Contrivance with Purpose? International Relations and the Reconstitution of the International

In observing and plotting the dialectics of how our present world works, fragmenting as it integrates we struggle in wanting to pin down a moving target! Unlike the world of science with its physical laws, the social nature of the world and its relations across borders keep changing course with social and transnational relations constantly mutating. This makes it rather difficult to plot the complexity of human relations, also those across borders. As the late Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon once said, the social sciences are, after all, the really 'hard' sciences. They are so hard because they are so hard to explain. With IR we do have a discipline where quite evidently politicians, pushed by the public, saw something that in the world of states was not working and wanted the professors to fix: International Relations, socially engineered as a discipline, a child of the First World War, was given the brief to find ways of avoiding future war. The study of the international, up to that point was lodged within disciplines such as Law and Political Philosophy; we think of Hugo Grotius who identified the Law of Nations as essential to the cohabitation between independent states, Immanuel Kant who points to a cosmopolitan overarching universal justice under which all individuals fall or Nicholas Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes who point to the philosophy and logic behind political or foreign policy decisions. One of the outcomes of the politicians' meeting at the Peace Conference of Versailles after 1919 was the creation of three chairs or institutes at Aberystwyth, Paris and New York for the purpose of creating the discipline called International Relations. IR was given the brief to study the ways in which interstate conflict could be overcome and suggest means of reconstructing the international away from war. This was a rather prescriptive and applied task. Given all this, for some, IR, even today, remains an incomplete discipline of borrowed thought, created by political fiat to aid the world of states and its men (rather than women). In short, for some, IR looks a somewhat contrived theory. Despite these concerns, IR nevertheless, paradoxically it would seem, has come, to be positioned to see to something rather momentous in today's insecure world: In borrowing from a poem by Robert Frost, IR is strategically placed to see to it that the world (and here comes Frost), is to not to 'end in fire or in ice'. In other words, IR is tasked to understand and have the world desist from trajectories that lead to conflict and destruction: IR is about putting our minds to undoing multilayered conflict--amongst states, groups and individuals--across the political, economic, cultural and environmental borders of the international. It does this with a view to looking for dialogue and political accommodation, of bringing about the kind of consensus that can build international regimes, systems and institutions to bridge the gaps and plug the holes of the international. But this idea of reconstructing the international in IR, how did it start? With the unprecedented carnage in human lives during the period 1914-1918, war as an institution of international life had seemingly become unsustainable. War, as a political instrument, now had unintended consequences--take the Great October Revolution of 1917 for example--as to be threatening to the international status quo: amidst deep colonialism and minority rule recently commemorated in South Africa with the 50th anniversary of the constitution of Union in 1910, even the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa dared send a delegation led by Sol Plaatje to the peace conference at Versailles, wanting to be heard in challenging the Land Act of 1913! The idea of constructing a permanent peace, not least to pre vent unintended social unrest or revolutionary change gave international liberal reformism a chance to be the architect of a permanent dialogue amongst states where foreign policy would no longer rely on war. …