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ID:
150998
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| Summary/Abstract |
The standard of civilisation served Western states to hierarchically organise international politics and reproduce Western pre-eminence. Russia, depending on the historical period, has been interpreted as either an ardent follower or a major challenger to Western projects, but it has been markedly absent from debates regarding the standard. This article proposes to engage Russia in the standard of civilisation discussion with reference to the standard’s two most considered expositions: the colonial-era ‘original’ and what the literature interprets as the standard’s contemporary revival. In order to do so, I trace Russia’s nineteenth-century colonial practices and analyse Russia’s selected policies towards post-Soviet states in the post–Cold War period. On the basis of these explorations, I argue that Russia’s application of the standard of civilisation goes beyond the mere reproduction of hierarchical arrangements between an imagined centre and peripheries. The practices of the standard of civilisation have been employed to improve Russia’s desired, and imagined, status in international politics – that of a great power equal to the West. From that it follows that the concept of the standard of civilisation should be recognised as ordering relations not only of the strong and the weak but also of those in position of power in international politics.
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| 2 |
ID:
168397
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article studies the contentious problem of reification in international relations (IR) on the example of the idea of international society. It shows how the idea became reified, that is, how the move was made from approaching international society as one of several competing frameworks for the study of international politics to considering it an objective fact, a self-evident reality of international politics, and an entity in the possession of agency. For this purpose, I trace key writings of the English school and survey their contribution to the idea’s development and gradual reification. I posit that reification has been the outcome of individual strategies and disciplinary practices pertaining to the knowledge production process, in particular the perceived need to establish and maintain a research program while continuing to provide viable explanations of world events. In discussing the consequences, I argue that reification adversely affects not only research outcomes but also the study process. A reified category, once it becomes a default language through which to think and talk about international politics, narrows down avenues for diverging interpretations of international politics. Furthermore, endowing international society with agency hides real agents behind specific actions in international politics.
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