Professor Anders Stephanson

This course is available on the MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation, MSc in History of International Relations, MSc in International Affairs (LSE and Peking University), MSc in International and World History (LSE & Columbia) and MSc in Theory and History of International Relations. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

Writing the history of the ‘international’ poses, or should pose, the problem of what kind of object or domain that actually is, how it has been conceived and how it might now be conceived. The solution in history, as a discipline, is often pragmatic: the international is what takes place under that description, practices and politics changing over time. The solution in the dominant (US) tradition of political science is to offer theories featuring case studies and predictive models. A third, partly hybrid variant, to be pursued with some vigour in this course, is that of historical sociology. As our aims will be both historical and conceptual, the readings will feature works that, whatever their focus, raise basic questions along those dual lines. Specifically, we will (i) follow empirically the emergence and development of what is referred to as ‘the international’ and the system(s) to which that concept might correspond; and (ii) put into question some (and only some) of the ways in which that process can be thought about historically and conceptually. The ‘history’ here, then, entails an empirical account of an object and an ‘order’ as well as a reflection on what counts within them. It is essential to underline the ‘partiality’ of the exercise: no attempt will be made to cover any conventional range of exemplary approaches, nor indeed many of the crucial contemporary issues (e.g. international law or human rights). The overall purpose is thus to give students in ‘international history’ a chance to think about their own subject-matter not so much from a purely methodological standpoint as in terms of ‘problematization.’ 

20 hours of seminars in the MT. 20 hours of seminars in the LT.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the MT.

William Sewell. Logics of History: Society Theory and Social Transformation; Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation: the political and economic origins of our time; Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times; Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political; Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population; Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Kaldor, Mary. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era; Bartelson, Jens. Visions of World Community; Mazower, Mark. Governing the World: The History of an Idea; Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.

Essay (50%, 5000 words) in the LT.
Essay (50%, 5000 words) in the ST.