Description
What, where is zen in the study of global politics, and in knowledge practices that global politics mobilise? Inspired by The Zen of International Relations (Stephen Chan, Peter G. Mandaville, and Roland Bleiker eds., 2001),this paper creatively illustrate how ‘zen’ might crack open new lines of inquiry by following absurd possibilities, for example that maybe communism is buddhism. I argue this possibility is generative in the study of statecraft and the global division system that perversely turns places like (divided and divisionary) Korea into a symptom of Cold War logics and US-led military and diplomatic manoeuvres. Drawing together postcommunist, postsocialist, postcolonial, Black, Indigenous and feminist thoughts on nothingness, nowheres, stillness, under/other worlds, I posit this conjunctive possibility and ask, ‘what happens when we think communism is buddhism?’ I suggest this possibility helps us better understand not only what occurs in the shadows of monumental politics and diplomacy but how one might live and do international relations that takes us beyond the realm of the symptomatic, the perverse, the ugly. Here then, zen signifies not only Buddhist practices but an assemblage of critical-creative worlding practices that privilege the movement of emptying out, states of contemplation, processes of self-transformation, and ideas of healing.
