This study was originally conceived and written as a Ph.D. dissertation in the relative comfort and security of post-Cold War 1990s United States (US) of America. From that vantage point it seemed that after a few missteps (in northern Iraq, Somalia, and Rwanda), the US seemed to be settling into its new role as “Globo-cop,” enforcing the consensual will of the international community and adopting suitably internationalist diplomatic positions, particularly in the rapidly disintegrating former Yugoslavia.

As a preliminary version of this study was under consideration by the editors of the ancient history journal Klio, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11) on the World Trade Center in New York City, on the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania occurred. As a part-time resident of both the Washington, D.C. area and Pennsylvania at the time, these events made a great impression on me, and guided the revision of my dissertation more firmly down a theoretical path to which I had already been inclining by the summer of 2001: International Relations (IR) Constructivism. My belief was that IR Realism – the dominant paradigm in foreign-policy circles as well as in Political Science departments in academia – had exerted a debilitating effect on inquiry into past empires, states, and state systems, and its inability to predict or account for the internal breakup of the Soviet Union and its satellite empire in Europe only added to that conviction. The change of tone and discourse in the way politicians and diplomats spoke about the world under the Clinton administration also compelled me to think more about the constructive power of language and ideas.