This chapter contrasts the approach to nature taken by Alexander von Humboldt and Hegel. In particular, it focuses upon the notion of Naturphilosophie and how it is developed in the work of both thinkers. It gives details from the work of Schiller, Goethe, and Schelling in order to provide historical context to the discussion. To clarify some of the contrasts between Humboldt’s and Hegel’s approaches to nature, the chapter focuses upon their approaches to the landscape and people of America. The fate of natural beauty in the work of both thinkers is highlighted. It argues, by reference to Adorno’s critique of Hegel, that while Humboldt gives natural beauty autonomy by not limiting it to what the subject contributes to it, Hegel’s view of nature is as repressed natural beauty, eclipsing it with human reason and human subjectivity. Ultimately, Humboldt’s more empirical approach, balanced with a recognition of the role of freedom, allows nature to come into clearer focus than it does in Hegel’s work. Hegel’s more abstract, speculative approach keeps nature too far from the empirical realm. In the case of our understanding of nature, Hegel’s clean hands become a problem, resulting in a Naturphilosophie that does not bring us close enough to nature or its beauties.

This chapter seeks to revisit Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella, a foundational fiction of the Haitian Revolution which is considered to be the first novelistic representation of the event written by a Haitian author. This nineteenth-century novel gives rise to an infinite number of themes yet to be explored. The narrative design that examines the Slave Revolution of 1791 highlights the conflict between Blacks and mulattoes through two main protagonists, the brothers Romulus and Rémus. It focuses on the filiation that the Black Revolution maintains with the French Revolution by evacuating the question of agency among the revolutionaries and instead favors a purely providential approach through the white heroine Stella. The chapter attempts to offer a contrapuntal reading of Bergeaud’s figurative rendition of the Revolution by contrasting two dominant views, that of the colonizer and that of the colonized.

When we think of empirical research, we think of things we can observe. Empirical research, as conceived within a Western scientific framework, is discussed in this chapter by addressing the Eurocentric basis of research and the curriculum. It is now imperative to consider how to enrich sociological theory and find new ways of revealing innovative knowledge in educational research. This chapter highlights the role Indigenous knowledges and theories have in informing educational research and knowledge production. Indigenous Standpoint Theories (IST), situated within Indigenous knowledge paradigms, goes beyond Western research as this encompasses our way of knowing and being in the world. Foley and Rigney conclude that Indigenous research must work to free our people from oppressive barriers and reflect our lived experiences as Indigenous people. IST positions our people as knowledge holders and speaks to the significance of critically situating ourselves in relation to that knowledge.

This chapter explains how international society emerged and was globalised. Its main purpose is to explore how the European sovereign states-system expanded across the globe to become the truly international order of sovereign states that we see today. The first part of the chapter examines how the expansion of the states-system came about and how it has been analysed. The second part provides a critical discussion of how the spread of the states-system has been understood in IR. It aims provoke thinking about the enduring Eurocentrism that continues to bedevil our theorising of international politics.

Existing research on the ISCM tends to focus on the ‘centres’ in Western and Central Europe and North America. Although the membership included countries in Latin America and Asia from early on – for instance, Argentina joined in 1924, and Japan in 1935 – and eventually in Africa (South Africa, 1948), much less attention has been paid to the role the ISCM played in these regions. As this chapter argues, it is in the ‘peripheries’ that the ISCM proved particularly influential in stimulating diverse conceptions of musical modernism within specific local contexts. However, the significance of the ISCM for its far-flung members was rarely reciprocated. The ISCM’s inflexible structure and flawed conception of internationalism, founded on the unquestioned sovereignty of the nation state, perpetuated the imbalances between centre and periphery. Using quantitative data on national and regional representation at various levels, complemented by qualitative data, such as interviews with key players and archival records, I formulate a critique of the ISCM as an institution that struggled to overcome the systemic Eurocentrism of its foundation.

Chapter 1 is a discussion of the scope of the concept of sustainable development. It examines the multiple dimensions of the concept and how these different angles to this concept have contributed to both its advance and decline in the law. This conceptual challenge accounted for the concept’s poor meaning and considerably poor performance. This chapter also provides insights into theoretical and methodological considerations underpinning this book, including the choice of Africa as the pivot of analysis and Third World Approaches to International Law as a scholarly approach.

The chapter examines the developments in the field of Latin studies in different periods and in different countries and institutions. Section 1 gives an outline of the history and the status of Latin studies in the schools and universities in a variety of continents and countries, over a certain period of time and in politically and ideologically distinct phases. The chapter analyses the diverging methods and research issues in Latin studies resulting from different institutional conditions. It scrutinises the influence of western European educational institutions in which Latin has been taught on individual academic disciplines also outside Europe, and raises the question whether they are determined by national or ideological schools of thought. Section 2 contains case studies seeking to determine the extent to which characteristic ‘national’ differences impinge on research in Latin. Using the example of critical editions of specific Latin texts, of the developments in the commentary tradition and of approaches derived from theoretical discourses elsewhere, the chapter attempts to illustrate the persistence or slowdown of national traditions in Latin studies to the present day.

This chapter’s overall argument is that to advance cultural-historical activity theory, at this time of a severe sociopolitical and ecological crisis, it is imperative to amplify connections to the radical scholarships of resistance immersed in social justice struggles. I address how Marxism and Vygotsky’s approach directly align with this scholarship, on an array of positions, in contrast to approaches that do not prioritize such struggles. Using the transformative-activist stance (Stetsenko, 2017a) - premised on Marxist/Vygotskyan foundations, inclusive of a unified ethico-ontoepistemology - and while connecting to contemporary scholarship of resistance, I further the notion of agency in several steps (relevant also to motives). The core argument posits agency at the nexus of a seamless, ever-evolving/moving process of a mutual self-and-world co-realization, while problematizing reality as a task and gearing agency to the tasks of resistance. Additionally, the chapter sets the stage to interrogate charges of eurocentrism and anthropocentrism in Marx and Vygotsky.

The concluding chapter contextualizes the study of ancient Doric architecture against the backdrop of European colonialism and modern globalization. The evolutionary explanation of the Doric temple can be seen as part of a broader tendency in the West of naturalizing and normalizing Greek/Western culture as world culture by tracing it back to universal principles. The critique of the evolutionary narrative makes it possible to appreciate the disruptive and innovative character of the Doric order as part of a historical shift in the wielding of religious and political power and in the relation between Greek communities and the landscapes they inhabited. Population growth, social change, and political innovation led to urbanization, colonization, and land reclamation on an unprecedented scale. These processes challenged the traditional religious system, which was based on an intrinsic relation between the divinities and the natural features of the landscape. The Doric temple can be seen as a response to this situation: by redefining the sacred space, “inhabited” by the gods, it also redefined what was outside the sacred precinct, the “profane” land that was subject to new forms of exploitation, land distribution, and colonization.

The final discrediting of the Manchu regime’s traditionalism sparked a range of new efforts in domestic and also foreign policy, and fostered an embrace of international law as a vocabulary for the articulation of state interests and “rights” that would continually intensify across successive governments. From this point forward, Chinese positions on public law issues at the international and domestic levels would be closely related. This phenomenon was perhaps most strikingly illustrated in the often-overlooked but crucial Chinese role at the Second Hague Conference of 1907, where for the first time China’s delegates joined other marginalized states of the “Global South” to resist initiatives by great powers.

State formation in East Asia developed a thousand years before it did in Europe, and it occurred for reasons of emulation, not competition. China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea emerged as states beginning in the second century BCE, and existed for centuries thereafter with centralized bureaucratic control defined over territory and administrative capacity to tax their populations, field large militaries, and provide extensive public goods. They created these institutions not to wage war. Rather, these countries developed states through emulation of China. State formation in historical East Asia occurred under a hegemonic system in which war was relatively rare, not under a balance of power system with regular existential threats. Rather, domestic elites copied Chinese civilization for reasons of prestige and domestic legitimacy. Our research challenges the universality of the bellicentric thesis of state formation. The willingness to acknowledge the Eurocentric origins of much of IR theory is not new; what is new in this book is the empirical evidence we bring that shows this explicitly, and a positive theoretical contribution about the causes of state formation.