ABSTRACT
Before I took up a doctoral studentship in International Relations at the London School of Economics, I was working for a time as a Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths at St Pancras, just opposite the famous station in central London. My main job was to marry people in civil ceremonies. I assisted at or conducted a wide range of marriages, some jolly, some uninhibitedly exuberant, some lonely. There were large parties of happy and, on occasions, sober people. There were also two street people who married from their home in a cardboard box, on the same day as a couple in their early twenties who, both dying, had met in a hospice. There were several elderly couples, and, given that this was in the heart of multicultural London, couples from more ethnic and cultural backgrounds than I can remember. Each of the occasions meant something specific to the people involved. From observation, you might discover something about the processes involved, the material base (how much was paid for the dress, the party, the licence), the legislation that guides the process; but you would reach little understanding of the importance, the significances, the humanity of the separate occasions involved in these ceremonies to each couple. Every one had something in common; every one was different; but it was the differences that mattered. The example helps to explain why an approach to research that tries to unpack the diversity of meanings and constructions of social relations is fundamental in the study of International Relations (IR). Understanding IR is, one might recognise, first of all an attempt to make sense of inter-cultural relations where language and social practice and social meanings meet and challenge each other. It interrogates changing meanings, recognising their ambiguities, and accepts that there may be no single ‘underlying truth’ concealed behind them. As William Connolly (2005) has argued, we need tools to unpack the ambiguities of a plural world where there are not only many different kinds of entities (ontological pluralism), but many different kinds of knowledge (epistemological pluralism) and many different kinds of values (normative pluralism), yet where there are also right and wrong judgments and legitimate and illegitimate interpretations. It is in what Levinas referred to as the ‘encounter with the Other’ (see Andrea Den Boer’s chapter in this volume) that the challenge of making sense of international relations in all their diversity arise. This is prior to any other theorisation and to any other way of organising knowledge.
