Encounters and Communities in Historical International Relations

The goal of this workshop is to explore the potential of two concepts in the study of historical IR: encounters and communities. It starts from the perspective that, although these concepts are central to how historical IR has developed, they have very rarely been explicitly reflected upon in this body of scholarship. On the one hand, scholars have proposed that the notion of community provides a more nuanced analytics from which to approach the historicity and variability of international relations (Keene 2005; similarly but through the concept of polity, Ferguson and Mansbach 1999). In this perspective, international relations concern relations between communities, however historically understood, and one of the core tasks of historical research is to reconstruct these various constructions of community and their implications. And yet, what exactly is implied in the notion of community, which communities would be relevant, and what assumptions may underpin this approach have rarely been unpacked.

Similarly, an important driver in bringing empire into the center of historical IR research has been the notion of the (colonial) encounter. Whether to highlight the formative nature of encounters for international political thought (Jahn 1999), or as sites of violence but also identity formation (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004, Sajed 2013, Grovogui 2006), the idea of encounter lays at the center of a burgeoning body of literature. And yet, at the same time, there are important selectivities: first, what exactly constitutes an encounter and what dynamics surround it are rarely discussed, most of it being modeled on the imaginary of 1492. In this sense, our historical exploration of encounters remains centered on modern encounters between ‘Europeans’ and ‘non-Europeans’. In what way can a more developed notion of encounter productively open up avenues for research in historical IR?

The workshop brings together International Relations scholars from various traditions in order to reflect on the potential, pitfalls and intersections of these concepts for historical IR and, more broadly, for ongoing conversations in International Relations. People interested in attending can email: j.costa.lopez rug.nl