150 Garrett Graddy-Lovelace
Blaser goes further to challenge even this as a universalizing statement. In fact,
multiple worlds and worldings co-exist all the time, and require analytic – and, I
would argue, governance – approaches that “delineate a picture of socio-material
worlds as always-emergent heterogeneous assemblages of humans and morethan-humans” (Blaser, 2014, p. 50). Sarah Hunt, a Kwakwaka’wakw scholar,
also lays out the power and risks of invoking ontology to counter coloniality; it
“requires destabilizing how we come to know Indigeneity and what representational strategies are used in engaging with Indigenous ontologies, as differentiated from western ontologies of Indigeneity” (Hunt, 2014, p. 28). Destabilizing
colonialist/modernist temporalities helps counter reductive multiculturalism.
Yet, liberal internationalism retains its temporal limitations if the multilateralism
deploys a reductive multiculturalism.
Liberal internationalism limits spatially as well. This also leads to paradoxes,
wherein alleged universalism obscures and enables Eurocentric myopia.
Moreover, in an attempt to transcend nationalism, modern international order
reinscribes the nation-state as the dominant scale of reference. Indigenous and
First Nations remain systematically erased, as do migrants, nomads, and the
pan-African Diaspora the world over. In her 2020 book Naming a Transnational
Black Feminism: Writing in Darkness, K. Melchor Quick Hall foregrounds Diasporic lineages of liberation transgressing and transcending state borders (Quick
Hall, 2020). These alternate scales of reference relate directly to who feeds and
nourishes whom.
Liberalism depends on the paradox of government power only insofar
as this government power defers to globalized markets and private property.
Neoliberalism furthers the paradox: it entrenches the power of the state only if
the state submits to the reign of the allegedly free market, transnational corporate actors, and the “rights” of individualized real and intellectual property. The
paradoxical dominance – and limits – of liberalism hinges directly on intellectual
and physical property rights regimes. Accordingly, it is unsurprising that the
tensions of the Treaty hinge on the fierce contestations around intellectual property of plant genetic resources and their digital manifestations as data. It is also
foreseeable that international PGRFA governance stumbles over the fundamental paradox of liberalism: ideals of international peace, amidst realities of racial
capitalism, ethno-nationalism, imperial legacies, and resurgent authoritarianism.
Political and social scientists – and civil society – have grappled with the
tensions of how neoliberalism entrenches the nation-state as a dominant scale
of reference even as transnational corporations have weakened it economically
through political-economic processes of globalization. Many multinational companies do without the nation-state, as their increasing reliance on transnational
law and free trade zones testify. Saskia Sassen demonstrates how “understanding
the epochal transformation we call globalization must include studying these
processes of denationalization” (Sassen, 2009, p. 14): “Today it is, then, the foundational features of multiple global, rather than national, systems that get partly
structured inside nation-states” (ibid.).
Blaser goes further to challenge even this as a universalizing statement. In fact,
multiple worlds and worldings co-exist all the time, and require analytic – and, I
would argue, governance – approaches that “delineate a picture of socio-material
worlds as always-emergent heterogeneous assemblages of humans and morethan-humans” (Blaser, 2014, p. 50). Sarah Hunt, a Kwakwaka’wakw scholar,
also lays out the power and risks of invoking ontology to counter coloniality; it
“requires destabilizing how we come to know Indigeneity and what representational strategies are used in engaging with Indigenous ontologies, as differentiated from western ontologies of Indigeneity” (Hunt, 2014, p. 28). Destabilizing
colonialist/modernist temporalities helps counter reductive multiculturalism.
Yet, liberal internationalism retains its temporal limitations if the multilateralism
deploys a reductive multiculturalism.
Liberal internationalism limits spatially as well. This also leads to paradoxes,
wherein alleged universalism obscures and enables Eurocentric myopia.
Moreover, in an attempt to transcend nationalism, modern international order
reinscribes the nation-state as the dominant scale of reference. Indigenous and
First Nations remain systematically erased, as do migrants, nomads, and the
pan-African Diaspora the world over. In her 2020 book Naming a Transnational
Black Feminism: Writing in Darkness, K. Melchor Quick Hall foregrounds Diasporic lineages of liberation transgressing and transcending state borders (Quick
Hall, 2020). These alternate scales of reference relate directly to who feeds and
nourishes whom.
Liberalism depends on the paradox of government power only insofar
as this government power defers to globalized markets and private property.
Neoliberalism furthers the paradox: it entrenches the power of the state only if
the state submits to the reign of the allegedly free market, transnational corporate actors, and the “rights” of individualized real and intellectual property. The
paradoxical dominance – and limits – of liberalism hinges directly on intellectual
and physical property rights regimes. Accordingly, it is unsurprising that the
tensions of the Treaty hinge on the fierce contestations around intellectual property of plant genetic resources and their digital manifestations as data. It is also
foreseeable that international PGRFA governance stumbles over the fundamental paradox of liberalism: ideals of international peace, amidst realities of racial
capitalism, ethno-nationalism, imperial legacies, and resurgent authoritarianism.
Political and social scientists – and civil society – have grappled with the
tensions of how neoliberalism entrenches the nation-state as a dominant scale
of reference even as transnational corporations have weakened it economically
through political-economic processes of globalization. Many multinational companies do without the nation-state, as their increasing reliance on transnational
law and free trade zones testify. Saskia Sassen demonstrates how “understanding
the epochal transformation we call globalization must include studying these
processes of denationalization” (Sassen, 2009, p. 14): “Today it is, then, the foundational features of multiple global, rather than national, systems that get partly
structured inside nation-states” (ibid.).