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> <p></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></p> <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>