Reimagining IR’s biomedical foundations: East Asian medicine and the need for cosmological plurality

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Critical scholarship has long pointed to the problematic ways in which mainstream International Relations (IR) takes Westphalian state politics to be universally applicable, yet existing analyses fall short of providing an alternative grounding for IR. Departing from the close relationship between medicine and politics, this article advances two arguments. First, Westphalian IR is based on a particular Western conception of biomedicine. Second, biomedicine is treated as the hallmark of modern science, which exacerbates the discipline’s gatekeeping against ‘alternative’ scholarship that does not look like this particular description of science. By mobilising the notion of ‘cosmology’, we suggest that East Asian medicine (EAM), informed by Daoist yin-yang dialectics, can help to rethink the alleged universality of IR’s biomedical metatheoretical foundations. Specifically, we illustrate how the Westphalian state body and its territorial politics are made possible by biomedical knowledge, and how EAM’s relational cosmology and method of employing creative images helps to conceive shared communal bodies and re-evaluate territorial conflicts. Ultimately, this article argues for the necessity of a plurality of cosmological viewpoints in IR to overcome exclusionary oppositions in both the practice and study of global politics.