Forum: doing historical international relations

Abstract

This forum takes up the question of how to do work in Historical International Relations (IR). Especially in the past decade, scholars have debated what modes of analysis are best suited to this sort of work and how Historical IR relates to the disciplines of History and International Relations. The contributors to this forum intervene in these debates and converge on three issues facing Historical IR—questions of methods, ontology, and disciplinary boundaries. We outline the convergences and differences among the contributors on those points in this introduction, and we conclude by offering a definition of Historical IR in an effort to clarify its position within the discipline of IR.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 de Carvalho, Costa López, and Leira’s edited volume, The Routledge Handbook of Historical International Relations, is itself evidence of this consolidation and a helpful overview of the process. As they note there, ‘so much material is being produced that a stock-taking exercise is both possible and necessary,’ and we see this forum as serving a similar purpose (2021, 2). One important factor in the subfield’s consolidation was the formation of the Historical International Relations Section (HIST) within the International Studies Association in 2013, which has spurred coordination among like-minded scholars. The kind of work done by HIST’s founding committee—Daniel Green, Halvard Leira, Benjamin de Carvalho, Andrea Paras, and Daniel Nexon—suggests some overlap in a substantive interest in the ways that international political practices have been constructed, maintained, and disrupted over long periods of time and an affinity for critical perspectives or genealogical approaches that seek to denaturalise concepts like sovereignty and anarchy (see MacKay and LaRoche 2017; Paras 2019).

2 As Vaughan-Williams (2005, 133) explains, ‘The worry is that the discourse of the historical turn in IR perpetuates rather than displaces the tendency to privilege structure and space over context and time in our analyses of world politics.’

3 Elman and Elman (2001, 35) offer a similar warning against using history solely for theory-testing.

4 Nonetheless, Historical IR remains a broad category, and we do not seek to bar quantitative, rationalist, or neo-positivist work from being considered a part of this field. For work of this sort that could be considered Historical IR, see, e.g., Kokkonen and Sundell (2014) and Blaydes and Paik (2016). See Jackson (2010) on neo-positivism as one of multiple equally ‘scientific’ approaches to the study of world politics.

5 See also Barkin (2008) on the perhaps unhelpful distinction between ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ research, the latter often being a residual category that encompasses myriad approaches.

6 Lawson (2012, 218-219) argues that ‘narrative,’ or the construction of ‘structured stories that explain events and make them intelligible to others,’ is a shared feature of work in History and International Relations. Auchter’s emphasis on storytelling is similar but is less concerned with causal explanation

7 Though there are many varieties of constructivism in IR (Srivastava 2020), we mean constructivist in at least the minimal sense of accepting the non-inevitability of a given social phenomenon (Hacking 1999, 6). Postcolonial perspectives share a similar emphasis on subjectivities (Epstein 2014).

8 Here Anievas (2016) echoes Hobson and Lawson’s (2008, 424) critique of ‘radical historicism,’ which ‘embraces a view of history as an infinite problem that can never be mastered’.

9 This is a typical starting point for scholars of International Historical Sociology. As Rosenberg (2006, 335) puts it, ‘This assertion of a fundamentally relational ontology is the first principle of any strictly sociological method: explanation not just of society, but by society.’

10 In considering how to reconcile this tension between particularity and generality in History and IR, Lawson (2012) argues that ideal-typification offers a way forward, and Jackson’s (2010) ‘analyticism’ offers a similar approach.

11 Correspondence with author, 26 May 2020. Here Green echoes the position of Hobson and Lawson (2008, 430) in advocating for ‘historicist historical sociology’ as an inclusive via media.

12 This forum began with a roundtable at the ISA-Northeast Regional Conference in November 2019.

13 Isacoff (2002) uses similar language in arguing for a pragmatist turn in IR.

14 This applies to our teaching as well, a domain in which IR students are typically exposed to a relatively narrow range of international history (Knight 2019).

15 Thanks to Andreas Behnke for this point.

16 See

https://www.thebigq.org/2018/03/29/history-as-battleground-how-does-memory-shape-todays-politics/.

17 For example, mainstream IR theories tend to assume in advance that history is linear, nonlinear or multilinear (MacKay and LaRoche 2017). This is an issue better addressed after a thick periodisation narrative is produced, not before.

18 A scan of their bibliography reveals how few articles on periodisation issues in IR had been written before theirs.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tobias Lemke

Tobias Lemke is Instructor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware (UD). He is also the Program Coordinator for Faculty Development and Assessment at the English Language Institute’s Academic Transitions and Accelerated-UD programs. His research focuses on nationalist movements and their impact on historical and contemporary international order. Some of his work is published in International Relations and Journal for Global Security Studies. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Delaware in 2021.

Andrew A. Szarejko

Andrew A. Szarejko is a Donald R. Beall Defense Fellow in the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School and a Non-residential Fellow in the U.S. Military Academy’s Modern War Institute. He received his PhD in Government from Georgetown University in 2020.

Jessica Auchter

Jessica Auchter is Guerry Professor and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, USA. She is the author of The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations (Routledge, 2014), and Global Corpse Politics (Cambridge, 2021).

Alexander D. Barder

Alexander D. Barder is Associate Professor of International Relations at Florida International University. He is author of Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy, Empire Within: International Hierarchy and its Imperial Laboratories of Governance and co-author of Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence, and Horror in World Politics. His work has appeared in Third World Quarterly, Millennium, European Journal of International Relations, International Political Sociology, and Philosophy and Social Criticism.

Daniel Green

Daniel Green is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware. Author of many articles and book chapters, he has recently edited Guide to the English School in International Studies (2014, with Cornelia Navari) and The Two Worlds of Nineteenth Century International Relations (2018). His current book project is Order Projects and Resistance in the Global Political System: An Approach to International Relations History. He is also Convener of the Nineteenth Century Working Group of ISA’s HIST section.

Stephen Pampinella

Stephen Pampinella is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the State University of New York at New Paltz. His research focuses broadly on international hierarchies, including the relationship between race and US military occupations, racialised norms, and small state status seeking.

Swati Srivastava

Swati Srivastava is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Purdue University. Her research on global​ governance, Big Tech, corporate responsibility, human rights, and constructivism has been published or is forthcoming in Perspectives on Politics, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies.