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This book offers a non-Western feminist perspective on world politics and international relations. Creative, innovative, and challenging, it seeks completely to transform contemporary Eurocentric and masculinist IR by re-presenting it in non-Western, non-masculinist, and non-academic terms. Drawing on Daoist dialectics, the stories of Sihar and Shenya aim to redress such hegemonic imbalance by completing the IR story. To the yang of power politics, this book offers a yin of fairy-tale. (Both are equally fantastical but to different purposes.) To the yang of binary categories like Self vs Other, West vs Rest, hypermasculinity vs hyperfemininity, Sihar and Shenya show their yin complementarities and complicities, inside and out, top and bottom, center and periphery. And to the yang of intransigent hegemony, Sihar & Shenya explores the yin of emancipation through porous, water-like thought and behavior through venues like aesthetics and emotions. From this basis, we begin to see another world with another kind of politics.

This book draws on Daoist yin/yang dialectics to move world politics from the current stasis of hegemony, hierarchy, and violence to a more balanced engagement with parity, fluidity, and ethics. The author theorizes that we may develop a richer, more representative approach towards sustainable and democratic governance by offering a non-Western alternative to hegemonic debates in IR. The book presents the story of world politics by integrating folk tales and popular culture with policy analysis. It does not exclude current models of liberal internationalism but rather brackets them for another.

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 play was written by L. H. M. Ling, and posthumously edited by A. H. M. Nordin.

AbstractAs 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's new moral heights. Linklater assumes, for instance, that Las Casas never talked with indigenes to realise that they, too, warrant recognition as human beings; Catholic piety alone sufficed. The West thus towers in singular triumph, embedding International Relations (IR) in what I call Hypermasculine Eurocentric Whiteness (HEW). Still, the Other retains a sense of its Self. An effervescent spirit of play enables resilience and creativity toco-produceour world-of-worlds. Come out and play!, I urge. It's time to shed IR's 'tragedy' for the sparkle within.

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 such trialectics, epistemic compassion can arise. It enables learning from the Other through what Buddhists call 'interbeing' or the recognition that 'you are in me, and I in you'. Reciprocity thus becomes key. The Self cannot violate the Other without also violating itself; likewise, loving the Other effectively loves the Self. Flat, monochromatic binaries like 'black' versus 'white' cannot continue and colour revivifies world politics, both literally and figuratively. I apply trialectics to the 'border problem' between India and China as an analogy.

AbstractDiscourse 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 and (Chinese/non-Western) Other, we may begin to shift IR/world politics from hegemony to engagement, the 'tragedy' of great power politics to the freedom of discovery and creativity.

AbstractNovice 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 their brother monks and sister nuns, consider the life of the 7th century monk, Xuanzang. He inspires Frank to imagine a 'worldly world order' where humility and learning drive one's engagements with others, rather than what we have today: hegemony and imperialism.