This article supplements dominant interpretative frameworks in historical International Relations (IR) and contemporary history by rethinking the history of Scandinavian IR. Unpacking three interrelated perspectives—highlighting less obvious Scandinavian roles in international politics, governance, and business since the interwar period—we nuance the typical realist-constructivist paradigms found in existing literature. These often lead to stereotypical portrayals of Scandinavian actors as peace-loving, bridge-building, norm-entrepreneurial small states. We argue for a different understanding by situating Scandinavian international interactions within transnational contexts and examining a broader range of actors and influences beyond the nation-state. We advocate moving beyond state-centric accounts to include diverse actors and arenas in analyses of Nordic IR, reflecting recent historiographical shifts and the transnational and global turn in international history. Inspired by new diplomatic history, we expand the focus beyond state actors to include boundary-spanning diplomatic practices. Drawing on global and transnational history, we reassess the structuring power of international orders—imperial liberal, Cold War, and post–Cold War—by empirically tracing the specific roles Scandinavians were given or assumed, and how these shaped what became mythologized as a particular kind of internationalism. These perspectives are especially relevant as Scandinavian countries again calibrate their place on the world stage.

Objective/Context: This introduction to the special issue “The Languages of Empire” begins with an overview of recent historiographical contributions to the history of the Iberian empires during the early modern period, focusing on studies of long-distance communication, knowledge production, and the new diplomatic history. It then offers a concise description of the global Iberian empires as communicative spaces where the creation and management of information were central to exercising power. Finally, it introduces the articles included in this special issue, highlighting their contributions to this field of study. Methodology: This study examines how new cultural history and new imperial history have influenced our understanding of how Iberian empires functioned, while also re-evaluating the roles of actors who had been traditionally marginalized by historical scholarship in shaping these complex political systems. Originality: This dossier provides an unprecedented selection of essays and case studies that, covering a broad historical period, analyze and describe the forms of communication within the Spanish Empire, from its origins to its final phase in the early modern era. Conclusions: This introduction situates the articles included in this special issue within a broader historiographical context, emphasizing their role in enhancing our understanding of the Iberian empires as global communicative and political entities.

Abstract One way historians provincialize New Diplomatic History ( ndh ) is through a microhistorical lens that focuses on specific diplomatic actors, spaces, and rituals. My contribution responds to several distinct nodes highlighted in the text “Provincializing ‘New’ Diplomatic History: An Interdisciplinary Manifesto,” namely those that promote inclusivity, as well as methodological innovations. My response explores the diplomatic practices of African students based in the United States and Canada under the chapter-based All-African Students Union of the Americas ( aasua ). To do this, I bypass official diplomatic archives to challenge hidden orthodoxies and assumptions. I illuminate the aasua ’s diplomatic practices (from its inception in 1953 until 1961 when it reorganized itself as the Pan-African Students Organization in the Americas) to illustrate the Manifesto’s reflections and, subsequently, enhance them.

Abstract Re-centering late-fifteenth-century* diplomacy on King Ferrante i of Naples (r. 1458–94), this essay reconstructs a resilient Anglo-Neapolitan axis that subtly rebalanced power against France across two thousand nautical miles. Engaging the manifesto “Provincializing ‘New’ Diplomatic History,” it applies three injunctions – geographical decentering, scalar analysis, and sub-elite agency – through a combined micro-macro reading of archival traces. Three interlocked infrastructures emerge: chivalric ritual, exemplified by Ferrante’s 1464 Garter investiture; the alum trade linking Neapolitan mines to England’s cloth economy; and “urban diplomacy” enacted by captains, aldermen, and litigating merchants who moved credit and intelligence between Bruges, Southampton, and London. This polycentric network collapses binaries of court/market, formal/informal, and core/periphery, casting Naples as an agile nexus between Mediterranean and North Sea. By weaving ritual, commerce, and litigation into a unified circuitry, this essay answers the Manifesto’s call to rethink Middle Ages and early modern periodization, dissolving inherited chronological fault lines.

Abstract This essay reflects on the critical role of language in diplomacy, as highlighted in the manifesto “Provincializing New Diplomatic History.” It discusses the potential for literary scholars and diplomacy scholars to work together; and the affordances of literature as a kind of “diplomatic technology,” from the insights literature offers into the nature of diplomacy (e.g. in British envoy George Macartney’s 1793–94 China travel journal), to literary texts themselves as sites of diplomatic encounter (e.g. in Turkish writer Halide Edib’s 1953 play Masks or Souls? , or Italo Calvino’s 1976 novel Invisible Cities ). More broadly, the essay considers the open-ended invitation extended in the manifesto as an opportunity to find new ways of co-reading and co-writing diplomacy across disciplines, guided by Calvino’s ethos of “multiplicity.”

Abstract In our contribution, we reflect on two challenges the Manifesto identifies in conducting diplomatic history. The first challenge is how to expand and diversify New Diplomatic History ( ndh ) while keeping its identity intact, while the second has to do with overcoming Eurocentrism. To resolve these dilemmas, we propose turning the ethos of diplomacy into an ethos of academic conduct, suggesting that just as the diplomat mediates between home and away, the scholar-diplomat mediates between history and theory, the particular and the universal. We believe the Manifesto’s laudable goals regarding the diversification of the ndh are better served by studying diplomacy diplomatically than by achieving globality.

New Perspectives on Actors and Practices in Diplomatic History

ABSTRACT This essay presents an alternative narrative of musical events surrounding the Congress of Vienna through the career of the guitarist-composer Mauro Giuliani (1781–1829). Although Giuliani’s creative activity is not associated with the monumentality typically attributed to the Congress’s large public events, I argue that his performances alongside Vienna’s other notable instrumentalists nonetheless served as musical embodiments of the Congress’s mandate of cooperation and conversation. By examining Giuliani’s Congress-era performances and publications meant to tap the market for memorabilia, I consider how the guitarist engaged with aspects of the Congress’s political agenda. While music was associated with some of the more frivolous activities that took place during this momentous event in diplomatic history, it nevertheless played an integral role in communicating the goals of the Congress, as well as those of the emerging Austrian state.

This article opens up new territory by cross-fertilising insights of New Diplomatic History and gender history focused on the diplomatic agency of informal actors, and specifically the female spouses of European male diplomats and ministers at the end of the eighteenth century, with perspectives from the history of emotions. To this end, Todd Hall’s concept of ‘emotional diplomacy’ is focused on friendship. Letters from the players on the international stage of the European powers that were once labeled as ‘personal’ and therefore largely ignored in historiography so far – can thus be read as a source of historical knowledge about various social and cultural tactics of ‘soft diplomacy’ behind the facade of the official interstate diplomacy. The case developed here comprises the epistolary legacy of Geertruida Francisca van der Goes-de Eerens, wife of envoy Maarten van der Goes who served the Dutch Republic in the late eighteenth century. This corpus comprises more than three hundred letters from members and representatives of European embassies, envoys, secretaries, the Danish and Spanish courts. The part selected for this article comes primarily from Danish ministers’ wives Augusta Bernstorff and Charlotte Schimmelmann, and from Russian ambassador’s wife Julie von Krüdener. Their letters provide an insight into the close collaborative practices of women and men in the cosmopolitan mixed world of diplomatic, political and royal circles in Copenhague in the years between 1787 and 1796.

This article opens up new territory by cross-fertilising insights of New Diplomatic History and gender history focused on the diplomatic agency of informal actors, and specifically the female spouses of European male diplomats and ministers at the end of the eighteenth century, with perspectives from the history of emotions. To this end, Todd Hall’s concept of ‘emotional diplomacy’ is focused on friendship. Letters from the players on the international stage of the European powers that were once labeled as ‘personal’ and therefore largely ignored in historiography so far – can thus be read as a source of historical knowledge about various social and cultural tactics of ‘soft diplomacy’ behind the facade of the official interstate diplomacy. The case developed here comprises the epistolary legacy of Geertruida Francisca van der Goes-de Eerens, wife of envoy Maarten van der Goes who served the Dutch Republic in the late eighteenth century. This corpus comprises more than three hundred letters from members and representatives of European embassies, envoys, secretaries, the Danish and Spanish courts. The part selected for this article comes primarily from Danish ministers’ wives Augusta Bernstorff and Charlotte Schimmelmann, and from Russian ambassador’s wife Julie von Krüdener. Their letters provide an insight into the close collaborative practices of women and men in the cosmopolitan mixed world of diplomatic, political and royal circles in Copenhague in the years between 1787 and 1796.

Before Anne Robson (née Taggart) became the second Lady Kerr upon marrying governor‐general John Kerr in 1975, she had an international career of some 30 years working as a French to English interpreter and consultant at over 30 national and international conferences and became the first Australian elected to the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) in 1966. She resigned from the profession and divorced her first husband in 1975 to marry John Kerr and within the year became entangled in the political and national crisis of the Whitlam dismissal, brought on by her new husband, and in which some contemporaries suspected she played a part. Eclipsed by the crisis and largely ignored by historians since, her life and career merit closer scrutiny. They speak to the professionalisation of interpreting services in the post‐Second World War era and to Australia's early endeavours in regional diplomacy. They underscore the critical role of language in facilitating and hindering international relations as well as of the invisibility of the interpreter in diplomatic history. Finally, her story merits closer examination for what it reveals about John Kerr, their relationship, his tenure as governor‐general and particularly his decision to dismiss Whitlam.

Abstract The term ‘pariah’ is a staple in the vocabulary of International Relations (IR), for example in phrases such as ‘pariah state’, ‘pariah diplomacy’ and ‘nuclear pariah’. In revealing anxieties about ‘pariah-hood’, it is also commonplace in Indian imaginations of international status and ‘rising power’. Yet such discourse has paid little attention to the caste origins and traumatic histories of the term or indeed what its continued circulation and ‘casual’ usage tells us about IR and Indian diplomacy. Through a close reading of the (mis)uses of the term ‘pariah’, we foreground the entangled, mutually constituted and foundational role of colonial and caste-coded hegemonic discourses in IR. We argue that IR usages are not so much an out-of-context utilisation of the term ‘pariah’ as they are invocations of a caste-like hierarchy in the international order. In so doing, the article highlights the centrality of caste to Indian diplomatic history and the discipline of IR itself.

Addressing growing security threats in South and Central Asia makes Russia’s intensifying cooperation with Pakistan’s counterterrorism programs in the 2020s more plausible, and an analytical evaluation of this cooperation is the focus of this paper. Extremist groups such as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) in Afghanistan, emerging after the U.S. withdrawal, are direct threats to Russia’s interests. Both countries work through programs involving mutual intelligence-sharing, military alliance, and diplomatic defence arrangements to fight against threats. The paper introduces an overview of Pakistan-Russia diplomatic history and examines modern practical cooperation, which overcame their earlier Cold War animosities. Using a geopolitical angle, this evaluation considers Russia’s importance in Pakistan’s counterterrorism efforts, conditions that affect regional stability and peace, US-Pakistan historical relations, and Russia-India connections. The research demonstrates that Russia’s growing alliance with Pakistan against terrorism creates impacts across South Asia.

The publication of the memoirs of Count S. Yu. Witte and the tenth anniversary of the overthrow of the monarchy in Russia caused a surge of interest in these events and in the figures of the past in Soviet Russia. Ye. V. Tarle was the first to prepare a small book dedicated to Witte’s diplomatic activity. Despite relying primarily on the memoirs of his character and utilising only a limited number of sources, the author successfully presented an objective and colourful portrait of the count. This portrait was set against the broader context of the diplomatic history of Europe in the early twentieth century, with a particular focus on Russian-German relations. However, in “Witte studies”, B. A. Romanov is usually regarded as a pioneer who began to prepare detailed documentary commentaries on Witte’s memoirs even earlier than Tarle. It appears that the lack of recognition for Tarle’s book, which was intended for a general audience and not for experts like Romanov’s texts, is unjust. The academician demonstrated not only his nuanced understanding of the era but also broke new ground by presenting a personal profile of the most prominent political figure of the Russian Empire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Доставка пушнины из Сибири в кон. XVI–XVII вв. имела большое значение не только для экономики России. Велика была роль сибирской пушнины во внешнеполитических делах Московского государства. Цель настоящей работы — изучить вопрос об экономическом значении города Берёзова и Берёзовского уезда как ясачных территорий для внешнеполитических контактов Москов- ского царства конца XVI — середины XVII века. В статье использованы документы дипломатической истории России конца XVI — сере- дины XVII вв. (наказы послам, их отчеты, статейные списки посольств), а также документы внутриэкономического характера — донесения берёзовских воевод о собранном ясаке. Основными методами стали историко- сравнительный, использованный для изучения количественных и качественных показателей ясачного сбора, типологический и историко- системный, применённые для выяснения значения сибирской пушнины для дипломатии Московского царства. Документы Посольского приказа в сибирской регионалистике рассма- тривались крайне редко, особенно в экономическом аспекте. Значение сибирской пушнины во внешнеполитических делах Московского государства было велико и имело много аспек- тов. «Мягкую рухлядь», прежде всего соболей, посылали в дар иностранным правителям и придворной знати, выдавали русским послам как платёжное средство, ими же одаривали иностранных послов в Москве. С помощью пушнины удавалось решать и другие задачи госу- дарственной важности. Поступления «мягкой рухляди» из Берёзовского уезда через Берёзов, так же, как и поступления через другие уездные центры Сибири, обеспечивало не только торгово- экономические отношения с другими странами, но и установление и поддержку престижных дипломатических отношений с европейскими и азиатскими государствами. The delivery of furs from Siberia at the end of the XVI–XVII centuries was of great importance not only for the Russian economy. The role of Siberian furs in the foreign policy affairs of the Moscow state was great. 120 ВЕСТНИК Сургутского государственного педагогического университета № 3 (96) 2025 г. The purpose of this article is to study the economic importance of the city of Berezov and Berezovsky Uyezd as yasacha territories for the foreign policy contacts of the Muscovite Kingdom of the late XVI — mid XVII century. The article uses documents from the diplomatic history of Russia in the late XVI — mid XVII centuries. (instructions to the ambassadors, their reports, article lists of embassies), as well as documents of an internal economic nature — reports from the Berezovsky voivodes about the collected yasak. The main methods were historical and comparative, used to study the quantitative and qualitative indicators of the ash harvest, typological and historical- systematic, used to clarify the importance of Siberian furs for the diplomacy of the Moscow Kingdom. The documents of the embassy order were rarely considered in Siberian regionalism, especially in the economic aspect. The importance of Siberian furs in the foreign policy affairs of the Moscow state was great and had many aspects. «Soft junk», primarily sables, were sent as gifts to foreign rulers and court nobility, given to Russian ambassadors as a means of payment, and given to foreign ambassadors in Moscow. With the help of furs, it was possible to solve other tasks of national importance. The arrival of «soft junk» from Berezovsky District through Berezov, as well as arrivals through other district centers of Siberia, ensured not only trade and economic relations with other countries, but also the establishment and support of prestigious diplomatic relations with European and Asian states.

This paper aims to shed light into Turkey’s political and diplomatic history by focusing on its efforts to join the United Nations (UN). The search for a new political system in Turkey coincided with the global quest for a new world order, initiated by the UN’s four founding members during the Second World War. After a brief discussion on the making of the UN and its predecessors, the paper delves into Turkey’s position during the war, followed by an analysis of the ruling elites’ perceptions as reflected in parliamentary debates and the contemporary national press coverage. Furthermore, the paper evaluates the influence of UN membership on the emergence of a multi-party system in Turkey and discusses how and why the change of the global political climate contributed to the transformation of the Turkish political system.

The author presents an analysis of the scientific and life path of an outstanding and talented historian, doctor of historical sciences, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Andrei Nikolaevich Sakharov (1930-2019), who devoted his scientific activity to the study of key issues of the foreign policy and diplomatic history of Russia. Having become the founder of a new direction for Russian historiography devoted to the study of the history of Russian diplomacy and the author of the first scientific monograph on this topic - he successfully combined scientific work with administrative and official duties of the director of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences during the turning point that came after the collapse of the USSR: from 1993 to 2010. The publication is based on the materials of the scientist’s personal file, stored in the Scientific Archive of the IRI RAS, the funds and documents of which were preserved during the years of reforms and the “perestroika” largely due to the scientific and human foresight of Andrei Nikolaevich himself.

Abstract A group of young scholars revisit the aims, nature, and purpose of New Diplomatic History.

The State of Israel’s Changing Role in the Struggle Against Antisemitism: A Diplomatic History and Personal Memoir

This article analyzes the description of the Joseon-Japan diplomatic restoration on the compilation of Edo bakufu in 19th-century. In the absence of records in the early Edo period, bakufu's compilation mainly referred to records submitted by daimyo. In the case of the Joseon-Japan diplomatic restoration, the records of Tsushima, which mediated relations between the two countries, were handed down to bakufu and used for compilation. However, in Tsushima's records, there were two lines that set the starting point of the diplomatic restoration as 1601 and 1599. As a result, in the bakufu's compilation, the issue of choosing the preceding historical descriptions arose. In general, the bakufu's compilations were centered on the historical perspective of the founding by the Tokugawa Ieyasu, who dominated the hegemony through the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. In line with this, the beginning of the diplomatic restoration tended to be set to 1601 as the following year. By the way, in consideration of the consistency with cited historical sources, Tsukōichiran, the bakufu's compilation in mid-19th-century, set the start of the diplomatic restoration to 1599. This was a result of reflecting the characteristics of a collection of diplomatic historical records organized by bakufu during the period of foreign confusion. On the other hand, the diplomatic restoration was highlighted as a significant achievement of Ieyasu, who established external peace. This ensured peaceful diplomacy that would continue in the future under the political direction of bakufu, which attempted to inherit and preserve the achievements of the first shogun. Additionally, at the end of the Edo Period, bakufu's compilation of diplomatic history was also the work of preparing for diplomacy with the western countries. In it, the history of Joseon diplomacy served as a model for a new diplomatic system.