Old cultures and new possibilities: Marege'-Makassar diplomacy in Southeast Asia

Prevailing approaches to managing international relations are heavily influenced by the European legacy and associated understandings of diplomacy and order. To explore possibilities for expanding beyond these approaches, this paper examines an exchange that is particularly curious and provocative from an Australian vantage: the longstanding seafaring connection between Australian Aboriginal people of northeast Arnhem Land and people of what is present-day Eastern Indonesia. First, the paper makes an argument for moving beyond the developmentalist view that modern diplomacy and conflict management arise with the expansion of European influence. It then introduces a conceptual frame which opens to other ways of approaching political life and relations across difference by thinking in terms of three distinct yet overlapping forms of socio-political order - the traditional-mythical, the prophetic-religious and the modern-bureaucratic. Turning to the Aboriginal-Indonesian connection, I provide an overview of the relationship and academic approaches to it before examining a number of puzzles surrounding how we might know this relationship. Grappling with these puzzles shows that the Marege'-Makassar connection mobilises a flexible and 'relational' approach to socio-political order in contrast with the exclusionary sovereign logic of the modern nation-state. Experimenting with relationality promises to broaden and deepen our contemporary approach to diplomacy and international relations in the region and beyond.