CAN IR HEAR? Grasping the Global Politics of Languages

If we were to ask the average person on the street to share the first idea that pops into their head when they think of the wide world, it seems a safe bet that the multiplicity of languages would be a popular response. And yet, in the discipline of International Relations (IR) this basic fact has traditionally drawn surprisingly little attention. Why has the discipline been so impervious to global language politics, when it is arguably at the very core of international life? This paper seeks to explain and redress the field’s hearing impairment by showing how languages matter to global politics, why they have been mostly ignored so far, what the challenges are in studying them, and where the field may take this innovative research program moving forward. First, a case is made that modern sovereignty rests on linguistic territoriality and that the liberal international order is enabled by English as a global lingua franca. Then, key impediments to taking interlingual relations seriously are explored, including Anglo-American dominance, the pervasive myth of Babel, and an incomplete linguistic turn. Looking ahead, analytical and normative challenges are addressed, including reification, reductionism, translation, and diversity. The paper concludes by laying out a detailed research agenda spanning a variety of topics and sub-fields in IR and beyond. Overall, grasping the global politics of languages opens a unique window onto the international and its manifold social forces.