L. H. M. Ling

The New School · Department of International Affairs

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 a...

Most analyses of China’s “One Belt, One Road” policy focus on the Chinese government or transnational elites. Rarely do the localities receive any attention. Three conceptual failures follow: (1) conventional analyses fail to appreciate any local agency in negotiating with external, globalizing forces; consequently, they (2) fail to perceive local...

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 perpetr...

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 t...

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 –...

We bring together the concept of "multiple worlds" or "worldism" in International Relations with "epistemologies of the South," a global intellectual movement started in Latin America and southern Europe. Such "South-South talk" demonstrates the enduring resilience of the subaltern to withstand the Global North's "epistemicide" against the Global S...

L.H.M. Ling (Chapter 5) explores what it means to depart from a bordered approach altogether. She draws on traditional Indian (ayurvedic) and Chinese (zhongyi) medical principles and practices to diagnose, then prescribe treatment for, the border pathology that has plagued India-China relations since 1962.

Westphalian International Relations (IR) entrenches us in binary deadlocks like " China " vs the " West. " To break out, we need to emancipate IR spiritually, not just analytically or politically. This paper draws on two ancient traditions for help: Advaita monism and Daoist dialectics. A vision of post-Westphalian IR emerges: " raindrops in a barr...

Kōanizing IR seeks to awaken the discipline. 1 It needs to realize that the two key features of world politics, multiplicity and difference, can serve as sources of learning and stimulation rather than what they are now, targets of fear and rejection. With their sensibility for the absurd, the unconventional, and the hermeneutic, Buddhist kōans ope...

Behind the adage, “knowledge is power,” lies culture: it accounts for the knowledge that drives power. Recognizing culture as power shifts our focus from coercion to creativity, thereby offering a more balanced, equitable, and sustainable world politics. As a thought experiment, I apply an analysis of culture-as-power to the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islan...

This chapter claims the following: if it's Chinese, it's not IR; if it's IR, it's not Chinese. The only commonality between Chinese IR and Westphalian IR, I submit, is patriarchy.

This volume is much-needed. Not only does it pinpoint why the discipline of International Relations (IR) suffers from a ‘persistent dualism’—for example, Self versus Other, Knowledge versus Traditions, Westphalia versus tianxia/umma/ubuntu and so on—that accounts for the hegemony of the West vis-à-vis the rest of the world, but the volume also iden...

Challenging the Westphalian view of international relations, which focuses on the sovereignty of states and the inevitable potential for conflict, the authors from the Borderlands Study Group reconceive borders as capillaries enabling the flow of material, cultural, and social benefits through local communities, nation-states, and entire regions. B...

Disciplinary International Relations (IR) remains oblivious to the world and its politics. Vested material interests tied to a colonial social order maintain Disciplinary IR, culminating in a lack of imagination to conceive of the world in different terms. Conventional responses to the November bombings in Paris exemplify this condition. I trace th...

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 bo...

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 und...

This book draws on Daoist dialectics to move world politics from the current stasis of hegemony, hierarchy, and violence to a more balanced engagement with parity, fluidity, and ethics.

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),...

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 top...

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 directe...

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...

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 an...

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 vio...

U.S. interest in The Art of War (sunzi bingfa, 512 BCE) has risen dramatically since 9/11.1 Both former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, masterminds of the Iraq campaign, regularly quote Sun Tzu.2 The New York Times notes that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan may also be learning from The Art of War.3

“Welcome to the Coke side of life”.2 This slogan from one of corporate capitalism’s most famous icons encapsulates neoliberal globalization’s promise as well as its threat. That is, prosperity, equality and happiness can be attained by all but on one, unequivocal condition: convert to the US-led, neoliberal world-order or be disciplined. Conversion...

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 sub...

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 (Worldi...

Our argument proceeds in three parts. Part 1 identifies IR's foremost problematic: its constitution of boundaries that fence off a majority of the world. Identifying IR as a colonial household highlights its structural intimacy with capitalist-patriarchy. This recognition accounts for how this house has emerged in world politics and what it means f...

positions: east asia cultures critique 12.2 (2004) 377-400 Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has taken on an Orientalist discourse for its foreign policy. President George W. Bush has declared famously that the world is either with the United States (Western civilization, Christian enlightenment, law and order, progress) or with the...

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...

PEACEKEEPING OPERATES WITHIN A CONTEXT of neo-liberal power and capital.This context draws on and reflects older traditions of colonialism and patriarchy that valorize unequal treatments of race, gender, class, and culture. Although peacekeeping by multilateral agencies like the United Nations (UN) may provide a crucial service by ceasing violence...

Introduction 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 substa...

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 religiousc...

positions: east asia cultures critique 7.2 (1999) 277-306 Three visions of globalization currently dominate the popular imagination: "the West is best," "the West versus the rest," and "jihad versus McWorld." All three treat globalization as a Westernizing assault with little input or agency from local, non-Western sources. This Western exceptiona...

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 a...

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 t...

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...

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 a...

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, t...

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 m...

We present an alternative approach to world politics and the study of it: Worldism. It begins with the premise that we are all heirs to and products of multiple worlds. Multiple worlds refer to the various legacies and ways of relating that account for who and what we are, and why. From this Worldist perspective, we critique a mainstream manual of...

Racism and sexism are not, as many would assume, about outright hatred or domination. Though such sentiments exist, discrimination in the academy functions on a subtler, more passive, unthinking, sometimes even "friendly" level. Nonetheless, we must expose such friendly-fascism not just to redress individual cases of injustice but also to realize d...