‘In the West but not of the West’: Notes on Wittgenstein, dialogue, and decoloniality

Abstract The ‘relational turn’ in International Studies offers an important opportunity for the field to move beyond Eurocentric conceptions of relationality in the study of international politics. But pluralizing sources for relational thinking requires practical negotiation of epistemic, ontological, and cosmological differences for which the field remains poorly equipped. To address the methodological needs around navigating relational differences, this article rereads the philosophical method of Ludwig Wittgenstein alongside key insights from decolonial theory to provide a conceptual and practical bridge between Westernized approaches to International Studies and the diverse relationalities at play in non-Westernized ways of knowing and being. Scholars of International Studies and decolonial theory highlight Wittgenstein’s utility for deconstructing epistemic and ontological Eurocentrism. However, this article introduces for the first time the important practical, epistemic, and ethical consonances between Wittgenstein’s method of dialogical comparison and decolonial practices of pluriversal dialogue around specific ‘connectors’, seemingly cognate concepts whose irreducible plurality of meaning provides grounds for contingent practices of pluriversal encounter. Through its family resemblances to pluriversal dialogue, Wittgenstein’s method re-envisions the field’s key concepts as sites for discursive encounter across epistemic, ontological, and cosmological differences, opening possibilities for engagement with correspondingly diverse modes of relationality.