The sense of being-in-common and international relations

Abstract

International relations have always been related to a particular sense of living together, both as a concept and as an academic field shaped by some practices of being-together. The question of how international relations perceive a way of living together (as being-together in a common space) has been addressed from the early forms of post-structuralist quests by trying to deal with the issues such as inside/outside, identity/difference, but has not been intensely focused on the issue of common and its alternative perceptions by approaching the fundamental relationship between the ontological status of being-in and being-together. In this article, with focusing on how a particular way of being-in-a-common is related to a certain ontology of international relations, I will utilize French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy’s re-writing of Heideggerian notion of Mitsein (being-with) in order to problematize the phenomenon of the international as an intermediate category that defines our meanings of living-together and our relationship with this world.