If the arguments in favour of historicism are so compelling, why does historicism have such relative difficulty in gaining a strong foothold, even after decades of the historical turn? This conclusion chapter focuses the structural constraints historicism faces in IR in particular and the social sciences in general. It first discusses why IR’s particular American origins as a discipline (as well the continued domination of US standards in the evaluation of IR scholarship globally) makes it difficult for historicist calls such as the one advanced by this volume to resonate in the wider discipline. It also argues, however, that the problem will not be solved automatically as American influence in the discipline and the world decreases. Approaches to IR hailing from other parts of the world have their own motivations to reject historicism even as they seem to care more about history than US based approaches. Historicism needs to be realistic about the obstacles it faces.

Before developing the argument of the book, this chapter gives an overview of the contexts where combat drones have been deployed as a basis for the study. The description of the contexts in which drone operations have been conducted extraterritorially against non-state actors by the US, the UK, and France follow a chronological sequence, and draw some general common and diverging features of the different legal rationales crafted by these states.

The so-called ‘civil police’ which originated in London and then spread to the US and the rest of the world has been a crucial institution for maintaining the international order. This is because the civil police, unlike the army, is a coercive regime meant for ‘citizens’ rather than ‘foreigners’ or ‘subjects’. The civil police regulates ‘domestic’ space, while the military is oriented to ‘foreign’ or ‘international’ space. This essay examines the origins of this important institution in the United Kingdom and the United States and reveals its colonial genealogy. The first civil police, the London Metropolitan Police, founded in the nineteenth century, was modelled after a colonial counter-insurgency force, the Irish Constabulary. In the United States, the civil police was initially modelled after the London police but later, in the early twentieth century, appropriated a series of techniques and tactics from America’s colonial regime in the Philippines. The strategic operation of both civil police institutions has been to draw upon the colonial site while covering up its colonial counter-insurgency and militaristic origins.

Hybrid warfare is a widely interpreted and highly contested concept and also a label for opponents and targets in conflict or competition in international relations. It is often projected as being something underhand undertaken by the other, however, this chapter examines the conceptual and operational history of Western hybrid warfare. This refers to creating suitable environmental conditions in the information and cognitive domain as a means to subvert a target government and bring about regime change.

The technological evolution currently being experienced globally, comes with a tremendous number of different advanatages. However, there are also new threats and vulnerabilities that are being exposed that can adversely affect national security. This is evident in the social media environment. Therefore, the current research needs to focus on understanding the balance between pros and cons in a pragmatic way to understand the actual and potential impacts (physical and psychological) on society.

Chapter three concerns the role and influence of politics and other intangible elements in modern warfare. This is taken from a historical perspective with the philosophy of great military strategy thinkers such as Sun Tzu, Niccolo Macchiavelli and Carl von Clausewitz, and the influence of their ideas on the contemporary information war battlefield that runs parallel to physical wars.

The relationship between imperialism and international organizations is a close one. This chapter charts three stages in this relationship since the early nineteenth century: first, the use of international organizations as a means of coordinating imperialism and containing or, preferably, preventing inter-imperial conflict; second, the global expansion of international organizations as a means of stratifying polities initially via a ‘standard of civilization’ and, later, through quotients of ‘modernization’; and third, the use of international organizations as a means for various forms of interventionism. Taken together, these three stages mark a shift from a limited realm of international organization to a virtually universal condition of international administration. Over the past two centuries, the rationale and competences of international organizations have been reconfigured, rearticulated and redistributed. This narrative demonstrates that international organizations in particular, and forms of international administration in general, owe core aspects of their origins, development and legacies to imperialism.

The reason and motivation behind researching and writing the book is presented, along with a description of the individual chapter content. A series of research questions are posed, with the intended purpose and role of bringing together the diverse content and analysis that is presented across the chapters.

There are different generations of information warfare that evolve with technological, (geo)political and economic changes occuring in society. They are a ’convenient’ means of covert and indirect engagement with another actor in international relations while exposing oneself to the minimum of risk and accountability. It is linked to the popularized international relations concept of hybrid warfare.

This chapter identifies the notion of the International as the core concept of the inter- (nation) state system, which had so far defined the disciplinary knowledge of IR. It argues that Euro-centricity of the disciplinary knowledge of IR is closely connected to this inter-state-centred notion, which had become ‘a-colonial’ and ‘apolitical’, and that an historical unearthing of its neglected colonial legacies is crucial for globalizing this knowledge. The chapter, therefore, pays an attention to neglected imperial polities, and suggests two ways for retrieving them. First, it suggests the framing of inter-imperial/inter-colonial, which could capture complex lateral relationships across diverse forms of imperial polities, and which had otherwise been missed by the framing of inter-national. Second, it locates colonial policy studies in the genealogy of IR in Japan, and suggests its ambiguous legacy for the disciplinary knowledge of IR after World War II in Japan, and possibly beyond.

The goal of detecting future events has several implications and two of them are explored in this chapter. First, the objective of detecting future events means that whoever poses a threat has to be targeted and if the threat is posed by a number of individuals that increases over time, enmity is extended to those individuals. This is true even if they act in the name of a terrorist group that did not exist when the conflict started. From a legal perspective, this practice is facilitated by the uncertainties related to the temporal delineation of conflicts. Second, the objective of addressing future threats entails to act against individuals who are not presently perpetrating hostile acts. This practice requires that the traditional interpretation of direct participation in hostilities be subjected to a temporal change. Instead of suspending the protection of civilians solely when ‒ and only for such time as ‒ they engage in acts that reach a certain threshold of harm, targeting enemies because of the threat they pose for the future means extending direct participation in hostilities not only to preparatory acts, but also to signs revealing membership to an enemy group. This shift is facilitated by the insufficiently defined notion of “continuous combat function.”

In his seminal work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon develops a micro-sociology of colonial society. He characterizes the latter as a world divided in two, one for the colonizers and one for the colonized. In many former colonies such enforced racial or ethnic segregation has become a thing of the past. Yet, the socio-spatial arrangements described by Fanon re-emerge in contemporary zones of conflict, where they are recreated as security measures intended to separate the protagonists of international peace and development from the threats posed by contentious local populations. Based on ethnographic field research in Kabul in 2015, this contribution analytically pursues these structural resemblances. The aim, however, is not to make a (cheap) argument about the neo-colonial character of global humanitarianism, but to investigate the significance of this particular presence of the past for a sociology of world society.