By purpose and design The Cambridge History of International Law is situated at the forefront of the drive towards more global perspectives on the history of international law. This chapter accounts for the foundational choices and general architecture of the series. It does so by, first, surveying the broad outline of the evolution of the historiography of international law as an academic discipline since its first emergence in the latter half of the nineteenth century in terms of gradually overcoming the many self-imposed epistemological and mental constraints of the traditional state-centric and Eurocentric historiography. Second, the chapter assesses current methodological debates among historians of international law hailing from different disciplines – primarily law and history – within the broader contexts of general legal-history debates. The third section of the chapter indicates how the architecture of the series is purported to advance the agenda of the globalisation of the field, through a focus on the diverse histories of international law in various regions of the world.

This chapter narrates a history of the history of international law as a species of European historical jurisprudence born of the nineteenth century. It connects this historical jurisprudence with a wider atmosphere of historicism and its intellectual antecedents and descendents, including (but not limited to) so-called ‘progress narratives’. It argues that the history of international law in this specific sense largely vanished after the Second World War, and the history of international law underwent two distinct rebirths: as part of the anti-colonial legal arguments repudiating the colonial structures and presuppositions of international legal thought, and as part of a critique of a renewed historicism and civilisational progressivism between 1989 and the present. But the second revival of the history of international law coincided with emergent histories of empire, international history, histories of international political thought and global history. The result is an exploding field of scholarship with objects and subjects of many kinds connected to the international and the global and their laws, institutions and practices.

In one way or another, each of these teachers in the quotes above is grappling with the role of theory and how best to employ it in their teaching to assist their students to better understand the cultural complexity of the world in which they live. By ‘cultural complexity’, I am primarily referring to that derived from the ethnic diversity now characteristic of school communities in migrant-based nations, such as Australia. This, of course, is evident on a global scale with increasing migration, both voluntary and forced leading to the rapid transformation of national populations. Diversification through migration is more prevalent in some countries than others. But, with global flows of people occurring alongside that of information, goods, services and capital, aided by digital technologies and the speed of, and easier access to, travel, nowhere remains impervious to the forces of globalisation and the cultural complexity that results. Such rapid and complex change is difficult to comprehend, but its effects are so far-reaching that now, more than ever, there is a need for the appropriate conceptual resources to better navigate its impact.

For millennia, health and disease have shaped human society in profound and fundamental ways. While events such as the Justinian Plague and ‘Black Death’ decimated the European populations in the sixth and fourteenth centuries respectively, arresting urban development and impacting the relationship between church and state, the introduction of European and African diseases into Latin America is believed to have caused the deaths of up to 90 per cent of some of the continent’s indigenous populations. Biological weapons used during World War I led to international moratoriums on their use, even as more recent ‘naturally occurring’ events extending from the 2003 SARS outbreak, the 2013–16 West African Ebola outbreak and the COVID-19 pandemic have had widespread social, economic and political impacts.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the contemporary political debates surrounding globalisation. It illustrates the main features of protests against the social consequences of a globalised economy, and it identifies some of the key political issues that scholars and students of International Relations must face when addressing the promotion of justice and effective governance within a more densely connected world.

This chapter makes three main arguments. First, ideas and practices of diplomacy have a multi-millennial history – much longer than is generally thought. Second, this long history has been characterised by both continuity and change. As a result, diplomacy has been as much adaptive as resistant to change. And third, that diplomacy is not diminishing in importance. To assess these claims, the chapter first addresses the issue of defining diplomacy, before examining the evolution of diplomacy in terms that may be characterised broadly as pre-modern, modern and postmodern. Finally, the chapter evaluates the relationship between diplomacy and the study of international relations.

This chapter offers an account of postmodernism. It begins by drawing a distinction between two broad approaches to the postmodern: one that outlines the contours of a new historical period (postmodernity), and another that places emphasis on finding new ways of understanding modern practices of knowledge and politics (postmodernism). The second part of the chapter examines how postmodern ideas entered international relations scholarship, and how ensuing contributions continue to reveal important insights up to the present day. Defining postmodernism is no easy task. Postmodern scholarship is characterised more by diversity than by a common set of beliefs. Add to this that the postmodern has become a very contentious label, which is used less by its advocates and more by polemical critics who fear that embracing postmodern values would throw us into a dangerous nihilist void. But while the contours of the postmodern will always remain elusive and contested, the substantial issues that the respective debates have brought to the fore are important enough to warrant attention.

The debate about whether state or non-state players have primacy has been a major preoccupation for International Relations researchers. This chapter argues the key is not so much to determine which players are dominant, but how they interact to produce the prevailing order. The 1985 book Bringing the State Back In declared the return of the state for international politics and political economy (Evans et al. 1985). This chapter argues instead for bringing state–society relations ‘back in’ to the centre of what makes international relations.

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.

This chapter introduces the principal actor in international relations: the sovereign state. First, it defines the state. Second, it explores the origins of the state in the transition from the medieval to the modern world. Third, it examines the concept of sovereignty, especially as it was articulated in early modern political thought. Fourth, it surveys different historical explanations of how the sovereign state triumphed over alternative forms of political society. Finally, it outlines some of the continuing debates about the modern state.

This chapter, written by a founder of the field and a historian with a long-term interest in DOHaD, examines the key (long) decade in the history of DOHaD, bookended by two conferences: one in 1989 and the other in 2003. At the 1989 workshop, David Barker presented his retrospective epidemiological research to an audience of fetal physiologists and clinicians. Discussions about the plausibility and underlying mechanisms of Barker’s findings fostered new research collaborations, methodologies, and projects, which over the next decade produced a new field. By 2003, DOHaD had grown sufficiently in both numbers and ambitions to host a major global conference. This chapter argues that to understand the objectives, methods, research questions, and intellectual networks making the field of DOHaD, the reactions that it provoked, and how it responded to them, we must understand the historical and geographical context in which it was created, first in Europe, especially the United Kingdom, and then globally. Here we identify and explain three key drivers that shaped the field: interdisciplinarity, the history of social class and attempts to address health inequalities in the United Kingdom, and the globalisation of the 1990s informing the intellectual underpinnings of the global health agenda.

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.

Cities are contact zones characterised by conviviality of cultures. They have been described as the ideal setting for multilingual utopias, where institutional spaces emerge that cultivate multilingualism. In the context of globalisation and super-diversity, cities can redefine themselves as post-national spaces. Neoliberalism embraces diversity for its profitablity value; it is opposed by notions of the right to the city and local citizenship. Critical social and sociolinguistic theory embraces definitions of identity, community and language that recognise the dynamics of multiple components in individuals' repertoires of features and networks of practice. Traditional notions of identity, belonging, commuity and language give way to an appreciation of the fluidity of forms of belonging and networking practice. Diasporas are understood as translocal networks of practice with multiple expressions of belonging. Manchester as an early industrial city offers an interesting setting to observe the evolution of diaspora communities and their alignment with fluid language practices.

This chapter explores male homoerotic desire, whether idealised, romanticised, visualised or physically enacted. Male homoerotic practices and relations have sometimes been structured around notions of difference between two males who were thought to be respectively masculine and feminine, active and passive, free and slave, or older and younger. The last pairing was particularly important in classical European antiquity where it was, typically, regarded as compatible with heterosexual marriage and reproduction. This should alert us to the fact that many societies across the globe have not viewed male homoerotic relations according to the set of sexualised identities that emerged from nineteenth century western medical science, and which have since been contested by gay liberationists and queer activists. Western imperial practice has produced an abundance of evidence concerning the legal and religious regulation of ‘sodomy’. This invites comparison with records from other cultures which have often been, in their various ways, more positive in their attitudes to same-sex desire. The chapter, therefore, includes a consideration of globally diverse patterns of male homoerotic relations that acknowledges the complexity of cultural responses to same-sex desire.