Presents a challenge to international relations scholars to think globally, understanding the field's development in the Global South alongside the traditionally dominant Western approach.
The story of the women, financiers, and other unsung figures who helped to shape the post-Napoleonic global order In 1814, after decades of continental conflict, an alliance of European empires captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte, defeating French military expansionism and establishing the Concert of Europe. This new coalition planted the seeds for today's international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its center. Glenda Sluga reveals how at the end of the Napoleonic wars, new conceptions of the politics between states were the work not only of European statesmen but also of politically ambitious aristocratic and bourgeois men and women who seized the moment at an extraordinary crossroads in history. In this panoramic book, Sluga reinvents the study of international politics, its limitations, and its potential. She offers multifaceted portraits of the leading statesmen of the age, such as Tsar Alexander, Count Metternich, and Viscount Castlereagh, showing how they operated in the context of social networks often presided over by influential women, even as they entrenched politics as a masculine endeavor. In this history, figures such as Madame de Staël and Countess Dorothea Lieven insist on shaping the political transformations underway, while bankers influence economic developments and their families agitate for Jewish rights. Monumental in scope, this groundbreaking book chronicles the European women and men who embraced the promise of a new kind of politics in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and whose often paradoxical contributions to modern diplomacy and international politics still resonate today.
A new and systematic view of how global international society (GIS) came into being and acquired its current structure and dynamics. Buzan and Schouenborg integrate states, intergovernmental and international non-governmental organisations, and the diffusion of norms, into a single theoretical framework for the study of GIS.
Theorising within the American 'discipline' of International Relations has been plagued by a rather severe intellectual crisis. Theorists have meant that they need to emulate the natural sciences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in outlook and argumentative style. But this has destroyed much awareness for the 'nature' of modern international relations as a dynamically evolving historical process. This book seeks to overcome the vicissitudes of mainstream theorising by abandoning the discipline's scientism and by adopting a stance that is more in tune with the standards of modern social science.
This volume reconsiders the process of globalization, drawing on a wealth of new perspectives to understand better this momentous historical development.
Is contemporary international order truly a secular arrangement? Theorists of international relations typically adhere to a narrative that portrays the modern states system as the product of a gradual process of secularization that transcended the religiosity of medieval Christendom. William Bain challenges this narrative by arguing that modern theories of international order reflect ideas that originate in medieval theology. They are, in other words, worldly applications of a theological pattern. This ground-breaking book makes two key contributions to scholarship on international order. First, it provides a thorough intellectual history of medieval and early modern traditions of thought and the way in which they shape modern thinking about international order. It explores the ideas of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Martin Luther, and other theologians to rise above the sharp differentiation of medieval and modern that underpins most international thought. Uncovering this theological inheritance invites a fundamental reassessment of canonical figures, such as Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, and their contribution to theorizing international order. Second, this book shows how theological ideas continue to shape modern theories of international order by structuring the questions theorists ask as well as the answer they provide. It argues that the dominant vocabulary of international order, system and society, anarchy, balance of power, and constitutionalism, is mediated by the intellectual commitments of nominalist theology. It concludes by exploring the implications of thinking in terms of this theological inheritance, albeit in a world where God is only one of several possibilities that can called upon to secure the regularity of order.
Building on recent debates in critical social theory and international relations, Making Things International I: Circuits and Motion presents twenty-five essays that engage the global, the local, and the international through the lens of objects. It represents the first substantial new materialist intervention in global politics and international relations, offering a diverse and provocative set of reflections on how different objects create, sustain, complicate, and trouble the international. Problematizing the stuff of global life, Making Things International focuses on contemporary materialist scholarship on the international realm. The first of two volumes, these original contributions by both new and established scholars examine how war, diplomacy, trade, communication, and mobile populations are made by things: weapons, vehicles, shipping containers, commodities, passports, and more. The authors demonstrate how mundane, everyday objects—not normally understood as international—are in fact deeply implicated in how we think of the world: blood, garbage, viruses, traffic lights, clocks, memes, and ships’ ballast. Contributors: Michele Acuto, U College London; Peter Adey, Royal Holloway U of London; Rune Saugmann Andersen, U of Helsinki; Jessica Auchter, U of Tennessee at Chattanooga; Mike Bourne, Queen’s U Belfast; Kathleen P. J. Brennan; Elizabeth Cobbett, U of East Anglia; Stefanie Fishel, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Emily Gilbert, U of Toronto; Jairus Grove, U of Hawai‘i at Manoa; Charlie Hailey, U of Florida; John Law, Open U; Wen-yuan Lin, National Tsing-hua U; Oded Löwenheim, Hebrew U of Jerusalem; Chris Methmann; Benjamin J. Muller, U of Western Ontario; Can E. Mutlu, Bilkent U; Geneviève Piché; Joseph Pugliese, Macquarie U; Katherine Reese; Michael J. Shapiro, U of Hawai‘i at Manoa; Benjamin Stephan; Daniel Vanderlip; William Walters, Carleton U; Melissa Autumn White, U of British Columbia; Lauren Wilcox, U of Cambridge; Yvgeny Yanovsky.
In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions. Tang highlights the various modes in which literary texts—some highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille, Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth rediscovering—engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book approaches the development of international law in this period—its so-called classical age—in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved.