Within IR, scholars are starting to consider difference on the level of ontology rather than epistemology. Other worlds are introduced into IR’s political pluriverse , however, these are often encountered in faraway places, thereby playing into the colonial narrative that ontological difference does not exist in the ‘West’. This paper introduces another real from within the ‘disenchanted North’...
ABSTRACT In recent years, scholars have considered how activists are ‘being the change they want to see in the world’ and have developed the concept of prefigurative politics to describe how movements for social change align the means of their changemaking practices with the end goals of their organisations. Whereas being and embodiment seem to be central to this slogan, relatively little...
A growing group of people uses contemplation as a spiritual response to complex global challenges such as conflict. Peace, these contemplative activists argue, is not an external material condition, but an embodied, mystical experience beyond religion, language and social roles that brings about social change. Scholars should therefore reconsider the claim that spirituality in the public domain...
Abstract Contemplation, or the practice of sitting still to ‘stop and see’, can expand one’s embodied awareness. This expanded awareness resembles ethnographic sensibility, a disposition practiced by researchers to generate an understanding of the ‘field’. My fieldwork on contemplative activism involves a double thoughtful observation: once as contemplation, and once as ethnographic...