This article interprets Kant’s political cosmopolitanism through the metaphor of globus terraqueus. This spatial metaphor has important consequences for Kant’s political philosophy, namely, to highlight Kant’s cosmopolitan relationality. The spherical shape of the earth is not only a feature of this planet; rather it creates the conditions for the emergence of increasingly larger communities. This relational reading of Kant’s cosmopolitanism is supported by reading the notion of unsociable sociability as grounding relationality in the components of agency, conflict, and vulnerability. Thus, especially through the notions of universal hospitality and cosmopolitan right, Kant’s cosmopolitan relationality is useful for reinterpreting his political cosmopolitanism.

The field of International Relations (IR) has come under increasing and sustained criticism for producing and disseminating a particular reading of European history, one rooted in violence, as if it were universal knowledge. Generations of students, academics, practitioners, and policymakers have been taught and socialized into accepting this violent historical experience as the norm and, implicitly, as a reflection of human nature. As a result, the dominant accounts of IR tend to foreground competitive, conflictual, domineering, power-seeking, and exploitative behaviours as defining features of international life. This understanding of IR marginalizes and often ignores Indigenous ways of knowing that emphasize relationality, solidarity, mutual care, and cooperative forms of social organization. In this article, we argue that centring Afrocentric Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS), particularly their conceptualizations of persons in IR scholarship, has the potential to move the field beyond its bleak and violent roots towards a more humane and relational epistemology. The AIKS-centred approach to IR is better suited to capturing the nuances of contemporary global life while speaking to the lived experiences of Africans and potentially other Indigenous peoples around the world.

How should we assess and judge the harm inflicted by egregious wrongdoing and how should we respond to such wrongdoings after they have occurred? These are the questions this contribution tackles from an African communitarian Ubuntu worldview that centres the humanity of everyone impacted in both its understanding of wrongdoing and remedy. It argues that restoration of shared humanity is regarded as the primary and ultimate function of justice in the African systems of political thought.

Biodesign is an emerging field that brings together a wide range of practices, connecting fundamental research, applied sciences and creative approaches. Within this spectrum, a tension exists between instrumental uses of biological processes and a growing sensibility that acknowledges the agency of living materials and organisms. This study proposes reconciliation as a guiding concept for biodesign, understood not as a metaphorical gesture but as a concrete and plural perspective that promotes species coexistence and conservation. We contextualise reconciliation through restoration, reciprocity and relationality as distinctive yet interconnected design and ecological principles that extend beyond normative human exchange, promoting multispecies coexistence. Through a mix of reflexive thematic synthesis and the analysis of selected case studies derived from the authors’ own projects, employed as a practice-based methodological inquiry and primary source of empirical and reflective insight, we explore how reconciliation is enacted and experienced in practice. Finally, we propose a conceptual framework to address reconciliation in biodesign, offering guiding concepts and key questions to discuss and support ecological flourishing in multispecies collaborations.

In this paper we argue that performance and the arts invite a deliberate sensorial connection with the body and can support a bodily turn or return, in order to help artists, scholars and communities more broadly, better attune to increasing climate instability, through collaborative, supportive and reflexive storytelling. Drawing on the three “weather” symposia, the paper focusses on the second symposium which featured a keynote presentation by Rachael Swain, co-artistic director of Marrugeku, Australia’s leading Indigenous Intercultural Dance and Performance Company. Responses to Marrugeku’s work Cut the Sky are collectively presented to illuminate what Swain argues are, “Dramaturgies of consequence” (2020), that emerge from working and thinking with the choreopolitical platform of Marrugeku’s practice, and how this is felt in the bodies and the actions of audiences. Such a focus on thinking and feeling with and through our bodies, is crucial in preparing to respond and adapt to the myriad evolving political, environmental and social crises we are enmeshed in. By focusing on Cut The Sky we argue that contemporary performance, which foregrounds the body, is an exemplary practice which can ignite visceral and kinaesthetic responses in spectators for activating change through Marrugeku’s choreography of resistance.

What is access and how has accessibility—as a perceptual frame, a discourse, a box to check, and a relationship—infiltrated our everyday lives and become a means for adjudicating whether we live in inhabitable worlds in India and internationally? This article draws from a roundtable discussion at a 2024 disability studies and disability justice conference held in Kolkata, India, as well as interviews and participant observation conducted with disabled Indians to explore the meanings of access and to think about alternative concepts or frameworks that are used instead.

The Maputo Accord process in Mozambique is regarded as a rare success story in a context where international peace mediation as a tool of conflict resolution is in decline. Drawing on empirical research conducted with parties to the process, we outline two framing elements that constitute the practice of ‘peace listening’. The first is human-centred and value-based mediation, which centres the needs of the parties. The second foregrounds the flexibility of peacemaking actors to create an ‘enabling environment’ for peacemaking, challenging the structural and hierarchical nature of international peace mediation. We present two novel contributions to the field of peace mediation. The first is to present a qualitative case study of the Maputo Accord process in Mozambique based on the perspectives and testimonies of the participants themselves. Secondly, by centring the participants in the research, we highlight the potential of relationality as an underpinning theory of successful mediation. We ask what made the Maputo Accord process ‘different’ from previous attempts in the long and complex history of peacemaking attempts in the country, and in so doing, we address an ontological and theoretical gap in the literature on ‘Track One’ processes when it comes to relationality.

This paper revisits the longstanding debate over the nature of suffering, focusing on the divide between subjective and objective accounts. I defend a Personalist conception of suffering, rooted in an Aristotelian understanding of human flourishing, that recognizes suffering as both universally human and deeply personal. On this view, suffering is neither a purely sentient, inner experience nor reducible to external conditions, but a disruption of flourishing that arises when love or justice is violated or absent—and that calls for a communal response. Understood through this lens, suffering, I argue, invites a shared practice of meaning-making—not as sentimental optimism but as a form of grounded hope: realistic, responsive, and attuned to the dignity of both the sufferer and those who accompany them. Even when suffering cannot be cured or fully comprehended, it can be met with deeper engagement, mutual responsibility, and a reaffirmation of our commitment to a life lived in relation and shared purpose.

Archaeologists have long identified quarries as a ubiquitous part of the landscape in which precolonial Maya populations built their world. Yet, it is only recently that scholars have begun to move away from viewing these quarries simply as places where stones were extracted to recognizing them as important nodes in the social, political, and cultural fabric of the Maya Lowlands. The four articles in this Special Section discuss some of the most recent insights into the lives of those who intimately worked with limestone, inhabited the cratered landscapes created by its extraction, and crafted their worlds through the relationships forged and maintained in the practices of quarrying, processing, and utilizing this material. In this introductory paper, we set the scene by reviewing previous research and outlining the main approaches involved in the documentation, analysis, and interpretation of Maya limestone quarries and production loci. We continue with a discussion of the relevance of quarry investigations for the general study of precolonial Maya societies. We conclude with a brief overview of current methodological trends, followed by a look ahead to the ways in which researchers could take such investigations forward and integrate them into future research agendas.

This article introduces a fungal framework, both metaphorically and methodologically, for reimagining power, resistance, and world-making in International Relations (IR). Drawing on relational ontologies and ecological insights, it examines how fungal processes of decomposition and regeneration shed light on the entangled relations that constitute the pluriverse—a world of many worlds. By centering decay as a site of transformation, the framework proposes an ethic of research grounded in humility and care. It critiques the epistemic closures that structure dominant IR paradigms and offers tools for engaging ontological multiplicity beyond Eurocentric frames. In doing so, the article contributes to emerging debates on decolonial methodology, more-than-human agency, and pluriversal ethics, advocating for approaches that accompany, rather than assimilate, multiple worlds.