ABSTRACT
This chapter takes as its starting point the possibility and potential for politically meaningful engagement with other cultures across the disciplinary and conceptual boundaries inscribed by political categorizations such as the nation-state. The effort speaks to concerns expressed by International Relations theorists based in North America that its current disciplinary paradigms may be inadequate for the task of accommodating difference, of hearing voices that speak in foreign languages and which come from countries across the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans and are less powerful politically. For example, Arlene B. Tickner (2003: 319) has pointed out that “given IR’s fundamental interest in explaining developments within the international system, what goes on inside the state is largely irrelevant.” She writes that among critical IR scholars there is growing hunger for locally grounded knowledge to better understand problems such as conflict and how it may be resolved, and a realization that the production of ideas in conditions far from the center of political power, in the realm of everyday life and under varying conditions of social, economic and other oppressions leads to potent intellectual positions that are worth engaging with (Tickner 2003: 311). There is some urgency to this endeavor, since the solutions to myriad conflicts currently underway that threaten the security of dominant states, such as the United States, may lie in unraveling the complexity of intractable local and regional conflicts far from the center of global hegemony. For this reason, organizations such as the Collective for Social Science Research, based in Pakistan, can offer some insights that speak to this need, based upon its own experience of engagement with one such complex region. 1
