Imagining World Politics

<p>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 <em>yang</em> of power politics, this book offers a <em>yin</em> of fairy-tale. (Both are equally fantastical but to different purposes.) To the <em>yang</em> of binary categories like Self vs Other, West vs Rest, hypermasculinity vs hyperfemininity, Sihar and Shenya show their <em>yin</em> complementarities and complicities, inside and out, top and bottom, center and periphery. And to the <em>yang</em> of intransigent hegemony, <em>Sihar & Shenya</em> explores the <em>yin</em> 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.</p><p>Written with students of IR and world politics in mind, this book offers a postcolonial bridge for IR/WP. Following an academic introduction to assist the reader, Ling moves away from traditional scholarship and into three interlocking fables:</p><ul> <li>Book I shows what an alternative world could look and feel like.</li> <li>Book II makes the implications for IR/WP more explicit. It draws on the traditional Chinese notion of the five movements (<i>wu xing</i>) -- fire, metal, earth, wood, and water -- to illustrate iconic elements of IR/WP -- power, wealth, security, love, and knowledge -- and how they could change according to circumstance and context.</li> <li>Epilogue/Introduction: The Return brings the reader back into the Western world and focuses on modern-day PhD student Wanda who is troubled by what she is learning, and searches for a different perspective.</li> </ul><p>Engaging with the substantive problematiques at the heart of international relations studies, this work is a unique and innovative resource for all students and scholars of international relations and world politics.</p> <p>1. Introduction - Why do we need Sihar & Shenya in IR? 2. Book I: "The Orchid and The Tree"<strong> </strong>3. Book II 4. Book III: “The Return.”</p>