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Research project

A Conceptual History of International Relations

The purpose of CHOIR is to investigate taken-for-granted concepts of international relations.

Themes

  • Diplomacy
  • Foreign policy
  • Historical IR

Events

We start from the assumption that concepts such as “international”, diplomacy”, “foreign policy”, “war” and “peace” are not neutral and natural, but that they have emerged at specific times, for specific purposes and with specific connotations. The concepts through which we approach the world are not neutral analytical ones, but fundamentally political ones. Taking them for granted leads to misguided historical analyses, where the past is read in light of the present, and to misguided analyses of contemporary affairs, where the political world around us is naturalised.

The main goal of CHOIR is thus to write the first conceptual history of international relations. CHOIR starts from the assumption that the political vocabulary changed fundamentally between 1750 and 1850. This is the period when it became possible to think systematically about what we today refer to as “the international”. Additionally, this was a period where political hierarchies were established, and through the project, we will investigate if and how hierarchies of gender and civilisation were written into the basic concepts of international relations.

Another common assumption is that the central concepts of international relations have the same meaning across languages. We believe this to be wrong. CHOIR will thus also investigate how central concepts were translated to languages beyond English and French.

CHOIR will be conducted by an international team of closely cooperating researchers, covering different concepts and languages. Our sources will primarily be published texts, analysed first, to the extent possible, through quantitative content analysis to identify central concepts and when they emerged, and qualitative methods for studying content.

Project Manager

Halvard Leira
Research Professor

Participants

Benjamin de Carvalho
Research Professor
Morten Skumsrud Andersen
Senior Research Fellow, Head of the Research Group on Global Order and Diplomacy
Minda Holm
Senior Research Fellow

Articles

News
News

What does foreign policy really mean?

This, with other widely used IR concepts, is what Halvard Leira and his project CHOIR team have received funding to explore.

  • Diplomacy
  • Foreign policy
  • International organizations
  • Historical IR
Bildet viser Halvard Leira

New publications

Publications
Publications
Scientific article

The emergence of foreign policy

International relations scholarship typically treats foreign policy as a taken-for-granted analytical concept. It assumes either that all historical polities have foreign policies or that foreign policy originates in seventeenth-century Europe with the separation between the “inside” and “outside” of the state. It generally holds that foreign policy differs in essential ways from other kinds of policy, such as carrying with it a special need for secrecy. Halvard Leira argues against this view. The difference between “foreign” and “domestic” policy results from specific political processes; secrecy begat foreign policy. Growing domestic differentiation between state and civil society in the eighteenth century- articulated through a relatively free press operating in a nascent public sphere - enabled the emergence of foreign policy as a practical concept. The concept served to delimit the legitimate sphere of political discourse from the exclusive, executive sphere of king and cabinet. Leira explores these processes in Britain and France, important cases with different trajectories, one of reform, the other of revolution. Historicizing foreign policy like this serves to denaturalize the separation between different forms of policy, as well as the necessity of secrecy. Doing so cautions against the uncritical application of abstract analytical terms across time and space.

  • Diplomacy
  • Foreign policy
  • Governance
  • International organizations
  • Historical IR
  • Diplomacy
  • Foreign policy
  • Governance
  • International organizations
  • Historical IR
Media
Media
Lecture

A Conceptual History of International Relations

In this lecture, I discussed why we need a conceptual history of international relations, and how we can go about writing it.

  • Historical IR
  • Historical IR