On Transversality: For a Reproblematization of the International in IPS

Abstract In this article, we invest in the conceptual development of transversality to establish it as the key analytical tool for examining the international from the perspective of international political sociology. We engage in this work for two main reasons. First, to strengthen IPS as a field with unique concepts that facilitate a new understanding of international relations, serving as more than just a common ground for various critical perspectives. We believe transversality is one of the key concepts that shape IPS’s approach to international issues and which remains underexplored in our field. Our second motivation concerns the challenge of exploring the potential of transversality to conceptualize the international in an alternative manner. As transversality has largely been mobilized descriptively, IPS has struggled to sustain a critical engagement with the international as a problem. This limitation has contributed to a tendency to presume the obsolescence of the international and to replace it with ostensibly “alternative” spatialities that often reproduce the global as an unexamined background condition. We propose transversality as a concept capable of reactivating the critical purchase of IPS by overcoming the slumber into which “the problematization of the international” has fallen over the past 20 years.