Historical Sociology Of International Relations Research Articles

«Islamic Socialism» in Pakistan: Evolution, Implementation and Legacy in Domestic and Foreign Policy

The article examines the phenomenon of "Islamic socialism" in Pakistan and its impact on the nation's current domestic and foreign policies. Employing critical theory, the author delves into an analysis of the political class's objectives and how the environmental context influenced the political process, offering insights into the perceptions held by higher echelons. The application of elite theory allows for a deconstruction of the Pakistani statehood, unveiling the specific social groups shaping developmental trajectories. By leveraging historical sociology in international relations, the article investigates the influence of historical underpinnings on the decision-making of social groups, shedding light on their endeavors to construct the past for political purposes.The study meticulously traces the origins of "Islamic socialism," exploring the discourse's evolution in the initial decades following the country's independence. It identifies the driving forces that led the state leadership to adopt the model of "Islamic socialism." Focused on the tenure of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (1971-1977), the article examines the implementation of the "Islamic socialism" policy and the subsequent reasons for its failure, culminating in a military coup. The author contends that the principles of "Islamic socialism" introduced in Pakistan's domestic and foreign policy retained relevance even after its rejection.Conclusively, the article posits that the "Islamic socialism" constructed by Pakistani elites, often viewed through an orientalist lens, emerged not only as a response to the crisis in Pakistani statehood but paradoxically, became a crucial driver in shaping Islamabad's foreign policy determinants. Notably, this development forged integral relationships with China and the Islamic world, evolving into pivotal imperatives in Pakistan's grand strategy.This study highlights the interplay between "Islamic socialism," the crisis in Pakistani statehood, and its unforeseen impact on foreign policy, ultimately forming the bedrock for Islamabad's strategic engagements with China and the Islamic world.

Pakistan’s Military Elites in Search of «Strategic Depth»: The Concept’s Evolution and Prospects

The article deals with the concept of “Strategic Depth” that allegedly determines Pakistan’s military elites’ course of action. The author gives a definition to “Strategic Depth” and points out the issues relating to the term, analyzes the roots of Pakistan’s military elites’ perception of the Frontier and traces the evolution of the issues considered. The author invoked elite theory to identify certain social groups involved in prioritizing defense and security policies. The historical sociology of international relations makes it possible to assess the influence of the past on the essence of the social groups’ decisions, and to consider their attempts to construct outer threats for domestic purposes. The concept of “Strategic Depth” could be divided into three aspects: the demarcation and delimitation of the Pakistani-Afghan border, control over the Frontier area in Pakistan, and the possible usage of instability in these territories by other countries. None of “Strategic Depth”’s aims has ever been achieved after the Taliban takeover. The Taliban government in Kabul is not ready to recognize the Durand line, the confrontation between the TTP and the Centre has only escalated, New Delhi and Kabul are resuming their dialogue. The Pakistani military elites equally perceive the threats from India and Afghanistan, which allows them to justify their special mission to repel external threats and preserve statehood. It can be assumed that the whole range of problems will remain on the agenda in the long term, since the domestic dimension of “Strategic Depth” is of greater importance than the foreign and strategic one.

Searching for an Economic Basis for the Indo-Pacific: Evolution of India’s Approaches

The article is devoted to an analysis of Indias attempts to form an economic basis for its flagship foreign policy initiative - the concept of the Indo-Pacific. The author, using a multidimensional approach based on critical theory, historical sociology of international relations, the strategic culture approach and spatial approach, examines the evolution of the economic system of the Indo-Pacific in a historical perspective. India has historically played a key role in the system. So the Indian political elites believe that it has to be the regional hegemon. The rapid growth of the Indian economy at the beginning of the 21st century allowed New Delhi to start implementing its ambitions. The growth of neighboring China and its expansion into traditional Indian spheres of influence forced India to intensify the Indo-Pacific policy. Possible options for building the economic basis of the Indo-Pacific have been consistently explored in the article. The author highlights the economic mega blocs (TPP and RCEP), which India refused to join due to concerns about its economy; sub-regional trade and economic blocs and initiatives (SAARC, BIMSTEK, SAGAR, AAGC), local and relatively weak for providing the economic basis of the mega-region on their basis; finally, the latest infrastructure projects (Blue Dots Network, Build Back Better World), in which India is still hesitant to participate, not being sure of their effectiveness and fearing excessive involvement in anti-Chinese projects. The author concludes that India can either join Western infrastructure initiatives, or try to build an economic basis for the Indo-Pacific on a set of sub-regional initiatives. In the latter case, Russia could play an important role by implementing bilateral projects with India and participating in multilateral ones.

THEORIZATION IN IR AND THIRD WORLD STATES: THE PROMISE OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY IN EXPLAINING THE NEXUS BETWEEN DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL SPHERES

Until alternative theories that sought a serious consideration of third world states in International Relations (IR) proliferated in the last quarter of the 20th century, knowledge production remained monopolized by dominant Western-centered theories. Historical Sociology in International Relations (HSIR) is one of the approaches that aimed at directing IR towards more inclusive inquiries that acknowledge temporal and spatial variance; especially against ahistorical and ‘asociological’ foundations of Neorealism. Despite this motivation, most of the studies and debates within HSIR are concentrated on illustrating the approach’s applicability in the study of Western states. Through a review of the available literature, this paper aims to demonstrate the promise of HSIR in explaining the relationship between domestic and foreign affairs of third world states. To achieve this objective, the paper mainly draws from the works of John Hobson and Fred Halliday and suggests the incorporation of third world states in the inquiries and debate within HSIR.

Tracing the International Dimensions of Iranian Nationalism: The Era of Mohammad Reza Shah

This study explores the reconstruction of Iranian national identity during the Mohammad Reza Shah era (1953 to 1979). Drawing on materials collected from the memoirs and statements of the Shah and the key actors of the era and using Historical Sociology in International Relations as its theoretical backbone, it aims to unravel the constitutive role of the international on the formation of Iranian state nationalism. It argues that in order to understand the meaning attached to being Iranian, we should look into the specifics of international- domestic interaction, as Iranian national identity has been framed and re-framed by the Shah alongside the changing dynamics born out of specific interaction between the domestic and international dynamics. The Shah’s interpretation of Iranian identity emerged and evolved at the intersection of his endeavours for gaining legitimacy against the legacy of Mosaddeq and his popular nationalism at the domestic level and for reclaiming the actorness of Iran during the Cold War at the international level. Playing inwards and outwards, the Shah sought to deconstruct the content of Iranian nationalism articulated by Mosaddeq and to give a new meaning to Iranian nationalism. Serving as the ideological glue of his state building, it was characterized by a strong belief in the rapid industrialization, emphasis on unity rather than diversity, uniqueness of Iranian identity vis-à-vis the East and the West, and presentation of the Shah as the real and moral representative of the Iranian people.

İran’da Milliyetçiliği Millilikten Çıkartma: Ulusal ve Uluslararası Dinamiklerin Etkileşimi Üzerine Bir Değerlendirme

The discipline of International Relations is increasingly paying attention to nationalism, although this attention is mostly limited with the role of nationalism on international system. By presenting an approach born out of the intersection of Historical Sociology in International Relations (HSIR) and the Modernist School of Nationalism, this paper aims at expanding the terrain of nationalism studies in International Relations (IR). Using Iran as an example, it demonstrates that three basic premises of HSIR—the interaction between domestic and international dynamics, historicization, and multi-causality—are central to analysing nationalism, which is only associated with the domestic level. It argues that HSIR has much to offer not only to studies of nationalism and/in the Middle East but also to the discipline of IR by elucidating the international connections of this seemingly domestic issue.

Global Historical Sociology ed. by Julian Go and George Lawson

Reviewed by: Global Historical Sociology ed. by Julian Go and George Lawson Sung Hee Ru Global Historical Sociology. Edited by julian go and george lawson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 310 pp. £26.99 (paper). One of this book's great contributions is that it opens up new horizons in historical sociology. So far, research in historical sociology and historical sociology in International Relations has tended to prioritize the state as the unit of analysis, while disregarding, both implicitly and explicitly, connected histories or global dynamics. As a welcome contrast, the contributors to Global Historical Sociology (GHS) problematize this trend under the premise that there is no everlasting and invariable state concept in the historical context. Theoretically and methodologically, they insist that viewing the state and social structures as preconceived underpinnings is indeed ahistorical. Instead, these "entities-in-motion" should be seen in relation to each other. Although the contributing authors blame state-centrism and a Eurocentric perspective for the relative ignorance about the global context or connected historical accounts, the GHS research project does not completely exclude such perspectives. Rather, it recasts them within a relational framework. For instance, the presentation and analysis of Eurocentric views can be useful for eliciting the hidden motives of European colonialism and justifications for Europe's globalization project. This is a kind of Hegelian dialectical turn. GHS, [End Page 427] in this regard, is a meta-approach that combines theoretical and methodological concepts of historical sociology, international relations, and world history. GHS researchers try to find the missing links of connected historical narratives behind individual cases in historical sociology, IR, and world history, and then reinterpret them within the global historical framework. In chapter 1, Matthew Norton examines the circulatory networks as an alternative to the state-centered perspective that limits historical sociologists. Instead of state-centrism, Norton focuses on "state effect" as a pattern of social consequences to better frame the nature of European states and empires. For instance, understanding pine tree circulation and slave trade on a transnational context is difficult within a state-centered perspective because these extend beyond the limits of national boundaries. In chapter 2, Tarak Barkawi argues that European military units in the early modern world were not populated exclusively by European nationals. He contends that Europe's imperialism formed the modern world by deploying colonized peoples for wars of imperial expansion. Given that mobilized colonized people, including local native soldiers and police, were exploited for Imperial powers' military expansions, he believes that, ontologically and conceptually, a transnational approach is necessary to examine the Imperial powers' conduct of wars. As an example, he describes how the American Frederick Townsend Ward's Ever Victorious Army used Filipinos in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion of the Qing. The use of a hybrid army enables us to comprehend the Taiping Rebellion within a trans-national framework. In chapter 3, George Lawson attempts to reinterpret revolutions in a global historical context. For Lawson, prominent historical sociologists such as Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly, and Jack A. Goldstone have paid little attention to global dynamics or globalized historical accounts in analyzing revolutions. Although they acknowledge international dynamics in their analyses, it played only a minor role in their arguments. Lawson, by contrast, examines how revolutionary struggles are formed within trans-national contexts. Thus, his analysis of the Haitian revolution notes the salience of three global elements: "its embedding within circuits of capitalist accumulation, slavery, and colonialism; its embroilment in interstate wars; and its impact on the development of uprisings in other parts of the world" (p. 88). As a case in point, global capital accumulation pushed enslaved Africans to work at colonized sugar plantation areas. Labor exploitation of enslaved Africans in turn prompted the Haitian revolution; however, interstate conflicts between England and Spain also ignited during the revolution [End Page 428] because England provided French plantations with military help while Spain gave aid to revolutionary armies. The aftermath of the revolution then exerted a strong influence on other slave societies and anti-slavery movements in the pursuit of racial equality. The Haitian Revolution provided a model for some. Lawson also stresses the importance of an intersocietal approach centered around relations with neighbor countries, various...

Passive revolution: a universal concept with geographical seats

AbstractIn this article, I argue that Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution makes a foundational contribution to International Relations (IR), yet has been relatively under appreciated by the broader discipline. Within the Historical Sociology of International Relations, uneven and combined development has recently been postulated as a key trans-historical law that provides a social theory of the ‘international’. Drawing from, but moving beyond these debates, I will argue that passive revolution is a key conditioning factor of capitalist modernity. I will demonstrate how the concept of passive revolution is the element that explains the connection between the universal process of uneven development and the manner in which specific combinations occur within the capitalist era as geopolitical pressures, in tandem with domestic social forces become internalised into geographically specific state forms. It therefore offers a corrective to the frequently aspatial view that is found in much of the literature in IR regarding uneven and combined development. Additionally, passive revolution provides a more politicised understanding of the present as well as an important theoretical lesson in relation to what needs to be done to affect alternative trajectories of development.

History, theory, and contingency in the study of modern international relations: the global transformation revisited

Debates engaging the problems of ahistoricism and Eurocentrism in International Relations (IR) theory have taken on new dimensions in recent years. Scholars from a variety of different theoretical traditions have aimed to reconstruct IR theory on stronger historical–sociological grounds, while re-orienting the study of IR away from the fetish of ‘Western’ thought and agency. Buzan and Lawson’sThe Global Transformationoffers a welcome contribution to these endeavours to furnish a non-Eurocentric historical sociology of international relations. This article seeks to push their project further by re-assessing the relationship between history, theory, and contingency. In particular, it interrogates whether Buzan and Lawson’s ‘configurational’ approach to the ‘global transformation’, emphasizing thecontingentconcatenation of historical events and social processes, results in a displacement of theory through an over-emphasis on the interaction of free-floating contingently related causes, causes that areexternalto any theoretical schema. This approach obscures the deeper, structural forces in the making of global modernity, most notably those that escape Buzan and Lawson’s singular focus on the ‘long 19th century’.

The Dialectic of the Concrete: Reconsidering Dialectic for IR and Foreign Policy Analysis

Modes of dialectical reasoning were introduced into International Relations (IR) from the 1980s onwards in the context of the post-positivist debate as an alternative intellectual resource drawn from the philosophy of the social sciences. To the extent that the deployment of dialectics for IR drew upon Marx and the wider Hegelian Marxist tradition, it was challenged philosophically and substantively on two fronts. Philosophically, the problem emerged how to disassociate dialectics from the ‘systemic’ Hegelian legacy, which expressed itself in the naturalism and monism of dialectical materialism, and how to overcome a reading of capital as a self-unfolding conceptual category, expressed in systematic dialectics, which de-historicised and de-subjectified capitalism as a social relation. Substantively, the problem remained how to anchor a Historical Sociology of international relations in a historicist philosophy of praxis to avoid the temptation of a relapse into structuralist modes of explanation. By addressing this double challenge, this paper identifies a central lacuna within the Marxist IR tradition—the gap between general Marxist theories of IR and the analysis of foreign policy-making. This gap persists in equal measure in the bifurcation between the fields of general IR theory and actor-specific foreign policy analysis (FPA). For general IR theories—Marxist and non-Marxist—tend to deploy structuralist versions of theory, which relegate the problem of foreign policy-making to lesser, possibly non-theorisable, forms of inquiry. FPA is thereby demoted and subsumed under wider structural imperatives capable of cross-case generalisation. The paper moves from a critical exposition of the wider debate in IR and FPA of attempts to close this gap, via a critique of dialectical materialism and systematic dialectics, to a re-statement of the dialectic of the concrete. It concludes with a reconsideration of how dialectical thinking may bridge this gap by incorporating foreign policy as the crucial site for the active drawing together and re-articulation of multiple influences from the domestic and the foreign into a Historical Sociology of international relations.

War and the use of force under the gaze of the historical sociology of international relations

El debate contemporaneo de las relaciones internacionales propone que los Estados nacionales pierden en el siglo XXI su capacidad de mantener la vigencia del monopolio de la violencia legitima y de la guerra. Sin embargo, el uso de la fuerza en incursiones punitivas y disuasivas sigue siendo un elemento que manifiesta la continuidad del poder estatal en el sistema internacional. Desde la perspectiva de la Sociologia Historica de las Relaciones Internacionales, el articulo analiza los cambios en el moderno sistema internacional para detectar los elementos que persisten y que dan cuenta de la capacidad de los Estados nacionales por mantener bajo su control los medios para ejercer el uso de la fuerza de manera efectiva.

Can contingency be ‘internalized’ into the bounds of theory? Critical realism, the philosophy of internal relations and the solution of ‘uneven and combined development’

Can general mechanisms governing social life (necessity) and the possibility of multiple outcomes in socio-historical processes (contingency) be incorporated into a single theoretical framework? In recent years, the critical realist philosophy of science has emerged as an intellectual strand within international relations (IR) that makes theoretical claims about necessary social processes while recognizing the irreducible role of contingency. However, critical realist scholars treat contingency as an ‘externality’, thereby declining to theorize social processes that result in contingent outcomes. Here, it is argued that contingency emerges out of the combination of events and processes as theorized by the law of uneven and combined development. This provides a general conceptualization that treats differentiated historical outcomes, and their contingencies, as inherent to human development. Out of these assumptions a workable approach to historical sociology in IR can be developed—one predicated upon uncovering the form of historical ‘combination’, the contingent fusion of elements, in international systems.

What’s at Stake in the Neo-Trotskyist Debate? Towards a Non-Eurocentric Historical Sociology of Uneven and Combined Development

This article seeks to appraise the direction that historical sociology has undertaken within Millennium in the last four decades while simultaneously laying out the groundwork for a ‘thirdwave’ historical sociology of international relations. In particular, I intervene in the current neo-Trotskyist debate concerning whether the concept of uneven and combined development (U&CD) should be historically generalised or merely confined to the modern capitalist-industrial era that emerged as late as the 19th century. My aim is to support the former position. I argue that failure to historically generalise the concept — at least to a certain extent — leads ultimately into a Eurocentric cul-de-sac. To advance my third-wave non-Eurocentric historical sociological approach, I apply U&CD to the rise of the West in general and to British industrialisation in particular. By extending U&CD back to at least 800 CE, I argue that the West was a late developer that enjoyed the advantages of backwardness. That is, only by borrowing from, and assimilating the technologies, ideas and institutions of, the key early developers — China, India and the Islamic Middle East/North Africa — could Europe rise up from its tiny promontory on the far western edge of the vast Afro-Asian economy to eventually overtake its Eastern predecessors some time during the 19th century.

Waiting for Gramsci: State Formation, Passive Revolution and the International

This article asserts that Antonio Gramsci's account of 'the international' linked to the rise of the modern capitalist states-system remains neglected within debates on the historical sociology of International Relations (IR). It does so by following two main axes of inquiry that assist the aim of unravelling Gramsci's relevance to understanding processes of state formation within the causal conditioning of `the international'. The first axis focuses on Gramsci's historical research on Renaissance Italy and the role of mercantile capital in shaping late medieval and early modern states; the `southern question' concerning the terms of uneven development of the Mezzogiorno in Italy; and the Italian Risorgimento understood as a passive revolution, or the reorganisation of state identity through the reproduction of capitalist property relations. These issues provide a historical backdrop to considering Gramsci's novel contribution to understanding the `national' dimension as a point of in understanding processes of capitalist expansion within `the international' realm. This is pursued in the second axis through his account of the states-system and its relation to the emerging hegemony of Anglo-Saxon capitalism that detailed the European response of fascism to the growing intervention of foreign capital and the conditions of uneven development in terms of the specific contexts of the Russian Revolution and Woodrow Wilson's liberal internationalism. It is argued that a recognition of such, as specific instances of passive revolution, assists in providing an essential contribution to understanding `the international' in conditioning state formation that has been absent from current debates in historical sociology in IR.

Reconstructing International Relations Through World History: Oriental Globalization and the Global–Dialogic Conception of Inter-Civilizational Relations

In this article, I seek to move the agenda for historical sociology of international relations (HSIR) onto the next stage of research by considering how both international relations (IR) and HSIR can benefit from entering into a dialogue with World History and, more specifically, with what I call the ‘new global history’. This is necessary because much of IR — and ironically, the vast majority of HSIR — suffers from ahistorical Eurocentrism. In this article, I begin the process of reconstructing IR by drawing on a range of non-Eurocentric arguments that are furnished in the new global history. My overarching framework explores how ‘Eastern agency’ and ‘Oriental globalization’ have informed many of the developments in world politics that are conventionally assumed to have Western origins. More specifically, I show how various global–dialogic relationships conducted between Eastern and Western agents have shaped the modern world, in particular capitalist modernity and the rise and spread of the sovereign state. In the final part of the article, I argue that great power politics under Oriental globalization differed fundamentally from Western hegemony/imperialism, thereby debunking the myth that great power politics can be universalized through time and place. In the conclusion, I suggest various areas of future research that could propel both IR and HSIR out of their ahistorical Eurocentric impasse.

Historical Sociology in International Relations: Open Society, Research Programme and Vocation

Over the last 20 years, historical sociology has become an increasingly conspicuous part of the broader field of International Relations (IR) theory, with advocates making a series of interventions in subjects as diverse as the origins and varieties of international systems over time and place, to work on the co-constitutive relationship between the international realm and state–society relations in the processes of radical change. However, even as historical sociology in IR (HSIR) has produced substantial gains, so there has also been a concomitant watering down of the underlying approach itself. As a result, it is no longer clear what exactly HSIR entails: should it be seen as operating within the existing pool of available theories or as an attempt to reconvene the discipline on new foundations? This article sets out an identifiable set of assumptions and precepts for HSIR based on deep ontological realism, epistemological relationism, a methodological free range, and an overt normative engagement with the events and processes that make up contemporary world politics. As such, HSIR can be seen as operating as an open society, a research programme and a vocation.

Levels and Agents, States and People: Micro-Historical Sociological Analysis and International Relations

The historical sociology of international relations is becoming an increasingly prominent field of enquiry. While advocates of an international historical sociology (IHS) have delivered a range of outstanding contributions, they have tended to revolve around the macro-scale, dealing with sweeping grand themes such as the nature of civilizations, the creation of world order, the advent of modernity, and the purpose and formation of the state. This article makes the case for incorporating micro-historical sociological analysis into IHS as a means of complementing already existing analyses, and providing a more rounded field of enquiry. The article argues that the micro–macro issue is an analytic strategy rather than an ontological choice, illustrating this point through a historical institutionalist variant of foreign policy analysis.

The Promise of Historical Sociology in International Relations

This essay draws on historical sociology, in particular on historical institutionalism, to critique the micro-, macro-, and meso-level explanations of contemporary international relations theory. Focusing on institutional development, change, and disintegration, it proposes a conjectural, mid-range approach to capturing the processes of large-scale change that are occurring in the international realm. This essay seeks to broaden the field's scope by outlining the possibilities that historical sociology offers to international relations theory and practice.

Historical Sociology of International Relations

Part I. Introduction: 1. What's at stake in 'bringing historical sociology back into international relations?' John M. Hobson 2. Historical sociology: back to the future of international relations? Stephen Hobden Part II. Historical Sociologies of International Relations: 3. The two waves of Weberian historical sociology in international relations John M. Hobson 4. Neo-Weberian historical sociology and the question of epochal transformations Randall Collins 5. Globality and historical sociology: state, revolution and war revisited Martin Shaw 6. Historical sociology and constructivism: an estranged past, a federated future? Michael Barnett 7. The idea of history and history with ideas Christian Reus-Smit 8. World system analysis, historical sociology and international relations: the difference a hyphen makes Barry K. Gills 9. Towards a critical sociology of transnational harm Andrew Linklater 10. International systems in world history: remaking the study of international relations Barry Buzan and Richard Little Part III. Conclusion: The Future of Historical Sociology in International Relations: 11. Historical sociology and international relations theory Steve Smith 12. For an international sociology Fred Halliday 13. On the road toward a historicised conception of international sociology John M. Hobson and Stephen Hobden.

Historical Sociology of International Relations. Edited by Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 324p. $70.00 cloth, $25.00 paper

Historical Sociology of International Relations. Edited by Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 324p. $70.00 cloth, $25.00 paper