Recognition, multiplicity and the elusive international

This article argues that the normative promise of recognition theory in International Relations has become increasingly inadequate to the cross-cutting and intersecting issues characteristic of a globalised and fragmented world. Engaging in critical readings of cosmopolitan forms of recognition theory, the critique of sovereignty and Markell’s influential critique of recognition theory, I suggest that the increasing ontological specificity of recognition theory in IR has come at the expense of its ability to develop links between different areas of international politics. The result is a failure to deal with recognition’s simultaneity, or the co-existence of analytically distinct and internally coherent recognition orders that is characteristic of the international. Building on this insight, I argue that a more historically-sensitive and materialist approach to recognition can be grounded in the concept of multiplicity. By opening recognition up to processes of interaction, and not merely reproduction, multiplicity frames the international more clearly as a historical presupposition, rather than a limit, of recognition. Furthermore, placing recognition struggles within the state, international institutions or transnational movements in relation to each other ensures that IR can contribute to the further development of recognition theory by situating recognition struggles at the intersection of different moral geographies.

The Politics of “Greater India,” a Moral Geography: Moveable Antiquities and Charmed Knowledge Networks between Indonesia, India, and the West

Since the nineteenth century, today's South and Southeast Asia have become part of scholarly and popular geographies that define the region as a single, superior, civilization with Hindu-Buddhist spiritual traits and its origins in India. These moral geographies of “Greater India” are still current in universities, museums, textbooks, and popular culture across the world. This article explores, for the period from the 1890s to the 1960s, how networks of scholars, intellectuals, and art collectors linking Indonesia, mainland Asia, and the West helped shaping these moral geographies and enabled the inclusion of predominantly Islamic Indonesia. It contributes to recent debates on the role of religion and affections in Orientalism by following object-biographies and focusing on knowledge exchange via the networks they connected, and by exploring the possibilities, violence, and limits of cultural understanding as objects travel from their sites of origin to elsewhere in the world. The article conceptualizes moral geographies as a heuristic device to understand how people have imagined their belonging to a transnational space—in this case Greater India—whether they live inside or outside of that space. It examines the impact these moral geographies have on processes of inclusion and exclusion, particularly their common disregard for Indonesia's Islamic cultures. It warns against pitfalls of transnational, “Oceanic” approaches to Asian history that focus on cultural flows, as these can exaggerate the region's cultural unity and, in doing so, reify the moral geographies of Greater India that the article interrogates.

Irregular migration, borders, and the moral geographies of migration management

Migration management expresses the idealizations of policymakers: how they view the world’s ideal biopolitical and geopolitical organization. This article presents an analysis of an anti-irregular migration campaign funded by Australia and administered by the International Organization for Migration to deter “potential people smugglers” in Indonesia. The article demonstrates that the campaign attempted to normalize the idea that transporting irregular migrants was immoral and a sin. The Indonesia–Australia border and the Westphalian nation-state system were structured as moral geographies. The campaign framed immigration law as the ultimate determinant of moral and immoral migration, proclaiming a righteousness in immobilizing irregular migrants, regardless of circumstance. Per the campaign, moral migration is to be managed, and borders to be guarded, by unaccountable consultants for hire like the International Organization for Migration—states’ deputized migration managers. The article analyzes how irregular migration was structured as subverting and exploiting territorialized nations, how the campaign associated emplacement and boundedness with safety and irregular migration with a threatening, foreign, immorality. Finally, the article investigates how everyday spaces were infiltrated by bordering practices designed to normalize the campaign’s purported “truths” about morality and migration, showing the varying temporalities and scales of border-making and migration management.