Imperialism

Imperialism and empire have been central to the constitution of modern world order, and provide the backdrop to the intellectual development of the discipline of International Relations (IR). Despite this, imperialism and empire have often only featured on the margins of scholarly enquiry in IR. This has begun to change in recent years, in part due to the re-historicization of the field. Imperialism and empire have been understood from multiple perspectives: as an essentially political relationship of effective control of sovereignty; as a form of order in itself; and as a hierarchical pattern of economic, intellectual, symbolic and cultural dominance. This multivalent conception of imperialism reveals the ongoing imperial characteristics of contemporary world politics and forces a return to some of the foundational concerns of an IR discipline that was born into a world of empires, not states.