The Practice of International History in the Twenty-First Century

The international challenges facing British society today underline the crucial importance of understanding the nature and dynamics of world politics. International historians must play a role in furthering this understanding. The Practice of International History in the Twenty-First Century will create an international research network comprised of historians, international relations specialists and officials from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The core objective is to establish an inter-disciplinary forum for collective reflection on the nature and practice of international history and its role in contributing to wider British society. The research network will include leading scholars from the UK, the European continent, North America and Australia. It will be made up of established researchers, PhD students, post-docs and early career scholars. This will provide a framework to allow UK-based international historians to make an important contribution to wider debates on the current and future state of our field.

The past two decades have seen the emergence of fundamental challenges to the philosophical and methodological underpinnings of international history. Advocates of a 'cultural turn' have argued for greater attention to race, gender, religion and collective memory as a means of deepening our understanding of international politics. The emergence of 'transnational' history has presented a different kind of challenge that rejects the nation-state as the focus of analysis to concentrate on the flow of people, ideas and technologies across what are in many ways arbitrary national frontiers. This 'transnational turn' complements a turn away from 'Eurocentric' historical approaches that is a central feature of the new 'global history'. Debates among international relations [IR] theorists over the relative importance of ideas, institutions and material power have the potential to further enrich the work of international historians. A final challenge to practices in our field is the need to engage more fruitfully and systematically with the UK policy community in general, and with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office [FCO] in particular.

International historians in North America and Europe have recently been active in addressing the implications of the issues raised above for the practice of international history. Scholars in the UK have been far less active. This project will provide a framework for redressing this silence while at the same time creating structures for ongoing engagement with the policy community as well as teachers of international history at all levels from schools to postgraduate university courses.

A number of core questions have been identified to provide a conceptual framework for four one-day workshops. Historians and IR specialists from the UK, Europe, North America and Australia and FCO officials will participate in these workshops. The chief 'outputs' produced by the project will be a 'state of the field' collection of essays, an inter-active web-based resource for teaching and research in the history of international relations and durable structures for engagement with policy stakeholders. Achieving these aims will leave the present and future generations of international historians better-equipped to teach, research and to contribute more effectively to meeting the ever-changing international challenges of our time.

Principal Beneficiaries:
1. Academic researchers in the fields of international history; transnational history and the cognate field of politics and international studies.

2. Teachers of history and politics in the United Kingdom at all levels from secondary school to university undergraduates and postgraduates.

3. Cultural institutions dealing with the course and impact of international politics on modern societies.

4. Policy-makers involved in the formulation and execution of the United Kingdom's foreign and defence policy.

PATHWAYS TO IMPACT

The project will pursue a two-stage process for achieving impact.

Stage 1: The network will work to overcome barriers to effective knowledge exchange that exist among academics and between academics and user groups. The interdisciplinary colloquia will bring together academic and non-academic participants including university historians and political scientists but also official international historians working for the British government, museum professionals and teachers of international history. Moreover, by assuring a prominent role for research students, post-docs and secondary school teacher, the project will also contribute significantly to capacity-building in research and teaching international history in the UK.

Stage 2: Stage 2 provides the framework for the public-facing dimension to the project. The proposed network will produce a digital resource capturing the practices and debates of leading international historians working in the UK. The project will create a website of its discussions that will serve as an open-access "users' guide" to the contemporary practice of international history. This web site will serve as a sustainable resource for researchers and practitioners. It will outline the contours of international history as it is practised today and its relationship with cognate disciplines of political science, historical sociology and cultural studies.

The project proposes three immediately actionable pathways to impact:

Pathway 1: The Practice of International History & Government: Our field has been placed at the heart of British foreign policy by the British government (not least by the recreation of the Foreign Office Library and the established practice of witness seminars). It has done so as part of an explicit critique of the historical ignorance that, it is argued, has undermined British foreign policy in the past. One proposed solution has been to expand the role of official historians. The presence of Professor Patrick Salmon, Chief Historian of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office as a core member of the network ensures that the project will connect directly to this increasingly important unit within the UK policy-making establishment.

Pathway 2: The Practice of International History & Culture: The network leaders Ball and Jackson work with a range of cultural institutions that interpret international history on a day-to-day basis. These institutions are:
i) The BBC Documentary Unit produces the long-running Radio 4 historical investigative series, Document. Both Ball and Jackson have worked with this unit recently on projects concerning secret intelligence and Anglo-German relations.
ii) The National War Museum in Edinburgh has worked in partnership with the University of Glasgow, especially Ball, since 2003.
iii) The Federal AlliiertenMuseum in Berlin in Germany is wholly devoted to the interpretation of international history. Ball and Salmon serve on its International Advisory Board.
iv) The newly opened Musée de la Grande Guerre at Meaux in France dedicated to the memory and interpretation of the era of the First World War era. Jackson teaches at its annual summer school.

The bid will invite four institutions to take part in the colloquia. Their engagement and advice will help project managers craft the most effective dissemination of the project's digital resources to the target groups outlined above.