| Summary/Abstract |
The post-Western agenda of international relations will not be complete until it has tracked the worlding strategy of the provincialized West. This article examines one important aspect of this strategy, namely the appropriation of non-Western theory by the West as exemplified by the reception of Sun Zi’s The Art of War (or Sunzi Bingfa) in the Anglosphere. It looks at the ways in which Sunzi Bingfa has been translated, interpreted and applied in the field of Strategic Studies. This article identifies three plausible ways in which theory ‘travels’ from the East to the West, namely: (i) a useless resource or outmoded form of thinking, (ii) a useful, if exotic, culturally bound source, and (iii) a body of wisdom with universal value. It contends that most readers in the Anglosphere tend to cross these different routes to varying degrees. This critical examination of the reception of Sunzi Bingfa enables us to see that the academic field of Strategic Studies is rooted in self-other dynamics on the one hand, and characterized by an extreme parochialism on the other. The conclusion makes a normative judgment that the West can better contribute to global IR by conceiving of and relying on non-Western knowledge as an access to universal truth.
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