A summing up, touching upon the role of the state and nationalism both in creating central institutions for the study and preservation of medieval manuscript material and in pursuing increasingly destructive warfare that often annihilated that same material.

This Introduction begins by outlining what is meant by international relations. It then tells the story of how and why the academic study of international relations emerged in the early twentieth century before considering the need to ‘globalise’ the study of international relations – to make it an academic discipline more open to non-Western perspectives. It sketches the changing agenda of international relations, a shift that some scholars describe as a transition from international relations to world politics or from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘new’ agenda. Although there is little doubt that, as political reality has changed, new theoretical tools have become necessary to grasp it, we should not assume that the myriad changes in our world have rendered the ‘traditional’ agenda obsolete. As we shall see, the ‘new’ agenda supplements, but does not supplant, the ‘traditional’ agenda. It is now more important than ever to consider the relationships between ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ agendas, and to globalise IR.

This chapter introduces a new research program on the politics of religion and secularism. A focus on the politics of religion and secularism offers a productive port of entry into the study of international politics. Following a brief introduction to religion and international relations, it offers a basic introduction to the concept of secularism, explains why the politics of secularism is significant to the study of global politics and concludes with a discussion of the politics of secularism in the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79.

The discipline of International Relations owes its origins to the study of war and peace. But are today’s wars so different from their predecessors that we need a new mindset? To answer that question, this chapter begins with warfare’s diverse ends and means before considering five leading issues: the role of violence in warfare; the extent to which that violence is organised; the political nature of war; the interactive nature of warfare; and the scope and scale of war. The argument presented here is that war’s essential features have not changed as much as we might think. This should make us sceptical about claims that the role of war in international relations has somehow been revolutionised.

While nations and nationalism have become the dominant mode of ascribing political culture in world politics, understanding the meaning and political importance of these terms has been a notoriously challenging task. One survey of concepts in International Relations said of the term ‘national interest’ that it was ‘the most vague and therefore easily used and abused’; of nationalism, that ‘there is a lack of consensus about what it is and why it has maintained such a firm hold over so much of the world’s population’; and that ‘Nations and states seem identical but they are not’ (Griffiths and O’Callaghan 2002: 202–13). Notwithstanding this confusion, nationalism is typically characterised as both an important form of cultural identity and a pervasive political ideology affirming that territorial communities called nations are necessary for human flourishing and that each nation should therefore be accorded a degree of autonomy in determining its own affairs (Woods et al. 2020: 813).

To the modern political philosopher Amartya Sen, democracy appears a universal good, but others have seen it as a product of European and American thought bound up with colonialism, and have looked for qualities better attuned to ‘Asian’ values like consensus or the connection of human beings to nature. Gandhi presented himself as a man of transparent truth and integrity, so echoing Socrates, the Christian puritan tradition and (except in regard to violence) Robespierre. He disliked Parliamentary democracy, but needed it in order to secure independence. His encounter with Charlie Chaplin highlights the central problem: Was the Mahatma a staged role that he played, or an expression of his authentic self? Many were impressed, but some like Jinnah and Ambedkar were not. Rabindranath Tagore shared Gandhi’s objections to metropolitan Western-style electoral democracy, but distrusted Gandhi’s authoritarianism. As an artist, Tagore saw performance as an essential feature of human nature. He found no way in which he could himself enter the political arena, and fell back upon being an educator.

The introductory chapter argues that the near universal rise of the radical Right is more than a series of national coincidences and that despite differences in their ideas and policies, a globally connected Right is emerging. One indication of this is the emergence of global networks and events such as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the NatCon Conferences, and the Madrid Forum. However, the globality of today’s radical Right goes beyond mere transnational networks, and requires a wider rethinking of its relationship to the global in two ways. First, the radical Right is constituted by transnational interactions operating at multiple scales. Second, it defines itself and is co-constituted by its relation to the global, not just to the national. The chapter also discusses the vexed issue of defining the Right and the difficulties of studying the Right.

Existing research on the ISCM tends to focus on the ‘centres’ in Western and Central Europe and North America. Although the membership included countries in Latin America and Asia from early on – for instance, Argentina joined in 1924, and Japan in 1935 – and eventually in Africa (South Africa, 1948), much less attention has been paid to the role the ISCM played in these regions. As this chapter argues, it is in the ‘peripheries’ that the ISCM proved particularly influential in stimulating diverse conceptions of musical modernism within specific local contexts. However, the significance of the ISCM for its far-flung members was rarely reciprocated. The ISCM’s inflexible structure and flawed conception of internationalism, founded on the unquestioned sovereignty of the nation state, perpetuated the imbalances between centre and periphery. Using quantitative data on national and regional representation at various levels, complemented by qualitative data, such as interviews with key players and archival records, I formulate a critique of the ISCM as an institution that struggled to overcome the systemic Eurocentrism of its foundation.

Chapter 4 analyses the history, evolution, internalisation, and legal operationalisation of sustainable development in Africa. The analysis reveals how concepts like sustainable development flow through nations and regions without being influenced by the peoples and politics that matter to that part of the world. It reveals the colonial and postcolonial politics of natural resource access in Africa by mapping the concept’s progress. It discusses the concept and its link to the international law on nature conservation and how that history omitted Africa as a framework for analysing the law and politics of sustainable development. It also explores Africa’s perspectives on international law relative to the Global South’s position on sustainable development within the never-ending Third World international law-making project. It also reveals deficits in the dominant rights-based approach to sustainable development in Africa as uncritically empowering the state over non-state interests as the state has failed to purposefully incorporate customary and indigenous governance into sustainable development. In addressing this question, I examine the promise and failure of the implementation of sustainable development as seen through the work of Africa’s regional adjudicative institutions.

The historical trajectory of states-in-waiting was determined by many overlapping factors: their international-legal status vis-à-vis the United Nations, their popular support within their territories, the presence or absence of regional allies, their role in global Cold War politics, as well as the influence and impact of their international advocates, who often served as the connectors between these geopolitical spheres. In addition, a territory’s possession (or lack) of economic resources desired by multinational corporations shaped the pathways of particular nationalist claimants. In Southern Africa, the presence of natural resources made advocacy networks thick, overladen, multiple, and intertwined. Beyond the international-legal dimensions of Namibia’s struggle for national liberation, the territory was integrated within international politics through mining interests. Claims to territory and its resources are central to the demand for sovereignty.

States-in-waiting are territories that claimed statehood but had not (yet) received independence. By foregrounding the nationalist insurgent movements that arose from these regions, States-in-Waiting illuminates the un-endings of decolonization – the unfinished, messy, and improvised way that the state-centric system of international order replaced empire. Nationalist claimants from communities left out of the global order (as it was radically expanded by decolonization) were forced to work through unofficial channels to advance their claims in international politics. Therefore, the ambiguous and at times unreliable role of their advocates, the intermediaries they used to navigate these channels, highlighted the uncertainties of the transitions from empires to states. This uncertainty, and the political weakness of particular nationalist demands, left certain claimants seemingly perpetually awaiting international recognition.