A Conceptual History of International Relations

In CHOIR (A Conceptual History of International Relations) we investigate taken-for-granted concepts of international relations. We start from the assumption that concepts such as international, diplomacy, foreign policy, war and peace are not neutral and natural, but that they have emerged at specific times, for specific purposes and with specific connotations. The concepts through which we approach the world are not neutral analytical ones, but fundamentally political ones. The project has already delivered a monograph on foreign policy (in Norwegian) and a number of analyses of diplomacy. The main goal of CHOIR is to write the first conceptual history of international relations. CHOIR starts from the assumption that the political vocabulary changed fundamentally between 1750 and 1850. This is the period when it became possible to think systematically about what we today refer to as the international. Additionally, this was a period where political hierarchies were established, and through the project, we will investigate if and how hierarchies of gender and civilisation were written into the basic concepts of international relations. Another common assumption is that the central concepts of international relations have the same meaning across languages. We believe this to be wrong. CHOIR will thus also investigate how central concepts were translated to languages beyond English and French. CHOIR is conducted by an international team of closely cooperating researchers, covering different concepts and languages. Due to the Corona pandemic, the first project years (2019-22) consisted mainly of digital meetings and research on digitised source material, and to be able to finalise our research, the project period has been extended to the summer of 2025. 2023 has been the first year of normal project progress, with a combination of project workshops and conference presentations, geared at generating new ideas, disseminate knowledge within the discipline and develop finalised manuscripts for publication. Some outputs have already been published with top presses, while a number of others have been accepted for publication in top journals or by top publishers.

CHOIR is the first systematic approach to writing a conceptual history of international relations. It starts from the premise that we know the world through the concepts we employ when thinking and talking about it, but that these concepts are not neutral, nature-given signifiers of a world just waiting to be understood, they have emerged at specific times, for specific purposes and with specific connotations. Taking them for granted leads to misguided historical analyses, where the past is read in light of the present, and to a naturalisation of our present understanding of the conceptual building-blocks of global politics, making us relate uncritically to the world around us. CHOIR challenges this approach, asking how and when our modern world of international relations became conceivable, how "the international" and international relations as we know them emerged? Where existing approaches to the emergence of international relations have focused on emergence of a world which is recognisable from our current perspective, CHOIR will focus on how such a world became thinkable. It will do so first by focusing on how the conceptual language of international relations was established/transformed in the period 1750-1850. Thereafter, challenging the assumption that concepts have immanent meaning, it will explore with what meanings the concepts of international relations were translated into different linguistic communities. Underlying the entire project is the question of hierarchies, how and to what extent the key concepts of international relations became gendered and civilizational? CHOIR will draw on existing methods from domestic conceptual history and studies of relevant concepts. By applying them to international relations, it will contribute to the research front in historical and theoretical international relations, providing important innovation in how the international is thinkable.