Using "of" more than once seems weird to me, so I'm trying to avoid such repetition.
For example there is
a notion of sustaining of relations
which I want to replace with
a notion of relations sustaining
Is this replacement grammatically correct?
Feel free to post a short answer and/or a link if it's a general rule.
You almost got it right,
a notion of sustaining relations
would be adequate for what you are trying to say
a notion of relations sustaining
doesn't make much sense without further context.
... a notion of relations sustaining ...
is not idiomatic. The usual construction with an attributive noun casts the noun in the singular, "relation sustaining", although there are exceptions.
But the of is unnecessary; in fact, VERBing of OBJECT usually sounds rather old-fashioned in contemporary discourse, suggesting bureaucratic volubility or 19th-century canons of elegance. Sustaining as a gerund retains many of its properties as a verb, including the capacity to take an object: it's perfectly OK to speak of
... a notion of sustaining relations ...
