Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Vivekanandan, Jayashree

Titel

Temporal Journeys: Reorienting International Relations

Ist Teil von

• Interrogating International Relations, 2011, p.1-36

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge India

Erscheinungsjahr

2011

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Much of our intellectual preoccupations with the world around us have centred on the passage of time. In its layers of epochs, accounts and historical memory, every society has sought its identity or fought for the right to seek one. This grappling with history has essentially concerned the issue of human agency - to act purposively in a manner that renders our social and political pursuits as individuals and as a collectivity, meaningful. The arena of international politics is no different. States and empires have always asserted their right to act and sought justification of their actions in their pasts. Interpreting a state's strategic history has thus assumed centrality within its discourse and has fired the intellectual curiosity of international relations (hereby IR) as a discipline. However, while IR has largely sought to establish a relationship of convenience with history as a discipline, IR scholars remain deeply divided on how much salience should be accorded to historical particularities within the broad folds of theory. For instance, whereas realists tend to view history as a reiteration of the timeless pursuit of power, postmodernists problematise historical progress itself. While one privileges continuity, the other celebrates the principle of difference. These contrasting theoretical positions on the status of history make for much disciplinary ambiguity and debate. This book takes its theoretical cue from such divergences on the status of history and is a journey into time as a variable in the study of IR theory.