Ethnos of the Earth: International Order and the Emergence of Ethnicity

Date
Thursday, March 6, 2025, 4:30 pm6:00 pm
Audience
Public

Speaker

Details

Event Description

By constructing the first transnational and interlingual conceptual history of ethnicity, Ethnos of the Earth: International Order and the Emergence of Ethnicity reveals the pivotal role this concept played in the making of the international order. Rather than being a primordial or natural phenomenon, ethnicity is a contingent product of the twentieth-century transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states. As nineteenth-century concepts such as 'race' and 'civilisation' were repurposed for twentieth-century ends, ethnicity emerged as a 'filler' category that was plugged into the gaps created in our conceptual organisation of the world. Through this comprehensive conceptual reshuffling, the governance of human cultural diversity was recast as an essentially domestic matter, while global racial and civilisational hierarchies were pushed out of sight. A massive amount of conceptual labour has gone into the 'flattening' of the global sociopolitical order, and the concept of ethnicity has been at the very heart of this endeavour.

Jaakko Heiskanen is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. Before joining Queen Mary, he worked at the University of Cambridge where he also completed his PhD in 2020. His research interests are located at the intersection of international relations, nationalism studies, and global history, with a focus on the transnational circulation of ideas and the global spread of the nation-state. He is especially interested in the histories of key concepts through which the modern international system has been ordered, including categories such as ‘nation’, ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘nomad’. His first monograph Ethnos of the Earth: International Order and the Emergence of Ethnicity (forthcoming in November 2024 with Cambridge University Press) provides the first transnational and interlingual conceptual history of ethnicity. He has also authored book chapters and published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as International Theory, European Journal of International Relations, Nations and Nationalism, Global Studies Quarterly, International Political Sociology, and Journal of Political Ideologies.

Pre-Circulated Paper

The pre-circulated paper will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via SharePoint. All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Sunaina Danziger.


 

Contact
Sunaina Danziger
Scholarly Series