30 novJack Snyder (Columbia University), « Religion and IR Theory », Tuesday November 2nd 2010

Jack Snyder (Columbia University)

Since September 11, 2001, religion has become a central topic in discussions about international politics. And yet the standard works of US international relations theory, which continue to shape much academic research, hardly mention religion. A handful of new works by young US international relations scholars have begun to fill this gap. The best of this new work is represented in Religion and International Relations Theory, edited by Jack Snyder, forthcoming from Columbia University Press in March 2011. Snyder’s overview of the project will focus on four approaches to integrating religion into theoretically-grounded international relations scholarship: (1) working within the traditional US paradigms of realism, liberalism, and social constructivism, (2) supplanting existing paradigms with a religion-centered theory, such as the “clash of civilizations” thesis, (3) analyzing secularisms as worldviews comparable to religions, and (4) treating religion as a variable in testable hypotheses about the causes of conflict international relations.

Discussant: Denis Lacorne (CERI)
CERI – Salle de conférences 5pm – 7pm

30 novErez Manela (Harvard University), “International Society as Historical Subject”, Tuesday June 2nd 2010

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