The Causes of War

This essay focuses on the various motives of decision-makers responsible for state policy. While smaller and weaker powers often choose to capitulate to threats, states prepared to use force have been inspired by distinct combinations of motives. These have included winning independence, imposing domination, promoting allegiance to an ideology, gaining economic advantages, and resisting the rise to supremacy of a political-military competitor. Fear of the loss of security and autonomy may lead to preventive war or intervention to maintain a favourable balance of power. While leaders as prominent as Napoleon and Bismarck have referred to deterministic models of causation in some circumstances, ‘the motive of mutual fear’ may predominate. Compared to their important role in medieval litigation, irredentist wars intended to settle legal and territorial claims have become vestigial, but they may be regarded as modern versions of wars for rights.

Mapping Imagined Territory. Quaresmio's Chorographia and Later Franciscan Holy Land Maps, in Constructing and Representing Territory in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Mario Damen and Kim Overlaet (Amsterdam University Press).

This contribution examines pre-modern cartography as a territorial technique for representing imagined territory, linking social groups to geographical space. It suggests that pre-modern maps could project territory by means other than visualising boundaries, and that accompanying texts could play a significant role, as in the case of Friar Francesco Quaresmio’s map of the Holy Land in Terrae Sanctae Elucidatio (1639). By analysing the immediate context of Quaresmio’s map – a lavish book publication – I show how Quaresmio’s Chorographia represents Franciscan territorial claims through an interaction between the map’s visual content and its immediate textual context within the book. Like other Franciscan maps also discussed here, it employs the imagined territories of the Bible as a versatile cartographical topos for various purposes, territorial or otherwise.

Crisis in the Tar Sands: Fossil Capitalism and the Future of the Alberta Hydrocarbon Economy

Using a case study of Alberta, Canada, this paper demonstrates how a geographic critique of fossil capitalism helps elucidate the tensions shaping tar sands development. Conflicts over pipelines and Indigenous territorial claims are challenging development trajectories, as tar sands companies need to expand access to markets in order to expand production. While these conflicts are now well recognised, there are also broader dynamics shaping development. States face a rentier’s dilemma, relying on capital investments to realise resource value. Political responses to the emerging climate crisis undercut the profitability of hydrocarbon extraction. The automation of production undermines the industrial compromise between hydrocarbon labour and capital. Ultimately, the crises of fossil capitalism require a radical transformation within or beyond capital relations. To mobilise against the tar sands, organisers must recognise the tensions underpinning it, developing strategies that address ecological concerns and the economic plight of those dispossessed and abandoned by carbon extraction.

For Science and Country: History Writing, Nation Building, and National Embeddedness in Third Republic France, 1870–1914

This article examines late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiographical practices and convictions in Third Republic France. It shifts the focus from the question of whether French academic historians were nationalists to the issue of how they were nationalists. If republican academic historians took a critical stance on nationalist distortions of the past, they nevertheless associated the teaching of history with patriotism and opposed historiographical “pan-Germanism” in ways favorable to French cultural and territorial claims. Meanwhile, the growing internationalization of the field stimulated scholarly competition across the West and spurred reflections about nationals’ epistemological privilege over national histories, methodological nationalism, and the invention of national historiographical traditions. Uncovering the anxieties of continual debate with foreign historians and the nationalist right wing, this article offers a prehistory of present-day dilemmas over global, national, and nationalist histories in an international field characterized by structural inequalities and academic competition.

CONTEXT OF RELIGION SECURITIZATION: CASES OF ARTSAKH AND NORTHERN IRELAND

Securitization of religion, or consideration of religion within the context of the security sector, has returned to the Slovak and Serbian context in connection with the migration crisis. This paper is mostly theoretical, and the question of religious identity is categorized under the sector of societal security. Unlike other conflicts of identity, religion is polarizing, and religious conflicts feature the destruction of cultural heritage and religious monuments. Religious conflicts can be observed among both believers of different religious groups as well as among different denominations of one particular religion. The last section deals with the particular cases of Artsakh and Northern Ireland. In the former conflict, nationalism and overlapping territorial claims play a key role, but the later conflict can be better understood as a hierarchical ethnic conflict.

Russia and International Law in 2000–2020: 100 Theses About Facts and Trends

The paper is an overview of the international legal stances of Russia, which were formed in the period from 2000 to 2020. The application of international law within the legal order of Russia is complicated by inconsistency of the Russian monistic concept, unclear status of customary law and general principles of law; lack of a developed judicial tradition. The Russia’s treaty policy comprises wide participation in general U.N. treaties, as well as bilateral treaties in the field of economic cooperation and legal assistance; unwillingness to participate in treaties, if this may entail negative political consequences. Russia backs down from some minor territorial claims in order to ensure stability; in some cases, she does not formulate a clear legal stance, limiting herself to political statements; she refuses to use judicial mechanisms, preferring bilateral negotiations and/or maintaining the status quo, and does not make efforts to create coalitions that support its claims. Russia uses international organizations rather as political fora, and not as a mechanism to create new legal order; she often takes a passive position when considering issues that do not affect its interests; she makes efforts to use the U.N. mechanisms, but sometimes lacks allies and trust from other members of international community. Russia recognizes the jurisdiction of international courts, but takes a passive position by rarely filing suits, objecting to jurisdiction and refusing to participate in the proceedings. The postSoviet international courts are politicized and do not make a serious contribution to the development of integration law. Russian doctrine is experiencing a serious crisis, which is caused by various reasons and can hardly be overcome by the efforts of the corporation itself

Diplomatic Preparation for the English Invasion of France in 1415

Introduction. According to the latest research, the managerial genius of Henry V was most fully manifested in the military, financial and diplomatic fields. The authors analyze in detail the royal diplomacy, which has not been the subject of special study. Diplomacy is analyzed as a space of political communication. Methods and materials. The basic methods of historical analysis were used to work with the material. The sources used in the work are diplomatic documents (treaties, “memorandums”, instructions to ambassadors and their correspondence with monarchs, decisions of royal councils, discussion of the course and results of negotiations in parliament) and chronicles. In historiography, the problem is traditionally considered within the framework of works devoted to the personality of Henry V or the history of the Hundred Years War. Analysis. The article analyzes three phases and three components of English diplomatic policy from the coming of Henry V of Lancaster to power to his invasion of Normandy: 1) negotiations with both sides of the intra-French conflict in order to prevent their reconciliation. 2) the territorial claims of Henry V in France (territory in exchange for giving up the “rights” of inheritance). 3) diplomatic activity as a disguise of preparation for war (territory in exchange for peace). Results. The authors concluded that the English in the years 1413–1415 are moving from military mercenarism on the side of one of the warring groups in the intra-French conflict to declaring themselves as one of the parties to the struggle for power in France with their rights and claims. The diplomacy of the English crown pursued the intentions of 1) demonstrating the impossibility of achieving the claims of the royal house of England on the continent peacefully; 2) maintaining schism and confrontation within the highest French nobility; 3) ensuring international recognition of the English monarch’s right to intervene in the intra-French conflict.

Territorial Delimitation Between Siberian Territory and Ural Region in 1923—1926

Based on a wide range of attracted archival materials, the problems of establishing the border line between the Siberian Territory and the Ural Region in the mid-1920s are examined in the article. The main controversial issues, which consisted in the discussion about the belonging of a part of the Tobolsk North and the Ishim District, which were part of the beginning of zoning in the Ural region are revealed. Attention is paid to the history of the emergence of border disputes that appeared as a result of the attribution of a number of West Siberian territories from the jurisdiction of Sibrevkom to the Urals in the early 1920s. A detailed description of the process of determining the western border of the Siberian Territory is given by the leadership of the Sibrevkom, as well as by the higher authorities of the RSFSR in close cooperation with the Ural and Siberian authorities. Various arguments of the Siberians, the Urals and the central authorities, used in the process of delimiting and resolving disputes between Siberia and the Urals, which make it possible to more objectively determine the legality of the established demarcation line are presented. It is concluded that the territorial claims of the Siberian leadership to the Ural authorities were justified and relied on the undefined status of the disputed sections of the border, which arose as a result of the temporary abandonment of the territory of the former Tyumen province by the central government as part of the Ural region formed in November 1923.