Routes, Roots and International Relations: (Re)Learning from the Diaspora(s)

Abstract

This article aims to understand different ways of thinking about modernity/ies. Instead of thinking through the fixity of their concepts and understandings, which lead to a totalizing and universalizing look at the modern subject, the modern State (characterized by sovereignty) and the modern international, I seek to understand how the theorization of modernity and the international starting from the movement make us contest the perspectivism of an absolute truth. It therefore brings different perspectives of truth. The movement here is based on theorizations through the routes and roots that characterize the diasporic and Atlantic perspectives as a way of (re)visiting multiple resistances. The routes and roots that run through the Atlantic(s) incorporate the movement as a place of production of political life. Therefore, I bring decoloniality as a project in constant (re)making that enables the cultivation and multiplication of imaginaries that are constituted not “despite of” but “through” difference. This movement allows us to sow different ways of being and knowing that were and still are a crucial point of rupture within the field of International Relations. Their assertions of cultural practices and the connections they create challenge and subvert the static order, making us question where (else) con we look for politics?