Stories we live by: the rise of Historical IR and the move to concepts
Scholars of the humanities and social sciences are necessarily storytellers. Thus, crafting narratives is an inescapable feature of the practice of International Relations scholarship. We tell stories about the past to orient ourselves in the present and envision the future. Historical International Relations has greatly expanded the repertoire of available narrative elements. However, when we read the past through the prism of our present, we risk closing down opportunities for different ways of imagining both the present and the future. In this article, we acknowledge the advances made in HIR over the last decades but suggest that a closer engagement with conceptual history would enhance its potential even further, making it possible to explore how a wider space of experience can also widen our horizon of expectations.
The future is just another past
Before International Studies can confront the future, it needs to get a better grip on its past and present. The discipline lacks agreement on both its own name and the name of its object of study. More importantly, key concepts used to describe phenomena have changed continuously: no concept emerging in the 19th century has remained untouched, no envisioned future of the past could have prepared us for the present. Old concepts have been discarded, new ones adopted, and existing ones modified. This implies that any exercise in ‘futurology’ must necessarily come with an openness towards conceptual change, and that a key challenge for International Studies going forward will consist in matching our conceptual toolbox to an ever-changing world. The importance of conceptual change has until recently been neglected in the study of global politics. Thus, in this paper we start by presenting the empirical case for incorporating conceptual change by laying out key past and present conceptual changes in the international realm. We then move on to a presentation of conceptual history and the tools it provides us for grasping conceptual change, before discussing how to tackle conceptual developments when thinking about the future of global politics.
Anni Roth Hjermann
Anni Roth Hjermann is a Senior Research Fellow at NUPI, working in the Research group for Eastern Europe and Asia. She holds a PhD in Politics and...
Theory Seminar: “Futures in German” with Maja Zehfuss
Maja Zehfuss will discuss her ongoing work on issues of immigration and citizenship in the context of language policy and the invention of the future.
Mother of the Oceans: Elisabeth Mann Borgese and Ocean Governance
Join us when Lucian M. Ashworth visits NUPI on 21 May.
Multiplicity: Take Two
What is the idea of ‘Multiplicity’? And how convincing are the claims that it can be used to overcome longstanding problems in social and international theory?