Most conflicts seem to our contemporaries to be unprecedented events. They rarely are. The historian’s first contribution is to relativise: to show that today’s war or rupture is part of a lineage of episodes, with comparable if not related causes. This does not diminish the urgency of the crisis or conflict we experience, but, rather, situates it.
International history is not “international relations” narrowly conceived — treaties, summits, ambassadors. It is the history of how societies, economies, and ideas cross borders. Sometimes this happens against the will of states. A conflict framed as bilateral and international usually proves, on closer inspection, to be embedded in transnational currents that no single state fully commands.
While political science supplies categories like security dilemma or deterrence, history pays attention to contingency. It shows us that outcomes are rarely predetermined, that actors miscalculated, and that alternative paths existed and were foreclosed by specific decisions. Combining both guards against two errors — reducing conflicts to timeless law, or dissolving them into accident.
Borders and identities invoked as self-evident today are usually artifacts of earlier settlements such as colonial partitions, post-imperial arrangements, Cold War compromises. Studying these origins helps us explain why the same geographies keep generating friction, and why maps drawn to end one era’s disputes sometimes help manufacture a later era’s tensions.
Great powers narrate their own past selectively. They emphasise restraint and minimise their violence and intervention. Historians test these self-narratives against the documentary record. Sometimes, these include archives that powers would rather not have consulted. Without such correctives, policy debates recycle official memory rather than confront it.
A crisis illuminated only by its most recent antecedent — the last war, the last election — misses slower causes: demographic shifts, resource dependencies, institutional decay. These unfold across years if not decades and are rarely visible in daily reporting — but they are key for us to understand current conflicts.
Language matters practically. Sources produced by the parties themselves, in their own languages, reveal internal debates invisible to analysts relying on translated summaries. Much of what passes for expertise on a conflict is expertise on how outsiders have described it.
The practical upshot for training students of international affairs is that an awareness of general theory and historical research complement each other. A curriculum offering only models produces analysts fluent in frameworks but blind to context; one offering only narrative produces chroniclers unable to generalise. Understanding present conflicts requires both.
This article was published in Globe #38, the Graduate Institute Review.
