4 - The humanistic moment in International Studies: Reflections on Machiavelli and Las Casas

Summary

As a student of international relations, most of my ostensibly successful voyages of scientific discovery have ended up at the edges of a misnamed continent. Sailing under the non-national flag of “the pursuit of truth,” I have come to see many of our concerns, theoretical models and methodological ways of defining research problems as parochial, scientistic, or even ethnocentric – crudely fashioned guides or tools for attempted “conquests” of already occupied and cultivated lands rather than the more innocent sounding “discovery and exploration” of a “New World.”

Believing he had only found the eastern edges of an already known Eurasian landmass (“the Indies”), Columbus also long resisted such a description of his discoveries. For different reasons, many of us agree: the opening up in 1492 of an already occupied “New World” for European exploration and conquest was not the original human “discovery” of two continents. But it was a fateful shock for the “old orders” in Europe, Asia and the Americas; so we may rightly consider “1492” as a major world historical turning point, symbolizing a more complex transition from the pre-modern to the modern age. Today we are faced with the comparable challenge of making sense of a postcommunist “new world order,” in what some describe as a “postmodern” era.

The positivistic exploratory approaches of my early research now appear inadequate for addressing such challenging reorderings of both space, time and human lives.