When STAIR was founded in 2005, Grand Narratives abounded. ‘The Clash of Civilizations,’ ‘New World Order,’ ‘New Internationalism,’ ‘The End of History,’ and others were applied by students and scholars of International Affairs as heuristics to frame developments around them in historical context. Amid growing attention to the question of unipolarity, its decline, and the rise of China as a new Great Power and other middle powers from the Global South, Issue 19.1 seeks to investigate whether Grand Narratives remain common and/or useful tools with which to analyze International Affairs. STAIR seeks contributions about a comprehensive set of issues anchored by an investigation into the extent those who study International Affairs have taken for granted assumptions about their field which are now outdated. In other words, are the issues which top global agendas conceivable using the frameworks popular among STAIR contributors of the past?
Why are major parties on the Western political right, often associated with military intervention and free trade, now hesitant to provide military aid to Ukraine and increasing advocates for protectionism? Have multinational institutions of governance, diplomacy, and war such as the EU, NATO, the G7/20, and the United Nations (including the Security Council), lost legitimacy they once possessed? Has a transnational populism reframed domestic politics from classification along a left-right continuum to one for and against an ‘establishment,’ or ‘globalism’? What connects January 6th, 2021, in Washington D.C. to January 8th, 2023, in Brasilia? What links may be uncovered between the Trucker Convoy in Canada and the Gillet Jaunes in France? Were major political mass movements in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis, including Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, the anti-Austerity Movement, the Pink Tide, and the Arab Spring regional expressions of the same phenomenon? Are Euroscepticism, climate change denial, and vaccine hesitancy variations of a common, underlying suspicion?
Is democracy in peril? Is BRICS a Global South analogue to the G7, or are expectations of zero-sum competition between them unnuanced? Will other reserve currencies ever seriously challenge the predominant use of the US dollar in global trade? Is the normalization of relations occurring among Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, and Gulf States in the Middle East capable of reshaping the regional balance of power? Will the world’s various Indo-Pacific Strategies successfully contest Chinese regional hegemony? What explains the emergence of rapid and sustained regime change across the so-called “coup belt” from Niger to Somalia? Has there ever been a ‘Rules-based International Order,’ and has our fascination with the concept clouded our understanding of actually existing International Affairs? Do we live in a multipolar world, and if so, what will become of the global supply chains and financial system which traverse acrimonious spheres of influence?
Submit abstracts using our form by: December 1, 2023
Deadline to submit: January 1, 2024
Email submissions in .docx format to: stairjournal@politics.ox.ac.uk