This article revisits Austria's migration history from the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War. Recent research has challenged the persistently commemorated welcoming Austrian attitude toward refugees who had been living under communism. The initial humanitarian efforts in 1956 and 1968, respectively, were remarkable. However, an analysis beyond the first weeks of both events reveals that (though to different degrees) public and political attitudes toward refugees took a negative turn. Throughout the 1970s, asylum for dissidents was portrayed as a continuation of the country's humanitarian tradition. However, in 1981, refugees from Poland were immediately perceived as unwanted labor migrants. In 1989/90, the scenario was similar: while the transiting East German refugees were welcomed, migrants from other countries (like Romania) were not. In the early 1990s, Austria decided on a reform of its asylum and foreigner policies. But when and why did the (supposedly welcome) refugees from countries under communist rule turn into unwelcome labor migrants? The analysis in this article explores the potential impact of the age of détente and the repercussions of the 1970s economic crises and the resulting end to active recruitment of foreign workers.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

[It] may be that never before in my life have I had to meet such a trial as I am undergoing today.

In contrast to other scientific renaissances, the culture forged in seventeenth-century Europe became an enduring phenomenon rather than dissipating within a few generations. In an effort to understand the persistence of European science, this article uses the case study of France under Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) to argue that men of letters played a crucial role in the legitimation of the nascent scientific movement. These men of letters enjoyed a social, intellectual, and aesthetic affinity with the “new science” and developed a narrative of scientific change that foregrounded the idea of a radical break with the past. They diffused this narrative among the cultural elite, mobilizing recent thinkers, discoveries, and scientific instruments as they participated in wide-ranging debates, regardless of whether they supported modern innovations or classical models. In so doing, they invented the narrative of a “scientific revolution,” a construction that has wielded a profound influence over the social and cultural history of European science.

Even as it passed its seventieth anniversary, the 1953 coup in Iran has remained a hotly debated political topic. This is true in the public spheres of Iran, which saw its last democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, overthrown in the coup, and in those of the United States and the United Kingdom, which helped stage the ouster. There also has been an attempt at historical revisionism about the coup, usually by overemphasizing the domestic factors that led to the coup and placing less importance on the role of the CIA or questioning Mossadeq's democratic credentials. This revisionism has been robustly rebutted by the scholarly community, which has held to a general consensus on the basic narrative of the coup: that it overthrew a popular leader and that it took place with significant interventions from London and Washington. The release of the final batch of US documents related to the coup in 2017 (following many years of undue delay) also bolstered evidence for this consensus. But, although most public debates about the coup center on questions such as the constitutional process of Mosaddeq's dismissal or the relative weight given to domestic and international actors behind the coup, there is another historiographical question that has been subject to widely divergent perspectives in the field: the relationship of the coup to the Cold War. In other words, can the 1953 coup be considered a Cold War confrontation, or is this a misleading frame of reference? Both sides of this argument have often focused on the motivations of coup plotters (mostly those in Washington, DC, and London) and whether they are more readily explained by a genuine fear of the communist movement in Iran or whether this was a rhetorical smokescreen, masking the neocolonial drive for the control of Iran's resources. This tension is not limited to scholarship on Iran. Even as new global histories of the Cold War have grown in recent years, some have cautioned against the use of this framework for understanding politics in the Global South. Jeremi Suri, for instance, speaks of a “group of scholars” who have “questioned the very utility of the Cold War as an analytical concept” by pointing to “the ways in which this geopolitical term privileges state actors in the United States and Europe and neglects local forces of change, many of which had little apparent connection to the basic issues and personalities of the Cold War.” In his analysis of the global place of Algeria's drive for independence, Matthew Connelly suggests “taking off the Cold War lens,” arguing that such a lens did less to shape the views of historical actors (such as the Eisenhower administration) than “those of the historians who have studied them.”

This Special Issue celebrates the 50th anniversary of Review of International Studies. Since 1975, the Review has published over 200 issues and over 1300 articles. The journal has played a key role in shaping the discipline of International Relations (IR), leading, or critically intervening in, key debates. To celebrate 50 years of Review of International Studies, we have curated a Special Issue examining the challenges facing global politics for the next 50 years. IR has regularly turned its attention backwards towards its historical origins. Instead, we look to the future. In this Introduction, we start by outlining four traditions of future-oriented thinking: positivist, realist prediction; planning, forecasting, and scenario-building; utopian dreams of an ideal political future; and prefigurative thinking in activist politics. From these traditions, we learn that thinking about the future is always thinking about the present. We then outline four themes in the Special Issue articles: How do we think about the future at all? How do we think about imperial pasts and the ongoing questions of colonization and racialization in the present? How will technological change mediate and generates geopolitical change? How are socioecological crises, and in particular climate change, increasingly shaping how we think about the future of global politics? Overall, these provide us with a diverse, stimulating, and thought-provoking set of essays about the future of global politics, as both discipline and set of empirical problems.

In this article, I am going to suggest that questions of societal and political control will be fundamental to the challenges humanity faces in the next 50 years, a continuation of the political and social problems of modernity but playing out in a range of political contexts and with a range of technological ‘tools’. Technicians of security will attempt to manage the disorder and insecurity that results from the potential weaponisation of everything, to use a phrase from Mark Galeotti, and the weaponisation of everywhere, a condition where the state will be seeking to control a range of emerging terrains and domains. But at the same time, while societies in 2074 might be confronting conditions that are an intensification of modern political problems, there is the possibility that the impact of climate emergencies and other ecological/technological dangers might produce global disorder unlike anything experienced in modernity, radically transforming (or mutilating) the ‘material’ foundations of international politics, presenting us with problems unlike anything encountered before. At this point, as Bruno Latour suggested, we might have to depart (for our own survival and the survival of others) from the ideas about politics and economy that we have ‘inherited’ from modernity.

This article examines the various modes of conflict management used by the free city of Regensburg and the local nobleman Hans I Staufer of Ehrenfels during a prolonged dispute over revenues from 1413 to 1418. In the early years of this feud, both parties utilized nonviolent methods such as legal action and arbitration, which were occasionally accompanied by minor military interventions. In April 1417, however, the Regensburg councilors broke with convention and decided to escalate the conflict with their feud opponent by capturing his ancestral castle, Ehrenfels, near Beratzhausen in the Upper Palatinate region. Using both urban account books and documentary evidence, the case study investigates the reasons behind the councilors' decision to launch this ostentatious military attack, their objectives in seizing Ehrenfels castle, and the impact of their show of force on the ongoing conflict. It portrays late medieval Central European towns as potent military actors and argues for a more systematic integration of economic considerations and cost-benefit calculations into our picture of late medieval feuding.

George Leonard Staunton, who travelled on the first British embassy to China in 1793, and his son George Thomas Staunton, who translated the Chinese legal code into English, are well-known figures in the history of China. Their British identity was constructed by George Thomas to conceal the family's Irish Catholic background, but in fact George Leonard used that background for the benefit of an imperial career that propelled him from Galway to the West Indies, India and, finally, China. It enabled him to win the support of the papacy for the British embassy to China, and his son to learn Chinese and make a career as a merchant and translator. Their story shows some of the mechanisms that connected the nineteenth-century British Empire in Asia to the Catholic Church which had been the great global institution of the early modern age. Moreover, a distinctively Irish concern with property law can be seen to have influenced George Thomas's great work on Chinese law. The Stauntons’ imperial careers made the family wealthy and much of this wealth came back to County Galway.

Why did the Egyptian revolution happen? How did it happen? Was it planned? What did it achieve? Was it defeated? These are some of the questions that usually surface in January each year, and during grim anniversaries of the infamous massacres that Egyptians witnessed after the 2013 military coup against Egypt's first elected president.