Plural ontology of the international: in search of overcoming the crisis in political science

The article continues the discussion initiated by Mikhail Ilyin in the second issue of this journal in 2024, addressing the crisis in political science linked to the persistence of outdated 19th-century concepts of social structures and processes. As a solution, the article suggests drawing on the experience of IR theory, which has historically faced similar crises and is now seeking solutions on the ontological level. The author demonstrates that the crises in IR theory and the crisis in political science share a common root cause: an embeddedness in a specific political ontology (post-Heideggerian) characteristic of the modern era, based on the opposition between politics and social being. A vivid example of this is Hobbes’s contrast between political order and the state of nature. The article argues that employing alternative political ontologies described by R. Esposito—such as the ontology of constituting (Deleuzian) or the ontology of instituting (neo-Machiavellian, associated with Claude Lefort)—could resolve these crises in both political science and IR theory. In these alternative frameworks, politics does not oppose the “natural order” but rather constitutes (Deleuzian variant) or institutionalizes (neo-Machiavellian variant) it. However, these approaches may also give rise to crises unique to each ontology. Thus, the article underscores the importance of an ontological turn for overcoming crisis tendencies in contemporary social sciences.