ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of approaches to materiality found in international political sociology with a on how materiality can be methodologically apprehended. The material world is forcing itself anew, from all sides and in radically different ways, into the ‘social’ that forms the object of of an international political sociology. Echoing the insights from the wider new materialisms literature, the unfolding research agendas around materiality within an international political sociology can be typified as focusing on a different moment in the ‘political life’ of material objects. The agenda interested in materiality in the construction of power asymmetries explores apparatuses, that are assemblages of rule through which technologies of rule are woven. The agenda of illuminating the politics of technologies favours a methodology of mapping controversies, which entails opening the ‘black box’ of a given, seemingly apolitical, fact or artefact by following the ‘translations’ by actors as they attempt to reassemble that object and its constituent associations.
