The Politics Collection includes over 477 books authored by leading scholars. This collection provides in-depth analysis of political events, ideas, movements and the pivotal roles of government, voters, parties and leaders.
The collection offers an analysis of political theories and practices of governance at both local and international levels, providing insights into foreign policy, international law, gender dynamics, global ethics, environmental politics, cybersecurity, counter-terrorism and peace studies. It examines political developments from the twentieth century to the present and explores global politics across Europe, the USA, Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Additionally, the collection includes studies of confl ict mechanisms, national security and terrorism.
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| Total collection | 477 |
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Politics collection
This chapter focusses on inquiry as an instrument of international order and how the League of Nations used it when dealing with a wide range of international issues during its lifetime. The League’s model of inquiry was not created out of a vacuum but drew upon precedents from international dispute settlement to domestic and colonial inquiries. In this chapter, inquiry as an instrument of international order is discussed through the prism of a border delimitation dispute that created tensions between Albania and neighbouring countries Greece and Yugoslavia in the early 1920s, while juxtaposing this case study with elements from later League inquiries to reach a greater understanding about the instrument’s overall purpose. The chapter shows how officials and politicians at the League of Nations often spoke about truth, impartiality and independence when pertained to inquiry, but it was left unspecified how these aims could be fulfilled when commissioners were sent out to collect information. As a result, inquiries relied on informal practices and the personal authority of individuals to produce and qualify relevant information, creating a contrast between the institution’s formal adherence to fact-finding and impartiality and a markedly different reality on the ground. League inquiry is better understood if it is not strictly considered at face value, not as a fact-finding instrument but rather as an instrument of diplomacy and the interwar international order. Frequently it served as a safety valve, allowing a greater degree of flexibility to respond to an escalating conflict or a sensitive cross-border issue.
The transformation of the concept of self-determination to a principle to be applied in international politics in the first half of the twentieth century gave rise to several key practices that have shaped the field of international relations. This chapter discusses the recasting of self-determination to an instrument of international politics during the Great War and its immediate aftermath. It focusses on the Victorian underpinnings of the liberal understanding of self-determination that came to be associated with Wilsonianism and explains how the concept of self-determination became one of the key regulatory principles of international politics in the dawn of the interwar period. By focussing on Anglophone debates on national questions and the transformation of the Habsburg and, crucially, the Ottoman imperial space, this chapter assesses the application of ‘self-determination’ as a method to assuage national questions and stabilise international affairs.
The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the use of chemical weapons was cause for indignation at international fora, including the League of Nations, but while Italy was sanctioned for its invasion, no sanctions were imposed in response to the use of gas. Chemical weapons had been outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which Italy and Ethiopia had both ratified. This chapter addresses the League’s inaction, and demonstrates how Ethiopian delegates instrumentalised the international discourse condemning chemical weapons in an effort to claim full statehood and protection under the Geneva Protocol, using the League of Nations’ own legal instruments and norms. In other words, the chemical weapons discourse was used as an instrument of international order. In the fluidity of interbellum international order, Italy and Ethiopia sought to create certainty about which states were full members and which were not. By using chemical weapons, Italy upheld the distinction between colonial conquest and civilised interstate warfare and the prohibition of gas in the latter, but not in the former. As a member state of the Geneva Protocol, Ethiopia was able to challenge this understanding more effectively than colonised peoples had been able to before, and to affirm its understanding of international order as rule-based, equal and universal. Ethiopia’s liminality as a semi-sovereign state unable to receive protections under the Geneva Protocol demonstrated the interwar international society’s own liminality, on the threshold between Eurocentrism and universalism.
This chapter charts the growth and decline of American colonial drug diplomacy efforts by examining the role of the Philippines in the multilateral summits on drug control and interim negotiations during the first half of the twentieth century. Having taken control of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States ended the Spanish monopoly system on opium and in 1905 prohibited all recreational sale and use of opiates and cocaine. The subsequent failure of colonial authorities to contain the flow of illicit narcotics into the Philippines resulted in the United States successfully reframing international drug control as an international responsibility rather than a quixotic imperial undertaking. Through multilateral summits, the United States sought to convince foreign producer and manufacturing states of the need to restrict exports of drugs to countries permitting their entry and to work towards restricting their use to medical purposes, thus establishing an international drugs regulatory regime. The outcome of these summits represented a victory for the transnational movement against the opium trade, largely driven by Protestant missionary influences. Following the First World War, the drugs regulatory regime was solidified with the 1925 Geneva Convention. This nascent regime was not without conflict, however. As signatories to these agreements, the United States and the United Kingdom eventually had to end the sale of opium in their own possessions and take action against international trafficking. Begun in order to enforce colonial policy, American interwar efforts ended up shifting towards a focus on drug control in the metropole.
The institutions and impact of the League of Nations have been the subject of extensive analysis by historians in recent years and yet despite this, one of its primary institutions – the Assembly – has yet to receive serious attention. This chapter intends to begin to redress this by demonstrating that the Assembly served a crucial role within what became known as the Geneva system, becoming its most publicly visible manifestation as a result of a process of coordinated decision-making. It will show that media oversight of the Assembly was actively built into its function and explores how this oversight impacted the diplomatic practices of delegates to this body. Through this, this chapter will not only highlight the function of the Assembly in its broader context but will explore how diplomats at the League engaged with concepts such as public opinion and transparency in their day-to-day work. Finally, it will also argue that, as practices evolved to rely on displays of transparency, the Assembly quickly became a unique point of convergence between open and secret diplomacy, allowing diplomats to become practitioners of both without overt contradiction.
This book explores a set of diplomatic practices and principles that shaped international politics during the first half of the twentieth century. By considering these instruments as historical constructions serving various political ends, the chapters show how internationalists interacted with traditional diplomatic actors, thus blending new and old forms of diplomacy. To illustrate this process, the authors draw on a range of new archival evidence and consider understudied actors and venues, from Ethiopian diplomats to the League of Nations Assembly. What connects them is their attention to the ways in which internationalists sought to solve international problems at an international level by infiltrating established institutions at the highest level of political decision-making.
In the first half of the twentieth century, world politics underwent a profound transformation, as foreign policy was democratised, ambitious attempts to build lasting peace and prosperity through international organisation were launched, public diplomacy and education in international relations became widespread and much else. This book offers a new look at this transformation – often told as the story of the eclipse of the ‘old’ diplomacy by the ‘new’ – by showing how these new international practices and principles came to be shared by traditional diplomats and internationalist newcomers alike, blending new and old forms of diplomacy. The introduction outlines the key themes of the book. Starting from the historical rhetoric of ‘instruments’, it explains key terms and concepts. Second, it reviews recent historiography as well as scholarship in International Relations and related fields to contextualise the book. Finally, it provides an overview of the chapters and teases out some common threads, focussing on the ways in which internationalists sought to solve international problems at an international level by interacting with established institutions at the highest level of political decision making.
The foundation of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) was celebrated as a cornerstone for a new international order after 1918. Article 14 of the Covenant gave the PCIJ a double function ‘to hear and determine any dispute of international character’ as well as to ‘give an advisory opinion upon any dispute or question referred to by the Council or by the Assembly’. The second clause contained a novel instrument for an international court, that of the advisory opinion. It empowered the newly founded League of Nations (LoN) to initiate the advisory jurisdiction and thus opened new ways in which the court could shape international politics. The chapter will explore the advisory jurisdiction during the interwar period and examine not only how the LoN used the PCIJ’s new function but also how the PCIJ adopted its new role in international politics. The experimental character of the advisory opinion will be the focus of this chapter. It first examines how the drafters imagined the new instrument of an advisory opinion to work as part of the court’s procedure. A second part discusses various examples of PCIJ’s advisory opinions by examining the motives of the LoN to use this new tool and how the PCIJ dealt with the new task. A third part highlights the scope and limitations of the advisory jurisdiction. The chapter shows that the advisory jurisdiction was a popular instrument used to resolve conflicts at an early stage but also demonstrates the PCIJ’s reluctancy to adopt its new function.
This chapter argues that the League of Nations, claiming to be the first universal world organisation, had a decisive and enduring impact on the conceptualisation and practices of the malleable yet timeless concept of state sovereignty. These concepts and practices, in turn, played an instrumental role in shaping the international order. While many historians have emphasised the supposedly globalised and shared sovereignty managed by the League, given the emergence of numerous transnational actors, nodes and networks around it, this chapter demonstrates the ongoing significance of the sovereign state concept and the recognition or dispute of sovereignty within the intergovernmental organisation’s operations. It does so through an analysis of recent research findings from various disciplines. The chapter shows that rather than limiting the model of the sovereign nation-state, the League standardised, strengthened, expanded and globalised it. The League became a tool through which certain claims for sovereignty were deemed legitimate while others were not, leading to the recognition of some entities as sovereign and the denial of sovereignty to others. Moreover, League interventions compelled states to defend their domestic sovereignty, thereby expanding, strengthening or refining their own roles and responsibilities. Furthermore, in some cases, national governments sought to utilise the League and its internationalist instruments to bolster their sovereignty.
This chapter analyses how instruments of imperial arms control were adapted to the international system of the interwar period and what their role was in maintaining racialised global hierarchies. The focus is on the question of how British authorities tried to categorise different kinds of weapons so that arms trade regulations could function as effective instruments of imperial control. First, I will show that colonial powers drew on colonial laws and practices from the pre-war era and inscribed them into the new international order with the aim of creating not only a European peace but a global one – yet a peace that meant to create and to reinforce the hierarchies between imperial powers and their colonial subjects. To reach this goal, the British government used race as a determining factor to categorise arms by linking them to spatial concepts. Second, I will argue that it was not so much the governments of the colonial powers who pushed for the integration of these instruments into the League of Nations agenda, but primarily liberal internationalists whose goal was the creation of internationally binding disarmament instruments.