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Almost any conversation about Historical International Relations (IR) appears to be, at least implicitly, always already about Europe. The geographical and intellectual centrality of Europe shapes the way in which historically oriented work in IR operates. Paradoxically, despite a long and powerful lineage of disciplinary Eurocentrism, Europe has only rarely emerged as a conceptual focal point of historical investigation. Quite the contrary, its presence appears to go without saying. This chapter locates the reason for this in a teleological theory of history implicitly invoked with the articulation of Europe. We excavate how this implicit theory of history organizes debates in the English School tradition, in Historical Sociology, and in European Integration Theory thereby producing Europe as vanguard and telos of world history. In this way, we demonstrate that the centrality of Europe for Historical IR is not a matter of empirical focus but more fundamentally a question of conceptual and epistemological presuppositions. By addressing such conceptual Eurocentrism, we suggest, the horizon of possibility for historical and political engagements with Europe can be significantly expanded.

Disciplinary International Relations (IR) grew in part out of the discipline of History. Even so, the subfield of Historical International Relations (HIR) is a relatively new one. A mere decade ago, a handbook such as this one would have seemed unthinkable. Sure, there were books about History and IR (Elman and Elman, 1997) and more on the way (Bukovansky et al., forthcoming), people discussed the “problem of history” in IR (Armitage, 2004; Vaughan-Williams, 2005) and it was asked what history could be in IR (Hobson and Lawson, 2008). These takes nevertheless all supposed either the existence of a divide to be bridged or a continuum where the enterprises of History and IR were commensurable. The emergence and institutionalisation of a distinct subfield over the last decade has radically changed that landscape. Writing in 2020, it is obvious that a burgeoning subfield of HIR not only exists within the discipline, but that it has come to age and is thriving. As the ensuing chapters vividly demonstrate, so much material is being produced that a stock-taking exercise is both possible and necessary. This handbook attempts just such a stocktaking.

Historical periods are a central part of how the field of international relations (IR) defines the subject of its analysis but also how it regards itself as a field of analysis. On the one hand, historical periods represent the temporal unfolding of specific (spatial) logics of interactions among various and differentiated political units in a space that come to define what the international is. On the other hand, historical periods are not simply a referential point the boundaries of which are set outside the writing of history. Quite the contrary, historical periods are constructed and as such offer a window into the practice of that writing in IR. The aim of this chapter therefore is to set some of the parameters to conceptualise and discuss the processes of periodisation by first seeing how historical periods, beyond their historical accuracies and robustness, should be seen as heuristic devices dependant on a scholar's working hypothesis. The chapter then reflects on why Historical IR tends to largely consider ‘remarkable’ periods – such as economic or systemic ruptures, or the (Western European) state. Finally, some of the challenges and invitations that could be further explored by Historical IR are discussed.

The Arctic region has become the site of renewed great power interest. Not only are the US and Russia actively engaged in the Arctic Council, but China has also become an observer. In addition to that, a number of policy commentators have claimed that great power interest in the Arctic region is more than cooperation over natural resources and climate change, and that this “scramble for the Arctic” may, in fact, herald a renewed geopolitical engagement in the region. In the case of Iceland, commentators have pointed to the increased activity of both Russia and China as evidence of this. To the extent that there may be such an interest underlying the Arctic policies of Russia and China, in effect linking economic and public goods to security, we set out to probe this link here. Rather than being able to conclude that there was a clear great power competition going on over influence in Iceland, we suggest that much of the great power presence and interest in Iceland is the result of Iceland’s willingness to play great powers off against one another. We encountered little evidence of a strong Chinese presence in Iceland, although the few avenues China had pursued had resulted in a fair amount of distrust. As for Russia, there seems to have been Russian willingness to provide a loan to bail out Iceland in 2008, but it remains unclear what, if any, the ulterior motives were. For Iceland, the motive seems to have been the ability to use Russia as international leverage. On the balance, the case of Iceland gives little evidence of a strong competition between China, Russia and the US for influence on the island. On the other hand, Iceland’s ability to play different public goods providers up against each other suggests that the model of public goods substitution may have given to little emphasis on the agency of ‘client’ states.

Over the last decade, the Arctic region has become the site of new forms of great power interest. While the US has changed its hegemonic presence, other powers, in particular China and Russia, have been perceived to actively pursue Arctic strategies, perhaps seeking to undermine the western hegemony in the area. One of the most talkedabout features of this new interest, has been the alleged Chinese desire to get engaged in Greenlandic mining. While there is certainly a desire among some in Greenland for alternative sources of revenue, direct Chinese involvement runs into a number of political and logistical challenges. To close observers, the narrative of heavy Chinese interest and involvement in Greenland probably says less about China and Chinese interests, than about dynamics in the relationship between Greenland and Denmark. Even with Greenlandic independence a possibility in the intermediate future, there seems to be no obvious hegemon to take the place of the already existing ones.

Protection of Civilians (PoC) has during the last decade evolved to become an important guideline for international actors in post-conflict and conflict affected societies. While much policy literature has been written on how to better implement the PoC framework, less has been written on the conceptual framework of the protection of civilians and how this fits with local contexts, networks and relationships. Drawing on recent research and empirical material from Afghanistan, Somalia, Liberia, Sudan, Uganda and Colombia this policy brief identifies five implicit assumptions underpinning the Protection of Civilians as conceptualized in the Aide Memoire and UN Security Council resolutions. Through these assumptions we analyze how a skewed conceptual platform for protection implementers paradoxically disconnects protection needs.

The logics that we have outlined may, indeed, be applicable to a wide array of international actors and organizations that are aspiring to play public goods substitution roles. Likewise, they are applicable to a number of actors seeking alternative access to public goods. For example, supply and demand factors may help explain both the growing pains and potential power of the BRICS and recast debates about the role of alternative lenders in the developing world. Ultimately, our project is an appeal to think more precisely about the components of hegemonic order and the more hidden mechanisms that may contribute to its transformation or, in certain cases, enduring resilience.

The Protection of Civilians (PoC) concept is a prevalent buzzword in the contemporary security-development nexus and comes as a response to new modes of warfare that have made civilians the main causality of war. Just about all actors from the military, development and humanitarian segments relate to the PoC concept in conflict-situations. Although there is a presumably mainstreaming and general infusion of the concept within the international community, there exists no coherent and comprehensive understanding of what the concept really means and what kind of practices it comprises and entails. The concept’s seminal thinkers and proponents fail to provide a clear and unambiguous definition of the concept. Rather it seeks to infuse a culture of protection among international actors operating in contexts which see grave human right violations and direct and indirect targeting of civilians. This report addresses the protection discourse as perceived by various actors in the field, and approaches the discourse in the nexus of PoC and culture of protection. The present paper demonstrates that whereas a narrow definition of PoC runs the risk of repelling actors from the protection-agenda, mainstreaming a culture of protection drawing on wider principles seems worthwhile in order to be comprehensive in terms of including as many actors as possible. A negative facet of such an approach, however, is that PoC becomes open to various actors’ interpretation. Although in line with the implementation of PoC on case-by-case basis, this might not be sufficient to engender an inclusive culture of protection as PoC always will be interpreted at the backdrop of organisations’ embedded mandate and institutional culture, leading to a general conceptual dilution. This paper explores the PoC concept and the culture of protection in the context of Sudan. Utenriksdepartementet

During the last decade, peacekeeping operations have grown in both number and scope. A sign of the latter has been the development of larger “executive” mandates, where peacekeeping operations take on administrative tasks in the area where they have been dispatched. A response to the trends broader peacekeeping mandates have been designed in attempt to include a widening concept of the Protection of Civilians (PoC). In the present report, we outline the main challenges that must be met for the PoC in peacekeeping operations to be effective. First, we address the understanding of “protection” prevalent in UN documents today. The second section of the report addresses the characteristics and problems of the security gap in post-conflict states, as well as their importance in the literature on conflict prevention and resolution. Utenriksdepartementet

«Challenges to Collective Security» Working Papers from NUPI’s UN Programme

Following the conflicts in the Balkans, minority issues have re-entered the European stage after a prolonged absence, and the question of minority rights in international politics has once more become a pressing and legitimate concern to both students and practitioners of international relations. With this revived interest in minority issues, one question that has reached the forefront of the agenda is whether states should still deal with -'their' minorities, or if the implementation and enforcement of minority provisions ought to be left to other international actors. In this article I reflect on the historicity of the issue. When arguing about why actors others than states should have responsibility of imposing and enforcing minority provisions, it is important to understand the relation between minority provisions and the state, and how and why the state emerged as the guarantor of minority rights in the first place. Only then, I argue, can we identify the issues and dilemmas that must be taken into account in any contemporary discussion of the future role of the state vis-a-vis other international actors.

The concepts of ‘borders’ and ‘boundaries’ are in some sense inherently central to International Relations (IR), but historical IR is an area of the discipline where comparatively little work has been done which takes as its primary goal the analysis of ‘borders’ or ‘boundaries’. In this chapter we give an overview of IR scholarship which intersects with the history of borders, dividing it into two categories: first, historical IR which engages with borders and boundaries, and second, a broader range of IR work on borders and boundaries which either has a historical component or could benefit from having one. In a final section, we put forward some suggestions for future research, highlighting in particular some ways of dealing with Eurocentrism in historical IR’s coverage of the topic.

This chapter complements efforts to clarify historical International Relations’s use of the past by surveying its use of time. Scholars traditionally treated time and history as rough and ready concepts rather than carefully thought out terms of art. While this has changed in recent years, several issues persist. Widely popular but spurious temporal dichotomies like linear/cyclical and change/continuity exert outsized influence on the discipline’s temporal imagination, leading scholars to mistake interpretive responses to the problem of time for natural qualities of time itself. IR’s temporal turn has added significant temporal variety and made a compelling case that global politics is heterotemporal, but does not convincingly unsettle these traditional habits of thought. The fact that IR scholars interested in history and time do not engage each other as much as they could exacerbates these issues. Therefore, the chapter closes by proposing three ways forward toward closer dialogue between temporal and historical IR: narrative timing, temporalizing IR’s own history, and historicizing the politics of time.

A burgeoning body of research has documented that status-seeking abounds in world politics. Yet the status hierarchies to which states respond and compete within are notoriously ambiguous and difficult to empirically ascertain. It is seldom agreed upon where states rank, even within particular policy domains. This ambiguity has begotten considerable disagreement among scholars over the nature of international hierarchies and led to a proliferation of structural theories of international status. Rather than theorizing and investigating the purported effects of fuzzy international social structures, this dissertation posits that international status can be studied via the theories of international status (TIS) that governments and their opponents themselves produce and use to interpret their state’s status. Treating these theories as productive of the world they purport to describe, such a TIS approach foregrounds the interpretative agency of domestic groups to develop and maintain “hierarchies of their own making”, which need not be recognized internationally to become crucial for policy legitimation domestically. In order to study TIS systematically, this dissertation develops a new meta-linguistic framework for identifying and mapping the use of TIS within domestic politics. Inspired by the Copenhagen School, this Grammar of Status Competition framework defines status competition by its peculiar processual-relational logic rather than substantive indicators. This enables the analyst to avoid reifying the rules of the hierarchy prior to analysis, and illuminate contestation and change in the TIS that circulate and inform policy debates. Further, because TIS are manifested and observable in discourse, this approach avoids prior works’ reliance upon proxies for inferring international collective beliefs. The usefulness and transferability of this approach is demonstrated via three deliberately different case studies: how rival TIS were involved in the (de)legitimation of (1) Norwegian education reforms at the turn of the 21st century; (2) the United States various negotiating positions during the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between 1969 and 1980, and (3) the prosecution of Britain’s war with the Boer between 1899-1902. Among, other insights, the dissertation provides plausible answers to three major puzzles in IR status research: why states compete for status when the international rewards seem ephemeral; how states can escape the zero sum game associated with quests for positional status; and how status scholars can overcome the methodological problem of disentangling status from other motivations. Finally, the dissertation argues that ambiguity around status is itself is a social good that international society would be prudent to cherish rather than strive to eliminate.

Despite the renewed interest in political barriers in a contemporary teichopolitical era and an expanding body of research on border-related matters, meagre academic attention has been directed at linking aesthetics with teichopolitics. By means of a pluralist, reflective and multidisciplinary document-based approach, this thesis seeks to address this knowledge gap by exploring the ways in which aesthetic aspects provide an important and valuable source of insight and alternate meanings. The argument put forth is, hence, that the intellectually longstanding yet largely neglected field of aesthetic can contribute to a more profound and nuanced understanding of modern-day teichopolitics. Furthermore, the paper examines the links between ‘aesthetic borderscaping’ and teichopolitical practices through a comparative study of the US-Mexico Wall and the West Bank Wall, the two most prominent great walls in present-day world politics. More specifically, the discussion focuses on the surge of creative resistance that have emerged in response to the erection of these two barriers. In so doing, it delves into the teichopolitical ‘spectacle’ that is played out in the global public ‘theatre’. It uncovers how walls, as historically intrinsic features of the human landscape, serve as both sights and sites in which complex politics is performed, contradicted, contested and negotiated by a multitude of actors across spatio-temporal and demographic dimensions. M-IR