Since the 1970s, the post-modernist critique has proclaimed the “end of grand-narratives”. However, in international relations understood broadly, the most successful books have indeed had an underpinning grand-narrative. John Lewis Gaddis’ The Long Peace (1986), Samuel Huntington’s The Third Wave (1991), Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) or Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature (2011) are cases in point. This presentation will tackle the challenges of making historical sense of the post-1945 world by shedding light on the symmetrical temptations of relying on grand narratives and parochialism. It will critically assess the characterization of the period as the “long peace” and the “nuclear age” and will propose a new periodization which emphasizes an “age of global nuclear vulnerability”. It will then outline the epistemological and methodological implications of this approach for historians as well as IR theorists. It will argue that it is an opportunity for a renewed global history, a new engagement with the notion of contingency in history without the overconfidence of contemporary statistical research.

Dr. Benoit Pelopidas, Lecturer in International Relations at SPAIS, University of Bristol, a member of the Global Insecurities Center, and an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), at Stanford University. He has been awarded two international prizes for his research (from the International Studies Association and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies) and the award for best dissertation in international studies by the Swiss Network for International Studies. He has published a co-authored book in three languages and scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals including the Nonproliferation Review, Bullentin of Atomic Scientists and the Cambridge Review of International Studies.

Date and time: 18 December, 15.00-17.00.
Location: Seminar room A900, Stockholm University.