Circle of the Fish

The circle of the fish is our friendly rejoinder to Kautilya's law of fish. In a South Asian rendering of the law of the jungle in anarchy, Kautilya, in the Arthashastra, says that life without a state is like the life of fish living in a pond filled with predatory drives. The law of the fish prevails when big ones swallow small ones. In the Hobbesian anarchy, states, too, live under the law of fish. Unfortunately, however, Kautilya did not bother to ask the fishes themselves what it is really like to live as a fish, just as Hobbes did not ask wolves. A gang of puffers would not have recognized themselves in Kautilya's law of fish. They live rather constructive and artistic lives, building circles with elaborate patterns, the ones you see on this page.

We are junior South Korean IR scholars who are like these puffers. Many of us do not recognize ourselves in the theories and narratives of the current IR discipline. While we study disparate subjects, this ontological concern unites us.  At the same time, we are also not puffers. We do not know what it really is like to live as puffers. Thus, we want to learn their way and the way of many others beyond puffers: Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, Americans, indigenous peoples, non-humans, cyborgs, oceans, shells, aliens .... This learning is also our politics. Inter-world politics along with international politics.

But, we do begin from East Asia as it is the closest. In short, we aim to globalize IR by exploring ontologies in East Asia and beyond. We aim to:

• Recover marginalized ontologies in East Asian international relations

• Connect indigenous East Asian discourses on the international with the current IR theories

• Bring the long-term historical East Asian international relations into the history of the modern international order

• Contribute to the pluralization of IR by way of studying East Asian international relations