Deepshikha Shahi - Böcker

The academic discipline of International Relations strives to attain a ‘global’ spirit to narrow the cognitive gaps between the West and the Rest. On the one hand, there is the hegemonic presence of mainstream universalist Eurocentric IR theories, and on the other the counter-hegemonic presence of particularist Post-colonial and De-colonial non-Eurocentric IR theories. Nevertheless, both theoretical traditions endorse ‘epistemological dualism’ that essentially separates the ‘theorizing-subject’ from the ‘theorized-object’; thereby failing to bridge the gaps.This book uses the monist schema of ‘subject-object merger’ in the ancient Indian philosophy of Advaita to inaugurate a Global IR theory. In the global theoretical schema of Advaitic monism, the apparent particularist reality is supplemented (not contradicted) with the hidden universalist reality – the net result of which is a reconciliation of dualism with monism at the theoretical-practical level. The possibilities of this reconciliation have not been estimated at either level and as such, this untapped intellectual strategy stands to enrich both Eurocentric IR and non-Eurocentric IR. Shahi establishes Advaita as an alternative epistemological-methodological tool to re-imagine the complex realities of contemporary international politics.This fully fledged Global International Relations Theory will appeal to students of international relations, political theory, administrative theory and philosophy.

The academic discipline of International Relations strives to attain a ‘global’ spirit to narrow the cognitive gaps between the West and the Rest. On the one hand, there is the hegemonic presence of mainstream universalist Eurocentric IR theories, and on the other the counter-hegemonic presence of particularist Post-colonial and De-colonial non-Eurocentric IR theories. Nevertheless, both theoretical traditions endorse ‘epistemological dualism’ that essentially separates the ‘theorizing-subject’ from the ‘theorized-object’; thereby failing to bridge the gaps.This book uses the monist schema of ‘subject-object merger’ in the ancient Indian philosophy of Advaita to inaugurate a Global IR theory. In the global theoretical schema of Advaitic monism, the apparent particularist reality is supplemented (not contradicted) with the hidden universalist reality – the net result of which is a reconciliation of dualism with monism at the theoretical-practical level. The possibilities of this reconciliation have not been estimated at either level and as such, this untapped intellectual strategy stands to enrich both Eurocentric IR and non-Eurocentric IR. Shahi establishes Advaita as an alternative epistemological-methodological tool to re-imagine the complex realities of contemporary international politics.This fully fledged Global International Relations Theory will appeal to students of international relations, political theory, administrative theory and philosophy.

In an effort to attain a ‘global’ character, the contemporary academic discipline of International Relations (IR) increasingly seeks to surpass its Eurocentric limits, thereby opening up pathways to incorporate non-Eurocentric worldviews. Lately, many of the non-Eurocentric worldviews have emerged which either engender a ‘derivative’ discourse of the same Eurocentric IR theories, or construct an ‘exceptionalist’ discourse which is particularly applicable to the narrow experiential realities of a native time-space zone: as such, they fall short of the ambition to produce a genuinely ‘non-derivative’ and ‘non-exceptionalist’ Global IR theory. Against this backdrop, Sufism: A Theoretical Intervention in Global International Relations performs a multidisciplinary research to explore how ‘Sufism’ – as an established non-Western philosophy with a remarkable temporal-spatial spread across the globe – facilitates a creative intervention in the theoretical understanding of Global IR.

The overall exploratory venture leads to a Kautilyan non-Western eclectic theory of IR – a theory which moderately assimilates miscellaneousresearch traditions of Eurocentric IR, and, in addition, delivers a few innovative features that could potentially uplift not only Indian IR, but also Global IR.

The Global IR research programme promulgates a borderless ecology of cultures that has only an inside without an outside. This borderless ecology of cultures reinvents the human condition (including the condition of ‘the international’) as perpetually interconnected at the level of consciousness. While Western-centric IR theories depend on (neo-)Kantian philosophies to emphasize the time-space bounded identities of human beings living in visibly divided phenomenal worlds, the de-Kantian philosophies of the Global IR research programme – exemplified by the Tianxia, Advaita, and Nishida Kitaro’s Buddhism-inspired theories – recuperate the temporally-spatially indivisible phenomenal-noumenal flow of human life, thereby facilitating back-and-forth movement between the Westdominated ‘one world’ and the non-West-embodied ‘many worlds’. The central objective of the book is to demonstrate how this back-and-forth movement offers opportunities to conceive of and found a new world order that recognizes the temporally-spatially indivisible human condition on earth. The book delineates a set of guiding principles to promote an innovative practice of theory-building and policy-making that transcends the geo-centric limitations of knowledge-production and knowledge-application, thereby establishing the futuristic foundation of the Global IR research programme.