The history of international thought and International Relations theory: from context to interpretation

Hall, Ian

doi:10.1177/0047117817723061

Cited by 22 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…But we cannot stop here. The contextualist project of restoring and reinterpreting concepts in historical context too often presupposes that this context is singular (there is only one, not many), discrete (it does not overlap with other contexts), bounded (it is delimited in time and space) and holistic (context englobes the idea) (Armitage 2012, 32;Gordon 2014;Hall 2017).…”

Section: Critiques Of Appeasement As Peaceful Changementioning

confidence: 99%

‘Peaceful change’ in International Relations: a conceptual archaeology

Kristensen

2019

Int. Theory

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As the so-called liberal international order has come under duress, the problem of ‘peaceful change’ has reappeared on the agenda of International Relations (IR), mainly in a realist guise drawing upon E.H. Carr and Robert Gilpin's renditions of the problem. Making a conceptual archaeological intervention, this paper recovers long-neglected multidisciplinary debates on ‘peaceful change’ taking place in the tumultuous interwar period. It concurs that peaceful change is an IR problem par excellence, central to academic debates in the burgeoning interwar discipline, but also a more complex conceptual figure than posterity portrays it. The paper explores the debates between negative and positive conceptions of peaceful change, between political, legal-institutional and communitarian mechanisms of peaceful change, and different policies of peaceful change, particularly its troubled relationship to appeasement. The paper concludes that the interwar debate on peaceful change, while highly embedded in its context, does offer IR an alternative and more aspirational perspective on the problem of power and order transitions.

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Section: Critiques Of Appeasement As Peaceful Changementioning

confidence: 99%

‘Peaceful change’ in International Relations: a conceptual archaeology

Kristensen

2019

Int. Theory

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“…66 Devetak 2014a. For a more skeptical view emphasizing the limits of contextualism in IR, see Hall 2017. 67 MacIntyre 1966 For an introductory discussion, see Bevir 2011. original intention so carefully unearthed by a Skinnerian approach.…”

Section: Taking Context Seriously: Tracking the Aims Of Innovating Idmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 66 Devetak 2014a. For a more skeptical view emphasizing the limits of contextualism in IR, see Hall 2017.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Context, reception, and the study of great thinkers in international relations

Vergerio

2018

Int. Theory

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While the discipline of International Relations (IR) has a long tradition of celebrating ‘great thinkers’ and appropriating their ideas for contemporary theories, it has rarely accounted for how these authors came to be seen as ‘great’ in the first place. This is at least partly a corollary of the discipline’s long-standing aversion to methodological reflection in its engagement with intellectual history, and it echoes IR’s infamous tendency to misportray these great thinkers’ ideas more broadly. Drawing on existing attempts to import the methodological insights of historians of political thought into IR, this article puts forward a unified approach to the study of great thinkers in IR that combines the tenets of so-called ‘Cambridge School’ contextualism with those of what broadly falls under the label of reception theory. I make the case for the possibility of developing a coherent methodology through the combination of what is often seen as separate strands of intellectual history, and for the value of such an approach in IR. In doing so, the article ultimately offers a more rigorous methodology for engaging with the thought of great thinkers in IR, for analyzing the way a specific author’s ideas come to have an impact in practice, and for assessing the extent to which these ideas are distorted in the process.

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“…As cultural and legal heirs of the Enlightenment, contemporary Western society continues to 7 interact with this trans-historical phenomenon. Scholars can 'agree with, dispute, adopt, modify, mobilise and simply reflect upon ideas generated by thinkers' that precede us, 22 but that need not imply a careless misinterpretation of those ideas in their original context. We can (to the best of our abilities) contextualize historical ideas and practices while also considering how they help us to think about contemporary issues.…”

Section: A Long Viewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historicizing waterboarding as a severe torture norm

Cox

2018

International Relations

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The debate on waterboarding and the wider debate on torture remains fiercely contested. President Trump and large sections of the US public continue to support the use of waterboarding and other so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' as part of the 'War on Terror', thus putting the anti-torture norm under pressure. This article demonstrates that the re-imagining of waterboarding as 'torture-lite' is contradicted by the long history of waterboarding itself. Examining pre-modern uses and descriptions of torture and waterboarding, this article highlights that the post-2001 identification of waterboarding as a relatively benign interrogation technique radically inverts a norm that has predominated for over 600 years. This historical norm unequivocally identifies waterboarding not only as torture but as severe torture.The article highlights the value of historically contextualizing attitudes to torture, reviews how and why waterboarding was downgraded by the Bush Administration, reveals the earliest explicit description of waterboarding from 1384, and argues that 2 the twenty-first-century re-imagining of waterboarding as torture-lite is indicative of the fragility of the anti-torture norm.

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The history of international thought and International Relations theory: from context to interpretation

Cited by 22 publications

References 21 publications

‘Peaceful change’ in International Relations: a conceptual archaeology

‘Peaceful change’ in International Relations: a conceptual archaeology

Context, reception, and the study of great thinkers in international relations

Historicizing waterboarding as a severe torture norm

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