After the Interregnum - David Chandler

international sphere is no longer considered to be the task of the discipline of
International Relations.
The Interregnum: The US and the ‘Return of the Outside’
While many commentators celebrate the new cross-disciplinarity of International
Relations or assume that it was always a mistake to have seen International Relations
as a narrowly ‘Political’ discipline, this paper seeks to highlight just how rapid and
untroubled the passing of the defining distinctions, which demarcated the subject as a
separate academic discipline, have been. It is always difficult to understand a process
when one is in the middle of it. I suggest that today we have come out of the other
side. One starting point for understanding the death of International Relations as a
political discipline is the ‘interregnum’.
The ‘interregnum’ is a term taken from Mary Kaldor’s 2003 book Global Civil
Society: An Answer to War, which was then taken up by Martin Jacques in his
February 2004 review article in the London Review of Books (Kaldor 2003; Jacques
2004). Kaldor asks: ‘Will we look back on the last decade as the ‘happy nineties’?
Was it an interregnum between global conflicts when utopian ideas like global civil
society, human rights, a global rule of law, or global social justice seemed
possible?’(2003:149)
The discussion of the ‘interregnum’ begs the question of whether inter-national
relations have been overcome, with the end of the Cold War, the rise of globalisation
and the development of global civil society, or whether the recent consensus that
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