Extra-political Contacts across the B/Orders: Otherness, Culture and Order

The aim of this article is to explore the implications of the Order/Culture nexus in world politics as related to processes of othering and alterity formation. The contemporary international order brings together states, communities, and individuals with different ways of approaching the world. Meanwhile, it is inevitably hard to ignore the often sharply divisive shifts that penetrate the fabric of the global liberal order. This contestation surrounding the concepts of an international liberal order shows to what extent this contestation is not just about power transitions but reflects the conflicting narratives of the global—cultural, nationalist, ethnic, racial, historical, colonial, and religious. While stability in international politics is a defining element of how order-builders seek the constitution of political legitimacy, these contesting narratives present the global order with a legitimation crisis. This requires not only maximising material capabilities but also an aspiration to choreograph and organise cultural diversity into authorised forms of expressions, or diversity regimes. This article is particularly interested in how these diversity regimes are integral to the ways in which postcolonial orders prioritise and organise cultural differences in alignment with the established distribution of political authority. Analytic insights from the Constructivist and Post-colonial theory will help account for the discursive formations and representations of alterity and otherness, which I argue are another manifestation of diversity regimes. These formations rest upon a particular view of contemporary world order: the characteristic distinctiveness that drives interaction among actors, and which, in turn, constitutes different alterities: “ally,” “rival,” “friend,” and “exotic.”