On relations and relationality: a conversation with friends

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Notes

1 I thank Astrid Nordin for organizing the workshop at which this paper was first presented. Comments from workshop members also strengthened this paper tremendously. I am especially grateful to Marysia Zalewski for performing Act III with me in Lancaster, UK. In addition, I thank Juliana Mendes De Sa Beckert, Sneha George, and Patricia J. Robertson in the US for their contributions to this paper. Any errors or confusions, of course, belong to the author.

2 A portion of this dialogue was previously published in L.H.M. Ling, ‘Learning from the Silk Roads: Spices and the Demos,’ Huffington Post 21 October 2014 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lhm-ling/learning-from-the-silk-ro_1_b_6204164.html).

3 Mignolo first introduced the notion of ‘border thinking,’ as geography and episteme, with a hybridizing impact: gnosis. Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

4 For a classic example of bordered thinking in International Relations (IR), see Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1996). For an elaboration on how to overcome binaries in IR, see L.H.M. Ling, A Worldly World Order: Decolonizing International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

5 Ling, A Worldly World Order.

6 For an updated review of this literature, see Sara Shroff, ‘Whose Lives Matter? Valuefacturing Capital(ism) Within/Through Terrorisms, Femininities, and Transsexualities,’ PhD dissertation, Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy, The New School, forthcoming.

7 See, for example, Barry Buzan and George Lawson, The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

8 L.H.M. Ling, ‘Don’t Flatter Yourself: World Politics As We Know It Is Changing and So Must Disciplinary IR,’ in Synne L. Dyvik, Jan Selby, and Rorden Wilkinson (eds), What Is the Point of IR? pp. 135–146 (London: Routledge, 2017).

9 For British colonialism’s psychological impact on Indian and British society, see Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: The Psychology of Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988).

10 See, for example, Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Stewart Gordon, When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the ‘Riches of the East’ (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2008); Takashi Shogimen and Cary J. Nederman (eds), Western Political Thought in Dialogue with Asia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).

11 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).

12 Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

13 See, for example, K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Haneda Masashi (ed.), Asian Port Cities, 1600–1800: Local and Foreign Cultural Interactions (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2009); Freedman, Out of the East.

14 Thich Nhat Hanh, Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism (Berkeley: Parallax Books, 1987).

15 The Silk Roads lasted approximately from 2^nd century BCE-15^th century CE. But traders charted these routes, by both land and sea, in segments and episodes long before. See, E.E. Kuzmina (edited by Victor Mair), The Prehistory of the Silk Road (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

16 See, for example, Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Frances Wood, The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Luce Boulnois, Silk Road: Monks, Warriors & Merchants (New York: W.W. Norton 2008); Xinru Liu, The Silk Road in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History with Documents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

17 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992); Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).

18 B. d. Carvalho, H. Leira and J.M. Hobson, ‘The Big Bangs of IR: The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You About 1648 and 1919,’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39 (3) 2011: 735–758.

19 A.B. Sampson, ‘Tropical Anarchy: Waltz, Wendt, and the Way We Imagine International Politics,’ Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27 (4) 2002: 429–457.

20 Duncan S.A. Bell, ‘Writing the World: Disciplinary History and Beyond,’ International Affairs 85 (1) 2009: 3–22; Aoileann Ni Mhurchu and Reiko Shindo, ‘Introduction: Being Critical and Imaginative in International Relations,’ in Aoileann Ni Mhurchu and Reiko Shindo (eds), Critical Imaginations in International Relations, pp. 1–10 (London: Routledge, 2016).

21 Here, Rao is referring to career costs and benefits. See, for example, Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Jonas Hagmann and Thomas J. Biersteker, ‘Beyond the Published Discipline: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of International Studies,’ European Journal of International Relations (2012): 1–40.

22 Paul Feyerabend, Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Richness of Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

23 Westphalian IR sees the world as a ‘tragedy’ or a ‘problem’ to overcome; it also disregards any consideration of the Other. See, for example, Stephen Chan, Plural International Relations in a Divided World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017).

24 Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom,’ Theory, Culture & Society 26 (7–8) 2009: 1–23.

25 See the Silk Road Research Initiative (SRRI): http://newschoolsilkroad.wordpress.com/.

26 L.H.M. Ling with Badrul Hisham Ismail, ‘On Al-Ghazali and Global Governance: A 12^th-Century Mystic for Today’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP),’ paper delivered at a conference on ‘The Dialogue of Civilizations and Cultures,’ Tafila Technical University, Jordan, 5–7 May 2015.

27 450–505 AH/1058-1111 AD.

28 Al-Ghazali, ‘On the Manners Relating to Eating’ (Book XI), The Revival of the Religious Sciences (The Islamic texts Society, 2000). See also, David Waines, ‘Tales of Food and Hospitality’ (Chapter 3), The Odyssey of Ibn Battuta: Uncommon Tales of a Medieval Traveler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

29 This line of reasoning may resemble current charges by alt-right groups that ‘they will take our jobs!’ However, al-Ghazali sought to protect and prioritize local integrity; whereas, alt-right groups, in their incarnation from generations ago, were happy to support imperialist invasions and occupations of other peoples’ lands and countries. Rudyard Kipling characterized this ‘obligation’ as ‘the white man’s burden’ (1899). In brief, al-Ghazali’s principle applies as much then as it does now.

30 See, for example, G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Co-Directors, Forging A World of Liberty Under Law: US National Security in the 21st Century, Final Report of the Princeton Project on National Security (Princeton: Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, 2006) (http://www.princeton.edu/∼ppns/report.html) (Downloaded: 13 September 2009); G. John Ikenberry, ‘The Rise of China and the Future of the West: Can the Liberal System Survive?’ Foreign Affairs January/February 2008 (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2008-01-01/rise-china-and-future-west) (Downloaded: 30 December 2015).

31 Freedman, Out of the East.

32 For example, democratic institutions and practices in post-Taliban Afghanistan and post-Saddam Hussein Iraq remain underdeveloped despite the US removing their respective dictators. Zalmay Khalilzad, ‘Lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq,’ Journal of Democracy 21 (3) July 2010: 41–49.

33 See, for example, Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)

34 Heike Hennig-Schmidt, Zhu-Yu Li, Chaoliang Yang, ‘Why People Reject Advantageous Offers—Non-Monotonic Strategies in Ultimatum Bargaining, Evaluating a Video Run in PR China,’ Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 65 (2008): 373–384; Nidhi Srinivas, ‘Politics of Innovation: Cases from India and China,’ paper delivered at the conference on ‘The Environment in India and China: Histories and Innovations,’ India China Institute, The New School, 30 November–1 December 2012 (http://www.newschool.edu/ici/events.aspx?id=86532).

35 Research shows, however, just the opposite. A comparative study of behavioral sciences across the globe demonstrates that societies labeled as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) represent ‘frequent outliers’ when measured in terms of ‘visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ’ (Heinrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010: 1). The authors conclude that ‘[t]he findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans’ (Ibid.) Joseph Heinrich, Steven J. Heine, Ara Norenzayan, ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2010): 1–75.

36 Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

37 This phrase comes from Dr. John, an American singer, songwriter, actor, pianist, and guitarist. See his official website: http://www.nitetripper.com/

38 Besides Laozi, Master Zhuang or Zhuangzi (4^th century BCE) is considered the second pillar of what is now known as Daoism. His sayings/writings, however, were concerned more with ‘personal realization, and only derivatively concerned about social and political order.’ Roger T. Ames (ed.), Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).

39 Laudan, Cuisine and Empire. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

40 See, for example, Gavan Duffy, ‘Justification of Trans-Cultural International Studies,’ in Pinar Bilgin and L.H.M. Ling (eds), Asia in International Relations: Unlearning Imperial Power Relations (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 121–134.

41 Ibid., pp. 122.

42 A method in contemporary social science, ‘prediction and control’ aims to prefigure events to better deal with them. See, for example, King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry.

43 L.H.M. Ling, ‘World Politics in Colour,’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45 (3) 2017: 473–491.

44 Grace Ji-Sun Kim, ‘In Search of a Pneumatology: Chi and the Spirit,’ Feminist Theology 18 (1) 2009: 117–136. I thank Patricia J. Robertson for this reference. She has long educated me on the correspondences between Christian mysticism, Hindu prana, and Daoist qi. I also thank Patrick Thaddeus Jackson for reinforcing this connection.

45 Radha D’Souza, ‘What Can Activist Scholars Learn from Rumi?’ Philosophy East and West 64 (1) 2014: 1–24.

46 L.H.M. Ling, ‘Kōanizing IR: Flipping the Logic of Epistemic Violence,’ keynote address, 1^st Afrasian International Symposium, Ryukoku University, Kyoto, 27 February 2016.

47 ‘Zen Koans’ (http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/zenindex.html) (Downloaded: 19 July 2015).

48 For joy in IR, see Elina Penttinen, Joy and International Relations: A New Methodology (War, Politics, Experience) (London: Routledge, 2013); Saara Särmä, PhD dissertation ‘Junk Feminism and Nuclear Wannabes - Collaging Parodies of Iran and North Korea’, Department of International Relations, Tampere University, 2014 (http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-44-9535-9) (Downloaded: 9 March 2017).

49 This is an absurdist joke, not a typo. It has no meaning.

50 This term comes from poker. It means ‘I’ll bet three times what you just bet.’