Research Project
Historical International Relations
What is the source of our current predicament? Or, to put it more bluntly – how did we end up here? This has been one of the foundational questions of International Relations scholarship since the first steps towards a discipline were taken more than a century ago. During the first decades of disciplinary development, no particular justification for turning to history was needed. For a discipline which grew partly out of History, more or less explicitly theoretically informed historical narrative was the predominant form of scholarship.
The turn to behavioural analysis around 1960 challenged this state of affairs, and even though explicit historical analysis never disappeared, it clearly lost its pride of place. Likewise, even if scholars across the discipline were clearly studying history (albeit often relatively recent history), there was little explicit reflection about how and why one should engage history.
Over the last two decades, International Relations has undergone what has been referred to as an “historical turn”, with an increasing number of scholars self-consciously describing their work as historical, and engaging in ever more sophisticated theoretical and empirical historical analyses.
The HIST project at NUPI seeks to align itself with this trajectory, gauging the historical dimensions of current trends and predicaments, and theorizing international politics through historical analyses. It also gathers ongoing research on historical international relations at NUPI. This consists both of long-term personal projects and shorter-term collaborative projects.
- Iver B. Neumann is currently finalizing a book manuscript of the steppe with Einar Wigen;
- Morten Skumsrud Andersen is involved in a historical account of the balance of power;
- Halvard Leira and Benjamin de Carvalho are dealing with privateering and violence at sea in historical perspectiv;
- Halvard Leira is also working on a book manuscript of the emergence of the field of foreign policy,while
- Benjamin de Carvalho is working on a book manuscript on the impact of the reformations on the transformation of sovereignty and nation-states.
Project Manager
Participants
New publications
The Confessional State in International Politics: Tudor England, Religion, and the Eclipse of Dynasticism
The Big Bangs of IR: The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648 and 1919
Privateers of the North Sea: At Worlds End - French Privateers in Norwegian Waters
Det spanske imperiet: Imperial etos, identitet og legitimitetsgrunnlag
Den Westfalske fetisj i internasjonal politikk: Om den suverene stat og statssystemets opprinnelse
Keeping the State: Religious Toleration in Early Modern France, and the Role of the State
Sovereignty and Solidarity: Moral Obligation, Confessional England, and the Huguenots
International Diplomacy vol I-IV
Following on from where 2004's widely acclaimed three-volume SAGE collection, Diplomacy (ed. Jonsson & Langhorne) left off, this new four-volume major work takes a new look at a subject which has matured and developed significantly over the past decade. With the rise of India, China and Brazil as well as of the global south, diplomacy's history looks different. Significant shifts have prompted scholars in the field to reconsider the historical sequences that are relevant to an understanding of what diplomacy is today, and where it may be heading. Increased mediazation of global politics and diplomacy has prompted an exponential growth in literature on public diplomacy. This collection has been carefully structured so that each volume gives the reader an overview of the literature on a new area of development in the study of diplomacy: Volume One: Diplomatic institutions Volume Two: Diplomacy in a Multicultural World Volume Three: The Pluralisation of Diplomacy - Changing Actors, Developing Arenas and New Issues Volume Four: Public Diplomacy
Omverdenen som utfordring – imperieoppløsning og folkestyrets begrensning
(Available in Norwegian only): Hvordan skal man som ny stat forholde seg til omverdenen? Dette var et av de spørsmålene som kom opp til tidlig og heftig debatt på Eidsvoll i 1814, og som delte forsamlingen på midten. Unionspartiet ville ha bred drøfting av forholdet til andre stater, mens selvstendighetspartiet foretrakk å overlate dem til Christian Frederik. I denne artikkelen settes argumentene fra debatten i 1814 inn i en bredere idéhistorisk kontekst. Fremveksten av det vi i dag kaller «utenrikspolitikk» forstås her i tett sammenheng med gradvis differensiering av politikkbegrepet og grensedragning mellom stat og samfunn. Utenrikspolitikk forstås dermed som det som skiller ikke bare mellom statens utside og dens innside, men også mellom stat og samfunn. Debatten i 1814 gir et øyeblikksbilde av denne utviklingen, med arven fra eneveldet så vel som nye ideer om folkelig deltagelse.
The formative years: Norway as an obsessive status-seeker
This chapter shows how status concerns were central to how Norway related to the wider world during the formative nineteenth century: status and identity were inextricably intertwined. It argues that Norwegian politics throughout the nineteenth century were deeply concerned with status and status seeking. When Norwegians started discussing foreign politics and foreign policy, it was in terms of peace, prosperity and status, with the people closely linked to all these phenomena. The many active NGOs as well as the constant references to duties and a Norwegian mission indicate that this explanation must be taken seriously. Even though the resources spent internally in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have been modest, the sheer mass of public attention paid to peace issues has probably made it harder to discuss other matters in Norwegian foreign policy. Various Norwegian politicians have noted that peace activism has given them better access to great-power decision-makers.
International Relations Pluralism and History—Embracing Amateurism to Strengthen the Profession
This article approaches the possibility of achieving pluralist International Relations research through engagements with history/History. There are serious sociological and disciplinary challenges to achieving pluralism, most importantly related to the need to make a mark and a career in one specific discipline and the constant diversification of disciplines. Even so, drawing on the literature of amateurism, understood as engaging in an activity for the love of it, it is argued here that a spirit of engaged amateurism in dealing with history offers an important opportunity for exploring commonalities and fostering pluralism both within the discipline and across disciplinary boundaries.
'Our entire people are natural born friends of peace': the Norwegian foreign policy of peace
What makes a peace nation? In this article it is argued that the Norwegian foreign policy of peace is rooted in an historical self‐understanding of Norway and Norwegians as particularly peaceful, an identity which was first articulated around 1890. Norwegians hold a strong liberal/meliorist belief that the world can become a better place, and that Norway has an important role to play in this process. However, this general belief in peace and a Norwegian peaceful exceptionalism has been expressed in different ways over the last 120 years. Around 1900, the ideal was a passive state and an active people working for peace, while from around 1920 it was accepted that the state needed to take more active part. Where international peace activism was associated in particular with UN peacekeeping during the Cold War, and peace mediation during the 1990's, increasingly a broader panoply of ‘good’ issues have been tied to an ever expanding notion of peace. The last two decades have also seen increased Norwegian participation in offensive military actions, couched at least partly in terms of peace. That the Norwegian attachment to peace remains strong while still allowing for support to military action suggests both that the Norwegian self‐understanding as a peace nation is deeply rooted and that it allows for a self‐righteous understanding of ‘peace through war’.
Kaperne kommer!
(Available in Norwegian only): I en kommentar i Aftenposten i februar sammenlignet Inger Anne Olsen dagens sjørøveri utenfor Somalia med kapervirksomhet utenfor norskekysten under Napoleonskrigene, en praksis hun refererte til som «piratvirksomhet med statlig velsignelse». Sammenligningen er uheldig på mange nivåer, men ikke minst fordi den visker ut skillet mellom kaper og sjørøver, et skille som kunne bety liv eller død både for de mennene som bar karakteristikkene og for de som var om bord i skipene de bemektiget seg. Sammenblandingen er imidlertid forståelig; der de fleste har et relativt klart bilde av hva en sjørøver er eller var, tror mange fortsatt at man snakker om «kaprere» når man forsøker å diskutere kapere. Og selv forfatteren av boken om norske sjørøvere, som gjør et poeng av å skille mellom sjørøvere og kapere, faller for fristelsen til å omtale de norske kaperne under Napoleonskrigene som sjørøvere (Hetland 2008). Den første målsettingen med denne artikkelen er derfor å klargjøre hva en kaper var, og hvordan de skilte seg fra sjørøvere. I et norsk perspektiv er det påfallende hvor lite kunnskap som finnes om kapere. I kystbyer på Sør-Vestlandet finnes en levende bevissthet om kapervirksomheten under Napoleonskrigene, med kaperdager og lokale spel. I den nasjonale bevisstheten er det allikevel kaptein Sabeltann og sjørøvere som assosieres med Sørlandets private voldsmakt. Historisk sett har Norge som kystnasjon imidlertid vel så mye erfaring med kapere som med sjørøvere, og den andre målsettingen med denne artikkelen er å skissere kort hvilke erfaringer vi har med kapere i Norge og å antyde noen grunner til at kaperne har blitt glemt.
Taking Foucault beyond Foucault: Inter-state Governmentality in Early Modern Europe
Entry into international society reconceptualised: the case of Russia
Claiming the early state for the relational turn: the case of Rus' (ca. 800-1100)
The Semantics of Early Statebuilding: Why The Eurasian Steppe Has Been Overlooked
The importance of the Eurasian steppe to the study of international relations
Semi-cores in imperial relations: The cases of Scotland and Norway
Recently, the field of International Relations has seen increased interest in international hierarchy, and also an upswing in the analytical study of imperial logics of rule. Nonetheless, existing structural models of empire focus on core-periphery dynamics, and so cannot explain polities that display elements of both core and periphery. Therefore, I offer the new concept of ‘semi-cores’. Semi-cores are a specific form of historical political associations whereby certain imperial provinces are different from the others in terms of the close relationships it maintains with the imperial metropolis. Semi-cores are different by virtue of being relatively similar. The conceptualisation of semi-cores is followed by a section illustrating its logic, examining the relatively unfamiliar cases of Scotland and Norway and their position within the Danish and British empires, respectively. Although being separate imperial provinces, these were tightly connected to an imperial core. This concept helps us better understand imperial logics, and in the process shows how cultural factors can be formalised into accounts of structural logics of rule, impacting our understanding of both historical and contemporary hierarchical international affairs.
Hva var Norge i det danske imperiet? Skottland og Norge som semi-sentra
Denne artikkelen handler om Skottlands og Norges roller som politiske enheter i henholdsvis det britiske og danske imperiet. I artikkelens første del er argumentet at «semi-sentrum» er en nyttig ny analysekategori for å forstå de strukturelle posisjonene en politisk enhet kan inneha i et imperialt system. Eksisterende strukturelle imperiemodeller fokuserer på relasjoner mellom et imperiesentrum og periferier. Disse modellene har problemer med å forklare politiske enheter som innehar kjennetegn ved begge – både sentrum og periferi. Det nye begrepet semi-sentrum kan forklare imperiedynamikker på en bedre måte, empirisk illustrert i artikkelens andre del som undersøker Skottlands og Norges roller innen sine respektive imperier. Spesielt relevant for dette spesialnummeret er hvordan man ved å se Norges rolle som semi-sentrum kan kaste nytt lys på embedsmennenes sentrale rolle i det nye Norge etter 1814, samt hvordan sammenligningen med Skottland utvider det komparative universet for den nye norske statsdannelsen i etterkant av en imperieoppløsning.
Legitimacy in State-Building: A Review of the IR Literature
In this article, which focuses on different concepts of state-building and legitimacy as used in the mainstream International Relations (IR) literature, I suggest that recent debates may be categorized in a two-by-two matrix. The axes concern the choice between a normative or a sociological perspective on the one hand, and a focus on state institutions or on society on the other. The article identifies an empiricist-sociological approach. Still, the almost exclusive reliance on an ontology of entities and their attributes hampers foci on relations as constituting both “insides” and “outsides” in state-building, and on legitimacy as important in its own right as ongoing public contestations. In a concluding section, I explore the purchase of a relational sociology for future studies of legitimacy in state-building
Practices as Models: A Methodology with an Illustration Concerning Wampum Diplomacy
The everyday meaning of ‘practice’ is something like concrete ‘doings’ or ‘what is being done’ in a social setting. Its everyday counter-concept is theory. Intuitively, this may lead us to think of practices as what is really going on in the world, as opposed to theories or models. This commonsensical meaning of practices reinforces the separation between theory and empirical reality. We argue that such an understanding has informed much of the ongoing ‘practice turn’ in International Relations. We also argue that this is not necessarily an efficient way of conceptualising ‘practices’, because practices might end up being too general a concept to be analytically useful. To counter this, we argue, one must be explicit about practices at the level of models, that is, in fictional representations of the world. This can help in studying them as endogenous phenomena, and not only as the practical counterpart of some other phenomena, or emanating from unspoken theoretical assumptions of, for example, conscious rule-following behaviour, interests, identities, structures and so on. As an illustration of what a model of practice might look like, we include a case study of Iroquois diplomacy as practice. Using a model, without relying on unstated assumptions exogenous to it, we represent this particular case through assuming that both the agents and their social environments emerge through practices.