The Greater Implications of Bartelson’s Becoming International

Abstract

Of all major International Relations (IR) scholars active today, it is Jens Bartelson who has done the most in terms of getting us to rethink our assumptions about the basic building blocks of our field. In a series of very significant books — A Genealogy of Sovereignty (1993), The Critique of the State (2001) and Sovereignty as Symbolic Form (2014)— as well as numerous articles, he has changed our understanding of both the concept of sovereignty and its conceptual history, with serious implications also for the history of ‘the state.’ His 2017 book War in International Thought has led the reader through the evolution of the thinking about war. And his most recent book Becoming International (2024), which is the subject of this review essay, joins Visions of World Community (2009) in getting us to rethink the very basic notion of ‘the international’ and how it came about.