International Relations: A New Epistemological Framework for a New World 

Two years after it broken out, it is no exaggeration to say that the war in Ukraine, a European event, is part of a major restructuring of international relations: the principles of international law are being called into question, the United States of America is withdrawing from Europe and international organisations, the Gulf monarchies are asserting themselves as actors and venues for diplomatic meetings, the role of GAFAM seems to be undermining the authority of states, and so on. In this context, and taking into account regional and national specificities, the panel proposes to take advantage of the diversity of analytical tools available to historians today to read or review international relations. Numerous assessments have been made in the last twenty years in the context of numerous reviews or books. The 2000s were full of lively debates and collective publications. They highlight the diversity of labels in this research field – diplomatic history, history of foreign policy, international history, history of international relations, see Alexander DeConde (1988), Patrick Finney (2005), Laurence Badel (2024) – and the wide range of practices that adress the question of the place of the state and the nation in these ‘international’ relations. We assume here that the history of international relations can be defined today as the history of dynamics, that is, of forces and movements affecting individuals, groups and spaces. The resulting transnational processes lead to destabilise or reorganise the established international order. They can also contribute to its stabilisation and perpetuation. The history of international relations pay attention to the ways in which these processes are internationalised and institutionalised. We assert that transnational and global turns have had limited effects on the writing of history, with each historian continuing, for the most part, to write a subjective and located history of international relations based on his or her own history, the vision imprinted by his or her studies and reading, the foreign policy of the state in which he or she lives, and the ongoing debates in his or her regional environment. We wish to discuss these assumption un a free and a well-founded way. Each speaker is asked to present a reflection on his or her analytical tools, taking into account his/her status as a located historian of international relations/international historian, and then to propose a reinterpretation of one of these tools based on a specific example. A specific interest will be paid to the conceptuall tools of the historian in a multidisciplinary way. Both English and French will be used in this panel.