to
each other: We live in a world not only of plural but also of interconnected universalities
which challenge the conceptualisation of dichotomies such as the distinction between
‘inside’’ and ‘outside’ or ‘self’ and ‘other’. Colonialism provided paradoxically the con-
dition of possibility for the very peoples it dispossessed and enslaved nevertheless to
relate to one another through ‘a deep, global infrastructure of anti-colonial connectiv-
ity’.92 Attempts to suture the wounds inflicted by colonialism have led to calls for what
Robbie Shilliam calls a ‘decolonial science’ privileging a ‘deep relationality’.93
Whereas colonial science produces knowledge ‘of and for the subalterns’ through the
separation of different categories, decolonial science ‘cultivates’ rather than ‘produces’
knowledge.94 It seeks to cultivate the ‘living knowledge traditions of colonized peoples’
which provide ‘the possibility of a retrieval of thought and action that addresses global
injustices’.95 Decolonial science, in short, is thus explicitly emancipatory. This makes a
dialogue between different ‘living knowledge traditions’ on thin and thick normativity
possible, but not on the terms defined by the colonial science which privileges the logic
of separation over that of relationality. Cristina Rojas96 has extended Shilliam’s call for a

89. Annibal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America’, Nepantla 1, no. 3
(2000): 545.
90. Annibal Quijano, ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’, Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3
(2007): 168–78.
91. Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1988), 271–313.
92. Ibid., 185.
93. See Robbie Shilliam, The Black Pacific (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
94. Ibid., 25.
95. Ibid., 7.
96. Cristina Rojas, ‘Contesting the Colonial Logics of the International: Toward a Relational
Politics for the Pluriverse’, International Political Sociology 10, no. 4 (2016): 369–82.
Behr and Shani 389

‘deep relationality’ to encompass not only relations between humans but all beings.97
This accords with the ‘thick’ normativity of many cosmologies, from Andean cosmolo-
gies in Latin America to Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism and Jainism in Asia.98
However, thick normative claims may also articulate ‘racist visions, sexist visions,
visions that advocate a form of modernity that inevitably reproduces coloniality’.99
Should they be part of a global pluriversal dialogue? Certainly, these visions cannot be
discounted using the criteria outlined for ‘thick’ normativity since such a dialogue must
be open to the permanent possibility of counterarguments as outlined above. However,
‘thin’ normativity stipulates that we must keep open and defend spaces of critical dis-
courses threatened by these thick normative claims. Consequently, any participation in
dialogue should be premised on empathy and the recognition that other worlds – and
forms of normativity – are equally worthy of respect. A pluriversal dialogue does not
need to be initiated but arises from the empathetic recognition that other worlds and
conceptions of universality exist. We inhabit ‘our’ world but are also part of ‘their’ cos-
mos since our worlds are enmeshed. Oppression, domination and exploitation are based
on a prior logic of separation; we can’t oppress, colonise or exploit other worlds if ‘they’
simultaneously are recognised as an integral part of ‘our’ world without negating our-
selves. In short: Our argument here is not that cosmologies cannot be ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ or
‘hierarchical’. To make such an assertion would be to negate a key condition of ‘thick’
normativity: the permanent possibility of counterarguments. Rather, we assert that cos-
mologies should not be essentialised as ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ or ‘hierarchical’ from the ‘out-
side’ in logo-centric terms, but that an engagement with the ‘thick’ normative claims of,
and critical, emancipatory traditions within, different cosmologies based on conditions
of ‘thin’ normativity provides new, less exclusionary ontologies and epistemologies for a
critical IR that is emancipated from a particular cosmological tradition and its
universalisation.

Conclusion
This article began with the argument that ‘critical’ IR is unable to rearticulate political
praxis due to an a-normative understanding of its own theorising which leads it to
eschew emancipation. Subsequent to this diagnosis, we developed the notions of ‘thin’
and ‘thick’ normativity in order to recover the emancipatory potential of critical

97. See also Erika Cudworth, Stephen Hobden and Emilian Kavalski, eds., Posthuman Dialogues
in International Relations (London: Routledge, 2018); Donna J. Haraway, When Species
Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); and Isabelle Stengers, ‘The
Cosmological Proposal’, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, eds. Bruno
Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 1–16.
98. What is significant about Rojas’s intervention for our purposes is that she explicitly uses
the language of emancipation in positing an alternative political project to that of capital-
ist modernity. She calls this ‘emancipation-decolonisation’. Rojas, ‘Contesting the Colonial
Logics of the International’, 185.
99. Robin Dunford, ‘Toward a Decolonial Global Ethics’, 393.
390 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49(2)

theorising. ‘Thin’ and ‘thick’ normativity, we argue, are necessary for three reasons:
first, to (self)-reflect on the limits of theorising, its context, and its conditions; second,
to defend and seek out political and social spaces where critical theorising can take
place; and third, to identify and critically engage different knowledge systems and
their normative and universal claims. We have suggested to term these knowledge
systems and their epistemological and ontological orientations ‘cosmologies’, a term
that enables their non-hierarchical and non-dichotomist engagement. The concept of
cosmology engages epistemological and ontological orientations globally without car-
rying the burden of the western and Eurocentric differentiation into ‘self’- ‘other’ or
‘secular’- ‘religious’. The concept of cosmology thus allows us to rethink emancipa-
tion. On the one hand, it is emancipatory in that it fulfils the conditions necessary for
critical theorising; while at the same time it emancipates emancipation from ‘ontologi-
cal imperialism’. This reconceptualisation holds promise for an IR which is both criti-
cal (emancipatory) and post-western because it is explicitly normative and can be open
to cultural and political differences and pluralisms while not essentialising them
through ‘thick’ versions. In so doing, it retains its critical potential in being able to
reflect on and evaluate knowledge claims, neither romanticising an ‘other’, nor being
indifferent to political pluralism.
As such ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ normativity may be seen as conditions of a global, pluriversal
dialogue between different cosmologies on the possibility of emancipation. This would,
however, we argue, necessitate the following reformulation of ‘thick’ normativity as fol-
lows:(1) critique embraces a plurality of values since we inhabit different universes (2)
critique distinguishes between different forms of epistemological claims which may cor-
respond to different forms of knowledge including those which have been marginalised
and fragmented by the ‘coloniality of power’, (3) critique and its envisioned alternatives
are generated from historical judgement and imagination from multiple cosmologies
(which may be colonised); and, finally, (4) this necessitates an emancipatory project to
decolonise our imagination rooted in different cosmologies and to uncover the deep rela-
tionality which binds different cosmological fragments with one another. On the basis of
these conditions, a pluriversal dialogue would not be exclusionary as it would take into
account different cosmologically-derived understandings of emancipation which may
exist at the same time. Unlike an inter-religious or inter-civilisational dialogue, it does not
operationalise a particular category based on a separation between the ‘sacred’ and the
‘profane’, ‘spiritual’ and the ‘material’, or ‘religious’ and ‘cultural’, seeking instead to
uncover the cosmic ties which bind them together. Furthermore, it does not empower
anyone to speak on behalf of the ‘subaltern’ or ‘indigenous’. It is subversive of gendered
and racial hierarchies and contests hegemonic and totalising understandings of ‘race’,
‘religion’, and ‘gender. Finally, a pluriversal inter-cosmological dialogue disrupts bound-
aries between ‘self’ and ‘other’, and indeed the language of ‘otherness’ itself – which is
based on categories particular to some cosmologies and is thus already a specific framing
of difference(s). In so doing, pluriversal inter-cosmological dialogue de-essentialises indi-
vidual and collective identities and permits the construction of new, emancipatory
values.
Behr and Shani 391

Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Prof. Mustapha Kamal Pasha for very helpful comments on an earlier
draft of the article, the editorial team of Millennium and a number of anonymous reviewers for
their comments on the manuscript, as well as the audience of the ‘Research Conversations’ series
at Politics, Newcastle University, for additional thoughts and constructive criticisms of the manu-
script. We also thank Dr Lingbo Shangguan for the translation of the Abstract into Chinese as well
as the further translators of the Abstract into French and Spanish.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iD
Giorgio Shani https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1221-9950

Potential conflicts of interest

There are no potential conflicts of interest.