International Relations and the Study of History

Author(s):  
Constantinos Koliopoulos

International relations and history are inextricably linked, and with good reason. This link is centuries old: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, one of the very earliest and one of the very greatest historical works of all time, is widely regarded as the founding textbook of international relations. Still, those two disciplines are legitimately separate. A somewhat clear boundary between them can probably be drawn around three lines of demarcation: (1) past versus present, (2) idiographic versus nomothetic, and (3) description versus analysis. The utility of history for the analysis of international affairs has been taken for granted since time immemorial. History is said to offer three things to international relations scholars: (1) a ready source of examples, (2) an opportunity to sharpen their theoretical insights, and (3) historical consciousness, that is, an understanding of the historical context of human existence and a corresponding ability to form intelligent judgment about human affairs. This tradition continued well after international relations firmly established itself as a recognized separate discipline some time after World War II, and would remain virtually unchallenged until the 1960s. Since the 1960s, attitudes toward history have diverged within the international relations community. Some approaches, most notably the English school and the world system analysis, have almost by definition thriven on history. History plays a fundamental role in the critical-constructivist approach, while realist scholars continue to draw regularly on history. History is far less popular, though not absent from works belonging to the liberal-idealist approach. Postmodernism is the one approach that is almost completely antithetical to the analytical use of history. Postmodernists have characterized history as merely another form of fiction and question the existence of objective truth and transhistorical knowledge. One cannot exclude the possibility that postmodernism is correct in this respect; however, it is highly unlikely that uncountable generations of people have been victims of mass deception or mass psychosis regarding the utility of history, not least in the analysis of international relations.

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-352
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY SCOTT BROWN

‘In Search of Space’ explores the history of Krautrock, a futuristic musical genre that began in Germany in the late 1960s and flowered in the 1970s. Not usually explicitly political, Krautrock bore the unmistakable imprint of the revolt of 1968. Groups arose out of the same milieux and shared many of the same concerns as anti-authoritarian radicals. Their rebellion expressed, in an artistic way, key themes of the broader countercultural moment of which they were a part. A central theme, the article argues, was escape – escape from the situation of Germany in the 1960s in general, and from the specific conditions of the anti-authoritarian revolt in the Federal Republic in the wake of 1968. Mapping Krautrock's relationship to key locations and routes (both real and imaginary), the article situates Krautrock in relationship to the political and cultural upheavals of its historical context.


Author(s):  
Francine Fragoso de Miranda Silva ◽  
Cláudia Regina Flores ◽  
Rosilene Beatriz Machado

ResumoEste artigo tem por objetivo identificar e analisar práticas matemáticas inscritas em cadernos escolares de uma escola mista estadual do município de Antônio Carlos (SC), nas décadas de 1930 e 1940, com enfoque dado para as frações. São utilizadas as teorizações de Michel Foucault para nortear os preceitos teórico-metodológicos. Os resultados da pesquisa indicam práticas matemáticas desenvolvidas nessa escola obedecendo aos programas oficiais catarinenses da época, com soluções rápidas e sucintas e voltadas às tarefas de seu cotidiano. Também se observam que elas estão inseridas num contexto histórico, compreendido entre a Reforma Francisco Campos, de 1931, e o início do Movimento da Matemática Moderna, nos anos de 1960, no qual a fração recebe uma nova abordagem, distanciando-se da relação entre número e medida e aproximando-se da noção de parte-todo.Palavras-chave: Práticas matemáticas, Cadernos escolares, Frações, História da educação matemática.AbstractThis article aims to identify and analyze mathematical practices registered in school notebooks of a mixed state school in the city of Antônio Carlos (SC), in the 1930s and 1940s, focused on fractions. Michel Foucault's theorizations are used to guide theoretical and methodological precepts. The results of the research show mathematical practices developed in these schools obeying the Santa Catarina official programs of the time, with quick and succinct solutions and focused on their daily tasks. It is also observed that they are inserted in a historical context, between the Francisco Campos Reform, of 1931, and the beginning of the Modern Mathematics Movement, in the 1960s, in which the fraction receives a new approach, moving away from the relationship between number and measure and approaching the notion of part-whole.Keywords: Mathematical practices, School notebooks, Fractions, History of mathematics education.ResumenEste artículo tiene como objetivo identificar y analizar las prácticas matemáticas registradas en los cuadernos escolares de una escuela estatal mixta en la ciudad de Antônio Carlos (SC), en la década de 1930 y 1940, con un enfoque en las fracciones. Las teorizaciones de Michel Foucault se utilizan para guiar los preceptos teóricos y metodológicos. Los resultados de la investigación muestran prácticas matemáticas desarrolladas en estas escuelas que obedecen los programas oficiales de Santa Catarina de la época, con soluciones rápidas y sucintas y centradas en sus tareas diarias. También se observa que se insertan en un contexto histórico, entre la Reforma Francisco Campos, de 1931, y el comienzo del Movimiento de Matemáticas Modernas, en la década de 1960, en el que la fracción recibe un nuevo enfoque, alejándose de la relación entre numerar y medir y acercándose a la noción de parte-todo.Palabras clave: Prácticas matemáticas, Cuadernos escolares, Fracciones, Historia de la educación matemática


1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-382
Author(s):  
Cristina Altman

Summary When mention is made of Brazil in connection with American linguistics, it usually amounts to a reference to the Linguistic Circle of New York, where Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (b.1908), who had come from Brazil where he had done ethnological work, met and exchanged ideas. This singular event has cast a shadow on other contacts between Brazil and American linguistics, of which, the one between Jakobson and the Brazilian linguist Joaquim Mattoso Câmara (1904–1970) was much more consequential, at least as far as the implementation of structural linguistics in Brazil and in South America generally during the 1950s and the 1960s is concerned. Mattoso Câmara came to the United States and spent most of his time in New York City (September 1943 till April 1944), where he got exposure to Praguean type structuralism, notably through Jakobson’s lectures he attended at Columbia University and at the École Libre of New York, which had been established by European refugees at the time. He also participated in the first meetings of the Linguistic Circle of New York in 1943 as one of its co-founders. Following his return to Rio de Janeiro, Mattoso Câmara proposed, in 1949, as his doctoral thesis a phonemic description of Brazilian Portuguese. The work was published a few years later, in 1953. His most influential work, Princípios de Lingüística Gerai, first published in 1954, had two more revised and updated editions (1958, 1967) and served to introduce several generations of Brazilian as well as other South American students to structural linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ku Daeyeol

This important new study by one of Korea’s leading historians focuses on the international relations of colonial Korea – from the Japanese rule of the peninsula and its foreign relations (1905–1945) to the ultimate liberation of the country at the end of the Second World War. In addition, it fills a significant gap – the ‘blank space’ – in Korean diplomatic history. Furthermore, it highlights several other fundamental aspects in the history of modern Korea, such as the historical perception of the policy-making process and the attitudes of both China and Britain which influenced US policy regarding Korea at the end of World War II.


Author(s):  
H. Roger Grant

This book offers a history of the Wabash Railroad Company, a once-vital interregional carrier. Like most major American carriers, the Wabash grew out of an assortment of small firms. Thanks in part to the genius of financier Jay Gould, by the early 1880s what was then known as the Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway reached the principal gateways of Chicago, Des Moines, Detroit, Kansas City, and St. Louis. In the 1890s, the Wabash gained access to Buffalo and direct connections to Boston and New York City. One extension fizzled, and in 1904 entry into Pittsburgh caused financial turmoil, ultimately throwing the Wabash into receivership. A subsequent reorganization allowed the Wabash to become an important carrier during the go-go years of the 1920s and permitted the company to take control of a strategic “bridge” property, the Ann Arbor Railroad. The Great Depression forced the company into another receivership, but an effective reorganization during the early days of World War II gave rise to a generally robust road. In the 1960s, the Wabash, along with the Nickel Plate Road, joined the prosperous Norfolk & Western Railway, a merger that worked well for all three carriers. Immortalized in the popular folk song “Wabash Cannonball,” the midwestern railroad has left important legacies. Today, forty years after becoming a “fallen flag” carrier, key components of the former Wabash remain busy rail arteries and terminals, attesting to its historic value to American transportation.


Author(s):  
Raminder Kaur

The chapter considers the scope of film to act as what is described as a ‘docu-drama-ment’ for conveying affective engagements with political history. It does so with a focus on unique incidents in the history of Indian popular cinema with the example of the film, Aman (Mohan Kumar, 1967). The discussion centers on the cameo appearance of a British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, in the film along with phantasmal invocations of Indian anti-nuclear weapons protagonists such as India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and reproductions of the 1945 atomic attack in Hiroshima and subsequent nuclear tests in the Pacific. The chapter considers how the film may be viewed in terms of a ‘corporeal compound lens’ on the political vicissitudes of the 1960s. With such an approach – on the one hand to do with the assemblage of a historical film, and on the other, to do with the way this intersects with compound lines of reflexive reception – the author shows how the ‘docu-drama-ment’ moves away from linear equations of the filmic signifier with the signified - or the film and the represented - to one that revels in affective residues and resonances that are a constitutive force in socio-political realities of the Cold War era. 


2020 ◽  
pp. 004711782092228
Author(s):  
Aaron McKeil

International relations today are widely considered to be experiencing deepening disorder and the topic of international disorder is gaining increased attention. Yet, despite this recent interest in international disorder, in and beyond the academy, and despite the decades-long interest in international order, there is still little agreement on the concept of international disorder, which is often used imprecisely and with an alarmist rather than analytical usage. This is a problem if international disorder is to be understood in theory, towards addressing its concomitant problems and effects in practice. As such, this article identifies and explores two ways international order studies can benefit from a clearer and more precise conception of international disorder. First, it enables a more complete picture of how orderly international orders have been. Second, a greater understanding of the problem of international order is illuminated by a clearer grasp of the relation between order and disorder in world politics. The article advances these arguments in three steps. First, an analytical concept of international disorder is developed and proposed. Second, applying it to the modern history of international order, the extent to which there is a generative relationship between order and disorder in international systems is explored. Third, it specifies the deepening international disorder in international affairs today. It concludes by indicating a research agenda for International Relations and international order studies that takes the role of international disorder more seriously.


Author(s):  
Matthias Thiemann ◽  
Peter Volberding

Founded in 2013 as a unification of dispersed elements of development banking activities in France, Bpifrance has been one of the most active proponents of the new techniques of development financing, such as venture capital and fund of funds investments. Bringing together these new techniques of direct equity investment with more traditional forms of loan and guarantee business, Bpifrance provides a one-stop shop model for the promotion of SMEs and start-ups in France, including the human capital formation of entrepreneurs. This, we argue, represents a reconfigured mode of dirigiste intervention in the French economy. Placing Bpifrance both in the context of the European field of development banking, as well as the historical context of state dirigisme post World War II, this chapter explores both the dangers and merits of such a new dirigiste model, which on the one hand through its synergy effects of different business line provides the state with an efficient tool to foster innovation and entrepreneurship, but at the same time is fragile, as it is potentially subject to overburdening political demands for intervention, demands which in the long run might threaten its financial viability.


2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deniz Kuru

This article aims to present a history of International Relations (IR) that looks at the role of three big American foundations (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations) in the development of IR as an academic field in continental Europe. Its framework goes beyond the usual disciplinary history narratives that focus on IR’s US or UK trajectories, pointing instead to American foundations’ interwar and early post–World War II influence on French and German IR. The cases emphasize US foundations’ interactions with European scholars and international scholarly organizations as major factors shaping IR’s developmental pathways. This study offers a way to consider foundations’ role in IR’s gradual academic institutionalization by connecting disciplinary historical approaches to disciplinary sociology. Its sociologically conscious position underlines the significance of American philanthropies in a historical narrative and recognizes the relevance of transnational dynamics by going beyond usual emphases on ideas and national contexts.


2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahana Bhattacharya

State-organised technical education focusing on leather production was introduced in India in the early 1900s. One of its key objectives was to change the entrenched notions about the leather industry—as a ‘traditional’ industry associated with low caste and social status. This article traces the history of this endeavour, locating it within a wider account of the history of technical education in leather production. While some common concerns affected the project in both Europe and India, there were important points of difference, as technical education in leather production in India had to negotiate factors such as the extreme stigma of hides and skins mandated by caste on the one hand, and on the other, their integration within the capitalist colonial economy and their concomitant high profitability. Decisions of who or what were to be taught, and by which pedagogical methods, were produced through these negotiations. The article explores this history through a study of two leading institutions that provided technical education in this field. It highlights how official initiatives of skilling and technical education were, in complex ways, closely mediated by, and in turn mediated their historical context, its social and economic structures, prevailing ideologies and notions of skill.


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