Daoist IR Theory as a Research Program: International Predictions from a Classical Global Political Theory

Mirroring distorted patterns of international relations (IR) in the real world, Western institutions have overwhelmingly dominated the production of IR theories taught in the West and globally. Thus, while contending IR paradigms have proliferated since the late Cold War, most IR theories belong to either the 1st dimension (dominant Western IR theories) or the 2nd dimension (non-dominant, Western IR theories). The more recent trend of China and other non-Western states increasing their international influence has now brought some limited attention to the 3rd dimension (elite, non-Western IR theories) alongside impending changes in the global political order. For the most part, however, 4th dimension (non-elite, non-Western) IR theories have been ignored by the global IR community. This unfortunately represents a failure to properly and adequately globalize IR theorizing and the IR discipline. To correct this imbalance, I advocate paying greater attention to 4th dimension IR theories like Daoist IR theory which is the focus of this paper. This particular school of global political theory was first developed over two thousand years ago and it still offers us a number of powerful normative and methodological claims as well as insightful predictions concerning international security, international organizations, and international development. As discussed in this paper, these predictions offered by Daoist IR theory are not only of historical interest but can also help in providing guidance to modern foreign policy makers and the general public while being useful to scholars around the world today by offering coherent potential explanations (and testable hypotheses) pinpointing many upstream sources of international conflict and how to avoid them. This paper lays out those hypotheses and then offers a series of reflections on how to further advance the study of Daoist IR theory as a Global IR research program to help complement the currently dominant Western approaches to theorizing IR.