NAZM · Nezam and Nazm: Iran's Concept of International Order
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-10-01 → 2024-05-30
- EU contribution
- €202,159
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Nezam and Nazm: Iran's Concept of International Order
Project NAZM addresses one of the most pressing questions of contemporary international politics: how various polities, languages, and temporal framings conceptualize international order. This project analyzes various uses of concepts to understand and organize the international sphere, focusing specifically on Iran. It highlights the co-constitution of domestic and international order and examines how specific language and socio-political contexts lead to differing conceptions of international order. In exploring the longevity of debates on international order within domestic political contexts, the project also examines the temporality of political projects and how the past, present, and future are represented and imagined politically. It emphasizes how the discipline of International Relations often fails to grasp particularities such as religious notions of international order and messianism, which influence the study of concepts like justice, cooperation, and conflict, all with significant normative consequences. The project's objective is to challenge the unitary assumption of what international order is and how it is understood in various contexts and geographies. This broadens the scope of academic and policy debates on the present and future of international order beyond just great powers or Eurocentric frames. The project highlights the role of religion in shaping and contesting international order, both historically and contemporarily. It successfully studies how religious texts and other modes of knowledge, such as practices and rituals, influence both domestic politics and international order through various legitimacy claims or temporal politics.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The past, present, and future of the International Order are recurrent subjects of exploration and studies in International Relations, Middle East Studies, and History. Yet, most of such studies fail to grasp particularities and changes across time, space, and languages. In fact, International Order is traditionally discussed as an extension of the West or understood as a purely American-led phenomenon. How can we talk and study international order without grasping particularities of the concept across different geographies and histories? Relying on a universal concept and the Eurocentric and Anglophile analyses of the international order undermine the agency of the non-Western states and societies, obscures history, and limits the scope of our knowledge production by focusing on just a few cases. Attempts to go beyond the West are also usually framed as a way to assess the risks to ‘Western’ order or policies. By focusing on the case of Iran, this action challenges the assumption that 'International Order' has the same meaning across times, spaces, languages, and cultures. The action's state-of-the-art contributions to International Relations, conceptual history, and Middle East studies are manifested in its main objective to argue for investigating not just different conceptions of the international order but also analysing various usages of concepts to make sense of and order the international. The project asks how is international order conceptualised? Where does the order come from? What distinguishes a new order from an old order? It seeks to understand origins, conceptions, and evolutions of the international order at a time when the future of the order is being debated. Through conceptual history, Iran's distinct language and religious discourse also enables us to have a better understanding of the role of religion and temporality in the international order.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITETET I OSLO · OsloCoordinatorNorway
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union