ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the tendency of international political sociology and historical sociology to reinforce, rather than unsettle, conventional social scientific understandings and categories. It highlights an emerging body of work by historians and historical sociologists that suggest avenues of inquiry which break decisively with the ontology, historiography of conventional social science scholarship. International political sociology is a field of inquiry that encompasses at least three avenues of inquiry. The chapter focuses on exploring relations between the political and the sociological in the context of ‘the international’ as it is conceptualized by mainstream International Relations. Historical sociology is concerned with political institutions and with the state. Much scholarship associated with it has also been concerned with the international domain. The chapter suggests that the conceptualization of the domain of the ‘social’ that can be used to construct a non-Eurocentric and non-national, interconnected and global history as a starting point for rereadings of the international being elaborated by international political sociologists.
