Different units of international politics, such as states or the church, cannot be present in their entirety during international interactions. Political rule needs to be represented for international actors to coordinate their activities. Representants (i.e. maps, GDP, buildings, and diplomatic and warfare practices) establish collective understandings about the nature of authority and its configuration. Whilst representants are not exact replica, they highlight and omit certain features from the units they stand in for. In these inclusions and exclusions lies representants' irreducible effect. This book studies how representants define the units of the international system and position them in relation to each other, thereby generating an international order. When existing representants change, the international order changes because the units are defined differently and stand in different relations to each other. Power is therefore defined differently. Spanning centuries of European history, Alena Drieschova traces the struggles between actors over these representations.

‘In this historical tour de force, Drieschova details the four curial roles ‘representants' play in the formation of international order. She elegantly connects new materialism to International Relations, locating it at the core of the discipline's empirical and theoretical concerns.'

Anna Leander - Professor of International Relations and Political Science, Geneva Graduate Institute

‘Across time and space, practitioners work from a variety of social artifacts that stand in for and inscribe the international system, from maps to rankings through architecture. In a brilliant combination of practice theory and historical approach, Drieschova's path-breaking analysis throws much needed light on the politics of these ‘representants' in constituting changing forms of political authority and power constellations.'

Vincent Pouliot - James McGill Professor, Department of Political Science, McGill University