Monday, April 11, 2016

Sihar & Shenya: a fable for our times

I think I am probably not alone in finding Sihar & Shenya unlike anything I have ever read in IRT classes. Although we do find excerpts of things like Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War in many manuals (as we can see described in the Epilogue/Introduction) they are normally brief and used to illustrate a point of some particular theory. So the task of writing this discussion post was a difficult one: how does one go about critiquing a fable? The usual "avenues of attack" (methodology, concepts, and so on and so forth) are not readily available. 

My main question, than, would be this: Is Ling's work theory? And, perhaps more importantly, does it want to be? As the author itself argues, Sihar & Shenya is not "filtered through what we call "the West", "modernity", "realism" and "science" (xviii). Although it is unarguably a very interesting teaching/learning tool, what does it leave us beyond that? It seems four of the five elements in book II (wealth, power, security and knowledge) could - if we wanted to that - be easily translated to the "normal language" of IR. But what about Love? How does it come in a conversation about world politics?

My second question is about the "feminist" aspect of the book. It describes itself as a "non-western feminist perspective on world politics and international relations" (back cover). Yet its idea of feminist seem to differ from other readings we have had. It seems to accept  a more "traditional" view of the feminine/masculine, even as it argues against this dichotomy. This appear in some instances of the fable, such as when the women, becoming entrusted with control of the household accounts, are shown to be more compassionate and fair than the men (p. 14). 

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