The Global Transformation

International Studies Quarterly 57(3): 620–634, 2013

Unlike many other social sciences, international relations (IR) spend relatively little time assessing the impact of the nineteenth century on its principal subject matter. As a result, the discipline fails to understand the ways in which a dramatic reconfiguration of power during the ''long nineteenth century'' served to recast core features of international order. This article examines the extent of this lacuna and establishes the ways in which processes of industrialization, rational state-building, and ideologies of progress served to destabilize existing forms of order and promote novel institutional formations. The changing character of organized violence is used to illustrate these changes. The article concludes by examining how IR could be rearticulated around a more pronounced engagement with ''the global transformation.

2016

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’s The Global Transformation offers 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 the contingent concatenation 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 are external to 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’.

In this review symposium, Pinar Bilgin, Ann Towns and David C. Kang discuss Barry Buzan and George Lawson's The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations. In the book, Buzan and Lawson set out to provide a history of how we came to think about international relations in the way we do today. They explore the roots of our contemporary conceptions of the state, revolution, the international and modernity. They identify the long nineteenth century, from 1776 to 1914, as the key period in which the modern state and international relations as we know them today were forged. This was a global transformation in that it reshaped the bases of power, thereby also reshaping the relations of power that govern the relations between states and other agents today, across the world. In carrying through this project, Buzan and Lawson show us not only how the modern world was transformed, but also the kind of object it became for the discipline of International Relations. As such, this is also a book about the assumptions that have shaped, and continue to shape, that discipline.

2017

George Lawson and Barry Buzan's The Global Transformation advances the claim that International Relations (IR) has mistakenly overlooked the Long Nineteenth Century as a transformative era. They argue this period saw a shift in the mode of power, i.e. how power was utilised and expressed, and not merely a change in how it was distributed amongst competing political entities. The following offers a sympathetic critique of their theoretical claims. Highlighting the role of geopolitics and the societal changes of the public sphere, the article argues that the historical sociological method utilised by these authors is 'neither realist nor liberal enough'.

E-International Relations, 08/23, 2023

In this article I challenge the notion that any given epoch should be understood in terms of the international order constructed and maintained by states. The state-governed vision of history is contested through an exploration of the long-standing notion that much of the nineteenth century was organized by states into an international liberal order.

Acta Politica, 2003

Review of International Studies, 2001

Andrew Williams, Failed Imagination? New World Orders of the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998)International relations (IR) has had an opportunistic relationship with history. IR scholars have used the past, as Conal Condren has written of political theorists, as ‘a quarry ... [as a] ... source of useable facts; of entries to, and illustrations of, theoretical issues’. The result was an IR canon, of the ‘Plato to Nato’ variety, which was substantially anachronistic. Its dismantling over the last twenty years has much to do with efforts in the area of conceptual history. Despite this, and the keenness of post-positivist IR theorists to display an historical consciousness, IR and history maintain an uneasy association. Where the past is approached in contemporary IR writings, there is a tendency to build out of historical materials, or more worryingly commentaries on them, conceptual superstructures which are then accorded a determining force. Notions li...

Introduction by Richard Ned Lebow, King’s College London. 3 Review by Edward Keene, Christ Church, The University of Oxford. 6 Review by Jennifer Mitzen, Ohio State University. 9 Review by Ayşe Zarakol, University of Cambridge. 13 Author’s Response by Barry Buzan and George Lawson, London School of Economics and Political Science. 15