2026/07/24 by Vuslat Nur Şahin Temel
paper · pdf · doi:10.1177/03058298261458086
openalex publication_date 2026/07/24 · openalex created_date 2026/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/26
What if global governance were designed for neurodivergent rather than neurotypical minds? This paper challenges International Relations’ (IR) unstated assumption that effective political actors think in neurotypical ways: through linear planning, sustained verbal attention, rational cost-benefit analysis, and consistent preference ordering. Drawing on disability studies, crip theory, and epistemic justice scholarship, I ask: whose cognitive styles count as legitimate governance? IR theory is embedded with ableist assumptions about political competence, yet complex global challenges may require precisely the cognitive diversity that neurotypical governance excludes. This work develops the idea of ‘cognitive diversity methodology’, functioning simultaneously as an analytical tool and design principle, while proceeding reflexively, acknowledging the contradiction of advancing these arguments through academic conventions that are themselves neurotypically structured. I refuse to accept neurotypical universalism, proposing a cognitively diverse politics that recognises different sorts of minds as entertaining different political possibilities, thus contributing to Post-IR conversations about epistemic pluralism and decolonial futures, by revealing cognitive assumptions as a third dimension of epistemic colonisation, one that operates not only through whose knowledge counts or whose perspectives are accepted, but through the way that valid political cognition itself must operate.