This overarching chapter offers a comprehensive overview on how history is dealt with in International Relations (IR) and presents a conceptual framework for the study of history in IR based on the concept of historicity. The chapter also makes the case why looking at imperialism – the cross-cutting theme addressed in every chapter in this book – is a particularly fruitful way for both tracing the role of history in international politics and making use of the concept of historicity. The chapter introduces in particular six modes of historicity which shape its core argument on the centrality of history for a better understanding and better analyses of international politics.

This opening chapter outlines the book’s central argument, evidence, and political economy approach. The book argues Muslim societies tend to be less democratic and more conflict prone on average. However, there is considerable variation within the Muslim world depending on how Islam was spread. Territories where Islam spread via military conquest developed institutions and practices that led to political regimes that made them more impervious to democracy and, in response to declines in rents, more prone to civil war. In contrast, societies in non-conquered territories – including some Muslim societies, such as Indonesia and Malaysia – developed governance structures that made them more susceptible to political (democratic) development; and where declines in rents provided opportunities for transitions to democracy. A central takeaway from this book is that neither Islam nor aspects of Muslim culture are the root causes of political violence in many contemporary Muslim societies. Rather, it is due to the institutional legacy of Muslim conquest and contemporary rent streams. By linking these two independent variables – conquest and rents – to patterns of political violence, the theory and empirics advanced contributes to rich literatures in institutional economics, historical legacies, international relations, and the resource curse.

The Soviet Union’s official ideology, Marxism-Leninism, was universal, aspiring to explain all humanity’s past and future. It claimed to be a science, applicable to social relations, economics, and international politics. Culture, religion, and traditional social structures, Marxism-Leninism taught, would be swept away by economic and social change. This was true in Soviet domestic politics, where "feudal" practices such as religion and patriarchy were supposed to be replaced by the Party and the State. It was also true, experts in Marxism-Leninism taught, in international politics, where class not culture would determine the future. In the 1970s, however, Soviet experts, analysts, and officials began to question the supposed irrelevance of culture, religion, and tradition. In foreign policy, culture seemed of enduring relevance in explaining how countries in Asia and Africa interacted with the Soviet Union. In domestic politics, "traditional structures" in regions like Central Asia and the Caucasus seemed to persist generations after Soviet power had been established. This paper traces Soviet and later Russian belief in the importance of cultural, ethnic, national, and civilizational factors in politics from the 1970s to the present via several influential intellectuals who drove the shift. It connects the rising Soviet belief in the importance of clashing civilizations to declining faith in Russia in universalistic politics in general. In the West, the Cold War’s end was associated with Francis Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis. In Russia, the Cold War’s demise corresponded with a rejection of Marxist-Leninist universalism and a new emphasis on cultural and civilizational difference.

The function of intervention, in this context, was to act as a corrective in international politics. Fundamental questions posed by this practice of intervention by force in the internal affairs of a sovereign state are addressed in Chapter 2, which locates them in the context of the Vienna order. What can be observed here is, first, the emergence of an anti-revolutionary paradigm of intervention, by means of which the ‘Holy Alliance’, made up of the continental powers Russia, Austria and Prussia, made a collective attempt to prevent and suppress internal unrest and revolutionary movements. Second, and in parallel to these efforts, the British struggle to suppress the Atlantic slave trade gave birth to a further-reaching conception of intervention centred on the military enforcement of an internationally agreed humanitarian norm.

The Conclusion returns to the idea of Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana pursuing a common ideological project. It will further explore the relationship between individual aspirant states and the international state system to draw conclusions about the nature of African self-determination and statehood. Finally, this book will end by looking at the afterlives of these four, how they are remembered, their ghost-like existence in cyberspace, and discuss the complicated legacies left by Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana.

Chapter 2 counters each of the policy arguments that have been mounted against the criminalisation of State acts of aggression, including arguments relating to uncertainties surrounding the prohibition of the use of force; that acts of aggression are too complex an episode for adjudication by a criminal tribunal; that the criminalisation of aggression will politicise the ICC; that there is a risk of a fragmentation of relevant rules of international law caused by differing decisions of the ICC, the UN Security Council, and the International Court of Justice; and claims that the criminalisation of acts of aggression will have a chilling effect on States’ willingness to use force when they should (namely, to prevent atrocity crimes). The dissection of such arguments demonstrates that each objection is misguided and sets out the case in favour of criminalisation. The chapter also assesses the geopolitical significance of the crime, considering the extent to which the criminalisation of the unlawful use of force represents a shift in the balance between power and law. Finally, the chapter examines the likely impact of the crime of aggression on the rules of the jus ad bellum.

The question of the treatment of the Steward Malvolio is one of the crucial interpretive issues in Twelfth Night, and the placement of audience compassion is central to the history of that debate. Recent readings focusing on the social function of laughter have reached diverging conclusions. Is Malvolio the legitimate victim of a ‘community of laughers’, or does laughter fail to achieve social correction and cohesion in the play? Elisabetta Tarantino argues that the play’s audience is expected to achieve a higher understanding of the motives why compassion may be granted or withheld by different groups of characters within the play. Reading the play in its international political context, she argues that the ambivalent representation of Malvolio is a central part of the play’s semantic strategy. On the basis of new intertextual evidence, she suggests that Twelfth Night addresses issues of community and compassion in a direct historical and political sense, with reference to the contemporary relationship between England and Europe.

In 1971 the Pakistan armed forces began a genocidal attack on the population of East Pakistan, igniting the Bangladesh Liberation War. The main thread is the violent struggle between the armed forces and local guerrilla fighters. But interwoven with this chronicle of national liberation are many other themes: the victimisation of specific groups (women, Hindus, ethnic minorities); local vendettas and the settling of personal scores; tensions between nationalists of different hues; regional variation in violence and destruction as well as in population displacement; and thousands of stories of personal courage and sacrifice. Equally important is the fact that the war was part of two larger geopolitical games: the rivalry between India and Pakistan and the struggle between Cold War superpowers.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the years which followed brought into play a new international imaginary launched with a flurry of inaugural gestures. These included the proclamation, by US President George Bush, of a ‘New World Order’ in 1991, the publication, by UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, of an Agenda for Peace in 1992,and, in the most triumphalist gesture of the three, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s invocation of the end of history. Many international legal scholars, too, applauded the beginning of a new post–Cold War world, no longer dominated by two rival superpowers. It was a moment widely thought to be full of new ‘global’, if not cosmopolitan, possibilities.

Chapter 4 – Global arenas of transformation – analyses how the transformation concept has been used to describe or advocate change towards sustainable development in international contexts. The chapter presents the development of the research field and provides an overview of how sustainability transformations have been approached in the news media in different parts of the world. Media texts also present a range of transformation goals that are of two types: those intended to prevent the risks of environmental degradation and human insecurity, and those that propose ideas on how to attain various sustainable futures. Finally, the chapter explores how sustainability transformations have been conceptualized in international politics, with particular focus on the variations in policy discourse in low–, middle–, and high-income countries, in Agenda 2030 and the Voluntary National Reviews of the Sustainable Development Goals as well as the Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement.