Description
The majority of IR Theory, even in its more critical iterations, holds on to a teleology of history. The world as we find it might be transformable, but not in ways that would take us back to worlds overlain by the violence of colonial modernity. This paper draws on a tradition of kabbalistic thought rooted in historic Palestine and the broader world of Islamo-Judaic co-habitation and intellectual production which reached across from Baghdad to Al-Andalus for over a millennium, a tradition of Islamo-Jewish thought that is of Palestine, but not of Zionism or associated violent teleologies. In particular the paper explores the writings and thought of Haim Shaul Dweik Hakohen, a Syrian kabbalist who migrated to Al Quds in 1898, and who produced a series of texts that centres a retrieval of divine worlds thought to be lost to the violence of the biblical Creation. The paper argues that the retrieval embedded in Haim Dveik’s epistemic world contains lessons for how IR might respond more productively to calls from colonised peoples for the return of their lands and livelihoods, centring the wretched of the earth in our development of concepts and theories, rather than the masters of war.
