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AbstractThis article examines the emergence of early international organizations and efforts to export European institutional models to the periphery as part of the global expansion of a European international order. In particular, it focuses on the 1884–85 Berlin Conference as a pivotal moment in that expansion and the failed attempt to transplant the Treaty of Vienna model for transboundary river governance to the Congo River. Scholarship on the spread of institutions has highlighted the dangers of applying institutional models from one context to another, but there has been limited attention on why European institutional models are so compelling in the first place. Based on primary historical material, I show that despite some awareness among the diplomats at Berlin that the African context differed from the European one, this knowledge did not disrupt their underlying confidence in the Vienna model. I contend that the reason this model was so compelling was that it was built on two interrelated geographical imaginaries that constituted the diplomats' understanding of the global and the political possibilities available to them. The first imaginary constituted the periphery as conceptually empty and ready to be remade by European models; the second constituted Europe as the generative site of universal models. Together, these taken-for-granted imaginaries made the diplomats' practices of adopting the Vienna model seem natural and self-evident. These imaginaries continue to have implications for international politics today as we consider one-size-fits-all technocratic solutions and benchmarks for global progress.

The Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), created in 1959 to govern the southern continent, is often lauded as an illustration of science's potential to inspire peaceful and rational International Relations. This article critically examines this optimistic view of science's role in international politics by focusing on how science as a global hierarchical structure operated as a gatekeeper to an exclusive Antarctic club. I argue that in the early 20th century, the conduct of science in Antarctica was entwined with global and imperial hierarchies. As what Mattern and Zarakol call a broad hierarchy, science worked both as a civilized marker of international status as well as a social performance that legitimated actors' imperial interests in Antarctica. The 1959 ATS relied on science as an existing broad hierarchy to enable competing states to achieve a functional bargain and 'freeze' sovereignty claims, whilst at the same time institutionalizing and reinforcing the legitimacy of science in maintaining international inequalities. In making this argument, I stress the role of formal international institutions in bridging our analysis of broad and functional hierarchies while also highlighting the importance of scientific hierarchies in constituting the current international order.

In recent years, International Relations scholarship has looked back to the 19th century as a watershed epoch for the formation of the current international order and the development of 'Standards of Civilization' to legitimate that order. However, limited attention has been paid to the role played by society's relationship with the natural world in constructing these civilizational standards. This article argues that the control and exploitation of nature as a standard of civilization developed in the 19th century to constitute membership in a civilized European international society. The standard dictated that civilized polities must both demonstrate internal territorial control and uphold external obligations towards other actors. In examining 19th-century political contestations over the Danube River as a natural highway between Europe and the near periphery, I demonstrate that in the eyes of Western Europe, Russia failed to uphold the taming of nature as a civilizational standard, contributing to the delegitimization of its authority over the Danube. In its place, the Western powers following the Crimean War created an international commission to manage the Danube delta — a rational and scientific body to rectify the troublesome absence of civilized authority. These civilizational assumptions underpin the 1856 Danube Commission as an early international organization, and through its success, continue to have implications for today's international order.

In recent years, International Relations scholarship has looked back to the 19th century as a watershed epoch for the formation of the current international order and the development of 'Standards of Civilization' to legitimate that order. However, limited attention has been paid to the role played by society's relationship with the natural world in constructing these civilizational standards. This article argues that the control and exploitation of nature as a standard of civilization developed in the 19th century to constitute membership in a civilized European international society. The standard dictated that civilized polities must both demonstrate internal territorial control and uphold external obligations towards other actors. In examining 19th-century political contestations over the Danube River as a natural highway between Europe and the near periphery, I demonstrate that in the eyes of Western Europe, Russia failed to uphold the taming of nature as a civilizational standard, contributing to the delegitimization of its authority over the Danube. In its place, the Western powers following the Crimean War created an international commission to manage the Danube delta — a rational and scientific body to rectify the troublesome absence of civilized authority. These civilizational assumptions underpin the 1856 Danube Commission as an early international organization, and through its success, continue to have implications for today's international order.

AbstractIn recent decades, international events and incisive critical voices have catapulted the concepts of race and religion to the foreground of International Relations research. In particular, scholars have sought to recover the racialized and imperial beginnings of IR as an academic discipline in the early-20th century. This article contributes to this growing body of work by analyzing both race and religion as conceptual tools of scientific imperial administration—tools that in the 19th century classified and divided the global periphery along a continuum of civilizational and developmental difference. The article then applies this framework to the case of French, and more broadly, European, relations with populations in the Ottoman Empire, particularly within the Syrian Provinces. As described throughout this article and the case study, the Europeans used the language of race to contribute to religious hierarchies in the Syrian provinces in the mid- and late-19th century, having a lasting effect on discussions of religion in IR and international politics.

It is becoming customary to define the English School (ES) as a group of scholars participating in a common inquiry related to a few central concepts, notably that of international society. Although the roots of the ES are often attributed to the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, it is now said to be more of an open society of impersonal ties rather than an exclusive community based on personal relations. But how true is that assertion? If the School is theoretically open to anyone, why are its members predominantly male, white and Western? In this piece, we discuss three obstacles that prevent the ES from becoming a more inclusive venture.