Arrangement

George Lawsons teoretiske arbeid er orientert rundt forholdet mellom historie og teori, med ei spesiell interesse i global historisk sosiologi. Han bruker si teoretiske interesse til å studere revolusjonar, spesielt har han gjort dette i dei to bøkene sine Negotiated Revolutions: The Czech Republic, South Africa and Chile (2005) og Anatomies of Revolution (2019). Lawson har også publisert breitt om global modernitet, spesielt gjeld dette i ei bok (som han skreiv saman med Barry Buzan) som kartlegg måtane ei rekkje viktige dynamikkar i moderne IR har røtene sine på i ‘den globale transformasjonen ‘til 1800-talet'.

Teoriseminaret baserer seg på følgjande tekst:

“What unites fish and chips, the American national anthem, and the Battle of Trafalgar? The answer is that they are all global processes, enabled by flows of migration, war-making, imperialism and capital, which subsequently became inscribed as national symbols. The promise of global history lies in denaturalising national histories and demonstrating the ways in which the modern world has emerged through connections, entanglements and flows of multiple kinds and various intensities. If International Relations (IR) has been slow at exploring these insights, Global History has been equally slow at exploring what it can bring to IR. As a result, IR remains in large measure a state-centric, Eurocentric discipline dominated by national histories, while Global History has not done enough to theorise its narratives of entanglements. This paper examines what is lost in this story of mutual neglect, and outlines two possibilities for how engagement between IR and Global History can be further developed: a minimalist vision premised on the generation of synthetic historical-theoretical work, and a maximalist vision based on the construction of new, non-Eurocentric histories of transboundary encounters and entanglements.” 

Seminaret blir leidd av Catherine  Hirst som jobbar med ein PhD om revolusjonar og internasjonal orden på LSE og NUPI.