This study is primarily a diplomatic not a legal one, its object being to set the Berlin West African Conference of 1884–5 in its true relation to contemporary history. The importance of the conference as a landmark in international law, has in fact been exaggerated, for when its regulations are studied it can be seen that they all failed of their purpose. Free trade was to be established in the basin and mouths of the Congo; there was to be free navigation of the Congo and the Niger. Actually highly monopolistic systems of trade were set up in both these regions. The centre of Africa was to be internationalised. It became Belgian. Lofty ideals and philanthropic intentions were loudly enunciated by delegates of every country to the conference. Only the vaguest and most unsatisfactory resolutions were passed concerning the internal slave trade, the one humanitarian question of any importance to be discussed at its sittings; whilst the basin of the Congo, if not the Niger became subsequently, as everyone knows, the scene of some of the worst brutalities in colonial history.

Women defined and transformed the substance and practice of international relations as it emerged as a separate intellectual field examining the relations between peoples, empires, and states at the turn of the twentieth century. They engaged the international politics of their time in the context of diverse colonial and anticolonial struggles, inter-imperial wars and superpower rivalry, and nationalist, ideological, and political conflict. They addressed war, racial hierarchy and immigration, labor organization and world economy, colonial administration, foreign policy and diplomacy, international law and organization, religion and ethics, technological transformation, and environmental destruction. This wide-ranging work took many forms and genres and was produced in a variety of professional and intellectual contexts. It was well known and influential in its time. And, yet, examining the contemporary field of international relations, its history and scholars, it is as if this past had never existed, as if women had hardly lived, thought, and practiced as scholars, as advisors and policy makers, as journalists, and as public intellectuals. This anthology proves this conventional version of international relations history wrong.

History is traditionally concerned with the remote past. Today that’s no longer good enough. The world of the nineteen sixties is so different from that of even ten or twenty years ago that many people who’d have previously been quite unconcerned, today want to know how these changes have come about. It’s some indication of this interest in the recent past, that this year a new journal was launched, especially concerned with contemporary history. And this provides an opportunity to ask some searching questions. First and foremost, what do we mean by contemporary history?

The great lesson of the group process, in which all others are involved, is that particularism, however magnified, is no longer possible. There is no magic by which selfishness becomes patriotism the moment we can invoke the nation. The change must be this: as we see now that a nation cannot be healthy and virile if it is merely protecting the rights of its members, so we must see that we can have no sound condition of world affairs merely by the protection of each individual nation – that is the old theory of individual rights. Each nation must play its part in some larger whole. Nations have fought for national rights. These are as obsolete as the individual rights of the last century. What raises this war to a place never reached by any war before is that the Allies are not fighting for national rights. As long as history is read the contribution of America to the Great War will be told as America’s taking her stand squarely and responsibly on the position that national particularism was in 1917 dead.

It is right that, in a congress called upon to pronounce on peace, there should be at least one representative of black women. Since I am the only person present with a single drop of African blood in my veins, it is up to me to represent not only the women of color from the United States, but also the women of Africa and other black races.

Note: The following tentative course on International Relations has been prepared by Jessie W. Hughan, Ph.D., and Nicholas Kelley, of the Executive Committee. While the committee, in the short time at its disposal, was unable to prepare a course with any claim to scientific completeness, it yet seems advisable to suggest to the chapters some readings on the general subject of war and peace. International relations are not a part of Socialism, though the topics overlap to a great extent, and we believe that these relations can be logically approached only through the Socialist method of the economic interpretation of history.

A period of tumultuous flux like the one in which we are living poses grave problems for the government officials who must make policy decisions. For if the American people are led to feel that the officials have failed, as on the question of policy toward China, the verdict will be: “Off with their head” – figuratively, at least.

As you travel through the Saar district on the way from Berlin to Paris, it is difficult to realize that these lovely wooded hills are part of one of the densest industrial areas of Western Europe. Further on, as the railway runs through a chain of large industrial villages, tall chimneys and the smoke of blast furnaces appear, but even here there is enough woodland visible to make the Saar valley look quite different from any vista in England’s Black Country. ‘This’, the affable German gentleman sitting opposite will tell you, for no German is averse to giving information with perhaps a dash of propaganda thrown in, ‘is because the coal mines have always been government property, and so have the forests, and one is not allowed to spoil the other. See how German the country looks,’ he adds eagerly, ‘there can be no doubt of how the people will vote when the plebiscite is held.’ Certainly the country looks very German, with the trim little houses and stocky thick-set people. There are even plenty of the new German flags to be seen hanging from the windows, black, white and red, with here and there a swastika. All this is German enough but (if you have just left Germany) there seems to be something missing. Where are all the brown uniforms? ‘Forbidden by the Governing Commission,’ you will be answered gloomily, if you voice your question aloud. Whereupon it will be explained to you that here the Government is not German at all, it is run by the League of Nations.

This chapter starts with a discussion of the role played by verifiers in peace. We discuss some of the many types of verifiers, and how those whose roles are outside the formal political process can help to construct peace. Many of these have scientific or investigatory roles whose work informs the state of the world. There are interesting models in aviation, including not only the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) but also a variety of others including institutions dedicated to telemetry analysis and near miss analysis. We examine each and suggest how a cyber equivalent could contribute to our understanding of the state of the world, and in doing so, support peace.

Social science research on the aims and impacts of Chinese development finance remains in its infancy because Beijing shrouds its overseas portfolio of grants and loans in secrecy. This chapter introduces the Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF) methodology that the authors have developed to assemble a comprehensive dataset of Chinese aid and debt-financed development projects around the globe. It also provides an overview of previous attempts to quantify Chinese development finance, and explains how the authors’ methods and data are different from those of others. This chapter also tests whether an alternative approach—field-based data collection—might yield more useful and reliable re- sults. Drawing upon evidence from a “ground-truthing” exercise in Uganda and South Africa, the authors demonstrate that field-based and TUFF-based data collection methods produce similar results. However, the TUFF methodology is less vulnerable to detection bias and more readily scalable than field-based data collection.

Introduction

As the ink of the special issue on The Status of Law in World Society: Meditations on the Role and Rule of Law (Kratochwil, 2014) is barely dry (Peltonen and Traisbach, 2020), this chapter follows yet another invitation to engage with Friedrich Kratochwil’s seminal work in International Relations (IR) and International Law in celebration of his most recent monograph titled Praxis (Kratochwil, 2018). In this chapter, I turn to Kratochwil’s veritable gusto in performing academic interventions to explore the purpose and effect of his by now seminal practice of deeply engaging with the work of others by way of intertextual interaction. While some detect a certain ‘grumpiness’ (Welsh, 2020), this chapter argues that his academic interventions on IR theory and International Law, are of a notable game-changing quality. As the following will demonstrate, based on an agonistic reading of these interventions, this quality is characterized by two moves: firstly, a normative call for more critical engagement with the claims of other IR theorists, for ‘values and committing to them have to be an intrinsic concern for social analysis that cannot be sacrificed on the altar of scientific objectivity as otherwise we lose, so to speak, the “object” we are supposed to study’ (Kratochwil, 2020: 1); and secondly, the development of a practice-based approach to constructive critique through academic intervention. According to Kratochwil, this kind of practical engagement works best through praxis, which involves the practices of thoroughly scrutinizing and contesting the theoretical claims of others. This constructive critique in the social sciences is not value-free, to be sure, for ‘it makes at least prima facie sense to be sceptical about the possibility of a value-free “scientific” approach to problems of praxis since values are constitutive for our interests, and following rules is linked to “commitments” and the validity of norms, not to causality’ (Kratochwil, 2020: 1, emphasis added).

This chapter argues that throughout his academic career Kratochwil’s own scholarly action has been developed to a fine point. In the process, his repertoire for academic intervention has been constituted by the writings of those IR theorists whose work he finds to be misleading their readers, thereby often distorting the potential of the discipline.