Excellence Strategy

Dr. Flavia Guerra Cavalcanti

Global Encounters Fellow | Institute of Political Science | University of Tübingen

Ocean Thinking as a challenge to the modern territorial imagination in International Relations

 

26th June 2024 | 12 p.m. | Großer Senat - Neue Aula

Online participation via zoom is possible under the following link

This research explores the critical potential of "more-than-wet ontology" (Steinberg, Peters, 2015) to comprehend contemporary articulations between land and sea in International Relations Theorizing. We start from the assumption, already studied by other scholars, that the principal tenets of the discipline of International Relations rely on a myriad of dichotomies such as order/anarchy, inside/outside, domestic/international, and Land/Sea. However, compared to others, the opposition land/sea still needs more theory in international relations. Thinking about the Ocean does not demand an epistemological change in international relations since it is the rational subject that observes nature and tries to tame the supposedly irrational attributes historically associated with the Sea. On the contrary, thinking with the Sea invites us to consider the productiveness of the Ocean. The Ocean's liquid materiality, motion, and temporality allow for new ways of thinking that are impossible when only thinking with the Land (Peters & Steinberg, 2015).