Historiographical Investigations in International Relations by Brian C. Schmidt & Nicolas Guilhot

Author:Brian C. Schmidt & Nicolas Guilhot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Drawing Boundaries

Investigating the history of IR as an exercise in boundary making is an approach that embodies, I argue, a high interpretative potential. I will consider the meaning of the “boundary” as a conceptual image through the methodological perspective of “political space,” with particular attention to the writings of the Italian historian and political thinker Carlo Galli . The idea of “political space” has recently received the attention of IR scholars, who highlighted the importance of considering the relations between political order and geographic conditions (Starr 2013). Moreover, in historical research the “spatial turn” embodies a new conceptual attention to the importance of “space,” “place,” “location,” and “spatiality” as categories for understanding and analyzing historical knowledge (Withers 2009). By using the categories of political space and boundary, I do not intend to impose a rigid theory of political space on past thinkers (Jerram 2013). Rather, I employ Galli’s conceptual framework to argue that a consideration of the theoretical and concrete-physical qualities of the “political space ” of a written text can reveal how past thinkers experienced geographic reality and represented it in their international thought. Thus, the notion of political space becomes a method of reading texts, that can recover the practical spaces of IR, formed by states, communities, federations, transnational unions, regional organizations or universal constitutions, as well as the theoretical spaces of the discipline shaped by its interpretative tools and research questions.

The starting point of Galli’s reflection on political space is the interplay between theoretical ideas and geographic reality. “Political space” thus entails the perception of the physical geographic conditions of the world and their impact on the political and social order (Galli 2010). I employ the term “political space” to reflect on the theoretical conceptualization of the geographic materiality of politics. As an interpretative tool, it can bring together the concrete geopolitical aspects of IR with the more abstract notion of order. Importantly, the notion of “political space” transcends the theoretical and thematic concerns of geopolitics, political geography, and similar disciplines. The key feature of “political space” is the move from the experience of geographic space to its representation in abstract political categories.

Galli’s essay Political Spaces (2001, 2010) constructs an analysis of political concepts that can be defined as a “genealogy of political spaces” (Sitze 2010). Following Foucault, he presents “political spaces ” as a complex non-linear genealogy, a network of concepts, sometimes contradictory and always in close relations with the historical events that accompany their formation. Foucault describes the Nietzschean concept of genealogy as a historical analysis of the variations of an idea, not as a quest for its origins (Foucault 1991). There is no pretense for universal and absolute truth, but instead a strong insistence on the contingent, concrete, and specific history of the idea through time and space. By focusing on contingency, genealogy aims to deconstruct the historical and intellectual narrative , and reveal the disunity and complexity that accompanied its historical development.

Galli’s theoretical quest is based on two hypotheses. First, he writes that the relevant conception of space for his enquiry is “a specifically political space.

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