Five contexts conditioned papal relations to enslavement 1500–1800. (1) From Roman times, Christians understood enslavement as morally licit, and Christian thought was necessarily conservative when it came to social action. (2) Centuries of Christian–Muslim military conflict and mutual enslavement in the Mediterranean – and thus religious and not racial concerns – underwrote bulls authorizing Portuguese slaving in Africa. (3) While popes could make recommendations and excommunicate transgressors, the forces of state power and creeping secularism were infinitely greater. Thus, when popes called to cease or modify terms of enslavement, burgeoning capitalist goals often led colonial settlers and individual merchant opportunists to ignore these directives. (4) In Rome, the Papal States, and the early modern Mediterranean, popes employed slaves of various ethnicities to labor throughout their realms. (5) Both at home and overseas, papal will was extended, mediated, and at times altered by a broad universe of agents such as cardinals, nuncios, and missionaries.

In developmental processes and outcomes, the individual and the context are inextricably connected throughout the lifespan. As an individual from an unorthodox background, my academic career is full of continuities and discontinuities, as one of the most influential books from my advisor, Jerome Kagan, asserted. In retrospect, my upbringing gave me the cultural, ethnic, minority worldview. From the start my education gave me the opportunity to have essential intellectual tools and eventually become bicultural and critical of our academic field. Consistently and strategically, my scholarly, administrative, and volunteer work led to questioning and pushing boundaries of the dominant academic canon; this was achieved by making critical connections with like-minded scholars and institutions, and working directly at the top of mainstream scholarship, educational institutions, and professional organizations. A contextual developmental analysis of my academic trajectory provides evidence of the constant, powerful dialectic relationship of the individual and the context. It all makes sense now.

In the late Iron I, the Galilee was dotted with small farming villages. In the early Iron II, these were all abandoned while at the same time, large, fortified towns such as Hazor were built in the adjacent regions. The two processes were connected, reflecting the Israelite takeover of the region. As the highland polity expanded into the hilly Galilee, the local groups, many of which had a similar background and lifestyle, had to choose whether to affiliate with it or fight against it. Many, especially in more mountainous regions, simply became Israelite “tribes,” whereas settlements that were regarded as non-Israelites (“Canaanites”) were mostly destroyed. Like in other regions, the result was a complete reshuffling in settlement patterns, and the new polity built new centers to control the area. Here, however, the new polity had to contend with another polity, Tyre, with which it wished to remain on friendly terms. Thus, the western part of the Galilee (along with the Galilee coast) was left in Phoenician hands.

This chapter analyses constitutional intolerance on the basis of the Hungarian Church Law of 2011, which deregistered hundreds of religious organisations, attached special conditions to re-registration, and privileged a number of politically favoured religious organisations in return for their political legitimation and support. These micro-legal actions are analysed within the context of the notion of the “System of National Cooperation” and “constitutional identity”. Constitutional intolerance in Hungary appears to stem from a traditionalist commitment to protect traditional values: on the one hand, by strengthening the position of the main Hungarian churches, and on the other hand, by championing anti-liberal policies on gender and sexuality, including the prohibition from exposing minors to “gay propaganda”. But the varnish of Christianity is relatively thin: Hungarian society is thoroughly secularised with low numbers of church attendance, with language and ethnicity taking precedence over religion in their importance to national identity.

This chapter elaborates on the relationship between space and coexistence, and ways in which hegemony is reproduced in public space. Constitutionalism plays an ambivalent role in the reproduction of this hegemony, not least through the reproduction of a thick sense of publicness. This thick sense of publicness can be asserted against a range of “others”, such as religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities, whose identities may be subject to privatisation and retreat from public spaces. At the same time, constitutionalism offered a tangible alternative for the old order of toleration, recognising that religious divisions would be permanent, and that legal and social frameworks of accountability might support peace and order. Given that religious intolerance and the foundation of political order were entwined in early modernity, the establishment of the freedom of religion and the more general protection of religious minorities were vital to the project of the modern state.

Chapter 3 presents localized peace enforcement theory. It first discusses the challenges facing individuals involved in a communal dispute. Reflecting on these obstacles to peaceful dispute resolution, the chapter outlines a formal micro-level theory of dispute escalation between two individuals from different social groups who live in the same community. It explains how international intervention shapes escalation dynamics. The chapter then shifts the focus to local perceptions of intervener impartiality, which the theory posits are a key determinant of whether a UN intervention succeeds in preventing the onset of violence. The identifies the importance of multilateralism, diversity, and the nonuse of force as critical factors shaping local perceptions and, as a result, UN peacekeeping effectiveness. Critically, the theory does not suggest that UN peacekeepers will always succeed, or that all kinds of UN peacekeepers will succeed. Indeed, perceptions of UN peacekeepers vary depending on the troop-contributing country and the identity of the civilians involved in the dispute. The chapter closes with a discussion of the most important hypotheses derived from the theory.

The production of West Side Story at the Vienna Volksoper in 1968 contributed to the rise of the Austrian metropolis as a European centre of American musical theatre. As this chapter shows, the main link between Bernstein, Broadway, and Vienna was Marcel Prawy (1911–2003), a well-known Austrian dramaturg, opera connoisseur, and critic. Prawy created a German adaptation of West Side Story, and in it he imputed Central European cultural viewpoints and preferences into the American artform, particularly in its representation of ethnic conflicts. The differences between Prawy’s German adaptation and the English original suggest that Prawy was concerned about making the American work more understandable for Viennese audiences not only through his approach to language and the poetic properties of the lyrics, but also by subtle but significant changes of the work’s meaning. Most prominently, Prawy aimed at increasing the Broadway work’s exoticist elements.

Despite ubiquitous references to ‘ethnicity’ in both academic and public discourse, the history and politics of this concept remain largely unexplored. By constructing the first transnational and interlingual conceptual history of ethnicity, this book unearths the pivotal role that this concept played in the making of the international order. After critiquing existing accounts of the ‘expansion’ or ‘globalisation’ of international society, the chapter proposes to rethink the birth of the international order through a scrutiny of its major concepts. Fusing Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history with the philosophical writings of G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida, the chapter theorises the emergence of the international order as a dialectical process that both negated and preserved existing imperial hierarchies. The concept of ethnicity is ejected by this dialectical process as a residual category – an indigestible kernel of difference and particularity – that cannot be internalised by the work of sublation.

This chapter ties together the narratives presented in the book’s three substantive chapters to provide an overview of the conceptual history of ethnicity. The chapter then unpacks the ideological functions performed by this concept in service of the international order, and recaps how the emergence of ethnicity contributed to both the negation and preservation of imperial hierarchies. Drawing inspiration from Carl Schmitt’s discussion of ‘nomos’, the chapter concludes by proposing a speculative notion of ‘ethnos’ as the foundational ordering of beings.

This chapter explores how the conceptual shift from ‘tribes’ to ‘ethnic groups’ contributed to the dismantling of the standard of civilisation. Whereas the binary distinction between civilised nations and primitive tribes reinforced the imperial hierarchy between European and non-European peoples, the concept of ethnicity is characterised by a cultural relativism that acknowledges the formal equality of all peoples. The chapter also shows how these conceptual changes enabled the reimagining of the international order as an ‘anarchical’ system populated by sovereign nation-states: at the very moment that anthropologists were moving away from colonial notions of ‘primitive society’ and ‘ordered anarchy’, IR theorists were adopting this vocabulary to conceptualise their own object. In this way, IR effectively accumulated the functions of colonial anthropology as the scientific vehicle for the study of the modern state’s primitive ‘other’. The chapter wraps up with a discussion of indigenous rights and their relationship to minority rights.

This chapter traces how the concept of ethnicity emerged as a depoliticised alternative to nationality. By the end of the nineteenth century, the triumph of nationalism as the hegemonic source of state legitimacy had resulted in the politicisation of the nation concept. This conceptual linkage of ‘nation’ with ‘state’ opened up a terminological vacuum: If nationhood implied statehood, what label should be given to those stateless nations and national minorities that had neither a state of their own nor the political capacity to acquire one? Against this backdrop, the chapter traces how an embryonic concept of ethnicity was articulated to fill in the terminological void. The chapter’s empirical focus is on the early twentieth-century academic literature on nationalism and the establishment of the world’s first international minority rights regime after the First World War. The argument also has significant implications for debates surrounding the conceptual distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism.

This chapter demonstrates how the emergence of ethnicity led to the ‘domestication’ of race. During the nineteenth century, ‘race’ was an incredibly malleable term that could be used to describe both vast transnational populations differentiated by physical characteristics and smaller national communities such as the French or the Jews. With the emergence of a sharper divide between the biological and sociocultural spheres in the early twentieth century, this polyvalence came to be seen as a problem. To specify the meaning of race with greater precision, a cluster of new ethnos-based terms (ethnic group, ethnicity, ethnie, ethnos) was coined around the turn of the century. One important consequence of this conceptual shift was the effacement of the transnational stratum of race: there is no global ethnic line comparable to the global colour line. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how a pluralised concept of civilisation has filled in for the suppressed transnational stratum of race.