Description
Our ambitions for this cluster grow from ongoing conversations across EUI core sub-disciplines identified as ‘international’: International History, International Relations, International Law, and Macroeconomics. Out of these conversations we have developed two interdisciplinary foci we want to foster at the EUI to set innovative world-leading research agendas: i) ‘international’ thinking; and ii) ‘planetary’ futures. Scholars from International History, IR, and International Law and Economics share an intrinsic ‘international focus,’ yet rarely broach the connections across their research themes and/or their methodological distinctiveness. At the same time, the planetary scope and response of contemporary political, economic, and environmental challenges are both obvious, understudied, and open to debate.
Our cluster explores and expands the potential of this shared emphasis on the ‘International’; and compare and exchange the diverse ways in which our areas reflect on the global/world/international scale of governance, its rationales, and challenges. International Relations, for example, seeks to better grasp of how authority structures are shared among trans-international as well as state actors. International History has shifted away from the inevitability of national framings to an appreciation of transnational experiences and institutions. International Law scholarship has tried to overcome its sovereignty bias, exploring different legal arrangements to understand how law structures global governance. Macroeconomics operates in the international field, across these same themes and more, but has a distinctive method.
Our aim is to track loci of cooperation and exchange. Our cluster will create bridges for scholarly exchange across ‘international’ sub-disciplines, what they share and how they differ. We will build on a recent attempt in the EUI Departments of History and Political and Social Sciences to teach an interdisciplinary course on the international past and present. While each of these disciplines has its own distinctive profile, methods, and aims, we will push our respective research frontiers to pioneer systematic multi-, trans- and inter-disciplinary conversations on the nature and development of the modern international order, its challenges and frailties in general.
Our specific focus will be on the ‘planetary’ as an emerging point of analytical and methodological orientation. For example, while International law has since its inception tinkered with different categories to capture global governance beyond inter-state relations, from the notion of a ‘family of civilized nations,’ to the common heritage of humankind, this last category is now being genealogically linked to the rise of ecological perspective, and the planetary. In international economic law, the planetary is increasingly of interest as a means of rethinking multilateral solutions to global problems and opportunities.
With a vast network around the world and our past associations with leading interdisciplinary programs, the cluster leadership could provide a solid mechanism to explore these questions from more robust perspectives. We see in this cluster a mechanism to inform, propose, clarify, imagine better paths.