Making International Things: Designing World Politics Differently

Can we make international things—maps, algorithms, museums, visualizations, computer games, virtual reality tools? Objects that criss-cross global space, exert political influence, and produce novel forms of knowledge? This article, and the special issue it introduces, suggests that scholars of international relations can and should engage in the task of making concrete material, aesthetic, and technological objects that exceed the epistemic, logocentric, or textual. It joins a growing conversation focused on the potential of expanding the praxis of the social sciences into multimodal formats of design, craft, and making. In this article, we explore the intellectual, social, and political stakes of beginning to make international things, unpack the disciplinary reticence to engage in this task, and the potential dangers it entails. Most importantly, we suggest five central benefits moving in this direction holds: (i) generating a future-oriented social science; (ii) cultivating an “atmospheric” social science faithful to new materialist, feminist, and practice theories; (ii) embracing a radical collaborationist ethos more-suited to the demands of the day; (iv) investing us in sociopolitically committed scientific praxis; and (v) inaugurating a radically new disciplinary architecture of scholarly praxis.