This article offers a new perspective on 'buffer states'-states that are geographically located between two rival powers-and their effect on international relations with a particular focus on the imperial setting. The paper argues that such geographic spaces have often been analysed through a structuralist-functionalist lens, which has in some cases encouraged ahistorical understandings on the role of buffer states in international affairs. In contrast, the article offers an approach borrowing from the literature on ontological security and critical geopolitics in order to access the meanings that such spaces have for their more powerful neighbours. The paper draws upon the case study of Afghanistan and Anglo-Afghan relations during the nineteenth century and finds that in this case, due to the ambiguity of Afghanistan's status as a 'state', and the failure of British policy-makers to establish routinized diplomatic engagement, Anglo-Afghan relations exhibited a sense of ontological insecurity for the British. These findings suggest previously unacknowledged international effects of 'buffer states', and may apply to such geographic spaces elsewhere.
As of the first week of February 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in over two million people dead across the globe. This essay argues that in order to fully understand the politics arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to focus on the individual and collective experiences of death, loss, and grief. While the emerging scholarly discourse on the pandemic, particularly in political science and international relations, typically considers death only in terms of its effects on formal state-level politics and as a policy objective for mitigation, we argue that focusing on the particularities of the experience of death resulting from COVID-19 can help us fully understand the ways in which the pandemic is reordering our worlds. Examining the ambiguous sociopolitical meaning of death by COVID-19 can provide broader analytical comparisons with other mass death events. Ultimately, the essay argues that centering the impact of the pandemic on the experience of death and loss directly poses the question of how politics should value human lives in the post-pandemic world, helping us better formulate the normative questions necessary for a more ethical future.
This article seeks to add to the exploration and development of Imperial History's contribution to the discipline of International Relations (IR). Focusing on British perceptions of Afghanistan in the period preceding the first Anglo-Afghan war the article considers colonial knowledge as a source of identity construction, but in a manner that avoids deploying anachronistic concepts, in this case that of the Afghan 'state'. This approach, which draws on the insights brought to IR by historical sociology, shows that engaging with Imperial History within IR can encourage a more reflexive attitude to core disciplinary categories. This not only reveals alternative approaches to the construction of specific political communities but it also allows for a more historicist mode in the use of history by IR as a discipline. Furthermore, by moving away from material based purely on diplomatic history, Afghanistan's imperial
Despite a vibrant literature on the intellectual lifeworlds of anti-colonial international thought, the development of the formal study of International Relations in postcolonial states is frequently described as derivative of European or American practices. In India a privileging of the moment of India's independence in 1947 has obscured pre-independence literature and sustained the notion that the origins of Indian 'IR' were atheoretical, utilitarian, or simply absent. This paper challenges this understanding by playing closer attention to deeper intellectual lineages of Indian international thought and their institutionalization through the League of Nations Societies in India and the Indian Council of World Affairs -India's first independent international affairs think tank. Drawing upon archival material and postcolonial theory the article shows how Indian intellectuals and activists knowingly navigated the epistemic terrain of international thought, frequently discussing the 'international' as a realm of instruction allowing India to escape the constraints that imperialism had foisted upon Indian intellectuals: a 'pedagogy of internationalism'. Rather than standing apart from the world, Indian international affairs thinking was part of a global shift towards the sytematization of knowledge, a process driven not just by states, but by international organizations and globally connected think tanks.
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