ABSTRACT
The last section copes with the equivocal identity of balance of relationships (BoR) as a theory. The first question is whether or not it constitutes a non-Western theory. At a time when there is a call for a global IR discipline, coupled with the growing acknowledgment of non-Western IR’s significance, how can the Chinese cultural underpinnings of BoR be recognized as non-Western? Given the postcolonial celebration of hybridity, which is key to global IR’s promotion of sited identity, its agential appropriation of Western IR for sited purposes, and the consequential re-worlding of these sited identities, the temporal sensibility and cyclical perspective on history adopted by BoR can hardly belong. On the contrary, BoR implicitly identifies the dangers of highlighting sitedness, cautioning against an obsession with difference, spatiality, sited integration, and synthesis. We enlist post-hybridity to remind us of the dangers of reductionism in the construction of sited identity. Post-hybridity favors the notions of multilayeredness, cycles, and resemblance so as to enable the conceptual flexibility required of role-playing, epistemological shifts, and self-restraint. BoR is thus an inevitable but uneasy partner of post-Western IR.
