The Lived International

Demonstrating that a life of praxis—living international relations—yields more insight than a life of theory alone, Steven Chan provides an antidote to a purely conceptual approach to International Relations. It is also the work of a poet with a distinguished literary reputation, recounting travel and poetry, engagement and responsibility.

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The Lived International is a poetic account of Stephen Chan’s personal engagement in International Relations. It speaks to the inadequacy of an abstract voyeurism while the problems of the world are death, devastation and underdevelopment. Drawn from a lifetime of travel and engagement, and from both published and hitherto unpublished poetry, forming a parallel list to the author’s academic works, the book seeks to inject into debate the sense that language, spoken and written discourse alone, are not a sufficient claim to ‘bearing witness’, and that even activism from afar can often fail to understand a human condition that afflicts the majority of the world’s population. Chan demonstrates that a life of praxis, living international relations, yields more insights than a life of theory alone.