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Conventional studies of Chinese aid to Africa typically neglect China's six decades of donor experience, and de-emphasize the distinct historical relationships that China holds with African countries and the ideological and geopolitical contexts in which these relations were built. Applying the framework of relationality that highlights the role of social relationships in defining rational actions, I provide an alternative perspective on Chinese aid by analyzing the ideological and Cold War dynamics that shaped China's early Mao era aid allocation and the impact of these initial ties on contemporary Chinese policymakers' choices about where to direct Chinese aid. (Asian Perspect/GIGA)

This Element argues that relational policy analysis can provide deeper insights into the career of any policy and the dynamics of any policy situation. This task is all the more difficult as the relational often operates unseen in the backstages of a policy arena. Another issue is the potentially unbounded scope of a relational analysis. But these challenges should not dissuade policy scholars from beginning to address the theme of relationality in public policy. This Element sketches a conceptual framework for the study of relationality and illustrates some of the promise of relational analysis using an extended case study. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

AbstractThere is a multifaceted relational revolution afoot in International Relations (IR) and in the social sciences more widely. This article suggests, via engagement with varied forms of relational thought and practice in IR, but in particular via engagement with 'relational cosmology' associated with the 'natural' as well as the 'social' sciences, that there are important reasons for relational thought and practice in IR and around it to be more attentive to dialogues on relationality across natural and social sciences. If relational thought in IR has challenged the colonial and bifurcated ontologies of the field, relational cosmology too assists in shifting 'modern' understandings of science and the cosmos by facilitating engagement with situated knowledges and deep-going relationalities across 'nature' and 'society', 'human' and 'non-human' communities. Relational cosmology may be productive in joining, and perhaps even in facilitating, conversations across multiple relationalities emerging from different parts of the world and in different fields of inquiry, and yet – reflecting its relational and pluriversal orientations – it is not proposed here as a new 'meta-' or 'grand-' narrative for relational theorising or IR.

Both relationality and separateness are aspects of our everyday lives. How we engage these phenomena hinges on the particular existential assumptions that we take for granted. Within the discipline of International Relations (IR), both relationality and separateness have informed how global politics is studied and practiced. How states and their relations are conceived has, for instance, varied by the distinct degrees of privilege given to separation and interconnection: from notions of completely autonomous units like billiard balls to always emergent phenomena co-constituted through relations. The plurality of trajectories that inform this Special Issue illustrate how much broader the spectrum of relational engagement can be when we are cognisant of the impact of these existential assumptions on forms of life, knowing, and knowledge production in International Relations. By highlighting a spectrum of relational engagement, we raise important questions about the way the various knowledge frames in IR are acknowledged, legitimised, limited, and reproduced.

Recently, as performing land acknowledgments within activist and academic communities grows in popularity, scholars are beginning to critically engage with their purpose and production. While the development of these discussions in university settings demonstrates a beneficial turn toward working with and interest in Indigenous communities, as well as the academy's recognition of its complicity in ongoing settler colonization, it is important to reflect on these practices now, at this moment. Exploring recent critiques of land acknowledgments, we demonstrate that contemporary land acknowledgments maintain Western conceptions of land by focusing on the people as if they are divorced from it. This article argues, utilizing the peoplehood matrix, that land and people are inexorably linked in Indigenous ontologies, in an equal relationship, yet the form of current land acknowledgments often separates the people from their land in conformity with Western ideas of land ownership and history. We maintain that it is crucial in creating and performing land acknowledgments to remember the relationality between Indigenous peoples and the land.

AbstractThe capability approach (CA) is a framework for understanding, assessing, and promoting the quality of human lives and social justice. It focuses on capabilities – people's freedoms and opportunities to live in valuable ways. Although its proponents readily acknowledge that capabilities can depend on personal, social and environmental factors, little attention has been paid to the ontology of capabilities (what they are and how they are caused and constituted) and the inherent relationality of the approach is often not well followed through in research and practice. This, we suggest, leaves the CA vulnerable to misinterpretation and misappropriation. In this paper we draw on the complementary lenses of critical realism, hermeneutics and complexity theory to develop an explicitly relational ontology of capabilities that explains how capabilities, as potential for ways of being or forms of doing, are generated by both personal agency and material and social structures. We demonstrate how these lenses can illuminate the relational constitution of particular capabilities through reference to a composite case involving a man called Bert and his healthcare team. We outline how our relational ontology of capabilities can demand and support more theoretically coherent and socially just approaches to CA informed practice, research and policy.

The degree to which agency and identity are experienced as individualised or relational constructs have been widely debated in the sociological literature. Yet, at the centre of these debates are Western notions and understandings of individualisation and relationality, including in family research. They have relied on individualised and nuclearised understandings and approaches to being a family that more closely approximate the lives of white Western middle-class nuclear families. Drawing on semi-structured talanoa (akin to interviews) with separated heterosexual Pacific parents, specifically ten mothers and five fathers, living in New Zealand, I contribute to individualisation and relationality debates by examining how agency and identity are enacted following separation. In particular, I examine the way that Pacific mothers and fathers grapple with tenets of individualisation and relationality in terms of how and with whom they organise and negotiate care arrangements for children. My research demonstrates how Pacific gendered norms and values operated in ways that differentially shaped the kinds of decisions that mothers and fathers made about children's care arrangements. I conclude with a discussion that highlights the significance of integrating cultural relationality into research on family life.

Scale is an important concept. It works in geography, architecture, urbanism and a number of other areas. It also works in the 'real world' of humans where it organizes societies and fuel politics. Scale gather people in collectives, as well as it works a political force for pitting them against one another. Hence scale is far from neutral. In this paper, we want to critically challenge an understanding of scale as something fixed, structural, obdurate, and ordered. Rather we encourage a thinking of scale as something related to fluidity, mobility, networks, and continuums. Rethinking scale along these lines is important for the academic understanding of the world, as well as it is key to many of the global and planetary challenges of the immediate future. This will be discussed with reference to the notion of 'Critical Zone' at the end of the paper.

© 2020, Edizioni ETS. All rights reserved. This lecture outlines elements central to the project of rethinking the concerns of political theology. The lecture seeks to integrate that thinking into the development of a philosophy of life; life defined by an already given relation to the law. Maintaining the law, which is the stance against nihilism, whilst complicating the way law is understood, involves a shift in how sovereignty would itself then be conceived.

The concept of capacity that emerges from the Mental Capacity Act (2005) is conceptually flawed and places practitioners in an impossible situation regarding its application. The continued support by the UK government and others for the Act strengthens the idea that the capacity/incapacity distinction is natural and that incapacity is an intrapsychic feature of an individual. This paper proposes an alternative model for understanding capacity and its assessment based on a narrative theory that recognises the role of the practitioner and identity negotiation. Although this more nuanced approach may at first appear more complex, it avoids the conceptual and practical difficulties raised by the notion of mental capacity.