International History & Politics Newsletter

Background

In 2015, Peter Trubowitz proposed that we create a newsletter for the International History & Politics section of the American Political Science Association. At the time, he was the President of this APSA organised section; and I was his eager junior colleague. I loved the suggestion and happily agreed to serve as the newsletter’s first editor. Peter secured funding from the Department of International Relations at the LSE, enough to hire a PhD student to serve as Assistant Editor. Joanne Yao–now a Lecturer at Queen Mary–joined formally in that capacity; but, in reality, she provided much of the vision that guided that launch. When Karen J. Alter became Section Chair in 2016, Joanne and I agreed to continue as editors for another year, to continue building momentum and facilitate a transition.

Despite our interests in the past, the IHAP newsletter has always grappled with the pressing issues of the day. Joanne, in particular, was masterful at bringing together diverse groups of scholars discussing these topics.

Our Issues

Our first roundtable was on “International History and Reconceptualizing Empire.” This followed partly from the pioneering work of scholars to challenge and expand our understanding of imperialism, particularly by going beyond the “classic” European cases and the traditional focus on security over and above political economy. Since then, several subsequent issues have returned to these and related themes. Link

Our second rountable entered into a much larger debate in the discipline around the DA-RT (Data Access–Research Transparency) initiative. Given the implications for the production and publication of work in our field, we believed it was crucial that the members of our community had the chance to debate the benefits and the challenges brought by this move. The conversation was lively and so fulsome that we published an extended issue–coming to thirty pages. I contributed substantively myself, sharing my experience attempting to meet the DA-RT standards with an appendix I published in conjunction with one of my articles in the journal International Organization. Link

Our third roundtable took up the question of “Women in International History and Politics.” The contributors discussed both the exclusion and ellision of women as actors in international politics and the exclusion and ellision of women as scholars of these phenomena. I found this to be not just hair-raising but also quite instructive. Indeed, I now use some of Swati Srivastava’s practical strategies for addressing the bias against women in archives in my own teaching and research. For instance, I now consider whether women working as telephone operators might have been the infamous–but unnamed–source of “leaks” that drove frenzied speculation against the Bank of England in the raucous 1920s and 1930s. Certainly, few were better placed to trade on this information; and, yet, the Bank’s archives naturally do not document such activities. This is just one of many new questions raised by the discussion in this issue. Link

2016 was a shocking year. Not least, it showed that many of the challenges of “the past” remain with us still. Our fourth roundtable specifically explored the historical parallels to the events of 2016. This discussion was badly needed in part because it became fashionable to make simplistic analogies. The scholars in this issue, however, did the hard work of sussing out precisely where these comparison were apt and where they went awry. As ever, we worked to maintain a global view of these global issues. The discussions of the Anglophone disrupters–in this case, Brexit and Trump–were quite fruitfully combined with analysis of crises in Southeast Asia and populism in Latin America as well as Europe. Link

IHAP Newsletter Today

Scholarly work is often lonely toil. Arguably, historical scholarship, which is so often solo-authored, is particularly so. (Also, the archival facilities themselves are often literally cold!) But the IHAP newsletter brings us together, serving as a warm reminder of the broad, diverse community that shares this zeal. I am delighted–and proud–that the newsletter continues to thrive. I read each new issue of the newsletter, and I encourage colleagues and students to do the same. Link