Neomedievalism in International Relations Scattering the International, Elucidating the Empire

Chapter I  Rethinking World Politics Through Historical Analogy

1.1.  Overlapping Temporalities in World Politics

1.2. Contesting State-Centrism, Reframing Post-internationalism     

1.3. Historical Uses and Abuses: Medieval History versus Historical Analogy

1.4. Positioning the Book: Between the English School and Meta-Theory

1.5. Through the Neomedieval Mirror: Scattering, Elucidating, and Weaving

1.6. Threading Through Neomedievalism, Navigating World Politics

Chapter II Playing with Medieval Temporalities, Reimagining Present, Past, and Future

2.1. The Many Neomedievalisms, Temporalities, and Locales 

2.2. The Neomedieval Metaphor versus the Westphalian Narrative

2.3. Neomedieval Analogies and Perceptions of the Medieval Past

2.4. Neomedieval Futures Against the “End of History”

Chapter III Scattering the International: Overlapping Authorities and Multiple Loyalties in World Politics

3.1. The Unfinished Ontology of Neomedieval World Politics

3.2. Partial Exits, Flexible Participation, and Advancing Neomedievalism

3.3. External Consolidation: Authorities and Boundaries

3.4. Internal Structuring: Loyalties and Identities

3.5. Geographies of Overlapping Authorities: Functions, Profits, and Temporalities

3.6. Logics of Ordering, Imperial Power, and Influence  

3.7. Hybrid Security: Mercenaries, Rebels, and Terrorists

Chapter IV Elucidating Empire: Medieval Afterlives and Political Development

4.1. Epistemic and Temporal Ruptures in Neomedieval Analogy

4.2. Re-discovering Medievalism Through the Archaeology of Order

4.3. Medieval Afterlives: Political Development in the Bailiwick of Guernsey

4.4. From Layers to Boundaries: Overlapping Jurisdictions, Territorial Development, and Belonging

4.5. From Boundaries to Layers: Competing Jurisdictions, Borderland Memory, and Multi-layered Identity

4.6. Preserved Continuity, Attraction, and Oblivion in the Margins of World Politics 

Chapter V Broken International, Exposed Empire: Neomedievalism and Western Anxieties

5.1. Normative Ambiguities and Anxieties in Neomedievalism

5.2. Liminal Neomedievalism Transgressing Modern Sovereign Order

5.3. Inter-What? Leaky Boundaries, Hybrid Actors, and Fragmented Polities

5.4. Rentier Kings, Digital Dukes, and the Erasure of the International

5.5. The Eye of the Beholder, Western Anxieties, and Modern Insecurities

Conclusions. Weaving the Jigsaw: Neomedievalism, the International, and Empire 

Biography

Aleksandra Spalińska is a Research Associate at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, and a Visiting Fellow at the Global Security Programme, Pembroke College, University of Oxford, UK. Her professional experience includes research positions at the Polish Academy of Sciences, University of Warsaw, and European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Aleksandra’s research interests encompass the systemic transformation of world politics, theories of world order in transition (including neomedievalism and heterarchy), quasi-state entities, the role of history in International Relations, and historical and creative methods in International Relations and security studies. Her previous books include: The Idea of the New Middle Ages in the Processes of European (Dis)integration, 2017 (in Polish), and Politics and Power Between the Archetype of the Polis and the Universe of New Medievalism, 2019 (in Polish).

“With this book Aleksandra Spalińska announces herself as the new champion of neomedievalism as a theoretical concept for IR. She takes the idea beyond metaphor and prediction, and unfolds it as a way of seeing the cast and the character of international relations in a novel way. In doing this, she demonstrates why IR should pay more attention to the English School than it typically does.”

- Barry Buzan, Emeritus Professor of International Relations, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science

“How central is the nation-state to our understanding of international politics? This provocative and rich study seeks to analyze and consolidate ‘neomedievalism,’ an approach that emphasizes political fragmentation, multiple and overlapping authorities, and non-state actors.”

- Anna Grzymała-Busse, Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies and Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University

“This is a welcome contribution to a critical expansion of international studies. Spalińska delivers an ambitious effort to re-vision world politics as a site of overlapping authorities and multiple loyalties. Her reworking of neomedievalism to serve not just as a historical analogy, but as an analytical framework that thinks beyond the sovereign territorial state, highlights the tensions and contradictions that our simplified models all too often seek to discipline into neat boxes.”

 - Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Professor and Chair, Department of Global Inquiry, School of International Service, American University

“The medieval’ is both a blind spot and the nightmare of the modern Western mind...” So writes Aleksandra Spalinska in her new study. Spalinska reconstructs Hedley‘s Bull’s concept of neomedievalism, the main lines of interpretation it opened in IR to date, and its untapped potential  to illuminate the present. Deftly integrating empirical case study with theoretical reflection, Spalińska’s work shows how political loyalty and international order is assembled in trespass of the bordered nation-state, but not in the way Bull nor the post-Cold War theorists envisioned. An ambitious and theoretically sophisticated re-appraisal.”

- Matthew Specter, Senior Fellow, Institute of European Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and Lecturer in History, Santa Clara University

"The focus on the rise and fall of empires and states distracts from the equally important periods between the fall and the rise. Neomedievalism applies precisely to transition periods and entities that survive modern pressures of development, creating overlapping systems of heterarchical orders. Recent research in archaeology uncovers two great forms of order in human societies: the concentration of wealth and prestige, and the distribution of both. One finds that anarchy is not without order, it is without kings. Hierarchies have formal levels, heterarchies form flexible networks; they overlap, entwine, erase, and endure across time and space. In this important work, Spalińska picks up a shovel to refresh our understanding of both historic and contemporary world governance."

-- Carole Crumley, Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill