In a world of accelerated movements, this article examines how infrastructures matter in international relations. We first show that the International Relations (IR) discipline has relegated infrastructures to the background of their studies and treated them as passive tools despite their forcible role in the establishment of the modern state system. By adopting a sociological definition of “the international,” this article emphasizes the centrality of materials and mobilities in thinking about the international and calls for a novel infrastructural lens in the IR discipline. We argue that infrastructures provide crucial mechanisms for forging the distinctions between units that constitute the international as a separate realm. We outline how infrastructures continuously transform this realm through re-scaling and re-ordering spaces, polities, and people. In the meantime, infrastructures are at the heart of social processes, which generate knowledge practices that constitute the international. They inscribe themselves in discourses, produce meaning, and shape identities, and they are thus part of the ideational underpinning of the international. We conclude by advocating a shift in the analytical weight of materials in IR, premised on an interdisciplinary dialogue, and suggest a theoretical and methodological recalibration of the discipline’s treatment of infrastructures.

中文翻译：

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基础设施与国际关系：对材料和流动性的批判性思考


在一个加速运动的世界中，本文研究了基础设施在国际关系中的重要性。我们首先表明，国际关系 （IR） 学科已将基础设施置于他们的研究背景中，并将其视为被动工具，尽管它们在建立现代国家体系中发挥着强行作用。通过采用“国际”的社会学定义，本文强调了材料和流动性在思考国际问题中的中心地位，并呼吁在 IR 学科中采用新颖的基础设施视角。我们认为，基础设施为区分构成国际的单位作为独立领域提供了关键机制。我们概述了基础设施如何通过重新扩展和重新排序空间、政体和人员来不断改变这个领域。与此同时，基础设施是社会进程的核心，它产生了构成国际的知识实践。他们将自己铭刻在话语中，产生意义，塑造身份，因此他们是国际意识形态基础的一部分。最后，我们倡导在跨学科对话的前提下改变 IR 中材料的分析权重，并建议对该学科处理基础设施的理论和方法进行重新校准。