Forum: Interlingual Relations: Approaches, Conflicts, and Lessons in the Translation Of Global Politics

Abstract

Abstract At stake in this forum are the politics of translation in the study of global politics. More specifically, the following interventions aim to consider the ways that scholars can recenter the utility of language toward more flexible conceptions of relationality. As each contribution reveals, translation is indispensable to individual theorizations of international politics; yet taken together, the forum aims to mitigate the alleged necessity of a lingua franca in IR scholarship. We go beyond the linguistic demands of conventional conceptual history in that each intervention employs a reflexive disposition to consider both their subject position and normative aspirations in the experience of translation. The forum's overall goal is to illustrate the ethical imperative to acknowledge the contextual specificity of linguistic encounters—past, present, and future—and in the process breathe life into the prose of world politics.