{"id":2044,"date":"2014-11-03T11:00:34","date_gmt":"2014-11-03T10:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicseastasia.com\/staging\/3558\/?p=2044"},"modified":"2015-08-22T16:31:36","modified_gmt":"2015-08-22T14:31:36","slug":"reconceptualising-world-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicseastasia.com\/staging\/3558\/research\/ir\/reconceptualising-world-order\/","title":{"rendered":"Reconceptualising World Order"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chinese Political Thought and Its Challenge to International Relations Theory<\/h2>\n

At the outset of the twenty-first century, the world is facing a range of problems, including environmental, economic, and security risks, that increasingly challenge the logic of nation-state governance. While American and European models of International Relations and global governance, such as the Westphalian system of states and the Washington Consensus, have come under attack from poststructuralist thinkers, political philosophers from China and Taiwan have tried to reconceptualise the world of the twenty-first century from their own perspectives.<\/p>\n

This article examines current streams of Chinese International Relations theorising and confronts them with the case of territorial disputes in the East China Sea. The article analyses the arguments by Chinese realists, \u2018worldists\u2019, and procedural constructivists, showing how Chinese scholars creatively revive pre-modern Chinese political theory in attempts to provide new ways in which International Relations scholars might view the world, or: \u2018all-under-heaven\u2019.<\/p>\n

As this paper shows,\u00a0the complexities of a conflict surrounding the East China Sea indeed vindicate\u00a0some of the criticism that Chinese scholars have levelled against\u00a0mainstream IRT, but the shortcomings in this nascent conceptual framework\u00a0necessitate a revision and careful expansion.\u00a0While these creative and novel contributions from China are bound to\u00a0progressively challenge conventional theories of International Relations, such\u00a0so-called non-Western theorising will require additional rigorous empirical grounding, a critical perspective on its entanglement with nationalist political discourses in East Asian societies, and the willingness to incorporate existing theories\u00a0if they are\u00a0to deliver on their\u00a0promise to provide\u00a0fresh perspectives to IR\u00a0theory.<\/p>\n

The research for this article was generously funded by the Leiden University Institute of Area Studies<\/a> (LIAS) and Leiden’s Modern East Asia Research Centre<\/a> (MEARC).<\/p>\n

How to reference this article<\/h3>\n

Schneider, Florian (2014), ‘Reconceptualising World Order: Chinese Political Thought and Its Challenge to International Relations Theory’. Review of International Studies<\/em>, 40(4), 683-703.<\/p>\n

[button text=”Article via Cambridge\u00a0Journals Online” link=”http:\/\/journals.cambridge.org\/action\/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9326891″]<\/p>\n

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This article examines current streams of Chinese International Relations theorising and asks what these approaches to world order can contribute to our understanding of the territorial disputes in the East China Sea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2047,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48,56],"tags":[158,43,163,150,79,66,162,160,159,161],"class_list":["post-2044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ir","category-publications","tag-all-under-heaven","tag-china","tag-diaoyu-islands","tag-east-china-sea","tag-international-relations","tag-ir-theory","tag-political-thought","tag-procedural-constructivism","tag-tianxia","tag-world-order","post_format-post-format-image"],"yoast_head":"\nReconceptualising World Order - Politics East Asia<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This article confronts Chinese International Relations theorising on world order with the case of territorial disputes in the East China Sea.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.politicseastasia.com\/staging\/3558\/research\/ir\/reconceptualising-world-order\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reconceptualising World Order - 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