L H M Ling
Biographic Data
| ID | 386433 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L H M Ling |
| GIVEN NAMES | L H M |
| FAMILY NAME | Ling |
| SIGNATURE | LING L H M |
| AFFILIATIONS | New School |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 428 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Squaring the Circle: China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) and the Ancient Silk Roads
On relations and relationality: A conversation with friends
Synopsis: Two professors engage in deep conversation about deep thoughts—unbordered thinking, epistemic compassion, inter‐ being, democratic learning, intellectual freedom and culinary cosmologies—until they encounter a third. He verifies yet upturns their worlds with an absurdist joke. The professors then realize that humour is sometimes more divine than love. Laughter, after all, affirms the humanity behind all relations and relationality. This…
Towards global relational theorizing: A dialogue between Sinophone and Anglophone scholarship on relationalism
What is ‘relational theorizing’ in International Relations and what can it offer? This article introduces a thematic section that responds to these questions by showing two things. First, relational theorizing is not a doctrine or a method, but a set of analyses that begin with relations rather than the putative essences of constitutively autonomous actors. Second, relational theorizing has emerged from different geo-linguistic traditions, and a …
Three-ness: Healing world politics with epistemic compassion
Epistemic compassion can help to heal world politics. It mitigates almost six centuries of Eurocentric ‘epistemic violence’ and ‘epistemicide’ with a trialectical epistemology that bridges even seemingly irreconcilable opposites. Buddhists call this process Interbeing. I draw on Daoist yin/yang dynamics for epistemology and the ancient Silk Roads as an exemplar. Subsequently, I apply this analysis to a watershed development in our contemporary po…
Heart and Soul for World Politics: Advaita Monism and Daoist Trialectics in IR
Don’t Flatter Yourself
This chapter begins with a standard manual of training in disciplinary international relations (IR). Designing social inquiry by King, Keohane, and Verba or KKV (1994). Though, KKV represents the core concepts and methods, norms and principles of disciplinary IR. Through criteria like parsimony, rigor, and autonomy, KKV extends to social science the protestant ethic, long established by a secular parson like Locke. As taught by KKV via John Locke…
The missing Other: A review of Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-System
As Andrew Linklater has shown, Europeans have decreased their tolerance for, or endorsement of, violence over the centuries. Various international and domestic conventions demonstrate the point. This accomplishment rightfully deserves celebration. But herein lies the rub. While Linklater recognises the role of imperialism and colonialism in perpetrating global violence, he does not grant equal opportunity to the Rest in contributing to the world’…
World Politics in Colour
Racism reflects how we think and act as much as what. It manifests in terms of biology, geography, and culture but reflects an episteme that normalises Self and Other into a bordered binary. Here, a trialectical epistemology can help. It dissolves racialised realities by showing how opposites exist in each other, thereby constituting a three-ness – e.g. self-in-other and other-in-self – that links Self and Other despite mutual antagonisms. From s…
Beyond Soft Power: Cultural Power from India and China Today through Film 1
The concept of ‘soft power’ impoverishes our understanding of politics. It assumes (i) the world has never encountered instances of ‘soft power’ before or knows no better when encountering it; (ii) culture cannot have any interests, agency or impact of its own; and (iii) it cannot capture the state. History—especially from India and China—debunks these assumptions. I propose a contrasting concept, cultural power. It turns ‘soft power’ on its head…
A Discussion of Robert Vitalis’s White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations
In White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations , Robert Vitalis presents a critical disciplinary history of the field of international relations, and the discipline of political science more broadly. Vitalis argues that the interconnections between imperialism and racism were “constitutive” of international relations scholarship in the U.S. since the turn of the 20 th century, and that the perspectives o…
Postcolonial-Feminism: Transformative possibilities in thought and action, heart and soul
What a pleasure it is to read this special issue! The interview with Ann Tickner and Phillip Darby, in particular, adds a special bonus. To learn how each persevered in a field that's hostile to an
Assessing, Engaging, and Enacting Worlds: Tensions in Feminist Method/Ologies
Our methods, methodologies, and ways of producing and communicating knowledge not only orient the questions we ask and the knowledges we pursue, but they also direct the effects and purposes of our work. Methods enact our worlds (Law and Urry 2004Law, J., and J. Urry. 2004. “Enacting the Social.” Economy and Society 33 (3): 390–410. doi:10.1080/0308514042000225716 [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] ). While many femi…
Dialectics for IR: Hegel and the Dao
This article performs a thought experiment. We ask: what if we were to engage two venerable legacies of dialectics, Hegelianism and Daoism, to see what results in terms of our thinking in International Relations (IR) about World Politics (WP)? Would some kind of a shift, synthesis, or transformation occur, as suggested by the dialectical goal of both traditions? Our discussion focuses broadly on the question of understanding social relations in w…
Hobson’s Eurocentric World Politics: The Journey Begins
Hobson gives us a definitive accounting of Eurocentrism in IR. The only missing element is gender. Race needs gender to work, I argue. Otherwise, race serves as a mere descriptor
Decolonizing the international: Towards Multiple Emotional Worlds
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Dao of World Politics: Towards a Post-Westphalian, Worldist International Relations
The Dao of World Politics: Towards a Post-Westphalian, Worldist International Relations
Introduction Part I - Root: Why do we need a Dao of World Politics 1. The Problem with Westphalia: The Fish and the Turtle 2. Worldism: Multiple Worlds in IR 3. Daoist Dialectics: Gender as Analytic 4. Worldist Dialogics: Changing the Terms of Engagement Interregnum 5. A Fairy Tale of Science Part II - Branch: The Worldist Model of Dialogics 6. Relationality: From Hegemony to Parity 7. Resonance: From Hierarchy to Fluidity 8. Interbeing: From Vio…
Worlds beyond Westphalia: Daoist dialectics and the 'China threat
Discourse in the US/West that a rising China threatens world order serves no national interest or international purpose. It subscribes only to Westphalian anxieties about the Other. Drawing on Daoist dialectics, this article shows how we can reframe this issue by revealing the complicities that bind even seemingly intractable opposites, thereby undermining the rationale for violence. By recognising the ontological parity between (US/Western) Self…
Journeys beyond the West: World Orders and a 7th century Buddhist Monk
Novice Lee (‘Frank’) seeks world peace and thinks he has found it in the Liberal world order. He informs the Learned One, head of the monastery. Through their discussions, Frank discovers that the Liberal world order, despite its promises, offers neither ‘democracy’ nor ‘peace’. Turning to the Confucian world order of ‘all-under-heaven’ ( tianxia ), they find it similarly top-down and one-way. Finally, Frank and the Learned One, now joined by the…
Who Is an American
Cynthia Weber's documentary “I Am an American” is an audacious and creative intervention into the field of international relations (IR). It bypasses the usual conceptual boxes that the discipline imposes upon us since day one of graduate school: for example, only abstract arguments have force, only written articulations are acceptable, and only topics of “high politics” matter. With her documentary, Weber shows that we gain richer debates and ins…
Transforming World Politics
This book provides a critical understanding of contemporary world politics by arguing that the neoliberal approach to international relations seduces many of us into investing our lives in projects of power and alienation. These projects offer few options for emancipation; consequently, many feel they have little choice but to retaliate against violence with more violence. The authors of this pioneering work articulate worldism as an alternative …
Subaltern straits: Exit', 'voice', and 'loyalty' in the United States-China-Taiwan relations
Mainstream approaches perpetuate the Taiwan–China ‘crisis’. They do so by following Cold-War concepts and prescriptions, despite the rise of new realities and new visions for cross-strait relations. We draw on Hirschman's identification of ‘loyalty’ and ‘voice’ to describe the mainstream discourse on cross-strait relations in Taiwan, mostly directed by the United States. But a third option is now emerging. It offers the possibility of a paradigma…
Lust/Caution in IR: Democratising World Politics with Culture as a Method
International Relations (IR) needs democratising. Currently, IR theorising remains under the hegemony of a singular worldview (`warre of all against all') with a singular logic (`conversion or discipline') for all actors and activities. This top-down, state-centric and exclusivist approach is fundamentally anti-democratic for a field of inquiry and practice crowded with multiple worlds. The Humanities, we propose, will help to mitigate these tota…
Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds
Said's Exile: Strategic Insights for Postcolonial Feminists
Exile for Edward Said was a painful yet enriching condition. Indeed, exile accounted for his extraordinary productivity in theorising about and strategising for social justice for the displaced, the marginalised, the silenced. He spoke specifically on the exile of Palestinians from their historic homes but his insights apply to all subjects and subjectivities suffering from hegemonic oppression and stultification. Drawing on his volume, Reflectio…
The House of IR: From Family Power Politics to the Poisies of Worldism1
Poisies offers an alternative epistemology to understand, critique, engage with, and reconstruct international relations (IR). Generally, this Greek concept refers to "creativity" or "poetic inspiration." We enlarge this definition by returning to poisies' original, ancient meaning: that is, creativity that comes from an act of reverberation or putting "language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity" (Bachel…
Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence and Desire from September 11
America's "war on terror" and Al Qaeda's "jihad" reflect mirror strategies of imperial politics. Each camp transnationalizes violence and insecurity in the name of national or communal security. Neoliberal globalization underpins this militarization of daily life. Its desire industries motivate and legitimate elite arguments (whether from "infidels" or "terrorists") that society must sacrifice for its hypermasculine leaders. Such violence and des…
Authoritarianism in the Hypermasculinized State: Hybridity, Patriarchy, and Capitalism in Korea
Authoritarianism in East Asia's capitalist developmental state (CDS) is highly gendered. A hybrid product of Western masculinist capitalism and Confucian parental governance, CDS authoritarianism takes on a hypermasculinized developmentalism that assumes all the rights and privileges of classical Confucian patriarchy for the state while assigning to society the characteristics of classical Confucian womanhood: diligence, discipline, and deference…
Worlds beyond Westphalia: Daoist dialectics and the 'China threat
Discourse in the US/West that a rising China threatens world order serves no national interest or international purpose. It subscribes only to Westphalian anxieties about the Other. Drawing on Daoist dialectics, this article shows how we can reframe this issue by revealing the complicities that bind even seemingly intractable opposites, thereby undermining the rationale for violence. By recognising the ontological parity between (US/Western) Self…
Decolonizing the international: Towards Multiple Emotional Worlds
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Towards global relational theorizing: A dialogue between Sinophone and Anglophone scholarship on relationalism
What is ‘relational theorizing’ in International Relations and what can it offer? This article introduces a thematic section that responds to these questions by showing two things. First, relational theorizing is not a doctrine or a method, but a set of analyses that begin with relations rather than the putative essences of constitutively autonomous actors. Second, relational theorizing has emerged from different geo-linguistic traditions, and a …
An Unten(ur)able Position: The Politics of Teaching for Women of Color in the US
The U.S. academy wants 'multiculturalism' in the classroom. But its public rhetoric of fairness, standards, and diversity falls far short of its exclusionary actions in private, particularly for women of color faculty at tenure time. Tenure evaluations, we propose, reflect a narrative of institutional power that perpetuates the academy's religiouscolonial legacy. Priest-Novitiate relations rule the academy more than a community of peers. Accordin…
Three-ness: Healing world politics with epistemic compassion
Epistemic compassion can help to heal world politics. It mitigates almost six centuries of Eurocentric ‘epistemic violence’ and ‘epistemicide’ with a trialectical epistemology that bridges even seemingly irreconcilable opposites. Buddhists call this process Interbeing. I draw on Daoist yin/yang dynamics for epistemology and the ancient Silk Roads as an exemplar. Subsequently, I apply this analysis to a watershed development in our contemporary po…
Confucianism with a Liberal Face: The Meaning of Democratic Politics in Postcolonial Taiwan
Neither cultural conversion to Western liberalism nor resort to local traditions such as Confucianism adequately deals with the hybrid nature of democratization in a postcolonial context. With its assortment of Chinese, Japanese, American, and Taiwanese hegemonic legacies, Taiwan offers a case in point. Its version of democratic politics operates across three contending normative domains: liberal political institutions, Confucian rationales for p…
Sex Machine: Global Hypermasculinity and Images of the Asian Woman in Modernity
positions: east asia cultures critique - Volume 7, Number 2, Fall 1999
Said's Exile: Strategic Insights for Postcolonial Feminists
Exile for Edward Said was a painful yet enriching condition. Indeed, exile accounted for his extraordinary productivity in theorising about and strategising for social justice for the displaced, the marginalised, the silenced. He spoke specifically on the exile of Palestinians from their historic homes but his insights apply to all subjects and subjectivities suffering from hegemonic oppression and stultification. Drawing on his volume, Reflectio…
Postcolonial Dissidence within Dissident IR: Transforming Master Narratives of Sovereignty in Greco-Turkish Cyprus
In recognizing dissident voices, postmodern scholarship in international relations (lR) performs an invaluable service. It legitimates the multiple, contending, and interstitial identities that inhabit international life, thereby providing an analytical, not just humanitarian, basis from which marginalized voices can shout: I, too, am valid! In so doing, this self-styled dissident IR disturbs the sovereign recitations: that power always triumphs …
Hegemony and the internationalizing state: A post‐colonial analysis of china's integration into Asian corporatism
Gramscian globalists presume that internationalization means external‐ization, modernization, and Westernization, thereby enhancing the world‐hegemony of Western liberal capitalism. This paper proposes instead that internationalization mutates the world‐hegemony sometimes into non‐Western, non‐liberal orders of regional‐hegemony. As a case study, this paper focuses on China's internationalization into an Asian Corporatist regional‐hegemony in the…
World Politics in Colour
Racism reflects how we think and act as much as what. It manifests in terms of biology, geography, and culture but reflects an episteme that normalises Self and Other into a bordered binary. Here, a trialectical epistemology can help. It dissolves racialised realities by showing how opposites exist in each other, thereby constituting a three-ness – e.g. self-in-other and other-in-self – that links Self and Other despite mutual antagonisms. From s…
Lust/Caution in IR: Democratising World Politics with Culture as a Method
International Relations (IR) needs democratising. Currently, IR theorising remains under the hegemony of a singular worldview (`warre of all against all') with a singular logic (`conversion or discipline') for all actors and activities. This top-down, state-centric and exclusivist approach is fundamentally anti-democratic for a field of inquiry and practice crowded with multiple worlds. The Humanities, we propose, will help to mitigate these tota…
Power and Play through Poisies: Reconstructing Self and Other in the 9/11 Commission Report
Analyses of 9/11 tend to narrowly punctuate understandings of Self vs Other. These mystify the power of politics in international relations, fixing us in locked cycles of dominance, retaliation, and indeed, anihilation. We explore an alternative method (poetry) derived from a dialectical epistemology (poisies) framed by a prismatic ontology (Worldism) to address the relations between Self and Other, and their implications for an emancipatory, tra…
Assessing, Engaging, and Enacting Worlds: Tensions in Feminist Method/Ologies
Our methods, methodologies, and ways of producing and communicating knowledge not only orient the questions we ask and the knowledges we pursue, but they also direct the effects and purposes of our work. Methods enact our worlds (Law and Urry 2004Law, J., and J. Urry. 2004. “Enacting the Social.” Economy and Society 33 (3): 390–410. doi:10.1080/0308514042000225716 [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] ). While many femi…
Heart and Soul for World Politics: Advaita Monism and Daoist Trialectics in IR
The Monster Within: What Fu Manchu and Hannibal Lecter Can Tell Us About Terror and Desire in a Post-9/11 World
Research Article| May 01 2004 The Monster Within: What Fu Manchu and Hannibal Lecter Can Tell Us About Terror and Desire in a Post-9/11 World L. H. M. Ling L. H. M. Ling Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2004) 12 (2): 377–400. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-12-2-377 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email To…
Rationalizations for State Violence in Chinese Politics: The Hegemony of Parental Governance
This article asks why the Chinese state consistently resorts to violence when faced with domestic dissent. It concludes that both dissenters and state elites contribute to state violence by subscribing to the Confucian discourse of parental governance. Dissenters typically utilize moral suasion to argue for reform, while state elites respond with moral outrage. Underlying both discourses is the presumption that state-society relations reflect Con…
On relations and relationality: A conversation with friends
Synopsis: Two professors engage in deep conversation about deep thoughts—unbordered thinking, epistemic compassion, inter‐ being, democratic learning, intellectual freedom and culinary cosmologies—until they encounter a third. He verifies yet upturns their worlds with an absurdist joke. The professors then realize that humour is sometimes more divine than love. Laughter, after all, affirms the humanity behind all relations and relationality. This…
Dialectics for IR: Hegel and the Dao
This article performs a thought experiment. We ask: what if we were to engage two venerable legacies of dialectics, Hegelianism and Daoism, to see what results in terms of our thinking in International Relations (IR) about World Politics (WP)? Would some kind of a shift, synthesis, or transformation occur, as suggested by the dialectical goal of both traditions? Our discussion focuses broadly on the question of understanding social relations in w…
Subaltern straits: Exit', 'voice', and 'loyalty' in the United States-China-Taiwan relations
Mainstream approaches perpetuate the Taiwan–China ‘crisis’. They do so by following Cold-War concepts and prescriptions, despite the rise of new realities and new visions for cross-strait relations. We draw on Hirschman's identification of ‘loyalty’ and ‘voice’ to describe the mainstream discourse on cross-strait relations in Taiwan, mostly directed by the United States. But a third option is now emerging. It offers the possibility of a paradigma…
Democratization under internationalization: Media reconstructions of gender identity in Shanghai
This article examines theories of democratization proposed for post‐socialist, internationalizing economies with special attention to contemporary China. It finds the field discursively and conceptually truncated into institutionalist, internationalist, and feminist concerns, thereby losing the rich insights that each may bring to the other. This analytical lacuna leaves intact a default agenda that is anti‐democratic, anti‐international, and ant…
Beyond Soft Power: Cultural Power from India and China Today through Film 1
The concept of ‘soft power’ impoverishes our understanding of politics. It assumes (i) the world has never encountered instances of ‘soft power’ before or knows no better when encountering it; (ii) culture cannot have any interests, agency or impact of its own; and (iii) it cannot capture the state. History—especially from India and China—debunks these assumptions. I propose a contrasting concept, cultural power. It turns ‘soft power’ on its head…
East Asian Migration to the Middle East Causes, Consequences and Considerations
East Asian Migration to the Middle East Causes, Consequences and Considerations
In 1983, possibly more than 1 million East Asians were working in the capital-rich, labor-short countries of the Middle East. This article reviews the causes and consequences of this new migration flow and notes emerging political, military, and economic linkages between East Asia and the Middle-East
Intellectual Responses to China's Economic Reforms
Research Article| May 01 1988 Intellectual Responses to China's Economic Reforms L. Huan-Ming Ling L. Huan-Ming Ling Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1959) 28 (5): 541–554. https://doi.org/10.2307/2644642 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search S…
Rationalizations for State Violence in Chinese Politics: The Hegemony of Parental Governance
This article asks why the Chinese state consistently resorts to violence when faced with domestic dissent. It concludes that both dissenters and state elites contribute to state violence by subscribing to the Confucian discourse of parental governance. Dissenters typically utilize moral suasion to argue for reform, while state elites respond with moral outrage. Underlying both discourses is the presumption that state-society relations reflect Con…
Hegemony and the internationalizing state: A post‐colonial analysis of china's integration into Asian corporatism
Gramscian globalists presume that internationalization means external‐ization, modernization, and Westernization, thereby enhancing the world‐hegemony of Western liberal capitalism. This paper proposes instead that internationalization mutates the world‐hegemony sometimes into non‐Western, non‐liberal orders of regional‐hegemony. As a case study, this paper focuses on China's internationalization into an Asian Corporatist regional‐hegemony in the…
Democratization under internationalization: Media reconstructions of gender identity in Shanghai
This article examines theories of democratization proposed for post‐socialist, internationalizing economies with special attention to contemporary China. It finds the field discursively and conceptually truncated into institutionalist, internationalist, and feminist concerns, thereby losing the rich insights that each may bring to the other. This analytical lacuna leaves intact a default agenda that is anti‐democratic, anti‐international, and ant…
Postcolonial Dissidence within Dissident IR: Transforming Master Narratives of Sovereignty in Greco-Turkish Cyprus
In recognizing dissident voices, postmodern scholarship in international relations (lR) performs an invaluable service. It legitimates the multiple, contending, and interstitial identities that inhabit international life, thereby providing an analytical, not just humanitarian, basis from which marginalized voices can shout: I, too, am valid! In so doing, this self-styled dissident IR disturbs the sovereign recitations: that power always triumphs …
Confucianism with a Liberal Face: The Meaning of Democratic Politics in Postcolonial Taiwan
Neither cultural conversion to Western liberalism nor resort to local traditions such as Confucianism adequately deals with the hybrid nature of democratization in a postcolonial context. With its assortment of Chinese, Japanese, American, and Taiwanese hegemonic legacies, Taiwan offers a case in point. Its version of democratic politics operates across three contending normative domains: liberal political institutions, Confucian rationales for p…
Authoritarianism in the Hypermasculinized State: Hybridity, Patriarchy, and Capitalism in Korea
Authoritarianism in East Asia's capitalist developmental state (CDS) is highly gendered. A hybrid product of Western masculinist capitalism and Confucian parental governance, CDS authoritarianism takes on a hypermasculinized developmentalism that assumes all the rights and privileges of classical Confucian patriarchy for the state while assigning to society the characteristics of classical Confucian womanhood: diligence, discipline, and deference…
Sex Machine: Global Hypermasculinity and Images of the Asian Woman in Modernity
positions: east asia cultures critique - Volume 7, Number 2, Fall 1999
Hypermasculinity on the Rise, Again: A Response to Fukuyama on Women and World Politics
(2000). Hypermasculinity on the Rise, Again: A Response to Fukuyama on Women and World Politics. International Feminist Journal of Politics: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 277-286
An Unten(ur)able Position: The Politics of Teaching for Women of Color in the US
The U.S. academy wants 'multiculturalism' in the classroom. But its public rhetoric of fairness, standards, and diversity falls far short of its exclusionary actions in private, particularly for women of color faculty at tenure time. Tenure evaluations, we propose, reflect a narrative of institutional power that perpetuates the academy's religiouscolonial legacy. Priest-Novitiate relations rule the academy more than a community of peers. Accordin…
Borders of Our Minds: Territories, Boundaries, and Power in the Confucian Tradition
Dan Bell has provided us with a comprehensive survey of Confucian treatments of territorial boundaries. Professor Bell has accomplished this task, moreover, despite the tremendous range that exists within what is considered “the Confucian tradition,” both temporally (over two millennia of interpretation and reinterpretation) and substantively (“neo,” “post,” “reformist,” “orthodox,” and so on). In this regard, Professor Bell has given us not only…
The Monster Within: What Fu Manchu and Hannibal Lecter Can Tell Us About Terror and Desire in a Post-9/11 World
Research Article| May 01 2004 The Monster Within: What Fu Manchu and Hannibal Lecter Can Tell Us About Terror and Desire in a Post-9/11 World L. H. M. Ling L. H. M. Ling Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2004) 12 (2): 377–400. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-12-2-377 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email To…
Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence and Desire from September 11
America's "war on terror" and Al Qaeda's "jihad" reflect mirror strategies of imperial politics. Each camp transnationalizes violence and insecurity in the name of national or communal security. Neoliberal globalization underpins this militarization of daily life. Its desire industries motivate and legitimate elite arguments (whether from "infidels" or "terrorists") that society must sacrifice for its hypermasculine leaders. Such violence and des…
The House of IR: From Family Power Politics to the Poisies of Worldism1
Poisies offers an alternative epistemology to understand, critique, engage with, and reconstruct international relations (IR). Generally, this Greek concept refers to "creativity" or "poetic inspiration." We enlarge this definition by returning to poisies' original, ancient meaning: that is, creativity that comes from an act of reverberation or putting "language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity" (Bachel…
Power and Play through Poisies: Reconstructing Self and Other in the 9/11 Commission Report
Analyses of 9/11 tend to narrowly punctuate understandings of Self vs Other. These mystify the power of politics in international relations, fixing us in locked cycles of dominance, retaliation, and indeed, anihilation. We explore an alternative method (poetry) derived from a dialectical epistemology (poisies) framed by a prismatic ontology (Worldism) to address the relations between Self and Other, and their implications for an emancipatory, tra…
Global Presumptions: A Critique of Sørensen’s World-Order Change
Said's Exile: Strategic Insights for Postcolonial Feminists
Exile for Edward Said was a painful yet enriching condition. Indeed, exile accounted for his extraordinary productivity in theorising about and strategising for social justice for the displaced, the marginalised, the silenced. He spoke specifically on the exile of Palestinians from their historic homes but his insights apply to all subjects and subjectivities suffering from hegemonic oppression and stultification. Drawing on his volume, Reflectio…
Transforming World Politics
This book provides a critical understanding of contemporary world politics by arguing that the neoliberal approach to international relations seduces many of us into investing our lives in projects of power and alienation. These projects offer few options for emancipation; consequently, many feel they have little choice but to retaliate against violence with more violence. The authors of this pioneering work articulate worldism as an alternative …
Subaltern straits: Exit', 'voice', and 'loyalty' in the United States-China-Taiwan relations
Mainstream approaches perpetuate the Taiwan–China ‘crisis’. They do so by following Cold-War concepts and prescriptions, despite the rise of new realities and new visions for cross-strait relations. We draw on Hirschman's identification of ‘loyalty’ and ‘voice’ to describe the mainstream discourse on cross-strait relations in Taiwan, mostly directed by the United States. But a third option is now emerging. It offers the possibility of a paradigma…
Lust/Caution in IR: Democratising World Politics with Culture as a Method
International Relations (IR) needs democratising. Currently, IR theorising remains under the hegemony of a singular worldview (`warre of all against all') with a singular logic (`conversion or discipline') for all actors and activities. This top-down, state-centric and exclusivist approach is fundamentally anti-democratic for a field of inquiry and practice crowded with multiple worlds. The Humanities, we propose, will help to mitigate these tota…
Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds
Journeys beyond the West: World Orders and a 7th century Buddhist Monk
Novice Lee (‘Frank’) seeks world peace and thinks he has found it in the Liberal world order. He informs the Learned One, head of the monastery. Through their discussions, Frank discovers that the Liberal world order, despite its promises, offers neither ‘democracy’ nor ‘peace’. Turning to the Confucian world order of ‘all-under-heaven’ ( tianxia ), they find it similarly top-down and one-way. Finally, Frank and the Learned One, now joined by the…
Who Is an American
Cynthia Weber's documentary “I Am an American” is an audacious and creative intervention into the field of international relations (IR). It bypasses the usual conceptual boxes that the discipline imposes upon us since day one of graduate school: for example, only abstract arguments have force, only written articulations are acceptable, and only topics of “high politics” matter. With her documentary, Weber shows that we gain richer debates and ins…
Political science (36 works) · Law (30 works) · Politics (29 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Law (23 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Gender Studies (12 works)