The House of IR PDF

International Studies Review (2004) 6, 21–49
The House of IR: From Family Power

Politics to the Poisies of Worldism 1
ANNA M. AGATHANGELOU
University of Houston-Clear Lake and Global Change Institute, Nicosia
AND
L. H. M. LING
New School University, New York
Poisies offers an alternative epistemology to understand, critique, engage with, and

reconstruct international relations (IR). Generally, this Greek concept refers to
‘‘creativity’’ or ‘‘poetic inspiration.’’ We enlarge this definition by returning to po-
isies’ original, ancient meaning: that is, creativity that comes from an act of rever-
beration or putting ‘‘language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes
manifest through its vivacity’’ (Bachelard 1964:xxiii). In seizing upon the specific
reality of world politics as a trans-subjective mode of imagining, poisies pushes us to
recognize that becoming and being have countless forms, various voices, and
changing scripts. Consequently, we move beyond an instrumental, formalistic,
fixed, and narrow scientific logic that imposes a historical parochialism (e.g., Hob-
bes’s State of Nature) for an ahistorical universal (e.g., ‘‘it’s a war of all against all
across time and space’’).
We begin to see IR in a new light. Its ‘‘vivacity’’ is manifested through IR’s
political and ideological participation in world politics, accounting for the field’s
social relations and structural interests. This explains why conventional IR appeals
to some the way it does while affecting so many others so negatively. International
relation’s singularity also becomes apparent: that is, it is but one of many versions
and understandings of world politics.
Specifically, IR comes to resemble a colonial household. Its singular, oppositional
perspective (‘‘I versus You’’) stakes out an establishment of ‘‘civilization’’ in a space
that is already crowded with local traditions of thinking, doing, and being but
proclaimed, in willful arrogance, as a ‘‘state of nature’’ plagued by fearful ‘‘anarchy’’
and its murderous power politics. The House seeks to stave off such ‘‘disorder’’ by
imposing ‘‘order.’’ But the House does so by appropriating the knowledge, re-
sources, and labor of racialized, sexualized Others for its own benefit and pleasure
while announcing itself the sole producerFthe fatherFof our world. Others
qualify as ‘‘innocent’’ children, wards, or servants at best, or ‘‘unteachable’’ bar-
barians at worst. In either case, Others must wait faithfully for their admittance, if
ever, into the House of IR. Directing Others with declarative statements, the House
assumes that it knows both the problem (‘‘power’’) and its solution (‘‘more power’’).
Such suffocation of Self and Other leaves a multigenerational legacy similar to the
1
We thank John Vasquez for his invitation to contribute to this special issue. His comments on the paper were
most helpful. We also thank Timothy Emmert and Cynthia Weber for their trenchant reading of this paper despite
short time constraints, and we are indebted to Gavan Duffy for suggesting that we name our framework. Fiona
Chew has been a constant source of encouragement and support. Nonetheless, we alone are responsible for the
contents herein.
r 2004 International Studies Review.

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.
22 The House of IR: From Family Power Politics to the Poisies of Worldism
TABLE 1. From House to Worldism
House of IR Worldism
Image House Oceanic Circle

Motivation Escape from Hobbes’ State Enabling poisies
of Nature
Interest Manage privilege for the Realize a fuller,
few more integrated life for the
majority
Perspective ‘‘I vs. You’’ ‘‘you and me’’
Purpose Order vs. Disorder Contestations and Negotiations
Approach Declarative Statements Open-Ended Questions
Legacy A pathology of power for Common building of
power’s sake ¼ 4erasures, communities based on open
violences, desires ¼ 4 desires and interests ¼ 4 an
technologies of cruelty and ‘‘oceanic circle’’ of
cynicism interactive strength
and support
actual colonial household’s: that is, erasures and violences that flip the household’s
original intent. Order turns into disorder, repulsion into desire, purity into hy-
bridity. In the House of IR, especially, another practice rules: to treat power as
empire, regardless of public devastations or secret indulgences.
Poisies helps us to imagine a future beyond colonial capitalist-patriarchy. We
call our theoretical framework Worldism.2 Instead of detailing it upfront, we
would like Worldism to emerge, poitically, from our critical review of conven-
tional IR. This approach demonstrates why we need Worldism, where it fits, and
how it comes about. Nonetheless, we offer a preview here to give an idea of its
orientation.
Worldism opens with poisies’ collective, relational premise (‘‘you and me’’3).
Rooted in structural social relations of production, Worldism acknowledges the
existence of multiple worlds while registering, at the same time, their constant,
mutual ‘‘reverberation’’ and (re)construction. In contrast to the House of IR’s ob-
sessive fear of disorder, Worldism aims to allow negotiation across difference in the
building of communities. Toward this end, Worldism asks: What is the problem,
according to whom, and why? Only then can a solution arise that will serve the
greatest good for the greatest number. Not a house but Gandhi’s ‘‘oceanic circle’’
guides Worldism. Its ‘‘outermost circumference [does] not wield power to crush the
inner circle but give[s] strength to all within and derive its strength from it’’
(Ghandhi 1990:348). Realizing our oceanic connectedness, we may ‘‘wake up from
our personal and collective delusions to realize who we are, where we are going,
and how we are living [thereby preventing further violence through reactionary]
crusades to rid the world of evil’’ (Pigem 2002:10–11). Table 1 compares these key
features of Worldism with the House of IR.
Our argument proceeds in three parts. Part 1 identifies IR’s foremost problem-
atic: its constitution of boundaries that fence off a majority of the world. Identifying
IR as a colonial household highlights its structural intimacy with capitalist-patriarchy.
2
‘‘Worldism’’ differs from Jan Jindy Pettman’s (1996) notion of ‘‘worlding.’’ ‘‘Worlding women,’’ according to
Pettman (1996:xi), ‘‘make visible places and ways that women are in the world’’ and ‘‘explor[e] differences among
and between women.’’ In contrast, Worldism recognizes that womenFand menFinherit, reflect, and sustain
contending ontologies and epistemologies about their worlds. These, moreover, have been forged in the crucible of
colonialism and capitalist-patriarchy.
3
The lowercase letters for Worldism’s ‘‘you and me’’ visually reinforce this approach’s philosophical difference
from the House of IR’s capitalized ‘‘I versus You.’’
ANNA M. AGATHANGELOU AND L. H. M. LING 23
This recognition accounts for how this house has emerged in world politics and
what it means for unequal social relations. Part 2 examines the consequences to
colonizing IR as an academic discipline, a source of knowledge production, and a
field of practical politics. We find that elite gestures toward ‘‘fairness’’ and ‘‘rep-
resentation’’ still collude with power ideologically, institutionally, and practically.
International relation’s colonial desires surface when cracks in the system expose
acts of racialized, sexualized brutality by seemingly normal protectors of the status
quo, as seen recently at Abu Ghraib. Part 3 ends with suggestions for transforming
this outdated, (self-)destructive colonial set-up for an emancipatory, democratic IR.
IR Household Relations: In and Out, Up and Down

Our understanding of the colonial household comes from Ann Laura Stoler (2002).
Her study of colonial management in Indonesia and Indochina under Dutch and
French rule, respectively, tracks their ‘‘genealogies of the intimate.’’ She asks: How
do racialized categories of identity emerge and become naturalized into the lexicon
of colonial governance? Given the potent politics of categorizing identities, Stoler
(2002:8) examines ‘‘the histories of their making, the exclusions they enabled, and
violences they condoned’’ (2002:8). Stoler notes, for example, a legal case in
French-controlled Indochina where a French father sought clemency for his half-
Vietnamese son but was refused on the grounds of the son’s insufficient ‘‘French-
ness.’’ Yet other mixed-blood progeny were granted European status if they could
demonstrate due ‘‘cultural competence,’’ such as feeling alienated when placed
among ‘‘natives.’’
The House of IR exhibits a similar politics of exclusion and violence. It clearly
identifies who’s ‘‘in,’’ who’s ‘‘out,’’ and who’s precariously ‘‘on the border.’’ It also
stratifies who’s ‘‘upstairs’’ and who’s ‘‘downstairs.’’ This hierarchical division of
space reflects the house’s participation in and complicity with material relations of
production and its uneven distribution of social wealth.4
Inside the Household

Pater Realism. As its ‘‘founding father,’’ realism heads the House of IR. By
realism, we refer here not to one particular author or theory but rather ‘‘a family
of arguments related by a common set of fundamental, if often unspoken, com-
mitments’’ (Rupert 1995:3). Though labeled a peculiarly ‘‘American social sci-
ence’’ (Hoffmann 1995), realism claims an intellectual lineage that dates to
ancient Greek history, especially that recorded by Thucydides in 5 BC. Subse-
quently, realists have added luminaries of power politics like Machiavelli and
Hobbes to their roster. But it was a generation of scholars from post-World War II
Europe, Britain, and the United States that gave realism its distinctive voice.
Power, they asserted, reflects objective laws of calculated (sometimes amoral) self-
interest for all states across time and space. John Herz, George F. Kennan, Walter
Lippmann, and Hans J. Morgenthau each saw ‘‘political realism’’ as the cure to
what they considered the fateful causes of war among nations: ‘‘legalism,’’ ‘‘uto-
pianism,’’ and ‘‘idealism’’ (Keohane 1986:9).
Abstract individualism pivots realism’s understanding of the world. Primordial
individual units (states) struggle in eternal competition over resources that confer
power and wealth. In this way, realists justify instrumental reasoning and
4
Plenty more agents ‘‘live’’ inside and outside the House of IR than the ones we have chosen to discuss in this
essay. Our sample is necessarily limited and selective given the essay’s restrictions on scope and space. Nonetheless,
we believe our argument of colonial household relations in IR knowledge production holds even if more schools of
thought were included.
behavior. But then how do realists explain the existence of an interdependent

international political economy in a world of conflicting nation-states? He-
gemonic stability theory comes to the rescue (Kindleberger 1973). It posits a
dominant state or hegemon that willingly bears the asymmetrical costs of global
leadership so the interstate system may survive peacefully and prosperously de-
spite anarchy and competition. Game theoretic models explain such cooperation
under anarchy as a prisoner’s dilemma. Still, these approaches preserve realism’s
basic premise in abstract individualism. It places outside the realm of realist
inquiry issues like ideology, the social bases of state power, its practices, political
struggles, and strategies for reproduction (Rupert 1995).
Yet realists openly accept their origin in the white colonial/imperial state. They
read the History of the Peloponnesian War as Athens’ struggle against Sparta for
hegemony in the ancient world. Realists perpetually emphasize what they claim
to be Thucydides’ key lesson in power: ‘‘The strong do what they can, the weak
suffer what they must.’’ In this way, realists rationalize empire’s brutal legacy,
turning it into an ideological and political commitment. Expect violence and
colonization, realists trumpet, for it is integral to empire. And empire, they add, is
what international politics is all about. That realists ignore Athens’ demise due to
ambition and greed conveniently silences another reading of this text, such as the
crisis of empire and its implications not only for world politics but the empire
itself (see Ling 2002, 2002b:106–108 for alternative readings of Thucydides).
Realism stems from another lineage, rarely acknowledged: the global capitalist
economy. It accounts for realism’s birth into the world and its growth, suste-
nance, and eventual dominance in the House of IR. In turn, realism theorizes an
ideational infrastructure for global capitalism’s public, political face: the modern,
capitalist state (Agathangelou 1997). What is all this warring imperialism for if not
more wealth and resources for national elites? Lenin attributed World War I to
intra-elite scrambles for capitalist market shares, but these started when Europe’s
merchant ships first set sail for Asia and Africa in the fifteenth century, seeking
lucrative trades in silks and spices. Global capitalism delivers what the white
colonial/imperial state seeds.
Mater Liberalism. Liberalism naturally allies with realism. It shares common
roots in the white colonial/imperial state and its relationship with global capital-
ism, albeit with a conceptual division of labor (Agathangelou 1997). Whereas
realism commands the House of IR by focusing on the state (‘‘power’’), liberalism
organizes, manages, and reproduces it by emphasizing the market (‘‘interest’’)
(cf. Gilpin 1987). Liberalism started out as a proud tradition of defiance against
authority, such as Martin Luther’s fiery repudiation of Catholic Church hegem-
ony in sixteenth century Europe. Since then, it has evolved into an ideological
instigator of ‘‘free trade,’’ ‘‘open markets,’’ ‘‘instrumental rationality,’’ and other
pillars of global capitalism (Polanyi 1944; Hirschman 1977).
Realism and liberalism work in tandem by drawing on the mirage of ‘‘politics’’
and ‘‘economics.’’ Publicly, they convince ‘‘contemporary statesmen [like] the mer-
cantilists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries [that] power is a necessary
condition for plenty, and vice versa’’ (Keohane 1984: 22). Privately, realism-liber-
alism maintains an infrastructure of elite, bourgeois rule by seeming to care about
democratic peace, prosperity, and freedomFbut not really.5 Realism-liberalism’s
5
As Anthony Arblaster (1984) notes, for instance, the concept of tolerance in liberal thought allows only for the
voicing of dissent, not attention to it.
abstract, ahistorical conceptions of the state, the market, and the individual are
bound by particular cultural expressions (Western, white, male) that result from
concrete political struggles (bourgeois, colonial). Yet both ‘‘world’’ (materiality,
structured inequalities) and ‘‘politics’’ (practices, discourse) disappear from world
politics (Agathangelou 1997). Classical liberals like Kant, Locke, and Woodrow
Wilson, for instance, advocated a legally based ‘‘perpetual peace,’’ ‘‘limited gov-
ernment,’’ and a ‘‘league of nations’’ to forestall global warfare that, by extension,
preserve the realist-liberal interstate, commerce-based system, in principle if not in
form. Similarly, contemporary liberals like Hedley Bull (1966) and David Held
(1995) talk of an ‘‘international society’’ or ‘‘cosmopolitan democracy,’’ respectively,
but without regard to the worldviews or participation of Others in these processes.
A second generation of liberalism, most prominently neoliberalism, continues
this tradition. It professes good intentions for the masses while complying with
elite demands for new ideas for and methods of preserving colonial-patriarchal-
capitalist structures and their necessary subjectivities. Liberal and standpoint
feminism cheerlead from the rear as they seek to liberate ‘‘Third-World’’ women
to become more like their ‘‘First-World’’ sisters.
Still, nothing is what it seems. As we will see below, mater liberalism and
daughter neoliberalism each have sought to convert others with missionary zeal
but have ended up, instead, with hybrid progeny.
Caretaking Daughters: Neoliberalism, Liberal Feminism, and Standpoint Feminism.
The good daughters of the House of IR exhibit wonderful caretaking traits.
Neoliberalism, in particular, has resolved the realist dilemma. Economic ‘‘inter-
dependence’’ (Keohane and Nye 2000) and its institutional preference for ne-
gotiation and continuity account for ‘‘cooperation’’ under anarchy (Keohane
1984). That is, market relations raise the transaction costs of conflict. Indeed,
neoliberalism sets the market as the arbiter of all social relations. It posits that
corporate growth generates wealth, employment, and prosperityFall the nec-
essary ingredients for social order and with limited government interference to
boot. That these strategies also extend US interests, norms, and practicesFthat
is, a hegemonic regime (Stein 1984)Fis but a subsidiary consideration. Neolib-
eralism turns realism’s hegemonic stability theory into a user-friendly manual for
happy, consumer-based management.
Gender contestations within global capitalist crises push neoliberalism to up-
date itself. For this reason, neoliberalism finds sister-solidarity with standpoint
feminism (Keohane 1989). The latter proposes that ‘‘strong’’ objectivity would
pertain when the ‘‘standpoints’’ of various identities, especially those that have
been excluded or marginalized (e.g., black women), are taken into account
(Harding 1991). Of course, tensions strain any sibling relationship (Tickner
1997). But neoliberalism partners comfortably with standpoint feminism because
both promote a ‘‘network view that emphasizes how institutions could promote
lateral cooperation among organized entities, states, or otherwise’’ (Keohane
1989:248). Standpoint feminism, as one neoliberal (Keohane 1989:245–251) de-
scribes it, seems the perfect wife/mother/hostess: it offers a ‘‘conceptual’’ ap-
proach to IR that emphasizes ‘‘power as the ability to act in concert,’’ allowing for
‘‘collaborat[ion] [in face of] collective problems . . . [and] purposeful human ac-
tion and subjectivity in creating new conditions of life . . . stressing connectedness,
and obligations to other inhabitants of planet earth.’’6
6
For a presentation of Standpoint Feminism from one of its own, see Nancy Hartsock (1998).
Missing is gender analysis itself. Neoliberals and IR standpoint feminists tend

to equate ‘‘gender’’ with ‘‘women’’ (Carpenter 2002). This conflation elides the
role of men, masculinity, and patriarchy in the formation of gender in social
relations of power. In defining gender normatively (‘‘what is appropriate or
useful, what is not’’), they grant power to some agentsF‘‘good girls’’ (Weber
1994)Fwho can police or mediate capitalist relations for others.
Martha Nussbaum’s (1999) ‘‘capabilities approach’’ offers one such example. It
proposes ten criteria to allow for ‘‘a good human life.’’ These are life; bodily
health and integrity; senses, imagination, thought; emotions; practical reason;
affiliation; other species; play; and control over one’s environment (Nussbaum
1999:40–41). Her focus on capabilities shifts governmental action from what
individuals should think or do (which would amount to tyranny) to how. Once
society provides individuals with the basic infrastructure to make choices, Nus-
sbaum (1999:45) assures us, ‘‘the stage is fully set’’ for an independent, well-
informed, fulfilled life; the ‘‘choice is up to them.’’ Nussbaum (2000) especially
targets ‘‘Third-World’’ women. The capabilities approach would free them of the
‘‘shackles’’ of their thousand-year-old traditions and beliefs.
Nussbaum’s vision, however, recalls an earlier era of missionary authoritari-
anism. Insisting on the liberal norms of ‘‘personhood, autonomy, rights, dignity,
self-respect’’ as a universal good, Nussbaum (1999:56) fails to consider their mix
with other norms, values, practices, histories, and institutions. She cites a group
of feminists in China who reject Confucianism in favor of the liberal norm of
human rights, thereby demonstrating the international character of liberal fem-
inism. ‘‘What is East and what is West?’’ Nussbaum (1999:9) asks rhetorically. Not
once, though, does she consider the possibility that liberalism may have some-
thing to learn from, say, the Confucian sense of humanism or virtue-by-example.
(Although, Nussbaum demonstrates her cosmopolitan credentials by frequently
referencing non-Western thinkers like Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray.)
Nor does Nussbaum acknowledge her own adherence to a thousand-year-old
tradition, Aristotelian logic. Because Nussbaum sees ‘‘Third-World traditions,’’
particularly in their patriarchal form, as obstacles to the full realization of per-
sonhood through choice, she implicitly rationalizes their dismissal (to put it
mildly) or extinction (to put it more harshly).
This ‘‘civilizing mission,’’ Gayatri Spivak (1999) reminds us, is an old, colonial
tale that does not bear retelling. Nussbaum never reflects on her privileged,
masculinized position as a well-educated, well-paid white woman from the United
States talking to ‘‘poor women’’ in India or China subjected to ‘‘outdated pa-
triarchies’’ yet appropriating their knowledge that is given at great risk and
acquired through lifetimes of physical, mental, and emotional labor. Instead,
Nussbaum pities them for not being so-called free or rich enough to speak.7
Colonialism cuts both ways. Like their white sisters in the colonies who are cast
as ‘‘angels of progress’’ (McClintock 1992, 1995) representing the colonial or-
der’s ‘‘paragons of morality’’ (Stoler 2002), ambivalence bedevils the filial daugh-
ters of the House of IR. The logic of Stoler’s tale of white colonial women is the
same as that of neoliberalism and standpoint feminism: ‘‘Charged with guarding
cultural norms, [these good daughters] were instrumental in promoting [the
House of IR]. But it was partly at their own expense, for on this issue they were to
7
For more on Nussbaum, see L. H. M. Ling (2000). For an alternative perspective on the role of women in Third
World development, see Shirin Rai (2002).
be almost as closely policed as [the Native Other]’’ (Stoler 2002:60). A common

suppression may account for the intense relationships that have bound filial
progeny like neoliberalism and standpoint feminismFor even mater liberalism
herselfFto the Native Other.
In the House of IR, the Native Other refers to non-Western, nonwhite sources
of knowledge, traditions, or worlds. These may be smuggled in as ‘‘servants’’ or
‘‘wards’’ of the house but otherwise are not recognized as identities in their own
right. Such alienation does not allow the house to formalize connections between
and among different producers of knowledge, although informal cross-fertiliza-
tions flourish and from the most unexpected sources. One ‘‘bastard son,’’8 Asian
capitalism, results from mater liberalism’s consummation with the Confucian
world-order during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ‘‘bastard twins,’’
peripheral and transitional economies, come from neoliberalism’s contestations
and struggles with socialism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The same applies to the ‘‘bastard terrorist,’’ Al Qaeda, and its relations with
neoliberalism, especially since the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Detailed descriptions of each follow below.
Bastard Heir: Neorealism. Bastard Son No. 1 intrigues the most. Heir apparent
to the House of IR, neorealism springs not from the union of realism and lib-
eralism but an open affair between realism and its gold-digging neighbor, eco-
nomics. Mistress of her own house but impatient with opportunistic ambitions,
economics merged almost giddily with realism to produce neorealism. Waltz
(1979), for instance, constructs the international system as a market and states as
individual firms, magically accounting for ‘‘order’’9 without an ‘‘orderer’’10 in an
international system that is posited, a priori, as anarchical. On this basis, Waltz
infers that only great powers matter since they alone account for change and
consequence in world politics.
Similarly, neorealists and their cousin, rational choicers, have stormed the
House of IR. Like Jimmy Cagney’s dying psycho gangster in White Heat in 1949,
they crow manically: ‘‘Look, Ma, I made it! Top of the world!’’ They find no
contradiction in denying legitimacy and rights to others, be these involving in-
tellectual debate,11 hiring/promotion/grants,12 or publications,13 while failing to
8
We use the term ‘‘bastard’’ with reservation. It reflects patriarchal society’s attempt to control access to re-
sources, power, and social relations by legitimizing some identities and not others. We also recognize that the term
has been used historically to indict women, not men, for having children without the sanction of Church or State.
For this reason, women have borne the overwhelming burden, both moral and economic, of raising ‘‘illegitimate’’
children. Nonetheless, we retain this term to comply with the popular literary portrayal of ‘‘bastards,’’ usually male,
as suffused with anger due to a sense of robbed patriarchal entitlements. The term, in short, conveys a desire on the
part of the ‘‘illegitimate’’ son to receive recognition and acceptance from his biological father.
9
Here, realist balance of power theory simulates neoclassical economic laws of supply and demand.
10
By ‘‘orderer,’’ Waltz means a monopolistic world power or government like a monopoly in an economy.
11
For example, Kenneth Waltz (1986:337) effectively responded ‘‘Hunh??’’ to Richard Ashley’s extensive cri-
tique of neorealism. ‘‘I find Richard K. Ashley difficult to deal with. Reading his essay is like entering a maze. I never
know quite where I am or how to get out.’’ This exchange exemplifies the deafening silence that has passed for
debate between neorealists and their critics in the discipline. This lack of attention is especially egregious for
neorealists given their claim to scientific objectivity.
12
Stories abound in our discipline concerning departments that have disassembled due to ideological/method-
ological disputes between neorealist/rational choice advocates, on one side, and the rest on the other. Yet the former
continue to dominate both institutionally and intellectually (cf. Green and Shapiro 1994).
13
A scan of mainstream IR journals like International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, and the Journal of
Conflict Resolution affirms the dominance of neorealist/rational choice approaches. Related to the above point, these
journals carry more weight in hiring/promotion/grant decisions than journals that publish a range of ideological/
methodological approaches.
deliver on their own golden promises of, among others, ‘‘prediction,’’ ‘‘law-like’’
regularities, and ‘‘causal explanations’’ (Green and Shapiro 1994).
Yet neorealists remain insecure. Their own zero-sum logic induces a paranoid
worldview that treats Others as competition only for legitimacy and resourc-
esFin this case, in the House of IR. As Stoler (2002:39) notes for colonial gov-
ernance in Southeast Asia, ‘‘it was not the progeny of [cross-category] unions who
were problematic but the possibility that they might be recognized as heirs to a
European inheritance.’’ For this reason, tensions between neorealism and the
other progeny of the House of IR remain severe.
On the Borders, Upstairs

Rebel Sons: Marxism, Gramscian IPE, Postmodern IR, Constructivism-Pragma-
tism. Rebel sons populate the House of IR. Marxists disrupted the household
with their contentions of ‘‘dependencia’’ and ‘‘world systems’’ in the 1970s–1980s
(Cardoso and Faletto 1979; Wallerstein 1974, 1980, 1989), Gramscians with their
exposures of ‘‘hegemony’’ in the international political economy (IPE) in the
1980s–1990s (Cox 1987), postmodernists with their ‘‘third debate’’ from the
1980s around the same time (Lapid 1989), and now the twins constructivism-
pragmatism with their ‘‘linguistic turn’’ (Onuf 1989; Wendt 1999; Fierke and
Jorgenson 2001; Millennium 2002). These rebel sons challenge realism’s standing
as their paternal authority given mater liberalism’s youthful fling with an old
‘‘mentor,’’ critical theory. Each rebel son strikingly resembles critical theory in
voice and commitment (dialectical historical materialism for Marxists, counter-
hegemony for Gramscians, anti-Eurocentrism for postmodernists, emancipatory
language structures for constructivists and pragmatists). At the same time, they
share with realism considerable similarity in form, such as an exclusive reliance
on Western intellectual traditions, concepts, and methods. For instance, prag-
matists in IR claim to offer a ‘‘multiperspectival’’ approach, yet their concepts all
come from Anglo-American-European sources (cf. Millennium 2003). According-
ly, ambivalence also torments these rebel sons of the House of IR. They prescribe
emancipatory change, sometimes to the point of declaring their own households,
yet still seek approval from pater realism. James Der Derian and Michael
Shapiro’s (1989) reader on postmodernism in IR and Alexander Wendt’s (1999)
version of constructivism provide two such examples.14
Postmodernism decenters and relativizes the ‘‘West.’’ In challenging its ide-
ological rampart in the free, rational, and private individual, postmodernism
problematizes knowledge production as relations of power rooted in social
structures and institutions such as capitalist-patriarchy. Enlightenment knowl-
edge, postmodernists argue, follows a ‘‘partial’’ logic of inclusion and exclusion
such that one mode of knowledge defines itself in relation to another within a
hierarchical ordering. These do not conform to autonomous objects of knowl-
edge, as claimed by liberal empiricists (on individualism and empiricism, see
Arblaster 1984:Chs. 1–3). Instead, postmodernists foreground the ‘‘divisive
practices’’ of social life. ‘‘Our subjective sense as persons . . . is created by rec-
ognizable discursive practices that simultaneously implicate us in power-relations
. . . . In [their] concern about subjectivity as subjugation, [postmodernists are] also
the historian[s] of power’’ (Gregory 1989:xxi).
14
We note that neither postmodernism nor constructivism in IR is monolithic. Our critique concentrates on the
two sources that are cited due to their representativeness.
Despite its critical, revolutionary appeal, postmodernism ends up as static and

reformist as realism and liberalism. In setting up local practices as independent of
the global logic of exploitation, postmodernism ultimately paralyzes those very
forces (local, multiple, marginal) that it claims to recognize and support. Post-
modernists take this ‘‘offshore’’ criticality as a necessary criterion for non-
hegemonic theorizing (Shapiro 1992:49). In the ensuing vacuum, however, they
ensure de facto power (cf. Agathangelou and Ling 1997).
A second case of ambivalent rebellion comes from Wendt (1999).15 He recasts
realism into a ‘‘social’’ theory of the state. Its ‘‘ontological priority’’ gives the state
a ‘‘body’’ (sovereignty) that is full of ‘‘life’’ (motivational dispositions, national
interests) and wrestling with four types of identity (corporate, type, role, and
collective) as well as two kinds of interests (objective and subjective)F‘‘the state is
pre-social relative to other states in the same way that the human body is pre-
social’’ (Wendt 1999:198). Together, these properties infuse the state with ‘‘de-
sires, beliefs and intentionality’’ (Wendt 1999:197). Wendt’s conceptual innova-
tiveness notwithstanding, he ultimately reinstates a realist premise: the self-
enclosed (read: elitist, patriarchal), self-sufficient (read: colonizing), rational
(read: Western) state. Indeed, Wendt’s theoretical framework conveys an implicit
conservatism. It surfaces most clearly when he jockeys for position within the
House of IR. Against ‘‘anti-essentialists. . .like Postmodernists,’’ Wendt (1999:198;
emphasis in original) writes, he focuses on ‘‘social construction at the level of the
states system.’’ But ‘‘against thicker essentialists . . . like Neorealists and Neoliber-
als,’’ Wendt (1999:198) argues for ‘‘a minimalist vision.’’ Altogether, he con-
cludes, this ‘‘leaves a lot of room [in the House of IR] for constructivist theories of
international politics’’ (Wendt 1999:198).
Wendt gives little space, though, to sister theories like postmodern feminism
and queer studies. At best, Wendt (1999:296) rationalizes, they are redundant
(‘‘there are structurally similar, non-feminist critiques of liberalism that come to
many of the same conclusions’’); at worst, feminist analyses are ineffective,
particularly when addressing issues that he himself deems important (‘‘less clear
[is] whether. . .gender has had a causal impact on Westphalian sovereignty’’).
Wendt does not show how feminist and nonfeminist theorizing about IR may
reach the ‘‘same’’ conclusions nor does he explain why feminist approaches
should be judged on gender’s ‘‘causal impact’’ on sovereignty. This hegemonic
and ahistorical collapsing of explanation with interest pretends that theory-build-
ing just happens. It is innocent of a past, cleared of present ambitions, and primed
for future development. Yet, as we see here, none of the above could pertain or
ever has.
Fallen Daughters: Postmodern Feminism and Queer Studies. Postmodern feminism
and queer studies stand out as the ‘‘fallen daughters’’ of the house. They have
strayed from the household center and, consequently, dangle dangerously on its
edges.16 Yet postmodern feminism and queer studies share with their ‘‘rebel
brothers’’ a noble lineage in mater liberalism’s early cross-fertilization with critical
theory. The house disdains postmodern feminism and queer studies precisely
because they show that identityFspecifically, gender, sexuality, and desireF
is not ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘essential’’ but socially constructed to privilege a colonial,
15
For another angle to the same conclusion that Wendt seeks pater realism’s, if not brother neorealism’s,
approval, see Ronen Palan (2000).
16
Nonetheless, neoliberal capital eagerly embraces the homosexual market even while neoliberal theory argues
against queerness (Alexander 1998).
imperial, patriarchal, and heterosexist order (see Carpenter 2002). Most mem-
bers of the House of IR prefer to deal with identity in a less revelatory manner
(cf. Lapid and Kratochwil 1997). Put differently, the House of IR marginalizes
postmodern feminism and queer studies precisely for exposing its secret lusts
and unrequited desires.
In Faking It, Cynthia Weber (1999a) retells the history of US–Caribbean re-
lations through a queer lens. Weber begins with the well-established construction
of the United States as ‘‘straight hegemonic masculinity’’ to, for example, Cuba’s
‘‘trophy mistress’’ status. But Castro’s anti-capitalist, anti-US revolution in 1959
regendered Cuba from miss to mister ‘‘with a beard,’’ no less, causing a castrating
‘‘midlife/hegemonic/masculinity identity crisis’’ (Weber 1999a:1). Subsequently,
US foreign policy toward Cuba, specifically, and the Caribbean, generally, has
sought to remasculinize, rephallicize itself through various strategies (e.g., inva-
sion of the Dominican Republic, bombing of Grenada, extraterritorial arrest of
Manuel Noriega in Panama).
Aside from its vanity, Weber notes the utter futility of such nationalist ‘‘faking it.’’
‘‘[T]he American body politic,’’ she writes, ‘‘never ‘had’ a phallus to lose’’ in the
first place (Weber 1999a:131). America created for itself this hypermasculine
need to display hegemony in the form of phallic power (military, economic, po-
litical) and now feels eternally committed to replacing it or compensating for it
somehow. More effective, Weber (1999a:131) suggests, would be for American
power to enter ‘‘a third space’’ that is ‘‘in between ‘being’ and ‘having,’ female
and male, feminine and masculine.’’ In making this ‘‘queer claim,’’ the United
States may achieve, ironically, its goal of a ‘‘hegemonic subjectivity’’ (Weber
1999a:132).
How the United States would constitute this ‘‘third space’’ is beside the point
here. What the rulers of the house cannot forgive is such an exposé of skulking
desires in the liberal-realist state. It is shown to project a public heterosexuality
that wants to consume and be loved by Others even when, as Weber points out,
the objects of strategic desire switch national gender identities, as with Castro’s
Cuba. Calls for protecting the ‘‘national self-interest’’ take on a wholly different
meaning from that of ‘‘objective,’’ ‘‘rational’’ calculations of ‘‘ordered prefer-
ences’’ as propounded by liberals, realists, and their ‘‘good’’ progeny. Instead,
war, occupation, and other strategies for ‘‘regime change’’ turn into simula-
tions, rather than actual exertions, of power. Such put-ons of fake power seem
all the more pathetic, Weber concludes, given their dildo-like artificiality and
neediness.
Now we turn to the ‘‘downstairs,’’ where the servants live, work, and produce
for the House of IR.
On the Borders, Downstairs

Native Informant Servants: Area Studies and Comparative Politics Experts. The
House of IR treats those who labor in the fields of area studies or comparative
politics as ‘‘servants.’’ These ‘‘downstairs’’ members gather ethnographic, ‘‘thick
descriptions’’ (‘‘low politics’’) so that the ‘‘upstairs’’ members may theorize
grandly about the world (‘‘high politics’’). Indeed, those upstairs depend on the
ethnographic sustenance and services provided by those downstairs, especially
during times of crisis (e.g., ‘‘who’s in power in China?’’). Yet the House of
IR historically considers comparative politics (with area studies as one of its
components) to contain a method only (for comparisons) and no substance (cf.

Lijphart 1971).17
As in any household, ‘‘servants’’ embody ambivalence. They are, after all, the
domesticated Other. In interviews with former Indonesian domestics in Dutch
colonial households, Stoler (2002) finds a distinct lack of sentimentality for their
former employers.18 So, too, do the servants of the House of IR grate at their
marginalized, exploited status. Instead of scholars and theorists in their own
right, the House of IR casts them as ‘‘native informants’’ (Narayan 1997).
‘‘Upstairs’’ members of the house welcome this asymmetrical division of in-
tellectual labor. It allows for so-called autonomous sites where there is no clear
relation between, for example, identifications of the ‘‘global’’ and ‘‘First-World’’
either as theoretical frameworks or empirical cases. Glossed over are the impli-
cations of these theories for social relations. Reading ‘‘native works’’ tends to
reproduce social relations as they are, without interrogating the practices that
exploit and oppress ‘‘natives’’ like women, people of color, workers, peasants,
and even the environment. Exploitation and oppression continue through (1) the
constant division of the world into those who are ‘‘developed’’ and need no more
instruction, those who are ‘‘developing’’ and require further education, and
those who are ‘‘underdeveloped’’ and warrant more external control and manage-
ment and (2) the production of ideas that explain and justify this division through
the institutionalization of (Western, white, colonial) laws, rules, and ideas.
Native informants provide ‘‘order’’ for the House of IR. They discreetly let in
the ‘‘illegitimate’’ offspring produced by house members and ‘‘unruly,’’ ‘‘native’’
traditions like Confucianism or socialism. Progeny such as Asian capitalism and
peripheral-transitional economies become household ‘‘wards’’ and, by extension,
service the white colonial/imperial state and its global capitalist consort. In this
way, the House of IR contains the challenges of these wards within a racialized,
sexualized bourgeois hierarchy. Again, Stoler’s (2002:79) finding for the colonial
household on the outskirts of empire applies as well for the House of IR:
Métissage represented not the dangers of foreign enemies at national bor-

ders but the more pressing affront for European nation-states, what the
German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte so aptly defined as the essence
of the nation, its ‘‘interior frontiers.’’
Bastard son Asian capitalism and the bastard twins peripheral and transitional
economies, respectively, exemplify this notion of an ‘‘interior frontier.’’ Their pol-
itics may seem conservative, given their attempts to implement neoliberal economic
development, but their epistemologies for doing so are not. In this sense, these
bastard wards of the House of IR have more in common with their rebel brother,
postmodernism, than either recognizes.
Bastard Ward: Asian Capitalism. Asian capitalism results from mater liberalism
forcing her attentions onto the Confucian world-order since the nineteenth cen-
tury (Ling 2002b). Accordingly, Asian capitalism exhibits such métis features as: a
Westphalian state grafted onto Confucian patriarchy, capitalist rationality
wrapped in collective institution-building, and market development ordered
through social hierarchy (Ling 2002a). Yet the House of IR has exiled Asian
17
We thank M. Scott Solomon for bringing this article to our attention.
18
In contrast, former Dutch employers often remember their Indonesian servants with romantic, sometimes
sensual, nostalgia (see Stoler 2002:ch. 7).
capitalism as exotica only, not worthy of theorizingFuntil the latter gained

enough economic clout to bribe its admission. In the early 1990s, the Japanese
government funded a World Bank report that lauded Asia’s ‘‘miracle’’ economies
with their state-led development as exemplars of liberal capitalism (World
Bank 1993; Wade 1996; Berger and Beeson 1998). Asian capitalism seemed
on its way to household legitimacyFuntil a regional financial crisis struck in
1997–1998.
We need not recount the crisis here. What’s noteworthy for our purpose is the
vehement denunciation of Asian capitalism from the House of IR. Neorealists
and neoliberals trotted out, without question or reflection, all the old colonial,
racist stereotypes about Asian ‘‘cronies,’’ ‘‘despots,’’ and ‘‘mismanagement’’ (Ling
2002a). ‘‘The Western form of free-market capitalism,’’ Alan Greenspan intoned,
is the only model for the world to follow (quoted in Singh and Weisse 1999:204).
Thus the House of IR justified a return to the practices of the white colonial/
imperial state with its global capitalist agents self-righteously ‘‘saving’’ Asian cap-
italism by buying its bankrupt enterprises at firesale prices. As it appropriated
Asia’s markets, so too did the house abscond with regional ideas like an ‘‘Asian
Monetary Fund,’’ now relingoed into a ‘‘new global financial architecture’’ with a
‘‘social safety net’’ to prevent similar disasters in the future.
Acceptance into the House of IR, once so hopeful, is forever dashed. At most,
Asian capitalism may enter the house as a ‘‘ward,’’ slipped inside by sympathetic
but powerless native informants.
Bastard Twins: Peripheral and Transitional Economies. So, too, came forth the bas-
tard twins, peripheral and transitional economies. With the fall of the Soviet
Union and China’s change of economic heart to a limited form of capitalism,
neoliberalism has been busy with socialism and other economic systems. Neo-
liberalism sought to convert the latter but, to its dismay, ended up cavorting with
them, instead, producing the twin progeny of peripheral and transitional econ-
omies. These exhibit an interesting mix of masculinized realist state politics (e.g.,
antiterrorist campaigns through anti-Other, anti-immigrant policies in Russia, the
former Soviet republics, and the Mediterranean states) and feminized neoliberal
developmental policies (e.g., importation of female migrant laborers for sex or
domestic work). As one of the authors (Agathangelou 2004b) has shown, pe-
ripheral economies in the Mediterranean, at the behest of core economies in the
European Union, have set up ‘‘security zones’’ against the very population that
they import for cheap labor. Yet the House of IR continues to deny the discursive,
normative, and theoretical distinctiveness of these economies, insisting on char-
acterizing them, instead, as exemplary acolytes under Anglo-American-European
tutelage. Indeed, these economies can follow all the neoliberal rules and de-
mands and yet still be characterized as ‘‘backward’’ due to the violence and
marginalization that such a system requires (see, for example, Stark and Bruzst
1998; Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Khrushcheva 2000; Ong and Collier 2005).
Three other ‘‘illicit’’ progeny hover outside the House of IR. Each exhibits
distinct features but all share in their difference from the ‘‘bastard sons’’ iden-
tified earlier. Neither Orientalism, postcolonial IR, nor Worldism seek acceptance
into the House of IR. They are not motivated by an angry sense of robbed
entitlement though each shares a clear lineage with members of the House.
Rather, each intrinsically challenges, critiques, and engages with the House, es-
pecially its configurations of race, gender, class, and culture. Together, they con-
stitute successive generations of ‘‘love children’’ to the House of IR.
Outside the House

Love Child No. 1: Orientalism. Orientalism springs from the union between
literary theoryFtrue exotica for the House of IRFand two rebel sons, Marxism
and postmodernism. Edward Said (1979), a scholar of European literature, drew
on Gramsci and Foucault to understand and eventually coin the term, Orien-
talism. It refers to a Western Enlightenment project to construct the Self through
its negation of the Other. In this case, the Other comes from a geographically and
culturally demarcated ‘‘Orient’’ that ranges from Egypt to Japan in latitude and
Mongolia to Australia in longitude. Said analyzed French, German, and British
travelogues, speeches, scientific tracts, religious documents, and so on, to detail
how the ‘‘West’’ saw itself vis-à-vis the ‘‘Oriental Other.’’ He concluded that a
lopsided logocentrism resulted with the Western Self monopolizing all the terms
of value (‘‘beauty,’’ ‘‘truth,’’ ‘‘perfection,’’ ‘‘progress,’’ ‘‘rationality’’) at the ex-
pense of the Oriental Other (‘‘deformity,’’ ‘‘evil,’’ ‘‘incompletion,’’ ‘‘stagnation,’’
‘‘chaos’’). More than enslaving the Other, the West emasculated it through a
cultural/civilizational rape.
The West demonizes Islam today, Said (1988) charged, precisely because it
has refused to serve as a ‘‘civilizational womb.’’ Western renditions of ‘‘the Pal-
estinian problem,’’ for instance, typically dehistoricize and decontextualize the
region’s complex history into an essentialized identity politics where ‘‘Palestine’’
(by extension, ‘‘Islam’’) becomes equated with ‘‘terrorism,’’ now stamped as
‘‘evil.’’
More pointedly, Orientalists rarely admit the state interests that they represent
and perpetuate. Yet Orientalism’s very raison d’etre, Said emphasized, was to
rationalize violence in the colonial order. What results, as Agathangelou and Ling
(2004a) demonstrate, is a mirror strategy of imperial politics by both colonizer
and colonized. Each feels justified to do unto the Other what has been done to it
in the past without regard to those who are violated and sacrificed in the process.
The latest product of such angry, incestuous mirroring is the ‘‘bastard terrorist,’’
Al Qaeda.
Bastard Terrorist: Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda sprouts from the House of IR’s preoc-
cupation with Islam since the end of World War II. Contrary to latter-day Ori-
entalists who like to portray Islam as congenitally immune to ‘‘modernity’’
(Buruma and Margalit 2002), Al Qaeda has learned deftly from neorealist-
neoliberal practices. Its first training came by crawling through the belly of the
‘‘Great Satan’s’’ beast, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to oust the Soviets
from Afghanistan in the 1980s. Since then, Al Qaeda has taken on neoliberal
corporate strategies such as ‘‘satisfy[ing] customer demand through technological
efficiency [and] forward thinking (transforming Hollywood-like scripts into ac-
tual events)’’ (Weber 2002:142). Al Qaeda also emulates a dot.com business by
setting up a ‘‘mobile network of connections of cash and carriers [that are] lo-
cated everywhere . . . [and] nowhere’’ at the same time (Weber 2002:143). Al
Qaeda has reaped billions in profit from selling opium on the world market and
its leader, Osama bin Laden, derives vast wealth from family businesses with and
in the West (Robinson 2002).
Nonetheless, anger and destruction fuel ‘‘delinquent’’ identities like Al Qaeda.
Killing the ‘‘Great Satan,’’ the United States, becomes a religious mandate to
right historical wrongs. ‘‘What the United States tastes today,’’ Osama bin Laden
(2001) announced via video shortly after the events of 9/11, ‘‘is a very small thing
compared to [the humiliation and contempt] . . . [o]ur nation has been tasting . . .
for more than 80 years.’’ The United States, in turn, takes on a reactionary
mission to bag this colonial prey. ‘‘Smoke ’em out,’’ George W. Bush has ordered
famously. ‘‘Hunt them down.’’ Both parties engage in a ‘‘lethal love’’ of mutual
annihilation (Agathangelou and Ling 2004a).
Postcolonial IR aims to transform such rage and violence in world politics. It
exposes the mirror strategies used by both Self and Other to impose a power
politics of privilege.
Love Child No. 2: Postcolonial IR. Orientalism cross-fertilized with the rebel
twins, constructivism and pragmatism, producing a generation of postcolonial
theorizing applied specifically to IR. It combines the ‘‘world-making’’ and ‘‘mul-
tiperspectival’’ approaches of constructivism-pragmatism with an explicitly post-
colonial agenda of rehistoricizing race, gender, class, and culture as integral to
narrations of Self and Other (cf. Young 1990). This intellectual movement in-
itially came from works that register our syncretic reality through fiction (for
example, Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, Maxine Hong Kingston’s
Chinamen, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Jean Rhys’s Wild Sargasso Sea). Interna-
tional relations theorists subsequently applied these insights to film and other
forms of cultural analysis (cf. Paolini 1999). While instructive, these treatments
provide a textual representation of global life only. They fall short of addressing
its more concrete and pressing problems. Recently, postcolonial scholars in IR
have posed the question directly to institutions of power in national and inter-
national arenas (Agathangelou 2002, 2004a, 2004b; Chowdhry and Nair 2002;
Ling 2002a). They ask, for example, how postcolonial theory could explain pov-
erty and exploitation, racialized and sexualized class relations, war and insecurity
within as well as across national borders? What kind of changes and policy guide-
lines could a postcolonial understanding of race, gender, culture, and class offer?
Love Child No. 3, Worldism, emerges in response (Agathangelou and Ling
forthcoming). Whereas Orientalism identified a particular social construction of
Western Self vis-à-vis its Oriental Other and postcolonial IR further theorized
about their structural and cultural intimacies, Worldism aims to understand and
transform the unequal social relations of colonial capitalist-patriarchy as it is
manifested not just in ‘‘the West’’ or ‘‘the world economy’’ but in multiple worlds,
economies, and subjectivities. Girded by Marxist historical materialism, Worldism
takes us beyond a ‘‘post’’ derivation to come into its own.
Love Child No. 3: Worldism. Worldism is premised on the notion that we live in
multiple worlds and these, in turn, live in and through us. Multiple worlds stock
our visions, guide our actions, underpin our institutions, and account for our
interactions with Others. We are not torn apart by ‘‘jihad vs. McWorld’’ (Barber
1996) or a ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ (Huntington 1996) as some would suggest. The
story is not that simple. Humanity throbs on despite half a millennium of bloody,
brutal encounters in colonialism and imperialism. Today, the transnationalization
of peoples, goods, and markets, along with the militarization of fear, deprivation,
and violence, further bring us together. The noisy, jostling, immigrant crowds of
‘‘global cities’’ (Sassen 1998) and ‘‘peripheral economic states’’ (Agathangelou
2004b) alike attest to the multiple ways of thinking, doing, and being that daily
confront us even as ideological gatekeepers insist otherwise. Each world may
contain its own share of violence and contradiction but multiple worlds reflect the
starting point of social relations in world politics.
Worldism questions the House of IR: its foundations (‘‘power and interest’’), its
borders (‘‘in versus out’’), the presumed identities and claims of its members
TABLE 2. Impact of the House on IR
Open/Hidden Academic Knowledge Practical

Effects Discipline Production Politics
Positionings/ ‘‘Objective,’’ Tolerance of the Masculinity Game/

Erasures ‘‘Neutral’’ Social Other/ denial of
Science/ deracination and dependence on the
collusion with depoliticization of ‘‘domestic’’ and
power that knowledge ‘‘feminized’’: e.g.,
perpetuates relationships, labor,
structural and resources
inequalities
Reforms/ Multicultural, Psychologizing Protection of Nation
Violences International Systemic and People/
Education/ Pathologies/ proliferation of
a religious-colonial internalizing desire industries
ethos that exiles colonial oppression and militarization of
faculty, especially daily life
those of color, for
critiquing and
challenging the
interests behind
knowledge
production
Standards/ Cosmo Man/ Spreading Upholding
Desires colonial Democratic Values/ Tradition/
management insatiable desire for technological
through racialized, adoration and efficiency; torture
sexualized respect from the through sexual
discrimination in Other abuse
hiring, promotion,
and tenure for
dissident faculty,
especially those of
color
(‘‘legitimate versus illegitimate’’), their normative values (‘‘good versus bad’’),

and asymmetrical positionings (‘‘up versus down’’). Indeed, Worldism challenges
the very project of constructing IR as a ‘‘house’’ in the first place.
What’s Wrong with This House?

Colonial erasures, violences, and desires underwrite IR as a discipline, a source of
knowledge production, and a field of practical politics. These are hidden behind
public positions, reforms, and standards that seem internationalist and fair in scope
but actually perpetuate parochial and discriminatory practices. For this reason, the
house promotes Cosmo Man. He serves as globalization’s most logical and desirable
embodiment while policing patriarchal borderings of race, gender, class, and cul-
ture in IR. In this way, the house masks its collusion with the world’s privileged few
to maintain structurally unequal social relations.
A global masculinity game arises. It transnationalizes insecurity supposedly to
protect the ‘‘homeland’’ but exploits all forms of (re)production. A proliferation of
desire industries coupled with the militarization of social life offers one glaring
example (Agathangelou 2004a). Brutal expressions of hegemony through techno-
logical efficiency prevail. It manages Others by appropriating their labor and bod-
ies, often culminating in physical torture and sexual abuse. Table 2 sums up these
consequences of the house on IR as an academic discipline, a source of knowledge
production, and a field of practical politics.
Disciplinary Impact: Collusion with Power

Cosmo Man distracts attention from the academy’s collusion with power. He pub-
licly welcomes ‘‘multicultural,’’ ‘‘international’’ education while privately deters
tenure and promotion for faculty, especially those of color and women, who chal-
lenge capitalist-patriarchy’s version of Self and Other. Cosmo Man, thus, reenacts in
the academy those desires and abuses that shadow the colonial household.
As Steve Smith (2004) has noted, mainstream IR conveniently relieves us of any
ethical qualms regarding the larger world. We are not responsible, mainstream
theorists shrug, because our concepts are ‘‘value-free,’’ ‘‘rational,’’ and ‘‘objective.’’
We teach/advise/publish what anyone would in our place. Smith resoundingly re-
jects this stance as disingenuous at best. We forward a second critique: claims of
neutrality smoke-screen alignments with power structurally, institutionally, and
personally. The House and its accomplices hide their class politics by castigating
revolutionary knowledge as ‘‘occult’’ (Kelsh 1998). One consequence is the (re)pro-
duction of insecurity for the world’s majority through the securing of capital and its
social relations across borders for a privileged minority. Take, for examples, the
absence of any role for non-Western cultures, histories, or ideologies in Gramscian
IPE’s conception of a ‘‘global’’ hegemony (cf. Ling 1996; Ling with Bell 1996),
Marxist IPE’s decision not to acknowledge reproduction as production (cf.
Agathangelou 2004b), and postmodernism’s disservice to local resistance by as-
suming that power contaminates everything and everywhere (cf. Agathangelou and
Ling 1997). Each demonstrates, respectively, an implicit valorization of one con-
figuration of race/culture (white/Western), gender (patriarchal), sexuality (hetero-
sexual), and class (bourgeois). When this configuration encounters crisis or threat,
the discipline generates rationalizations to assure global capital of its right to pri-
vatize and militarize social life. Put differently, the house gives white, bourgeois
patriarchy the tools to rebuild itself.
Yet institutions of higher learning increasingly clamor for multicultural, inter-
national education. Note, for instance, Harvard University’s recent curriculum
change, the first in thirty years, to reflect this orientation. ‘‘If you’re going to come
to Harvard College,’’ announced William C. Kirby, Dean of Faculty Arts and Sci-
ences, ‘‘it would be very good to have a passport.’’19 Externally, the academy needs
to satisfy globalization’s demand for a more cosmopolitan, educated elite. Inter-
nally, the academy also needs to globalize to: (1) retain an increasingly multiethnic
student body, especially those who can pay high tuition fees during times of con-
stricting budget cuts (see McPherson and Schapiro 1999), (2) uphold its liberal
reputation as a ‘‘marketplace of ideas,’’ and (3) keep apace with managerial, fi-
nancial, and technical trends arising in various parts of the world. These apparent
contradictions allow the academy and its elites to use the intellectual labor of Others
while denying them due credit or acknowledgement for it (Agathangelou and Ling
2002). This appropriation is not for cultural stakes only. It provides an intellectual
justification for an unequal access to and distribution of wealth (Agathangelou
2004a).
Not surprisingly, white males dominate our discipline. Males comprise 66 per-
cent of the total faculty in the United States, with whites in the overwhelming
majority (American Association of University Professors 1998). Male full professors
19
Available at http://edition.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/04/27/harvard.curriculum.ap/.
outnumber female full professors by nearly 5 to 1 whereas at the rank of assistant

professor the proportion of males to females is relatively equal (American Asso-
ciation of University Professors 1998). Put differently, nearly half (46 percent) of all
assistant professors are women, but they become only 21 percent of all full pro-
fessors (Bellas 2002). Data on postgraduate enrollment in US academies bear out
this initial scenario. A relatively even spread of men and women not only enter the
classroom but also graduate with higher degrees. In the social sciences, women
accounted for 57 percent of all graduate enrollment in 1997 (Brandes et al.
2001:325). As a general category, women received 49 percent of doctorates in the
social sciences in 1993, with a steady increase for women of color.20 The National
Center for Education Statistics (NCES) (1997) expects this trend to continue until
the end of the century. Yet all male faculty enjoy an average 10 percent advantage
in salary at both public and private institutions (Bellas 2002) whereas nearly half of
all faculty appointments made at institutions of higher learning fall in the adjunct or
other part-time categoryFwith women as the majority recipients (American As-
sociation of University Professors 1993).21 These data do not break down according
to racial categories. Nonetheless, anecdotal evidence suggests that the racial and
gender disproportion found in the academy’s ‘‘formal sector’’ would spill over to its
‘‘informal’’ one.
Cosmo Man triumphs in the academy.22 Like his counterpart in the global econ-
omy, Cosmo Man takes on ‘‘science, technology, [and] business’’ with an ‘‘entre-
preneurial frontier masculinity,’’ ready to conquer new markets, new products, and
new consumers (Hooper 2000:67). Indeed, Cosmo Man exemplifies white, hetero-
patriarchal renditions of globalization. One renowned white-male theorist writes
that globalization means the freedom, choice, and authority to straddle the world
with ‘‘competence’’ and ‘‘mastery,’’ not ‘‘surrender[ing]’’ to or ‘‘negotiat[ing]’’ with
other cultures but imbued with a sense of ‘‘personal autonomy’’ that allows ‘‘exit’’
at will (Hannerz 1990:239). The academy rewards such intellectual compliance.
The Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, for instance, consist-
ently confers its cash prize of $200,000 to those who happen to be white, male, from
Western institutions, and offer intellectual paeans to the House of IR.23
Administrative decisions support Cosmo Man. Tenure and promotion disputes,
in particular, expose his colonial and imperialistic practices in the academy. One
Asian American female professor has observed that
[i]f we act like the [passive] Singapore Girl, in the case of some professors, then
they feel ‘‘she is [unequal to me].’’ If we don’t act like the Singapore Girl, then
[our] accomplishments must have derived from ‘‘a relationship with the chair’’ [or
some other senior male]. (quoted in Cho 1997:209)
20
Between 1991 and 1998 in political science, the umbrella discipline for international relations, African Amer-
ican and Asian female doctorates in political science exceeded the numbers of their male cohorts by 6.9 percent as
compared to 4.3 percent, respectively, for the former; 3.4 percent to 2.7 percent, respectively, for the latter (Brandes
et al. 2001:321). Hispanic female doctorates lagged slightly behind their male cohorts with 2.9 percent as compared
to 3.7 percent, respectively; American Indian male and female doctorates were 0.5 percent each (Brandes et al.
2001:321). Nonetheless, political science has the lowest proportion of students of color in graduate programs within
the social sciences, lagging behind the natural sciences and engineering (Babco 2000:297).
21
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that full-time employment declined by 1 percent from 1991 to 1995;
part-time employment, in contrast, rose by 18 percent and part-time faculty at two-year colleges surged from 19
percent to 31 percent of faculty totals (Schneider 1997).
22
Ideology, more than biology, qualifies for Cosmo Manhood. Note, for example, the success of Condoleeza Rice,
an African American woman, at Stanford University before becoming National Security Advisor in the George W.
Bush administration.
23
The most recent winners are two white law professors at Australian National University whose book on global
business regulation argues ‘‘that non-governmental organizations are crucial as networks promoting cooperation
among governments and businesses, and that motivated citizens and groups can influence businesses ‘to produce a
more just and equitable system benefiting global consumers’’’ (http://www.grawemeyer.org/winners/index.html).
In either case, she concludes, an Asian American womanFor any woman of

colorFhas difficulty obtaining recognition for her professional achievements. This is
so, we add, because she must function in a context, like the House of IR, that is
defined by the white colonial/imperial state intimately aligned with global capital-
ism. As Stoler (2002:45) notes, ‘‘sexual control was more than a convenient met-
aphor for colonial domination. It was a fundamental class and racial marker
implicated in a wider set of relations of power.’’ Similarly, the academy preserves its
privileges with racialized, sexualized colonial management.
Knowledge Production: Deracination and Depoliticization

With such institutional backing, the House of IR deracinates and depoliticizes
knowledgeFeven by those, like postmodern feminists, who claim the opposite.
Such intellectual politics inflicts an epistemic violence that psychologizes systemic
pathologies while mystifying the exploitation and violence they commit on Others
through knowledge production. Some Others, in turn, consent to internalize their
own structural oppression in exchange for admission into the House not as a
‘‘servant’’ or ‘‘ward’’ but ‘‘honored guest.’’ Even so, another desire complex arises
in the House of IR. It publicly seeks to do good (‘‘spreading democracy’’) while
privately yearning for adoration and respect from the Other that the Self will never
find satiable (‘‘why do they hate us?’’).
In a volume self-consciously titled, Global Voices: Dialogues in International Relations
(Rosenau 1993), four IR scholars (two men, two women, all white, all Western)
critically discuss the field. Each scholar deserves due credit, for his or her insights
have contributed to our understanding and evaluation of the House of IR. None-
theless, one chapter by a postmodern feminist disturbs (Sylvester 1993). She seeks
validly to introduce race and difference into the dialogue on IR but masks her
privilege with colonizing and monopolizing strategies. She writes in the name of a
Zimbabwean woman rather than having an actual conversation with one. The
chapter is written creatively in the form of a play with exchanges from various
characters, two of whom are Westfem and Tsitsi. Westfem represents a Western
feminist standpoint; Tsitsi, the Zimbabwean woman. Throughout the play, Tsitsi
speaks only in terms of her own particularities whereas Westfem pronounces on
theory, history, and politics in a universal tone. At one point, Westfem even lectures
Tsitsi about Zimbabwean men to which the latter submissively agrees. The colo-
nizing move in this dialogue is all-too obvious and familiar: Westfem speaks for all;
Tsitsi only for herself, and not very well. In fact, Tsitsi admits as much:
Westfem-self, I tell you, we women have been gagged by tradition and colonialism
for so long that now it is difficult for us to insist on our own voices, ideologies, and
statecrafts. (Sylvester 1993:30)
Such epistemic, political, and personal violence pervades the House of IR. The
US academic self-righteously presents the woman of color as a victim of ‘‘Third-
World’’ patriarchy in need of ‘‘First-World’’ feminist rescue without questioning
either her right or place to do so. No wonder many women of color, inside and
outside the West, react to ‘‘feminism’’ as another code word for ‘‘imperialism.’’
The House of IR benefits from such infighting. As noted earlier, those who live
‘‘upstairs’’ by theorizing about ‘‘high politics’’ take little account of those who labor
‘‘downstairs’’ with their data collecting for ‘‘low politics’’Funtil some crisis in world
politics requires specific, local knowledge. At that point, ethnographic ‘‘servants’’
must produce the information necessary for house members to plug into their
theorizing. They treat this information as data only, not subject to theorizing or
capable of retheorizing existing frameworks.
Note, for example, recent revelations of torture and sexual abuse by American
soldiers against Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. Mainstream attention has
localized the relations between US soldiers and Iraqi prisoners. Media pundits,
military leaders, and psychological experts explain away the abuse as a psycho-
logical distortion rather than an expression of a larger socioeconomic and
political pathology: that is, abuse of US power to secure hegemony for global
capitalist-patriarchy. No one asks, for example, why certain identities (‘‘minority,’’
‘‘them,’’ ‘‘queer’’) are always the target of abuse, while others (‘‘majority,’’ ‘‘us,’’
‘‘straight’’) perpetrate it? As Sherene Razack (2000, 2004) demonstrates in her
analysis of similar abuses by and among Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia, our
colonial legacy of race, gender, class, and culture spares no oneFnot even those
fighting for ‘‘peace,’’ ‘‘democracy,’’ and ‘‘justice.’’
Scholars from outside the West sometimes internalize this epistemic violence.
The ‘‘insecurity’’ of states in the South, writes Mohammed Ayoob (1992), stems
from internal, not external, sources. Their lack of ‘‘maturity’’ in state development
renders them ‘‘weak, intruder, have-nots,’’ eternally dependent on the North for
economic and military assistance, producing a sense of ‘‘impotence’’ and ‘‘depri-
vation’’ that leads to a ‘‘perpetual state of schizophrenia’’ (Ayoob 1992:71–91). In
contrast, Ayoob (1992:71–91) characterizes states in the North as ‘‘developed,’’
‘‘mature,’’ ‘‘rich,’’ ‘‘powerful,’’ ‘‘the center’’; they are, in short, the ‘‘managers of the
international system’’ (1992:71–91).
Ambivalence suffuses such scholarship. Though motivated to ‘‘brea[k] the
[knowledge] monopoly that control[s]’’ the international system (Ayoob 2002:27),
scholars like Ayoob nonetheless reproduce it. He proposes a ‘‘subaltern realism’’ to
‘‘supplement’’ or, at most ‘‘dent,’’ IR. Yet it resorts to similar conventions of ‘‘time-
less’’ and ‘‘universal’’ maxims by explaining ‘‘Third World states’’ in terms of their
‘‘essential’’ and ‘‘fundamental’’ nature. Ayoob aims to broaden IR with alternative
perspectives yet he remains lodged in classical, Western references like Hobbes.
Most troubling is Ayoob’s failure to address how imperial/colonial capitalism draws
asymmetrically on mediations of ‘‘First’’ and ‘‘Third-World’’ states to achieve its
vision and mission. Nor does he recognize the existence of each world within the
other leading to a similar outcome for all.
Indeed, collective schizophrenia afflicts states in the ‘‘North’’ as much as those in
the ‘‘South.’’ David Held, for instance, asserts that democracy is not a ‘‘fixed no-
tion.’’ It could be ‘‘re-invented’’ and ‘‘cosmopolitanized’’ by ‘‘deepening democracy
within nation-states and extending it across political borders,’’ thereby better serv-
ing our globalized, contemporary world order (interview of Held at http://www.
polity.co.uk/global/realism.htm). Held’s proposition seems reasonable until we re-
member capitalism’s role in producing the nation-state. Among other things, the
nation-state ‘‘unified [a] legal code that protected private property. . . . This eco-
nomic act was, of course, represented as the creation of a harmonious community
of people with a common language and a coherent culture and worldview’’ (Ebert
1999:393). Held seeks to reform globalization’s new transnational institutions but
neglects to query: Why would the capitalist state and its elites want to ‘‘deepen’’
democracy when they benefit daily from the exploitation of labor and other struc-
tural inequalities? Globalization may open new opportunities for some but it also
entails for most a ‘‘struggle over structured inequality in the world economy’’
(Ebert 1999:5). Cosmopolitan democracy may aim for more equality and justice but
it conveys, instead, an elite class position replete with bourgeois, patriarchal inter-
ests. Consequently, cosmopolitan democracy cannot recognize and support those
that it claims to. The concept remains an elegant, if remote, ideal with which to
tantalize the world but never find concrete expression. Still, many at the pinnacle of
the capitalist world economy ask: Why do they hate us?
Practical Politics: Masculinity Game

With Cosmo Man in charge of IR both as a discipline and source of knowledge
production, we end up, invariably, with a masculinity game in world politics.
Ostensibly, it involves hypermasculine jousts in politics (e.g., ‘‘terrorists’’ versus
‘‘infidels,’’ ‘‘democratic regime change’’ versus ‘‘occupation’’), economics (e.g.,
‘‘developed’’ versus ‘‘developing,’’ ‘‘structural adjustment reforms’’ versus
‘‘neocolonialism’’), and culture (e.g., ‘‘civilization’’ versus ‘‘hegemony’’). In actual-
ity, the masculinity game erases historical alternatives to ‘‘democracy’’ or ‘‘Islam’’ or
‘‘development.’’ These denials manifest most apparently in the current transna-
tionalization of militarization.
Elsewhere (Agathangelou and Ling 2004a), we document how Bush and bin
Laden mirror their transnationalization of insecurity. Each restructures the daily
life of their respective communities to suit nationalist, patriarchal needs. Just as
Homeland Security now cautions Americans to ‘‘stay alert’’ to report any suspicious-
looking individual at the supermarket, the train station, or the airport, so Al Qaeda
recruits among ordinary men and women whose violent experiences with impe-
rialism and colonialism may leave them sympathetic to the cause and thereby sus-
ceptible to signing up as ‘‘suicide bombers.’’
One indication of this mirroring tactic comes from their rhetoric. Note the almost
identical categorizations of ‘‘I versus You’’ from Bush and bin Laden. Both silence
alternative visions of ‘‘America’’ or ‘‘Islam’’:
1. Virtue, Truth, and Centrality versus Murderous Envy from the Periph-
eryFThe terrorists hate us, Bush (2001) explains, because they envy
America’s democratic freedoms: ‘‘our freedom of religion, our freedom of
speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.’’
The terrorists have no such privileges: ‘‘Afghanistan’s people have been
brutalized; many are starving and many have fled. Women are not allowed
to attend school. You can be jailed for owning a television. Religion can be
practiced only as their leaders dictate. A man can be jailed in Afghanistan if
his beard is not long enough.’’
2. Innocent Victim versus Irrational BarbarityFThe United States stands by
innocently in world affairs, but the barbaric irrationality of September 11
now prods America to military action: ‘‘Tonight we are a country awakened
to danger and called to defend freedom.’’
3. Rationality versus RadicalismFThe terrorists seek to shatter the secure,
prosperous world-order that America upholds for the evil purpose
of remaking it into their radical self-image: ‘‘These terrorists kill not
merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. . . . Al Qaeda is to
terror what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money; its goal
is remaking the world, and imposing its radical beliefs on people every-
where.’’
4. Faithful versus InfidelFFor this reason, the world must choose. ‘‘Either
you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’’
More than an ideology of ‘‘I versus You,’’ this militarization of daily life enshrines
a distinctly masculine identity into world politics. It normalizes the hypermasculine
features initially identified by Ashis Nandy (1988:32) in imperial–colonial relations
between England and India:
[Hypermasculinity] de-emphasized speculation, intellection and caritas as femi-
nine, and justified a limited cultural role for womenFand femininityFby hold-
ing that the softer side of human nature was irrelevant to the public sphere. It
openly sanctifiedFin the name of such values as competition, achievement, con-
trol, and productivityFnew forms of institutionalized violence and ruthless social
Darwinism.
Similarly, the masculinity game frees all action heroes of any association with
the feminine (e.g., birthing and nurturing the next generation, household/com-
munal management and social relations, emotions and other ‘‘uncontrollable’’
urges, communal wealth). At the same time, the masculinity game exploits all forms
of social reproduction. ‘‘Hug your children,’’ George W. Bush urged the nation
after 9/11. And don’t forget to shop, he added. It might ease the pain of losing a
loved one to the War on Terror. Similarly, Al Qaeda promotes a militant mater-
nalism among conservative Islamic women so they can preserve Islam’s ‘‘pure’’
value. While they’re at it, Al Qaeda adds, they could deliver more mujahedeen sons
for the cause.
The masculinity game pervades all social relations. Enabled by global capitalism,
the masculinity game transnationalizes insecurity through work surveillance by
police, immigration officers, and the state most usually to secure private, privileged
benefits for elites (Agathangelou 2004a). For example, governments righteously
avow to stop the proliferation of desire industries throughout the globe yet these
cull $8 billion per year (International Organization for Migration 1997), typically to
serve clients for the militarized state (Agathangelou and Ling 2003). Most insid-
iously, the masculinity game robs those subjects classified as feminine, private, in-
formal, and intimate of any legitimacy in protesting the injustices and inequities
fostered by those designated as masculine, public, formal, and impersonal. This
mirage of security persists despite the fact that militarizing daily life incarcerates
racialized, sexualized Others at all sorts of sites, including in our own households
(Agathangelou 2004a).
Alternative movements for ‘‘democracy’’ (e.g., indigenous movements, Zap-
atistas), ‘‘Islam’’ (e.g., secular governance in Arab states), or ‘‘development’’ (e.g.,
World Social Forum) lose out in this masculinity game. They do not comply with the
abstract individualism and self-aggrandizing power mongering that militarization
and marketization demand. Similarly, the global masculinity game ignores women’s
groups, peace organizations, labor unions, and other entities even though these
daily impact world politics through conflict resolution, crisis prevention, food dis-
tribution, and other venues of collective action.
Technology becomes the only fixation in town. Its cynicism pervades the social
relations of sexual domination and violence even in the name of the state. Per-
petrators claim that they do so on behalf of democracy and freedom but they kill,
violate, and torture their own as much as the enemy. Razack (2000:139) dissects one
hazing ritual among Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia, videotaped and later
broadcast on Canadian television. A black corporal had ‘‘ ‘KKK’ written on [his]
shoulder . . . [while] tied to a tree, sprinkled with flour, referred to as Michael
Jackson’s ‘secret,’ symbolically anally raped, and required to crawl on all fours.’’
White soldiers torture their black brothers-in-arms by reenacting colonial racism’s
iconic images of the Other. They brand the black recruit for lynching, taunt him for
not being white, feminize him as a sex toy, and compare him to an animal. Such acts
of racialized, sexualized torture are neither new nor limited to institutions of in-
carceration ‘‘out there.’’ Domestic prisons in the United States exhibit similar
abuses (see Joe Surkiewicz at mailto:jsurkiewicz@mdlab.org). Militarization comes
home to roost ‘‘in here.’’
Transforming the House of IR

Let us return to the House of IR. Transforming colonialism, Stoler (2002:217)
suggests, requires recalling ‘‘other kinds of memories . . . and stories to tell.’’ These
would begin to pave alternative visions of and approaches to the material inequal-
ities that beset the world (Agathangelou 2004a). Steve Smith (2004) concurs. Aus-
tralia’s aborigines, he points out, believe that they ‘‘sing’’ their world into existence.
In contrast, IR scholars seem much less wise, ‘‘rarely reflect[ing] on who wrote the
words and the music [of IR], and virtually never listening out for, nor recognizing,
voices of worlds than our own until they occasionally force us into silence’’ (Smith
2004: in press).
To begin our awakening, we need to theorize historically. That is, our analytical
categories need to help us distinguish and explain particular historical forms of
world politics and social relations. Included must be ‘‘some conception of how
[social relations] might be implicated in the reproduction of [global] systems in
particular’’ (Rosenberg 1994:38).
For this reason, we turn to Worldism. It begins with five epistemological com-
mitments: (1) intersubjectivity, defined as institutionalized social structures that
emerge through the labor of agents in relation to other agents; (2) agency, which
‘‘reverberates’’ with Others in a constant process of creating, articulating, and be-
coming; (3) identity, whose abstract subjectivity (e.g., notions of Self) emerges from
materiality (e.g., the body) and the social relations of production that produce it; (4)
critical syncretic engagement, which fosters exploration and experimentation at the
interstices of multiple worlds where conflict and contestation most pressure the
need for negotiation, adaptation, and reformulation; and (5) accountability, which
stems from the Self ’s inescapability from the Other.
These commitments differ from the House of IR’s five main principles: sover-
eignty, hierarchy, normality, legitimacy, and power. Worldism does not deny the
historical lineages that found the House of IR. On the contrary, Worldism histor-
icizes the House itself as an effect of larger, structural inequalities in global capitalist-
patriarchy. In response, Worldism poses open-ended questions, not answers, that
shift IR from an organizing principle of ‘‘order versus disorder’’ to that of ‘‘ne-
gotiation across difference’’ to construct a common yet alternative universe. World-
ism takes seriously Other worlds by engaging with their crises and contradictions,
not to convert or conquer them into another version of the Self.
Worldism relates to the House of IR accordingly:
(1) Intersubjectivity Dissolves Sovereignty. Sovereignty in the House of IR enables the
declaration: ‘‘I reside in the center, you stay at the margins.’’ This mode of political
organizing silences the problematic of ideologically territorializing and compart-
mentalizing communities into house versus state versus market versus order versus
disorder, as if these divisions do not sustain structurally asymmetrical social rela-
tions. ‘‘Cooperation’’ and ‘‘interdependence’’ simply delude under these condi-
tions. Worldism asks, instead: ‘‘How can we understand each other, especially our
relationally produced, differentially experienced positions, locations, interests, and
privileges?’’ This open-ended query compels us to recognize and accept multiple
sources of knowledge and their worlds. It dismantles house boundaries and the
constructions that keep us, literally and figuratively, in place.
Poetry offers one means of doing so:
Poetry envisions and revisions forms of political life. Yet its closer emphasis on
words sometimes illuminatesFrecalls or reinventsFtheir narrative construction.
That is to say, it can highlight how words are not just narrative material but . . .
can themselves have stories to tell . . . . [Poetry] can help to expose how the
dominant world narratives we are called to accept and act upon are in turn but a
collage of word-stories forgotten, interpreted, or synchronized to suit the rhe-
torical moral of the grand narrative (Constantinou 2000:287).
By broadening the routes to voicing and becoming, Worldism escapes narrow, fixed
boundaries and the interests they sustain. No longer must we tolerate bourgeois,
patriarchal authority passing for ‘‘abstract individualism.’’ Instead, Worldism fore-
grounds the fluid, dynamic landscape of mutual understandings and constant
(re)constructions of who and what we are. From intersubjectivity, then, we may
develop strategies to dissolve the House’s fixation on and need for sovereignty.
(2) Agency Obsolesces Hierarchy. Hierarchy stabilizes the House (‘‘I live upstairs, you
work [for me] downstairs’’). It relies on an epistemic violence that denigrates Other
sources of knowledge, traditions, and worlds even while exploiting them for
sustenance. Such violence is not unilateral. It afflicts, also, those who luxuriate ‘‘
upstairs.’’ They must contend with the agony and anger of disenfranchised
progeny while worrying, at the same time, about access to power and wealth in a
constantly changing and contested context. Seen from this perspective, hegemonic
stability theory takes on a self-isolating, self-reifying character. In contrast, World-
ism asks: ‘‘How do we affect our worlds?’’ It focuses attention on the empowering,
world-making role of all agents as they reverberate off each other’s identities and
subjectivities, desires and interests, power and histories. Recognizing that produc-
tion and reproduction, public and private, masculine and feminine together con-
tribute to a more integrated social life may, at last, free us from an internalized
oppression that deracinates and depoliticizes both knowledge and power. In help-
ing us recognize that difference is constituted through social relations, Worldism
affirms that identity is not immutable. We are enabled, then, to imagine and de-
velop different yet interconnected communities. Such community-building disturbs
and ultimately obsolesces hierarchy.
(3) Identity Relativizes Normality. The House of IR decides the norm (‘‘I set the
standard, you comply with it’’). It needs to keep in line ‘‘rebel sons’’ and ‘‘fallen
daughters,’’ not to mention ‘‘bastard sons’’ and a roaming ‘‘love child’’ here and
there. Like the actual colonial household, the House of IR resorts to this tactic to
deny its intimacies with exotic, destabilizing Others, even when they produce com-
mon progeny. Worldism removes such alienation and ambivalence by asking: ‘‘How
does my identity or self-understanding emerge from interactions with others?’’ In
this way, we may engage with those intimate parts of ourselves, as individuals and
collectivities. Even during moments of fear and insecurity, we may risk listening to,
communicating with, and learning from those who seem so different but who are
really part of us and just as committed to making our worlds better. By sustaining
healthy (nonparanoid, noncovetous) communities that benefit the world’s majority,
Worldism dynamizes and eventually relativizes the norm.
(4) Engagement Supercedes Legitimacy. The House of IR needs to enforce legitimacy
(‘‘I am genuine, you are false at worst or an incomplete imitation at best’’) to uphold
all its previous properties: sovereignty, hierarchy, and normality. Indeed, legitimacy
draws clear boundaries around those who ‘‘belong’’ and those who don’t, separat-
ing ‘‘gentry’’ from ‘‘riffraff,’’ ‘‘high politics’’ from ‘‘low politics,’’ ‘‘concepts’’ from
‘‘data,’’ ‘‘theorist’’ from ‘‘activist.’’ What results, as we have seen, is a camouflaged
complex of erasures, violences, and desires that, nonetheless, percolate to the
public, especially when crises break the routine. Relatively easy access to technol-
ogies of cruelty through a globalized and commodified militarization further in-
tensifies the need for Worldism’s next pair of questions: ‘‘How can I engage with
OthersFand myselfFthrough critique?’’24 And equally important, ‘‘how do I re-
construct syncretically from this critical engagement?’’ Critical, syncretic engage-
ment across borders, categories, and generations allows agents from multiple
worldsFwhether marked by tradition, race, class, gender, or sexualityFto build
communities together. No longer would we suffer from arbitrary exclusions, such
as who needs education (‘‘developing world’’) and who does not (‘‘developed
world’’). Nor would we prevent the fruitful syncretism of laws, rules, and ideas from
multiple traditions and worlds. The sheer joy of creative exploration and exper-
imentation derived from Worldism’s critical, syncretic engagement would help us
supercede the banal legitimacy of house rules.
24
Real engagement with others cannot begin without a simultaneous willingness to critique oneself. For more on
Worldism as a process, see Agathangelou and Ling (2004b).
TABLE 3. Impact of Worldism on the House of IR
Worldism’s Impact on the

House of IR House of IR Worldism
Sovereignty Intersubjectivity Intersubjectivity

(‘‘I reside in the center, you Dissolves Sovereignty (‘‘How can we understand
stay at the margins’’) one another?’’)
Hierarchy Agency Disturbs and Agency
(‘‘I live upstairs, you work Obsolesces Hierarchy (‘‘How do we affect our
[for me] downstairs’’) worlds?’’)
Normality Identity Dynamizes and Identity
(‘‘I set the standard, you Relativizes Normality (‘‘How does my identity or
comply’’) self-understanding emerge
from interactions with
others?’’)
Legitimacy Critical Syncretic Critical Syncretic
(‘‘I am genuine, you are Engagement Supercedes Engagement
fake at worst or an Legitimacy (‘‘How can we syncretize
incomplete imitation at multiple worlds by
best’’) critiquing and engaging
with others as well as
ourselves?’’)
Power Accountability Questions, Accountability
(‘‘I impose, you consent’’) Decenters, and Reframes (‘‘What are we
Power thinking/doing/being, at
whose cost, and why?’’)
(5) Accountability Reframes Power. Power determines the House of IR (‘‘I impose,
you consent’’). Without power, the house reminds us, we would tremble in a scary
state of nature where there is no shelter, no pater, no mater, and definitely no
servants. This rationale loses its force when we consider the insecurity that it pro-
duces despite a constant claim to the opposite. As the house reinforces its ramparts,
even ‘‘inside’’ members like postmodern feminism or constructivism-pragmatism
begin to seem threatening, not to mention ‘‘wards’’ like Asian capitalism and pe-
ripheral-transitional economies. Here, Worldism holds accountable those who
erect, maintain, and insist on such an establishment and ask: ‘‘What are we think-
ing/doing/being, at whose cost, and why?’’ We are moved to interrogate the mean-
ing and purpose of power. ‘‘Whom does it benefit? Whom does it sacrifice? Why
should we mirror imperialism?’’ From these queries, a more meaningful and sus-
tainable democracy may arise. It could involve another conception of the ‘‘house,’’
its role and significance:
If I were to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters
daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in
peace . . . . We can perhaps tell everything about the present, but about the past!
The first, the oneirically definitive house, must retain its shadows. (Bachelard
1964:6, 13)
Table 3 compares these differences between the House of IR and Worldism.

Many may question our optimism. How could Worldism retain its intellectual and
political integrity given the power politics of the discipline as outlined above?
Cynthia Weber (1999b:443) has noted that mainstream IR tends to ‘‘incorporate’’
alien theories by turning them into lesser, domesticated venues for ‘‘enhanc[ing]
scientific disciplinary knowledges of IR rather than in any way transform[ing]
them.’’
We cannot predict or control the course of an idea. Contestations, contradictions,

and crises will always follow. Nonetheless, we suggest that Worldism offers a sig-
nificant departure from previous ‘‘alien’’ theories explored in IR. First, Worldism
does not simply talk about including Others but directly integrates non-Western
epistemologies and ontologies into theory-building and political activism. Else-
where (Agathangelou and Ling 2004b), we discuss how poisies from ancient Greece
resonates with Buddhism’s pratitya samutpada (co-dependent arising). When the
Other voices itself, neither Self nor Other, theory-building nor practical politics, can
remain the same. Even Osama bin Laden, whose imperialistic rhetoric mirrors
George Bush’s, has changed IR by his authorship of another voice, another vision,
and another politics. Furthermore, Worldism aims to redress structural and ma-
terial asymmetries. It is not captured by elite politics whether in the discipline, as a
source of knowledge production, or as a field of practical politics. Rather, Worldism
‘‘vivifies’’ the perspectives, interests, and actions of those who are usually margin-
alized, exploited, or exiled by the House of IR. In so doing, Worldism is alert to the
seductive yet ultimately self-delusional ‘‘hyperreal’’ politics identified by some
postmodernists (cf. Baudrillard 2002). Furthermore, open-ended queries rather
than declarative statements drive Worldism. This orientation keeps the House of IR
in perspective. It becomes one of many sites, not the only one, at which knowledge
or politics is produced. Lastly, as shown by our tripartite analysis, IR is not limited
to one arena, that is, the discipline. Although consistencies align IR as a discipline
with its production of knowledge and implementation in practical politics, change
could occur at one site (e.g., knowledge production) with lagged effects in the other
two (e.g., the discipline, practical politics). Indeed, Weber’s observation of main-
stream IR’s supposed resilience may be accurate for now but overly pessimistic in
the long run. Our time frame for making such judgments may be unnecessarily
short.
Worldism, in brief, unleashes the poisies of IR. Worldism openly declares its desire
and interest to realize another world where wealth would not accrue to a privileged
few at the expense of the many. It would be a world, moreover, that reflects col-
laboration at all levels, ‘‘out there’’ and ‘‘in here,’’ to sustain an open, inviting, and
profoundly democratic environment that is free of necessity and rich with poisies
‘‘everywhere.’’
Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t cry to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings. Move within,
But don’t move the way fear makes you move
(Jalal Al-Din Rumi, 13th-century Sufi poet)
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International Studies Review (2004) 6, 21–49

The House of IR: From Family Power

Poisies offers an alternative epistemology to understand, critique, engage with, and

r 2004 International Studies Review.

TABLE 1. From House to Worldism

Image House Oceanic Circle

IR Household Relations: In and Out, Up and Down

Inside the Household

behavior. But then how do realists explain the existence of an interdependent

Missing is gender analysis itself. Neoliberals and IR standpoint feminists tend

be almost as closely policed as [the Native Other]’’ (Stoler 2002:60). A common

On the Borders, Upstairs

Despite its critical, revolutionary appeal, postmodernism ends up as static and

On the Borders, Downstairs

components) to contain a method only (for comparisons) and no substance (cf.

Métissage represented not the dangers of foreign enemies at national bor-

capitalism as exotica only, not worthy of theorizingFuntil the latter gained

Outside the House

TABLE 2. Impact of the House on IR

Open/Hidden Academic Knowledge Practical

Positionings/ ‘‘Objective,’’ Tolerance of the Masculinity Game/

(‘‘legitimate versus illegitimate’’), their normative values (‘‘good versus bad’’),

What’s Wrong with This House?

Disciplinary Impact: Collusion with Power

outnumber female full professors by nearly 5 to 1 whereas at the rank of assistant

In either case, she concludes, an Asian American womanFor any woman of

Knowledge Production: Deracination and Depoliticization

Practical Politics: Masculinity Game

Transforming the House of IR

TABLE 3. Impact of Worldism on the House of IR

Worldism’s Impact on the

Sovereignty Intersubjectivity Intersubjectivity

Table 3 compares these differences between the House of IR and Worldism.

We cannot predict or control the course of an idea. Contestations, contradictions,

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