ABSTRACT
International Relations and Political Theory have long engaged with the question of community, and in particular the question about the constitution of political community. Seminal contributions have highlighted that thinking about community is usually pursued within a dichotomy: either there is an essence by which community is constituted (usually referred to as ‘thick’ conceptions of community) or community is composed of pre-formed individuals and, thus, amounts to little more than procedural co-presence (denoted as ‘thin’ understandings of community, cf. Walzer 1994). Awareness of this dichotomy has led to a variety of critiques, for example, questioning the conflation of the community to the state; rethinking oppression and social exclusion and their relation to civil conflict; conceptualising the ‘we’ outside of essentialist and, therefore, exclusionary determinations such as those of religion, ethnicity, nation, etc.; investigating the assumptions of liberal democracy about community and diversity, as well as examining the ways in which modern assumptions about the subject of politics and society entail the reduction of coexistence, and community, to the mere co-presence of pre-constituted, ‘presocial’ selves.1
