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Collectivist Worldview: Its Challenge to International Relations
Abstract
This chapter unpacks individualist and collectivist worldviews in social science scholarship to show that many scholars in the English-speaking international relations (IR) community look at the world through the prism of individualism, which usually renders unheard the international experiences and voices of people in the global South. The neglect in IR theories and discourse of experiences and voices of the invisible majority undercuts our ability to gain a comprehensive understanding of global life. Key collectivist features of Africa’s IR are critically examined in the chapter and their ontological origins traced. The suggestion is that taking these collectivist features seriously and incorporating them into the analytical toolkits of IR would better enable scholars to gain a broader and deeper understanding of international affairs.
... That is why a critical translation must be reflexive and abstract in the first place if it is to be stranger-friendly. This amounts to the necessity of translating cosmological beliefs, as an initial step (Tieku 2012). ...
... Arguably, the 'Collectivist Worldview' (Tieku 2012) of Ubuntu of the African leaders, which leads them to prefer working with Chinese actors rather than Western ones, is partly a response to Western colonization. The Western colonizers saw their colonial populations as inferior to themselves and therefore in need of 'civilizing'. ...
Liberal political science misconceives socialist autocracy in China as the opposite, reinforcing its incapacity to explain the worldwide democratic recession in the 21st century and the failure of any democracy to recover. A fatal flaw of liberal scholarship lies in the conceptualization of politics as influencing the choices of independent individuals in aggregate. Practical consequences include a desire to avoid or convert allegedly illiberal systems according to a self-image of being participatory. Confucianism instead provides a governmentality clue to how all human gatherings evolve upon leadership struggling to balance dominance and belonging. Through Confucian enlightenment, leaders are convinced that all bad autocrats fall. So, leadership cannot survive without the willing following of the population. A derivative, tightly in line with the thrust of socialism, is that the population must be well-fed and protected. Such a relational lens considers people in their entirety while, epistemologically, desensitizing individual differences. However, political science tends to consult individual preferences, with the ironic consequence of a leadership losing sight of the entirety. A political science reconfigured through Confucianism reveals the false binary of democracy versus autocracy. It interrogates how leadership everywhere rebalances dominance and belonging to restore its relational sensibilities.
... That is why a critical translation must be reflexive and abstract in the first place if it is to be stranger-friendly. This amounts to the necessity of translating cosmological beliefs, as an initial step (Tieku 2012). ...
... Arguably, the 'Collectivist Worldview' (Tieku 2012) of Ubuntu of the African leaders, which leads them to prefer working with Chinese actors rather than Western ones, is partly a response to Western colonization. The Western colonizers saw their colonial populations as inferior to themselves and therefore in need of 'civilizing'. ...
“Chih-yu Shih’s exploration of the puzzle of governmentality demonstrates that, while distinct, democracy and autocracy are not opposites but two forms of relational communitarian imaginaries, cosmologies and forms of organization.” Emilian Kavalski, Jagiellonian University in Krakow ///
"Chih-yu Shih develops very important arguments against binary understandings of politics, directing our attention to more complex governmentalities, without necessarily legitimising them." Hartmut Behr, Newcastle University ///
"Chih-yu Shih's analysis offers fascinating insights into the philosophical foundations of Chinese politics. His combination of Confucian cosmology and Foucauldian governmentality explores the hidden layers of state-society relations in the era of Xi Jinping." Nele Noesselt, University of Duisburg-Essen
... This worldview impacts how these individuals make decisions and understand their duty and responsibilities regarding their life as it relates to the collective. Tieku's (2012) article speaks of how a lack of self-awareness and harmonious relationships with others defines a "good African," and achieving personal mastery is not required. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the fragility, and brokenness in some cases, of our systems, institutions, infrastructure, and society. Now that the immediate crisis has passed, is there an expectation to revert to the status quo, instead of creating a better version of the world? Technology has been hailed a savior, but human beings being human, and the complexity and interconnectedness of our world makes for challenges in trying to maintain society as it was and in creating a new world. Navigating outrage, cries for help, and cultural divides has left us in a precarious position but there is opportunity to effect change, if we choose.
... Del mismo modo, el lugar de África en el sistema internacional no solo puede comprenderse a partir de su desempeño diplomático, sino también en virtud de instituciones tradicionales y comportamientos políticos (p. ej., acción colectiva más que individual) que han impulsado en este continente la emergencia de formas alternativas de soberanía y estatalidad (Tieku, 2012). En este contexto, autores como Ulf Engel y creencias y los valores que condicionan las prioridades, las acciones y las estrategias de los estadistas durante su carrera política. ...
El objetivo de este artículo es evaluar la importancia de los líderes africanos en la política exterior de sus países. A partir de una revisión comprehensiva de literatura especializada, se evidencia la intrascendencia en África de los marcos teóricos tradicionales del análisis de política exterior, los cuales se basan principalmente en la experiencia diplomática de las grandes potencias. En el contexto de los países africanos, por el contrario, la unidad decisoria final no está institucionalizada, por lo cual la visión de mundo de los líderes se transforma en prácticamente la única referencia para la fijación de la estrategia internacional y el interés nacional.
This Handbook of Ubuntu, Inequality and Sustainable Development interrogates the multiple inequalities that subsist in our world today and explores the extent to which the concept of Ubuntu, emerging from Africa but with the potential to be applied in diverse contexts beyond the continent, holds promise for mitigation and resolution. The handbook responds to the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Agenda 2030, particularly SDG 10, which strives to “Reduce inequality within and among countries.” Among its targets is: “By 2030, empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status.” In addition, it speaks of the need to give voice to developing countries, as well as to promote “orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration of people” and “encourage official development assistance and financial flows….” (See https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/women-and-the-sdgs/sdg-10-reduced-inequalities, accessed 13 January 2023). Contributors to this handbook acknowledge the intrinsic connectedness of the SDGs, as they recognize the inequalities that relate to gender (SDG 5), climate change and the environment (SDG 13), as well as the struggle against poverty (SDG 1). They reflect on how Ubuntu can be a strategic resource in pursuit of these goals. Cognisant of the urgency of securing peace and strong institutions (SDG 16), they also seek to apply insights from Ubuntu to promote peacebuilding and sustainable development. This introductory chapter seeks to provide the ethos, motivation and orientation of the handbook. It outlines the global context of inequality, summarizes the trends in the study and application of Ubuntu and draws attention to some of the major areas where the values and principles of Ubuntu are urgently required. The chapter also provides an overview of the critiques of Ubuntu, admitting that no concept, including one as progressive and relevant as Ubuntu, should escape detailed analysis and scrutiny. It also summarizes the chapters in this handbook.
This chapter examines how Global South International Relations (IR) theories and concepts can be taught in a dynamic, interactive, and stimulating manner to students in an (inter)national classroom through the practice of an ethics of understanding. This teaching philosophy encompasses pedagogical strategies that nurture students’ affective competencies as well as their cognitive and analytical competencies enabling them to productively engage with encountered differences that unsettle their own worldviews and ontological security. The chapter outlines how through affective leadership, lecturers can nurture students’ empathy relationally and reciprocally through practices of decentering the self, listening intently, and engaging in respectful dialogue as a way of approaching, understanding, and engaging with difference in an open-minded, curiosity-driven, and reflexive way. This not only results in recognizing how global politics is experienced, understood, and theorized differently across the world, but it also facilitates the acceptance of a pluriversality of realities and life-worlds.
This article discusses the fundamental impact of normativity on producing evidence-based guidance for context-sensitive transitional justice policy. It draws on lessons learned from Uganda’s complex transitional justice context and extensive fieldwork to demonstrate the necessity and the means to differentiate between belief-based normativity and evidence-based normativity in conducting problem analysis as a crucial site that determines the integrity of evidence-based guidance. It also establishes that evidence-based normativity guiding problem analysis must include empirical evidence of societal dynamics and views of affected communities or there is a significantly higher risk of belief-based normativity decontextualizing strategy development. Findings establish significant substantive differences between the problem sets identified for intervention using a contextualized approach shaped by evidence-based normativity and those in Uganda’s National Transitional Justice Policy (NTJP), which was heavily influenced by belief-based liberal-legalist norms and standardized practice. Crucially, findings also show that the conventional mechanisms prioritized in the NTJP actively work against the mechanisms and aims affected communities prioritize for meaningful redress and to prevent recurrence of mass violence. The article offers concrete recommendations on how to evade belief-based normativity in academic and applied research models intended to produce evidence-based guidance for genocide and mass atrocities prevention.
Promoting economic and political interests, maintaining balance of power at the global level, and influencing others to protect state and regime security are some of the reasons why global powers contend with each other internationally. By using the Tigray crisis in northern Ethiopia as a case study and analysing it based on neo-realism principles, this article explores the competition between global and regional powers and their political, economic and security ramifications for the Horn of Africa. The article argues that by framing the Tigray crisis in a contradictory way and responding to it differently, global powers are competing each other to project their power by embracing either a defensive or offensive realistic strategy. The findings also demonstrate that the contradictory strategy adopted by the major global powers and their conflicting behaviour are driven by their competing geostrategic interests in the Horn of Africa. Furthermore, the article explores the consequences of these geostrategic political rivalries and power competition on matters of sovereignty, security, and power dynamics in the region and beyond.
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