Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics, Introduction
In this Introduction, we accomplish two main goals. First, we provide theoretical tools to better grasp the role and character of diplomacy and how it may be changing in the contemporary era. We develop a relational framework focused on two dimensions: the evolving configurations of state and non-state actors and the competing authority claims that underpin diplomatic practices on the world stage. Second, we begin to theorize the ways in which diplomacy makes and remakes world politics. The remainder of the book offers rich case studies to empirically substantiate our broad argument about the constitution of world politics in practice. In this Introduction, our more limited objective is to explain the significance of our argument for key debates in international relations (IR).
Doing Historical International Relations
The relationship between International Relations and History has varied greatly over the last century, following largely from the historiographical changes in International Relations theorising. This volume details the changing relationship over the last 60 years, through a number of both seminal and newer texts. The volume starts with classics of the 1950’s and 60’s, continues with the ebb of historical scholarship in the 1970’s and 80’s and the forceful calls for a regeneration, and concludes with the opening of new perspectives over the last two decades. Although the newer generations have indeed rehashed some of the older ideas, there has also been an obvious increase in the sophistication of (meta) theoretical reflection and methodological awareness. There have never been more or more varied ways of justifying historical scholarship in International Relations.
The History of International Thought
Being a distinct discipline entails being able to recount the disciplinary history and pre-history, and in IR this has led to a sustained engagement, first with the history of international thought in the classical sense, then with historiography. Over the last decades, scholars have increasingly come to see International Relations Theory neither as the recurrence of ancient patterns of thought nor as a miraculous conception of the early 20th century. Rather, continuous stories have been written, where IR has become tied to a wide variety of previous thought. In this volume we explore this scholarship in breadth, explicitly opposing the notion of “great traditions” and “great debates”, and focusing primarily on the challenges, and on works undermining, redirecting or expanding the canon.
Historical International Relations
As a quarry for data, testing-ground for theory and site of investigation, history has been one of the unacknowledged partners of International Relations. The last two decades has witnessed both a substantial increase in the scope of historical IR scholarship and in the sophistication of methodological approaches to history, accompanied by a rapidly increasing (and multidisciplinary) interest in the history of international thought, as well as an ever more sophisticated historiography of the discipline itself. This Major Work is structured in a way to engage with the key recent developments in the field of international relations, providing the reader with an overview of approaches to history in IR; the history of international thought/historiography; and the emergence of the state and the state system.