Theorizing Translation in International Relations: Time, Transformation, and the Politics of Meaning

Abstract This Forum theorizes translation in International Relations as a constitutive, world-making process through which meaning, temporality, and authority are negotiated in global politics. It moves beyond understandings of translation as a neutral transfer between fixed contexts to approach it as transformation—an ongoing process in which meaning is produced, circulated, and contested across time and space. Translation operates through acts such as categorizing, labeling, periodizing, and historicizing that shape how concepts travel and how worlds of meaning become intelligible. By foregrounding the temporal dynamics of translation, the Forum explores how meaning emerges in encounters across difference and how translation simultaneously generates new beginnings and stabilizes orders of knowledge. Collectively, the contributions reveal that the “international” is not pre-given but continually remade through iterative translations that mediate ambiguity, hierarchy, and the politics of meaning.