CIAO DATE: 06/2009
December 2008
The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs
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 practice crowded with multiple worlds. The Humanities, we propose, will help to mitigate these totalitarian tendencies by expressing and examining what hegemonic IR cannot but must: that is, a richness of being in global life. We present Ang Lee’s ‘Lust/Caution’ (2007) as an example. If seen as an allegory for Taiwan-China relations, this film shifts attention from the national security state, a defining concern for hegemonic IR, to the trans-national solidarities that bind peoples and societies despite inter-state conflicts, thereby offering a way out of the statist impasse that incarcerates the region. This approach extends beyond recent calls for a ‘linguistic’ or ‘artistic’ turn in IR. Culture, we argue, can serve as a method.
Resource link: Lust/Caution in IR: Democratising World Politics from Postcolonial Asia [PDF] - 178K