Pluriversal International Relations

Pluriversal International Relations (PIR) invites engagements that aim to reconfigure international relations—past, present, and future—both academically and in practice. It foregrounds the lives of those who continue to endure colonialism, defined as a relation of domination used to exploit our minds, bodies, and environments. Coloniality views the world through an epistemologically individuating and atomizing lens, emphasising putatively autonomous and integral entities such as states, citizens, firms, parties, regimes, and leaders, among others, as the exclusive sites for investigation. However, colonial relations in human and non-human realms engender neither integral nor autonomous agents in colonising and colonised spaces. PIR seeks to challenge and problematise the homogenising and universalised violence of dominant projects and systems of thought that insist on taking for granted fragmentation, division, hierarchisation and toward domination and extraction. 

Pluriversal is understood as an anticolonial orientation of imagining and making the world, as a world of many worlds. Inspired by experiences and thought from the Global South, PIR particularly values contributions that, beyond seeking hegemonic recognition or validation, focus on pluriversality and how such pluriversal IR can weave together diverse cosmologies and practices.   

PIR adopts no specific preference for methodological, theoretical, or thematic disposition. The board invites scholars of the international to engage in the studies of coexistence, unlearning, resistance, mutuality, emancipation, de- and re-construction, rupture, involution, and evolution and their limits and aporias. Topics may include, but are not limited to: 

• Dialogue across cosmological perspectives, e.g., Ubuntu, Sophism, and Confucianism;  
• Existing pluriversal practices like pluriversal peace, climate justice, and migrant communities; 
• Addressing colonial and postcolonial experiences, which encompass pedagogy, desecuritisation, and the contrast between indigenous and global governance;  
• Examining stark colonised perspectives, including issues of xenophobia, genocide, and epistemicide; and  
• Engaging with non-English primary materials and on-site intellectual traditions, such as autobiographies, oral histories, and travelogues. 

The inaugural issue invites reflections on what practicing pluriversalism might entail, how it can be studied, and how current research in international relations can adapt to this concept. To be considered for inclusion in the first volume, submissions should be received by 1 February 2026.