International, Politics, Philosophy (IPP)

Erez Manela (Harvard University)

Scholars of international relations and law have been writing about international society for a while now, but historians, particularly in the United States, have been slow to adopt this term or wrestle with its implications. Though the field of international history has been experiencing a revival in the United States, with new work taking the field in exciting new directions, innovation has been coupled with disagreement and confusion about the changing shape of the field and its spatial, temporal, thematic, and methodological scope. This paper summarizes the debate about the state and direction of the field over the last several decades, outlines the state of the field today, and then attempts to show how reconceiving the field as the history of international society could help bring the numerous threads of recent developments into a coherent and common framework.

Discussants:
Karoline Postel-Vinay (CERI Sciences Po), Paul-André Rosental (Sciences Po-Centre d’Histoire)

Co-organized with Sciences Po Centre d’Histoire

CERI, salle du conseil 10.30 am – 12.30 pm

Martti Koskenniemi (University of Helsinki)
“International Law and Politics – What is Critical Method in Law?“

Discussants: Horatia Muir Watt (Sciences Po – Ecole de droit), Jerome Sgard (CERI)

The talk is co-sponsored by Sciences Po’s school of law (Ecole de droit)

Martti Kosekenniemi on « What’s the future of academia? »

Kate Nash (University of London)

Universalism in Practice: between the Law and Human Rights

Human rights are formally universal, applying equally to all human beings on the planet. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is also an attempt to make human rights universal in content, stipulating that they must apply to “Everyone…without distinction of any kind” (Article 2). Increasingly too, the principle of universal rights is becoming legal as well as moral, as international human rights law becomes more detailed and dense, especially through judgements made in courts, national and international. At the same time, however, the world continues to be organised into states that are territorially bounded and historically associated with struggles for democracy linked to sovereignty and nationalism. As they are legalised, human rights are increasingly positioned as ‘intermestic rights’, ‘in between’ national and international law. In practice (in part as a function of the proliferation of sites at which it is decided) law is uncertain and unpredictable with regard to enforcing human rights. Realising human rights ideals in practice will always be controversial; realising such ideals will never become simply a matter of ensuring the rule of law.

CERI
10.30 am – 12.30 pm
Salle de conférences

Milja Kurki (Aberystwyth University)

‘The normative and political dimensions of causal analysis’

Often the idea of causal analysis is separated from the analysis of normative issues and questions of moral and political responsibility, in IR and also in many circles in philosophy of social sciences. This tendency is generated by an unthinking acceptance and reproduction of a positivist fact-value distinction. When causal analysis is framed in non-positivist terms we can see not only that there is nothing a-normative or a-political about the analysis of causation, but also that complex issues arise concerning the exact relationship between the frameworks of causal analysis we use and our normative and political commitments. I will argue here that engaging in causal analysis is a deeply moral, normatively-loaded, and political matter, and moreover, that important issues are at stake in the kind of meta-theoretical frameworks we apply to causal analysis. Far from dismissing causal analysis as de-politicising, as has been the tendency in the interpretivist end of IR, we should recognise that it is around debates about causality, and frameworks of causal analysis, that much of the interesting moral and political debate in international relations takes place.

http://www.aber.ac.uk/interpol/en/research/MK%20project/Index.htm
CERI, 5-7 pm (salle de conférences rez-de-chaussée)

Christopher Bickerton (Oxford University)

Politics without Sovereignty :A Critique of Contemporary International Relations

CERI, salle de conférences 10.00 am – 12.00 pm

Frédéric Mérand (Université de Montréal)

Le monde selon Pierre Bourdieu : éléments pour une théorie sociale des relations internationales

Discutant et responsable scientifique : Bastien Irondelle (CERI)

CERI, salle de conférences, 10.00 am – 12.00 pm

Richard Price (University of British Columbia)

Moral Limit and Possibility in IR

At what point, if any, is one to reasonably concede that the ‘realities’ of world politics require compromise from cherished principles or moral ends, and how do we really know we have reached an ethical limit when we seen one? Since social constructivist analyses of the development of moral norms tell us how we get moral change in world politics, that agenda should provide insightful leverage on the ethical question of ‘what to do.’ This talk identifies contributions of the social constructivist research agenda in International Relations for theorizing moral limit and possibility in global political dilemmas, engaging in particular international political theory and critical IR theory, and questions of the relationship of normative and empirical scholarship in IR.

CERI 10 am -12 pm