Last summer some readers suggested that we run open-ended posts designed to spark discussion. So consider this another attempt to do so.
My challenge: (1) name the most thought provoking piece — or pieces — that you read this year dealing (in a broad sense) with international studies concerns and (2) justify its inclusion on such a list. I don’t mean pieces that you agreed with, or even that you thought were good. But pieces that made you think, do a gut-check about your existing views, or just stuck in your mind for a while.
I’ll name two.
First, Julian Go’s Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires 1688 to Present (2011). In addition to being a terrific crystallization of what’s wrong with so much of the American-empire debate, Go’s notion of global fields has really gotten me thinking about how to recast hegemonic-order theory.
Second, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (2008). I was very late to this game, but beyond being one of those books that makes you go “whoah,” Anathem made me think long and hard about what, exactly, it means to be a scholar and the intersection between scholarly vocation and scholarly practice.
Awaiting your contributions ….
PS: My apologies for the lack of a linkage post this morning. We’ve moved to a distributed system for providing them, but seem to have gotten some wires crossed.
Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.
He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.
He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
Alright, now I may need to read Anathem. I’ve been feeling annoyed with Stephenson–even after slogging through all of the Baroque books–after reading his recently published book of essays.
Glad to see Julian’s book mentioned here – but i have one question which was in my mind when I read it: Julian is a sociologist and does some really great IR in the book – but he doesn’t draw on IR theory. Which led me to think, what about IR theory should/could he have looked at? In other words, when sociologists are encroaching on our turf, what do we have to offer??
There’s some engagement with systemic approaches. I do think more engagement might have made the global fields argument less, well, indistinguishable from an ES or norms approach. Clearly more engagement with HST would have been good, but I’m glad that this opening is still there for the rest of us. And my work, of course. Should’ve cited that. :-)
I’m going to put on my “token historian” hat and make two recommendations from my own discipline.
The first thing that comes to mind, possibly because I read it recently, is Philip Stern’s The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. It is great dissertation-turned-book, which analyses the British East India Company in the seventeenth century, treating it as a peculiar corporate polity with its own sovereign qualities separate from but related to the “national” British Empire. The book has caused quite a splash in the history of British imperialism, but I don’t think it has really caught on outside the discipline, despite presenting some very substantial challenges to how we think of sovereignty, statehood, and international actors.
A second one, which I know I’ve mentioned on the Duck before, is J. R. McNeill’s Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914. This book brings geopolitical and environmental histories into a closer dialogue, arguing in essence that disease vectors played a crucial role in the formation of the inter-imperial structure of the Caribbean and the Americas. I think McNeill pushes his case much too far, but the book and its argument certainly led to a “whoa” moment for me.
Don’t know the first. Agree on the 2nd.