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Imagining Economics Otherwise: Encounters with Identity/Difference (Routledge Frontiers Of Political Economy Ser.)
by Nitasha KaulIt is possible to beirrational without beinguneconomic ? What is the link betweenValue andvalues ? What do economists do when theyexplain ? We live in times when the economic logic has become unquestionable and all-powerful so that our quotidian economic experiences are defined by their scientific construal. This book is the result of a
Imagining Europe in Times of War and Crises: Youth Perceptions from Balkans, Caucasus, and Turkey (The Future of Europe)
by Başak Alpan Afrim HotiThis book aims to explore the perceptions of the EU integration by the young population in its “periphery”. It thereby bridges the gap between perceptions studies, youth studies, and the center-periphery conceptual framework. The chapters in the volume make use of data generated from focus group meetings with university students aged between 18-30 (which is the age range generally used by the European Social Survey to group young citizens) in Romania, Kosovo, Albania, North Macedonia, Georgia and Turkiye.
Imagining Europe: Transnational Contestation and Civic Populism (Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology)
by Paul BlokkerThis book provides an extensive analysis and discussion of the transnational mobilization of citizens and youth, alongside the production of creative, imaginative, and constructive solutions to the European crisis. The volume provides a variety of interdisciplinary analyses, as well as a series of perspectives on populism that have not been addressed extensively, including an examination of left-wing populism, the constituent power dimension of populism, and transnational manifestations of populism, contributing to debates on political science, political sociology, social movements studies, and political and constitutional theory.
Imagining European Unity since 1000 AD
by Patrick PastureIn 2012, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee conferred its most prestigious award to the EU. This book takes this prize as a starting point to review the association of Europe's quest for peace with plans and ideals about European unity, the oldest of which can be traced back as far back as the Middle Ages. But the call for unity was not only motivated by peace and prosperity. It was also, and surprisingly even up to the 1950s, grounded in a yearning to maintain Europe's colonial dominance in the world. Historical analysis additionally reveals a deep longing for homogeneity and an abhorrence of diversity, rooted in the early history of Western Christendom. This book does not tell the usual story of a growing European self-consciousness. Instead, it offers a multifaceted history that takes in account the ambivalences and divergences of the European imagination in a global context.
Imagining Global Futures
by Adom GetachewA collection of post-colonial visions for a more just world.What does a just world look like? This volume begins with a planet beset by accumulating crises—environmental, social, and political—and imagines how we can move beyond them. Drawing on the legacy of post-colonial struggles for liberation, Imagining Global Futures explores a range of radical visions for a world after neoliberalism and empire. Centered on movements in the Global South, the collection challenges dominant patterns of social and political life and sketches more just and sustainable futures we might build in their place. What can we learn from alternative conceptions of the good life? How can we build a world where people are both freer and more equal? An urgent resource for collective imagination, Imagining Global Futures counterposes thick visions of a better world to our dystopian present.
Imagining India as a Global Power: Prospects and Challenges
by Sangit K. Ragi Sunil Sondhi Vidhan PathakThis book provides a comprehensive understanding of the various dimensions of India’s international positioning and foreign relations. Already a dominant player in South Asian politics, India has gained a strong footing in the international pecking order with the signing of the Indo-US nuclear agreement and significant support for its claim for a permanent seat in the Security Council. The chapters presented here look at myriad aspects — India’s relations with its neighbours and global powers farther afield including the US, the European Union, Russia and China; India’s policies, influences and strengths; developments in economy, knowledge and innovation amid evolving global realities as well as geostrategic equations and alliances; its present and future plans vis-à-vis its standing in the world; and how international politics is likely to emerge in the coming years. <P><P>The volume will be useful to academics, researchers and students of politics and international relations as also to policy practitioners and those in media interested in Indian affairs, foreign policy and international relations.
Imagining India: इमॅजिनिंग इंडिया
by Nandan Nilekani Aparna Velankarसमकालीन संदर्भात अत्यंत महत्त्वाच्या अशा या पुस्तकात भारताचा प्रदीर्घ इतिहास, गुंतागुंतीचे वर्तमान आणि अनेक शक्यतांना जन्माला घालणारे भविष्य यांचा एक सुसंगत असा अन्वय लावण्याचा प्रयत्न नंदन निलेकणी यांनी केला आहे. स्वातंत्र्योत्तर काळातल्या समाजवादी धोरणांमागचे तत्कालीन उद्देश कितीही चांगले असले, तरी प्रत्यक्ष व्यवहारात मात्र या धोरणांची परिणती लोकशाही खिळखिळी करणाऱ्या कुचंबल्या वर्तमानात कशी आणि का झाली, याचे सखोल विवेचन निलेकणी यांनी केले आहे. वर्तमान आणि भविष्य यांचा खंबीर आधार म्हणून उदयाला आलेली भारतातील तरुण लोकसंख्येची दमदार शक्ती हा कळीचा मुद्दा का आहे; याचे विश्लेषण हा या पुस्तकाचा महत्त्वाचा भाग. माहिती तंत्रज्ञानाच्या क्षेत्रात झपाट्याने होत जाणाऱ्या क्रांतीमुळे केवळ व्यापार, उद्योग आणि सरकारी कारभारातच नव्हे; तर बहुसंख्य भारतीयांच्या आयुष्यात किती रोमांचक परिवर्तन घडते आहे; याचे अत्यंत रोचक वर्णन या पुस्तकात आहे. जातीच्या गणितांवर बेतलेले राजकारण, कामगार क्षेत्रात दीर्घकाळ प्रलंबित राहिलेल्या सुधारणा, पायाभूत सुविधांची उभारणी, उच्च शिक्षणाचे क्षेत्र आणि भारतातला इंग्रजी भाषेचा वाढता प्रभाव यांसारख्या कळीच्या वादग्रस्त मुद्द्यांचे नंदन निलेकणी यांनी विस्ताराने आणि संपूर्णत: नव्या दृष्टिकोनांसह विस्तृत विवेचन केले आहे. जिथे काही बलाढ्य कंपन्यांच्या वार्षिक उलाढालीचे आकडे हे छोट्या देशांच्या संपूर्ण अर्थव्यवस्थेपेक्षाही मोठे होत चालले आहेत, अशा जागतिकीकरणाच्या प्रक्रियेत शासन संस्थांची नेमकी भूमिका काय; याचाही ऊहापोह निलेकणी यांनी केला आहे. सार्वजनिक आयुष्यातल्या प्रत्येक क्षेत्रात नवविचारांची-नवनिर्मितीची आणि सुधारणांची गरज अधोरेखित करणारे हे पुस्तक भविष्य तोलून धरू शकतील, अशा नव्या संकल्पना समोर ठेवते. खऱ्या अर्थाने सर्वसमावेशक असणाऱ्या लोकशाही व्यवस्थेपासून सामाजिक सुरक्षेच्या छत्रापर्यंत आणि सार्वजनिक आरोग्याच्या सक्षम क्षेत्रापासून शाश्वत ऊर्जा-धोरणापर्यंतच्या या नव्या संकल्पना वर्तमान राजकारणाला ओलांडून पुढे येतील आणि त्यातूनच देशाचे भविष्य आकाराला येईल, असा युक्तिवाद नंदन निलेकणी यांनी या पुस्तकात मांडला आहे.
Imagining Interest in Political Thought: Origins of Economic Rationality
by Stephen G. EngelmannImagining Interest in Political Thought argues that monistic interest--or the shaping and coordination of different pursuits through imagined economies of self and public interest--constitutes the end and means of contemporary liberal government. The paradigmatic theorist of monistic interest is the English political philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), whose concept of utilitarianism calls for maximization of pleasure by both individuals and the state. Stephen G. Engelmann contends that commentators have too quickly dismissed Bentham's philosophy as a crude materialism with antiliberal tendencies. He places Benthamite utilitarianism at the center of his account and, in so doing, reclaims Bentham for liberal political theory. Tracing the development of monistic interest from its origins in Reformation political theory and theology through late-twentieth-century neoliberalism, Engelmann reconceptualizes the history of liberalism as consisting of phases in the history of monistic interest or economic government. He describes how monistic interest, as formulated by Bentham, is made up of the individual's imagined expectations, which are constructed by the very regime that maximizes them. He asserts that this construction of interests is not the work of a self-serving manipulative state. Rather, the state, which is itself subject to strict economic regulation, is only one cluster of myriad "public" and "private" agencies that produce and coordinate expectations. In place of a liberal vision in which government appears only as a protector of the free pursuit of interest, Engelmann posits that the free pursuit of interest is itself a mode of government, one that deploys individual imagination and choice as its agents.
Imagining Ireland's Future, 1870-1914: Home Rule, Utopia, Dystopia
by Pauline CollombierThis book attempts to delve into the connection between imagination and politics, and examines the many expectations and fears engendered by the Irish home rule debate. More specifically, it assesses the ways politicians, artists and writers in Ireland, Britain and its empire imagined how self-government would work in Ireland after the restitution of an Irish parliament. What did home rulers want? What were British supporters of Irish self-government willing to offer? What did home rule mean not only to those who advocated it but also to those who opposed it?
Imagining Japan in Post-war East Asia: Identity Politics, Schooling and Popular Culture (Routledge Studies in Education and Society in Asia)
by Paul Morris Edward Vickers Naoko ShimazuIn the decades since her defeat in the Second World War, Japan has continued to loom large in the national imagination of many of her East Asian neighbours. While for many, Japan still conjures up images of rampant military brutality, at different times and in different communities, alternative images of the Japanese ‘Other’ have vied for predominance – in ways that remain poorly understood, not least within Japan itself. Imagining Japan in Postwar East Asia analyses the portrayal of Japan in the societies of East and Southeast Asia, and asks how and why this has changed in recent decades, and what these changing images of Japan reveal about the ways in which these societies construct their own identities. It examines the role played by an imagined ‘Japan’ in the construction of national selves across the East Asian region, as mediated through a broad range of media ranging from school curricula and textbooks to film, television, literature and comics. Commencing with an extensive thematic and comparative overview chapter, the volume also includes contributions focusing specifically on Chinese societies (the mainland PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan), Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. These studies show how changes in the representation of Japan have been related to political, social and cultural shifts within the societies of East Asia – and in particular to the ways in which these societies have imagined or constructed their own identities. Bringing together contributors working in the fields of education, anthropology, history, sociology, political science and media studies, this interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to all students and scholars concerned with issues of identity, politics and culture in the societies of East Asia, and to those seeking a deeper understanding of Japan’s fraught relations with its regional neighbours.
Imagining Modern Democracy: A Habermasian Assessment of the Philippine Experiment
by Ranilo Balaguer HermidaWinner of the 2016 Outstanding Scholarly Work Award for the School of Humanities presented by Ateneo de Manila UniversityThis book is a pioneering study of Philippine democracy, one of the oldest in the Asian region, vis-à-vis Habermasian critical theory. Proceeding from a concise examination of the theory of law and democracy found in Habermas's Between Facts and Norms, Ranilo Balaguer Hermida explains how the law occupies the central role in both the legitimation of political power and the attainment of social integration. He then discusses how Habermas proposes to resolve the tension that exists in modern society between democratic norms and social facts, through the adoption of a lawmaking procedure whereby the informal sources of issues and opinions from the public sphere are allowed to develop and interact with the formal deliberations and decision processes inside the political system. He also explores certain provisions of the present Philippine Constitution that were expressly intended to restore democratic institutions and processes destroyed by decades of martial law, as well as the problems and hindrances that stand in the way of their full implementation.
Imagining Neoliberal Globalization in Contemporary World Fiction (Popular Culture and World Politics)
by Michael WalonenWe are in the midst of the third tectonic social transformation in human history. Our current transition toward greater forms of transnational interconnection, consumption- and finance-driven rather than production-based capitalism, digital information and cultural flows, and the attendant large-scale social and ecological consequences of these are drastically remaking our world, cultural producers from across the globe are seeking to make sense of, and provide insights into, these complex changes. Imagining Neoliberal Globalization in Contemporary World Fiction takes a broad cross-cultural approach to analyzing the literature of our increasingly transnationalized world system, considering how its key constituent features and local-level manifestations have been thematized and imaginatively seized upon by literary fiction produced from the perspective of the periphery of the capitalist world system. Textual renderings of globalization are not simply second-order approximations of it, but constitutive elements of globalization that condition how it will be understood and responded to, and so coming to terms with the narrativizations of globalization is vital scholarly work, as, among other things, it allows us to see to what extent it is currently possible to imagine alternatives to globalization’s more baleful aspects. This work will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of areas including contemporary literary/cultural studies, globalization studies, international relations, and international political economy.
Imagining New England
by Joseph A. ConfortiSay "New England" and you likely conjure up an image in the mind of your listener: the snowy woods or stone wall of a Robert Frost poem, perhaps, or that quintessential icon of the region--the idyllic white village. Such images remind us that, as Joseph Conforti notes, a region is not just a territory on the ground. It is also a place in the imagination. This ambitious work investigates New England as a cultural invention, tracing the region's changing identity across more than three centuries. Incorporating insights from history, literature, art, material culture, and geography, it shows how succeeding generations of New Englanders created and broadcast a powerful collective identity for their region through narratives about its past. Whether these stories were told in the writings of Frost or Harriet Beecher Stowe, enacted in historical pageants or at colonial revival museums, or conveyed in the pages of a geography textbook or Yankee magazine, New Englanders used them to sustain their identity, revising them as needed to respond to the shifting regional landscape.
Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame
by Heidi Tinsman Sandhya ShuklaThis rich interdisciplinary collection of essays advocates and models a hemispheric approach to the study of the Americas. Taken together, the essays examine North and South America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific as a broad region transcending both national boundaries and the dichotomy between North and South. In the volume's substantial introduction, the editors, an anthropologist and a historian, explain the need to move beyond the paradigm of U. S. American Studies and Latin American Studies as two distinct fields. They point out the Cold War origins of area studies, and they note how many of the Americas' most significant social formations have spanned borders if not continents: diverse and complex indigenous societies, European conquest and colonization, African slavery, Enlightenment-based independence movements, mass immigrations, and neoliberal economies. Scholars of literature, ethnic studies, and regional studies as well as of anthropology and history, the contributors focus on the Americas as a broadly conceived geographic, political, and cultural formation. Among the essays are explorations of the varied histories of African Americans' presence in Mexican and Chicano communities, the different racial and class meanings that the Colombian musical genre cumbia assumes as it is absorbed across national borders, and the contrasting visions of anticolonial struggle embodied in the writings of two literary giants and national heroes: Jos Mart of Cuba and Jos Rizal of the Philippines. One contributor shows how a pidgin-language mixture of Japanese, Hawaiian, and English allowed second-generation Japanese immigrants to critique Hawaii's plantation labor system as well as Japanese hierarchies of gender, generation, and race. Another examines the troubled history of U. S. gay and lesbian solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. Building on and moving beyond previous scholarship, this collection illuminates the productive intellectual and political lines of inquiry opened by a focus on the Americas. Contributors. Rachel Adams, Victor Bascara, John D. Blanco, Alyosha Goldstein, Hctor Fernndez L'Hoeste, Ian Lekus, Caroline F. Levander, Susan Y. Najita, Rebecca Schreiber, Sandhya Shukla, Harilaos Stecopoulos, Michelle Stephens, Heidi Tinsman, Nick Turse, Rob Wilson
Imagining Persecution: Why American Christians Believe There Is a Global War against Their Faith
by Jason BrunerMany American Christians have come to understand their relationship to other Christian denominations and traditions through the lens of religious persecution. This book provides a historical account of these developments, showing the global, theological, and political changes that made it possible for contemporary Christians to claim that there is a global war on Christians. Bruner does not advocate on behalf of particular repressed Christian communities, nor does it argue for the genuineness of certain Christians’ claims of persecution. Instead, this book is the first to examine the idea that there is a “global war on Christians” and its analytical implications. It does so by giving a concise history of categories such as "martyr" and theologies that have come together to produce a global Christian imagination premised upon the notion of shared suffering for one’s faith. This history does not deny certain instances of suffering or death; rather, it sets out to reflect upon and make meaning of the consequences for thinking about religious violence and Christianity worldwide using terms such as a “global war on Christians.”
Imagining Politics: Interpretations in Political Science and Political Television
by Stephen Benedict DysonImagining Politics critically examines two interpretations of government. The first comes from pop culture fictions about politics, the second from academic political science. Stephen Benedict Dyson argues that televised political fictions and political science theories are attempts at meaning-making, reflecting and shaping how a society thinks about its politics. By taking fiction seriously, and by arguing that political science theory is homologous to fiction, the book offers a fresh perspective on both, using fictions such as The West Wing, House of Cards, Borgen, Black Mirror, and Scandal to challenge the assumptions that construct the discipline of political science itself. Imagining Politics is also about a political moment in the West. Two great political shocks—Brexit and the election of Donald Trump—are set in a new context here. Dyson traces how Brexit and Trump campaigned against our image of politics as usual, and won.
Imagining Regulation Differently: Co-creating for Engagement (Connected Communities)
by Morag McDermont, Tim Cole, Janet Newman & Angela PicciniThere is an urgent need to rethink relationships between systems of government and those who are ‘governed’. This book explores ways of rethinking those relationships by bringing communities normally excluded from decision-making to centre stage to experiment with new methods of regulating for engagement. Using original, co-produced research, it innovatively shows how we can better use a ‘bottom-up’ approach to design regulatory regimes that recognise the capabilities of communities at the margins and powerfully support the knowledge, passions and creativity of citizens. The authors provide essential guidance for all those working on co-produced research to make impactful change.
Imagining Seattle: Social Values in Urban Governance (Our Sustainable Future)
by Serin D. HoustonImagining Seattle dives into some of the most pressing and compelling aspects of contemporary urban governance in the United States. Serin D. Houston uses a case study of Seattle to shed light on how ideas about environmentalism, privilege, oppression, and economic growth have become entwined in contemporary discourse and practice in American cities. Seattle has, by all accounts, been hugely successful in cultivating amenities that attract a creative class. But policies aimed at burnishing Seattle’s liberal reputation often unfold in ways that further disadvantage communities of color and the poor, complicating the city’s claims to progressive politics. Through ethnographic methods and a geographic perspective, Houston explores a range of recent initiatives in Seattle, including the designation of a new cultural district near downtown, the push to charge for disposable shopping bags, and the advent of training about institutional racism for municipal workers. Looking not just at what these policies say but at how they work in practice, she finds that opportunities for social justice, sustainability, and creativity are all constrained by the prevalence of market-oriented thinking and the classism and racism that seep into the architecture of many programs and policies. Houston urges us to consider how values influence actions within urban governance and emphasizes the necessity of developing effective conditions for sustainability, creativity, and social justice in this era of increasing urbanization.
Imagining Sustainability: Creative urban environmental governance in Chicago and Melbourne (Routledge Research in Sustainable Urbanism)
by Julie CidellCities, rather than nations, have become the key sites for enacting environmental policies. This is due to the combination of growing urban populations and increased action on the part of local governments (generally attributed to national governments’ failure to act on climate change). Imagining Sustainability seeks to understand how actors in local government conceptualize sustainability and their role in producing it, and what difference that understanding makes to their physical, political, and social environments now and in the future. International comparisons can uncover new ideas and possibilities. Chicago and Melbourne are prime candidates for such a comparison: they are cities of the same age, they have similar historical trajectories as interior gateways followed by industrial growth and then deindustrialization, and they have demonstrated the same recent desire to be global champions of sustainability. Based on qualitative fieldwork in these two cities, this book uses Karen Barad’s methodology of diffraction to read these case studies through each other. This methodology helps to understand not only what differences exist between these two places, but what effects those differences have on the urban environment. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of urban studies, urban planning and environmental policy and governance.
Imagining The Global: Transnational Media And Popular Culture Beyond East And West
by Fabienne Darling-WolfBased on a series of case studies of globally distributed media and their reception in different parts of the world, Imagining the Global reflects on what contemporary global culture can teach us about transnational cultural dynamics in the 21st century. A focused multisited cultural analysis that reflects on the symbiotic relationship between the local, the national, and the global, it also explores how individuals' consumption of global media shapes their imagination of both faraway places and their own local lives. Chosen for their continuing influence, historical relationships, and different geopolitical positions, the case sites of France, Japan, and the United States provide opportunities to move beyond common dichotomies between East and West, or United States and "the rest. " From a theoretical point of view, Imagining the Global endeavors to answer the question of how one locale can help us understand another locale. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources--several years of fieldwork; extensive participant observation; more than 80 formal interviews with some 160 media consumers (and occasionally producers) in France, Japan, and the United States; and analyses of media in different languages--author Fabienne Darling-Wolf considers how global culture intersects with other significant identity factors, including gender, race, class, and geography. Imagining the Global investigates who gets to participate in and who gets excluded from global media representation, as well as how and why the distinction matters.
Imagining The Post-apartheid State: An Ethnographic Account of Namibia
by John T. FriedmanIn northwest Namibia, people's political imagination offers a powerful insight into the post-apartheid state. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, this book focuses on the former South African apartheid regime and the present democratic government; it compares the perceptions and practices of state and customary forms of judicial administration, reflects upon the historical trajectory of a chieftaincy dispute in relation to the rooting of state power and examines everyday forms of belonging in the independent Namibian State. By elucidating the State through a focus on the social, historical and cultural processes that help constitute it, this study helps chart new territory for anthropology, and it contributes an ethnographic perspective to a wider set of interdisciplinary debates on the State and state processes.
Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them
by Carl AbbottWhat science fiction can teach us about urban planning Carl Abbott, who has taught urban studies and urban planning in five decades, brings together urban studies and literary studies to examine how fictional cities in work by authors as different as E. M. Forster, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville might help us to envision an urban future that is viable and resilient. Imagining Urban Futures is a remarkable treatise on what is best and strongest in urban theory and practice today, as refracted and intensely imagined in science fiction. As the human population grows, we can envision an increasingly urban society. Shifting weather patterns, rising sea levels, reduced access to resources, and a host of other issues will radically impact urban environments, while technology holds out the dream of cities beyond Earth. Abbott delivers a compelling critical discussion of science fiction cities found in literary works, television programs, and films of many eras from Metropolis to Blade Runner and Soylent Green to The Hunger Games, among many others.
Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars (Princeton Studies In International History And Politics Series #153)
by Elizabeth KierIn richly detailed case studies, Kier examines doctrinal developments in France and Great Britain during the interwar period. <P><P>She tests her cultural argument against the two most powerful alternative explanations and illustrates that neither the functional needs of military organizations nor the structural demands of the international system can explain doctrinal choice. She also reveals as a myth the argument that the lessons of World War I explain the defensive doctrines in World War II.
Imagining Windmills: Trust, Truth, and the Unknown in the Arts Therapies
by Richard Hougham Sarah Scoble Marián CaoImagining Windmills presents a compilation of scholarly chapters by selected authors of global standing in the arts therapies. This book reflects the theme of the 15th International Conference of the European Consortium for Arts Therapies (ECArTE), held in Alcalá de Henares, Spain, birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes. This innovative work seeks to further understanding of arts therapy education, practice and research and incorporates current thinking from art therapists, dance-movement therapists, dramatherapists and music therapists. Writers from Belgium, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, UK and USA combine to give an international voice to the book, which celebrates cultural distinctiveness, while also presenting shared intercultural developments in the professions. This interdisciplinary publication explores questions of the unknown and the imagined, misconception, delusion, truth and trust in the arts therapies. It enquires into ways in which education and the practice of the arts therapies engage with the imagination as a place of multiple realities, which may lead us closer to finding our truth. This book will be of interest and relevance not only to those in the arts therapeutic community, but also to a broad audience including those in related professions – for instance psychology, sociology, the arts, medicine, health and wellbeing and education.
Imagining World Politics: Sihar & Shenya, A Fable for Our Times (Interventions)
by L.H.M. LingThis book offers a non-Western feminist perspective on world politics and international relations. Creative, innovative, and challenging, it seeks completely to transform contemporary Eurocentric and masculinist IR by re-presenting it in non-Western, non-masculinist, and non-academic terms. Drawing on Daoist dialectics, the stories of Sihar and Shenya aim to redress such hegemonic imbalance by completing the IR story. To the yang of power politics, this book offers a yin of fairy-tale. (Both are equally fantastical but to different purposes.) To the yang of binary categories like Self vs Other, West vs Rest, hypermasculinity vs hyperfemininity, Sihar and Shenya show their yin complementarities and complicities, inside and out, top and bottom, center and periphery. And to the yang of intransigent hegemony, Sihar & Shenya explores the yin of emancipation through porous, water-like thought and behavior through venues like aesthetics and emotions. From this basis, we begin to see another world with another kind of politics. Written with students of IR and world politics in mind, this book offers a postcolonial bridge for IR/WP. Following an academic introduction to assist the reader, Ling moves away from traditional scholarship and into three interlocking fables: Book I shows what an alternative world could look and feel like. Book II makes the implications for IR/WP more explicit. It draws on the traditional Chinese notion of the five movements (wu xing) -- fire, metal, earth, wood, and water -- to illustrate iconic elements of IR/WP -- power, wealth, security, love, and knowledge -- and how they could change according to circumstance and context. Epilogue/Introduction: The Return brings the reader back into the Western world and focuses on modern-day PhD student Wanda who is troubled by what she is learning, and searches for a different perspective. Engaging with the substantive problematiques at the heart of international relations studies, this work is a unique and innovative resource for all students and scholars of international relations and world politics.