Oscillating between memoir, travelogue and poems, Stephen Chan offers a fascinating glimpse of a life well lived: as an activist, as a diplomat, as a scholar-teacher and as a policy adviser. He takes us from New Zealand to Sub-Saharan Africa and from the Middle East to East Asia, providing astute insights into key political challenges that define our time.

Roland Bleiker, University of Queensland

Through the eyes of Prof. Stephen Chan, The Lived International brings to life the messy, moving human relationships at the hinges of History, inviting us to hear behind the neat doctrines of International Relations textbooks: ‘Will they fire? Will they not fire?’ Stephen Chan lands this praxis with poetic grace and wit in a book that is part autobiography, part political narrative, and wholly a call from the heart for each of us to play our part for a better, more peaceful world.

Ginie Servant-Miklos, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Stephen Chan has done everything all before. Whatever innovations we have made in international relations — autoethnography, poetry, narratives, novels, the practical turn, the aesthetic turn — are already here in his book and in his life. This unique memoir charts Chan as a witness and an actor in a complex, exciting, and unjust world. We are witness to his precise, elegant, and insightful prose as he takes us on adventures involving war, mediation, and peacemaking in places such as China, New Zealand, Zambia, London, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Zimbabwe, Algeria, South Africa, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jerusalem, Turkey, Qatar, and Trinidad. Chan lives the international in a way that models what we might all aspire to. This book is serious fun that aims for the true and the good.

Naeem Inayatullah, Ithaca College

Following Stephen Chan anywhere, you never know what to expect, and his memoir is no different. He takes the reader through war zones, backroom negotiations, and karate clubs for a front-row view of how geopolitical transformations in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia unfold. A nationally recognized poet and world-ranked expert in the martial arts, Chan writes with razor-sharp wit and extraordinary warmth.

Kristin Surak, London School of Economics and New York University