The Guanxi of Relational International Theory

This book offers a relational theory of International Relations (IR). To show the ways in which the relationality is foreshadowed in IR conversations it makes the following three points:

1) it recovers a mode of IR theorizing as itinerant translation;

2) it deploys the concept and practices of guanxi (employed here as a heuristic device revealing the infinite capacity of international interactions to create and construct multiple worlds) to uncover the outlines of a relational IR theorizing; and

3) it demonstrates that relational theorizing is at the core of projects for worlding IR.

By engaging with the phenomenon of relationality, Emilian Kavalski invokes the complexity of possible worlds and demonstrates new possibilities for powerful ethical-political innovations in IR theorizing. Thus, relational IR theorizing emerges as an optic which both acknowledges the agency of ‘others’ in the context of myriad interpretative intersections of people, powers, and environments (as well as their complex histories, cultures, and agency) and stimulates awareness of the dynamically-intertwined contingencies through which meanings are generated contingently through interactions in communities of practice.

The book will have a strong appeal to the broad academic readership in Asian Studies, Political Science, Comparative Politics, International Relations theory and students and scholars of non-/post-Western International Relations and non-/post-Western Political Thought.

Emilian Kavalski is Associate Professor of Global Studies at the Institute for Social Justice, Australian Catholic University. Emilian's research focusses on post-colonial literature, European politics, International Theory, Asian affairs, and the post-humanities.