Description
Much ink has been spilled on the Westphalian world as the dominant but also a highly violent and unsustainable way to ‘do’ world politics. However, what to do with Westphalia following an ‘alternative’ worldmaking has been underexplored, and the implicit assumption that it would/should be supplanted by a more peaceful and sustainable post-Westphalian world risks reproducing the Hegelian master/slave logic. Furthering L.H.M Ling’s (2014) Daoism-inspired insights, this research maintains that as part of an evolving global yin-yang dialectical process Westphalia is never fully dominant nor eradicable; moreover, multiple intersecting and co-constitutive worlds exist of which the Westphalian is one of many. This claim is grounded on three creative imaginaries about the body in East Asian medicine: Seeing the body as ‘a cosmos in miniature’ (Kaptchuk 2000) dissolves the whole-part dichotomy in IR in a way akin to quantum physics (Fierke 2022); as ‘living in two or more worlds’ (T.W. Kim 2024) provincializes biomedicine and its ‘one-world’ onto-epistemology on which IR has been based (Chen & Krickel-Choi 2024), and; as having fuzzy and non-exclusionary boundaries (Ling 2016) allows us to reimagine, and belong to, various communal bodies beyond Leviathan and anthropocentrism.
