Benjamin de Carvalho

The Big Bangs of IR: The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648 and 1919

International relations as we know them emerged through the peace of Westphalia, and the discipline of International Relations emerged in 1919 and developed through a First Great Debate between idealists and realists. These are the established myths of 1648 and 1919. In this article we demonstrate how historical and historiographical scholarship has demolished these myths, but that the myths regardless are pervasive in the current textbooks that are used in teaching future IR scholars. Disciplinary dialogue seems to have failed completely. Based on a detailed reading of the myths and their perpetuation, we discuss the consequences of the discipline’s reliance on mythical origins, why there has been so little incorporation of revisionist insight and what possibilities there are for enhancing the dialogue.

Chronicle of a Frustration Foretold? The Implementation of a Broad Protection Agenda in the United Nations

Although the Protection of Civilians (PoC) today is now loosely embedded in the UN system as a whole, a number of issues remain to be addressed at the institutional level for PoC to inform a shared culture of protection. These include a conceptual clarification of whether protection activities are the mission’s mandate per se or a mere part of its many tasks. If PoC is only one of many tasks, what is the raison d’etre of peacekeeping missions? At headquarter level, two main challenges remain. How can PoC become part of a shared interagency culture, rather than remaining the sole prerogative or task of OCHA without thereby losing its institutional momentum, and how can UN DPKO take greater ownership to PoC without narrowing it down to mere physical protection? The process of implementation thus far shows that there is a risk that the rising primacy of a narrow conception of PoC – largely consistent with that held by military segments of peacekeeping – will be institutionalized at the expense of the broad concept advocated by OCHA. Finally, there needs to be clearer institutional mechanisms for learning from experience. As of today, the reporting from the field is largely lost to those drafting resolutions.

Sovereignty and Solidarity: Moral Obligation, Confessional England, and the Huguenots

This article addresses the question of the emergence of sovereignty and moral obligation through a study of the Protestant English state and its relations with and policies towards the French Huguenots in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The authors take as their starting point the fact that the emergence of sovereignty in early-modern England was made possible by the consolidation of a confessional identity, and therefore cannot be divorced from the religious politics of the time. Their argument, based on such a historical reading of the gradual enforcement of territorial sovereignty and the simultaneous practices of solidarity with ‘outsiders’ beyond territorial boundaries, is that moral obligation played a role in the formation of English sovereignty, rather than being entirely exogenous to the process. This gives the authors reason to reconsider the relationship between moral obligation and sovereignty. The case demonstrates how the emergence of sovereignty led to the expansion of moral obligations rather than their narrowing. The main contribution of the article is to question commonplace assumptions about sovereignty and moral obligation, and to offer an avenue along which to re-think how one accounts for the emergence of sovereignty in the early-modern era and beyond.

The Confessional State in International Politics: Tudor England, Religion, and the Eclipse of Dynasticism

Whilst religion and collective identity have become issues of central concern to international relations scholars, dynastic concerns and national interests still dominate their analyses of early modern international politics. This analysis contributes to the constructivist emphasis on collective identity to foreign policy by examining Tudor England in light of the concept of confessionalisation. Based on the recent historiography of Tudor England, this analysis demonstrates the importance of religion in defining not only the collective identity of international actors, but also their foreign policies, choice of alliances, and, more generally, their international outlook. Through such a lens, it seeks to draw analyses of the confessional state away from their focus on domestic state formation to the “external” dimension of confessionalisation and its importance for international politics.

Training in Vain? Bottlenecks in Deploying Civilians for UN Peacekeeping

UN peacekeeping missions suffer from cumbersome recruitment processes, high vacancy rates and a shortage of civilian staff. This article explores the bottlenecks hampering the recruitment and deployment of trained personnel, especially civilians. Paradoxically, an increased number of trained personnel has not translated into higher deployment rates. Individual factors and structural bottlenecks together accounted for half of the non-deployments. Of the latter, the informal nature of the UNs recruitment system and the central role played by personal contacts stands out. The article makes the case for an improved link between the recruitment architecture of the UN and its training programmes, and a significant overhaul of the UN recruitment architecture per se. Unless the UN and international training programmes address this paradox, the risk of training in vain will remain.

Moral authority and status in International Relations: Good states and the social dimension of status seeking

We develop scholarship on status in international politics by focusing on the social dimension of small and middle power status politics. This vantage opens a new window on the widely-discussed strategies social actors may use to maintain and enhance their status, showing how social creativity, mobility, and competition can all be system-supporting under some conditions. We extract lessons for other thorny issues in status research, notably questions concerning when, if ever, status is a good in itself; whether it must be a positional good; and how states measure it.

Reforms, Customs and Resilience

In 2000, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, a resolution which highlighted the role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, peace negotiations, peace-building, peacekeeping, humanitarian response and post-conflict reconstruction. It further stressed the importance of their equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security. This resolution propelled the formation of other resolutions on women, peace and security that focus particularly on women’s security in conflict and post-conflict situations (S/RES/1820, S/RES/1888, S/RES/1889, S/RES/1960, S/RES/2106, S/RES/2122). Championing these initiatives as well as in their wake, there has been an increasing focus on the women-conflict nexus in research and policy work.1 However, this body of work has come partly at the expense of a focus on the effects of these resolutions ‘on the ground’ in ongoing peace-building processes. The current chapter is an attempt at remedying that.

Shooting War: International Relations and the Cinematic Representation of Warfare

To Western societies today, warfare is primarily a mediated phenomenon. Thus, as we as ordinary citizens of Western societies no longer have the experience of warfare, yet consider it an integral part of our identity and politics in our attempts to civilise the rest of the world, the mediated re p resentation of warfare takes on a particular significance. As the two articles in the present exchange argue, the articulation of official discourses on warfare and international politics cannot be properly understood without analysing their representations in popular culture, and the role played by these in the construction of the collective memory of these events. Thus, the argument in the present exchange is not about whether popular culture is relevant to IR, but about how it is relevant, and how it shapes discourses about international politics. Our argument is that movie narratives tend to exclude politically and ethically contested issues and perspectives, in favour of more personalised and intimate renditions of warfare. The collective aspects of warfare are thus lost, and the war movie re p roduces a ‘depoliticised’ and amoral imagery of warfare and the international. As such, they tend to re p roduce dominant notions of the international in IR as a space in which the contested character of warfare remains larg e l y ____________________

Brazil — A New Global Energy Player and Partner for the EU?

According to recent International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates, Brazil is on the verge of becoming a new global energy player. In 2015, it is likely to become a net oil exporter and one of the top ten producers of oil globally. Further, Brazil is predicted to be the world’s sixth-largest oil producer by 2035, and its biofuels exports could account for some 40 per cent of the trade in global biofuels. However, in order to play this role, the country will have to overcome several technological and governance-related hurdles that have delayed the development of its giant offshore discoveries.