Books by Einar Wigen
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the vocabulary of civility and civilization is very... more At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the vocabulary of civility and civilization is very much at the forefront of political debate. Most of these debates proceed as if the meaning of these words were self-evident. This is where Civilizing Emotions intervenes, tracing the history of the concepts of civility and civilization and thus adding a level of self-reflexivity to the present debates. Unlike previous histories, Civilizing Emotions takes a global perspective, highlighting the roles of civility and civilization in the creation of a new and hierarchized global order in the era of high imperialism and its entanglements with the developments in a number of well-chosen European and Asian countries.
Emotions were at the core of the practices linked to the creation of a new global order in the nineteenth century. Civilizing Emotions explores why and how emotions were an asset in civilizing peoples and societies - their control and management, but also their creation and their ascription to different societies and social groups. The study is a contribution to the history of emotions, to global history, and to the history of concepts, three rapidly developing and innovative research areas which are here being brought together for the first time.
Authors: Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordheim, Orit Bashkin, Christian Bailey, Oleg Benesch, Jan Ifversen, Mana Kia, Rochona Majumdar, Angelika C. Messner, Myoung-kyu Park, Emmanuelle Saada, Mohinder Singh, and Einar Wigen
Publications by Einar Wigen
Building Bridges to Turkish, 2019
The Ottoman Empire lasted some six centuries (1299–1922) and disappeared a mere century ago. For ... more The Ottoman Empire lasted some six centuries (1299–1922) and disappeared a mere century ago. For much of this period, it was the suzerain force in the Eastern Mediterranean, Balkans, Anatolia, western Caucasus, North Africa, and Crimea. Through centuries of Ottoman rule its populations, societies, and landscapes were marked by common politics, institutions, concepts, cultural traits, circulation of goods and people, and social institutions. While it by no means brought homogeneity, such common historical experience socialised Ottoman populations and shaped societies in similar ways across a broad field of human activities. Nevertheless, no systematic programme for the exploration of Ottoman legacies has to date emerged. As a consequence, the geographical distribution, variation, and historical longevity of these legacies have yet to be fully explored and analysed. Moreover, in much scholarship, these legacies are outright ignored, assuming instead that the constituent parts were unmarked by centuries under Ottoman rule. It should go without saying that any polity that secedes from another is at its inception marked by that relationship and by institutionalised practices for handling such a relationship. Rather than the claim that post-Ottoman states are marked by Ottoman legacies having to be argued, the onus of proof should in the first place have been on those claiming that they are not. In the case of the Levant, such legacies are casually assumed to linger after 9–25 years of European mandate rule, but generally overlooked for four centuries of Ottoman rule.3 This is a typical case of Eurocentrism, whereby the primacy of European agency is the baseline assumption, while the importance of non-European agency is occluded (or at best has to be argued). In this chapter I explore successor states of the Ottoman Empire as an area studies
principle that never was; namely post-Ottoman studies. The point is to propose this as a way to ask new questions, not immediately to provide answers. The claim in this chapter is that it is worthwhile making more comparisons between post-Ottoman polities, communities, and cultures across all fields of scholarship, and to study historical entanglements between them. The hypothesis, which is developed but largely left unanswered, is that there are important unexplored commonalities, in political, social and cultural terms, through much of post-Ottoman space. At the very least, it is worth considering avenues for studying these commonalities, as this may bring a better understanding of each individual polity and society (and phenomena within them), as well as insights into how imperial legacies linger in post-imperial space.
This article is a call for making the Eurasian steppe an object of study within International Rel... more This article is a call for making the Eurasian steppe an object of study within International Relations. The first section argues that the neglect of the steppe is due to 19 th -century prejudice against non-sedentary polities as being barbarian. This is hardly a scholarly reason to neglect them. The second section is a nutshell overview of literature on the steppe from other fields. On the strength of these literatures, we postulate the existence of what we call an almost three thousand year long steppe tradition of ordering politics. The third section of the article suggests that the steppe tradition has hybridised sundry polity-building projects, from early politybuilding in the European the Middle Ages via the Ottoman and Russian empires to contemporary Central Asian state-building. We conclude this exploratory piece by speculating whether a focus on the steppe tradition may have the potential to change our accounts of the emergence of European international relations at large.
Empire was never an important concept in Ottoman politics. This did not stop Ottoman rulers from ... more Empire was never an important concept in Ottoman politics. This did not stop Ottoman rulers from laying claim to three titles that may be called imperial: halife, hakan, and kayser. Each of these pertains to diff erent translationes imperii, or claims of descent from diff erent empires: the Caliphate, the steppe empires of the Huns, Turks, and Mongols, and the Roman Empire. Each of the three titles was geared toward a specifi c audience: Muslims, Turkic nomads, and Greek-Orthodox Christians, respectively. In the nineteenth century a new audience emerged as an important source of political legitimacy: European-emergent international society. With it a new political vocabulary was introduced into the Ottoman language. Among those concepts was that of empire, which found its place in Ottoman discourse by connecting it with
the existing imperial claims.
To the extent that polities interact across linguistic boundaries, international relations are al... more To the extent that polities interact across linguistic boundaries, international relations are also inter-lingual relations. Since relations and practices are given meaning in language, it has to be possible to give at least a minimum of shared meaning to mutual relations in order for inter-lingual relations to function smoothly. Otherwise, the divergence of meaning and consequently also of social expectations will limit the possible extent and quality of those relations. Nevertheless, International Relations has not theorised inter-lingual relations. This article addresses this deficiency by proposing a theory of ‘conceptual entanglement’ as an approach to studying how compatibility of meaning comes about and is maintained between linguistic communities and hence also between polities. With the ‘expansion of international society’ from the 19th century onwards, linguistic divides have gradually narrowed, especially in terms of political vocabularies.
Yet, residues remain, making inter-lingual relations qualitatively different for different pairs of languages, and thus also for polities. The article elaborates on how conceptual entanglement is an aspect of ‘entry’ into international society by using the theory on
the case of how the French concept of ‘civilisation’ was translated into Ottoman and became part of the political vocabulary of the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey.
Since its publication three decades ago, Hedley Bull and Adam Watson’s The Expansion of Internati... more Since its publication three decades ago, Hedley Bull and Adam Watson’s The Expansion of International Society has served as the main point of departure for historically informed discussion of how today’s states system emerged and then went on to envelop the world. In a recent article, Iver Neumann criticized Bull and Watson’s conceptualization for being Euro-centric, in the sense that these scholars only ascribed agency to the European side of the relationship between an entrant and international society. For International Relations, it is particularly apposite that the new entrants to international society themselves came from suzerain systems, such as Habsburg-dominated or the Ottoman-dominated one. Neumann’s example was Russia, whose experiences with Mongol suzerainty and, before that, with being a part of a suzerain system centred on Byzantium, infused Muscovy with experiences and memories that formed the reference point for what to expect when getting in contact with international society. This forum broadens this debate by looking not only at one state, but at a set of Central and South-Eastern European states with experiences and memories from various suzerain systems. The articles discuss when and how Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Turkey began to aspire for membership in international society; experiences, memories and ideas such as translatio imperii that informed what they made of the entry; and how and in what degree the ensuing tensions remain today.
Publications in Norwegian by Einar Wigen
Få hendelser har utløst en slik sjelegranskning i tyrkisk politikk som USAs invasjon av Irak i 20... more Få hendelser har utløst en slik sjelegranskning i tyrkisk politikk som USAs invasjon av Irak i 2003. Mens Tyrkia er USAs allierte, har de alvorlige problemer med amerikanernes fremferd i regionen. Denne artikkelen tar for seg populærkulturens fremstilling av denne frustrasjonen.
Etter en sommer med demonstrasjoner, politibrutalitet og
propaganda, er Tyrkias innenrikspolitisk... more Etter en sommer med demonstrasjoner, politibrutalitet og
propaganda, er Tyrkias innenrikspolitiske landskap i endring. Der
befolkningen før var for eller imot militæret, EU, kurdiske
rettigheter og bruk av hijab, er tyrkerne i økende grad for og imot
Erdoğan og AKP.
Den tyrkiske nasjonalstaten ble til i en vekselvirkning
mellom Det osmanske rikets kategorisering... more Den tyrkiske nasjonalstaten ble til i en vekselvirkning
mellom Det osmanske rikets kategorisering av sine
innbyggere og «nye» europeiske kategoriseringsmåter.
Spenningen mellom disse måtene å organisere
relasjoner mellom stat og samfunn har stått sentralt i
tyrkisk politikk frem til dagens situasjon.
Tyrkia sies å ha en konstituerende rolle i europeisk identitetsformasjon og å være et
viktig refe... more Tyrkia sies å ha en konstituerende rolle i europeisk identitetsformasjon og å være et
viktig referansepunkt for tilblivelsen av «Europa» som politisk begrep. Fra «tyrkerkrigene
» på 1600-tallet ble «Europa» brukt til å mane til felles kamp mot Det osmanske
riket blant de kristne statene. Frem til i dag har «Europa» blitt stadig viktigere som et
politisk begrep som også stater som ikke omfattes av det må ta stilling til. Likevel finnes
det få studier som snur dette forholdet på hodet og ser på hvordan Europa-begrepet
ser ut utenfra. Denne artikkelen utforsker forholdet fra det tyrkiske perspektivet, og
stiller spørsmålet om hvilken rolle Europa-begrepet har i tyrkisk identitetsformasjon.
Hovedargumentet er at selv om Tyrkia har investert mye i endringsprosjekter som
«modernisering», «sekularisering» og «vestliggjøring», understreker alle disse begrepene
Tyrkias posisjon som noe mindre enn et fullverdig medlem av det europeiske fellesskapet.
Papers by Einar Wigen
LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Cop... more LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website.
Internasjonal Politikk, 2008
Internasjonal Politikk, 2008
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2020
We write to be read. Since the literary critic Wayne Booth came up with the concept of ‘the impli... more We write to be read. Since the literary critic Wayne Booth came up with the concept of ‘the implied reader’ in 1961 (Booth 1983), we have had a way of talking about how authors may think about thei...
Journal of International Relations and Development, 2012
This article is a call for making the Eurasian steppe an object of study within International Rel... more This article is a call for making the Eurasian steppe an object of study within International Relations. The first section argues that the neglect of the steppe is due to 19th-century prejudice against non-sedentary polities as being barbarian. This is hardly a scholarly reason to neglect them. The second section is a nutshell overview of literature on the steppe from other fields. On the strength of these literatures, we postulate the existence of what we call an almost three thousand year long steppe tradition of ordering politics. The third section of the article suggests that the steppe tradition has hybridised sundry polity-building projects, from early politybuilding in the European the Middle Ages via the Ottoman and Russian empires to contemporary Central Asian state-building. We conclude this exploratory piece by speculating whether a focus on the steppe tradition may have the potential to change our accounts of the emergence of European international relations at large.
International Studies Review, 2020
At stake in this forum are the politics of translation in the study of global politics. More spec... more At stake in this forum are the politics of translation in the study of global politics. More specifically, the following interventions aim to consider the ways that scholars can recenter the utility of language toward more flexible conceptions of relationality. As each contribution reveals, translation is indispensable to individual theorizations of international politics; yet taken together, the forum aims to mitigate the alleged necessity of a lingua franca in IR scholarship. We go beyond the linguistic demands of conventional conceptual history in that each intervention employs a reflexive disposition to consider both their subject position and normative aspirations in the experience of translation. The forum's overall goal is to illustrate the ethical imperative to acknowledge the contextual specificity of linguistic encounters—past, present, and future—and in the process breathe life into the prose of world politics.
Contemporary Levant, Jan 2, 2020
Like all contested concepts, the term 'Levant' is unstable. Both its academic and political uses ... more Like all contested concepts, the term 'Levant' is unstable. Both its academic and political uses are geographically and historically fairly loose and illdefined. This geo-historical instability makes room for the multiplicity of chronotopes that the contributors lay out in this special issue. In order to bring these contributions together, we also use the theoretical concept of the chronotope, the way that authors and actors under study bring together time and space in their legitimation of political efforts in the present. The chronotopes treated here have far-reaching implications in our experience and knowledge of the Levant. With Bakhtin's chronotopic method, we approach the region through its entangled history, taking people's mobility, their composite identities, and the major transformations in their lives as the central concern for analysis.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2018
International order is also temporal order, based on the alignment, more precisely, the synchroni... more International order is also temporal order, based on the alignment, more precisely, the synchronisation of the multiple times at work on a global scale. Synchronicity between cultures, languages, and polities does not emerge by itself. To create temporal orderings on a global scale requires work: political, social, and linguistic. Some work of synchronisation is performed by technological innovations such as clocks, trains, telegraph lines, phones, satellites etc. Another set of tools, however, is linguistic, made up by concepts used to make historical and political time understandable and workable. Concepts are used to order events, objects and polities temporally, thus making both them and their temporality aspects of international order. By drawing together experiences, events, and meanings from different knowledge fields or cultures, they synchronise them, aligning their speeds, rhythms, and durations. One of the most central concepts that have been used in synchronisation over ...
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Books by Einar Wigen
Emotions were at the core of the practices linked to the creation of a new global order in the nineteenth century. Civilizing Emotions explores why and how emotions were an asset in civilizing peoples and societies - their control and management, but also their creation and their ascription to different societies and social groups. The study is a contribution to the history of emotions, to global history, and to the history of concepts, three rapidly developing and innovative research areas which are here being brought together for the first time.
Authors: Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordheim, Orit Bashkin, Christian Bailey, Oleg Benesch, Jan Ifversen, Mana Kia, Rochona Majumdar, Angelika C. Messner, Myoung-kyu Park, Emmanuelle Saada, Mohinder Singh, and Einar Wigen
Publications by Einar Wigen
principle that never was; namely post-Ottoman studies. The point is to propose this as a way to ask new questions, not immediately to provide answers. The claim in this chapter is that it is worthwhile making more comparisons between post-Ottoman polities, communities, and cultures across all fields of scholarship, and to study historical entanglements between them. The hypothesis, which is developed but largely left unanswered, is that there are important unexplored commonalities, in political, social and cultural terms, through much of post-Ottoman space. At the very least, it is worth considering avenues for studying these commonalities, as this may bring a better understanding of each individual polity and society (and phenomena within them), as well as insights into how imperial legacies linger in post-imperial space.
the existing imperial claims.
Yet, residues remain, making inter-lingual relations qualitatively different for different pairs of languages, and thus also for polities. The article elaborates on how conceptual entanglement is an aspect of ‘entry’ into international society by using the theory on
the case of how the French concept of ‘civilisation’ was translated into Ottoman and became part of the political vocabulary of the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey.
Publications in Norwegian by Einar Wigen
propaganda, er Tyrkias innenrikspolitiske landskap i endring. Der
befolkningen før var for eller imot militæret, EU, kurdiske
rettigheter og bruk av hijab, er tyrkerne i økende grad for og imot
Erdoğan og AKP.
mellom Det osmanske rikets kategorisering av sine
innbyggere og «nye» europeiske kategoriseringsmåter.
Spenningen mellom disse måtene å organisere
relasjoner mellom stat og samfunn har stått sentralt i
tyrkisk politikk frem til dagens situasjon.
viktig referansepunkt for tilblivelsen av «Europa» som politisk begrep. Fra «tyrkerkrigene
» på 1600-tallet ble «Europa» brukt til å mane til felles kamp mot Det osmanske
riket blant de kristne statene. Frem til i dag har «Europa» blitt stadig viktigere som et
politisk begrep som også stater som ikke omfattes av det må ta stilling til. Likevel finnes
det få studier som snur dette forholdet på hodet og ser på hvordan Europa-begrepet
ser ut utenfra. Denne artikkelen utforsker forholdet fra det tyrkiske perspektivet, og
stiller spørsmålet om hvilken rolle Europa-begrepet har i tyrkisk identitetsformasjon.
Hovedargumentet er at selv om Tyrkia har investert mye i endringsprosjekter som
«modernisering», «sekularisering» og «vestliggjøring», understreker alle disse begrepene
Tyrkias posisjon som noe mindre enn et fullverdig medlem av det europeiske fellesskapet.
Papers by Einar Wigen
Emotions were at the core of the practices linked to the creation of a new global order in the nineteenth century. Civilizing Emotions explores why and how emotions were an asset in civilizing peoples and societies - their control and management, but also their creation and their ascription to different societies and social groups. The study is a contribution to the history of emotions, to global history, and to the history of concepts, three rapidly developing and innovative research areas which are here being brought together for the first time.
Authors: Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordheim, Orit Bashkin, Christian Bailey, Oleg Benesch, Jan Ifversen, Mana Kia, Rochona Majumdar, Angelika C. Messner, Myoung-kyu Park, Emmanuelle Saada, Mohinder Singh, and Einar Wigen
principle that never was; namely post-Ottoman studies. The point is to propose this as a way to ask new questions, not immediately to provide answers. The claim in this chapter is that it is worthwhile making more comparisons between post-Ottoman polities, communities, and cultures across all fields of scholarship, and to study historical entanglements between them. The hypothesis, which is developed but largely left unanswered, is that there are important unexplored commonalities, in political, social and cultural terms, through much of post-Ottoman space. At the very least, it is worth considering avenues for studying these commonalities, as this may bring a better understanding of each individual polity and society (and phenomena within them), as well as insights into how imperial legacies linger in post-imperial space.
the existing imperial claims.
Yet, residues remain, making inter-lingual relations qualitatively different for different pairs of languages, and thus also for polities. The article elaborates on how conceptual entanglement is an aspect of ‘entry’ into international society by using the theory on
the case of how the French concept of ‘civilisation’ was translated into Ottoman and became part of the political vocabulary of the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey.
propaganda, er Tyrkias innenrikspolitiske landskap i endring. Der
befolkningen før var for eller imot militæret, EU, kurdiske
rettigheter og bruk av hijab, er tyrkerne i økende grad for og imot
Erdoğan og AKP.
mellom Det osmanske rikets kategorisering av sine
innbyggere og «nye» europeiske kategoriseringsmåter.
Spenningen mellom disse måtene å organisere
relasjoner mellom stat og samfunn har stått sentralt i
tyrkisk politikk frem til dagens situasjon.
viktig referansepunkt for tilblivelsen av «Europa» som politisk begrep. Fra «tyrkerkrigene
» på 1600-tallet ble «Europa» brukt til å mane til felles kamp mot Det osmanske
riket blant de kristne statene. Frem til i dag har «Europa» blitt stadig viktigere som et
politisk begrep som også stater som ikke omfattes av det må ta stilling til. Likevel finnes
det få studier som snur dette forholdet på hodet og ser på hvordan Europa-begrepet
ser ut utenfra. Denne artikkelen utforsker forholdet fra det tyrkiske perspektivet, og
stiller spørsmålet om hvilken rolle Europa-begrepet har i tyrkisk identitetsformasjon.
Hovedargumentet er at selv om Tyrkia har investert mye i endringsprosjekter som
«modernisering», «sekularisering» og «vestliggjøring», understreker alle disse begrepene
Tyrkias posisjon som noe mindre enn et fullverdig medlem av det europeiske fellesskapet.
As the annual International Conference on Conceptual History celebrates its twentieth anniversary, conceptual history is gaining ground in an ever-increasing number of fields, disciplines and parts of the world. The number of scholars identifying with some version of conceptual history is increasing, as is the breadth of topics, theories, and approaches. This conference aims to reflect that diversity.
Few other approaches are as conducive to dialogues across disciplinary borders, and we want to use this occasion to invite in all those who center their inquiry on social, historical, political and scientific concepts and their history. Our ambition is that this conference shall be both a meeting-place for all those working on conceptual history, regardless of approach or topic, while also trying to expand the field by soliciting proposals on three specific, although broad themes:
1. Concepts in the World
2. Conceptual history as history of knowledge
3. The Multiple Times of Concepts and Histories