This essential new history of the Irish state synthesises existing research with new findings, and adopts fresh perspectives based on neglected European and American debates. It examines the evolution of Irish diplomacy from six consulate officers in the 1920s to sixty ambassadors in the 2010s, and provides an overview of a century of Ireland's diplomatic history that has previously only been examined in a piecemeal fashion. The author's original research findings are focussed particularly on Ireland's struggle for independence in a global context, and his original analysis gives an account of how the economic performance of the Irish state formed a perpetual context for its role in international relations even when this was not a priority of its diplomats. Equal attention is paid to the history of international Irish trade, the operations of bilateral Irish relations, and multilateral diplomacy. It highlights how the Irish state came to find its role in international relations mostly by means of the UN and EU, and analyses this trend in the light of international relations theory and European history.

The years of Ireland’s union with Great Britain are most often regarded as a period of great turbulence and conflict. And so they were. But there are other stories too, and these need to be integrated in any account of the period. Ireland’s progressive primary education system is examined here alongside the Famine; the growth of a happily middle-class Victorian suburbia is taken into account as well as the appalling Dublin slum statistics. In each case, neither story stands without the other. This study synthesises some of the main scholarly developments in Irish and British historiography and seeks to provide an updated and fuller understanding of the debates surrounding nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history.

Torbjorn L. Knutsen introduces ideas on international relations expressed by thinkers from the High Middle Ages to the present day and traces the development of four ever-present themes: war, peace, wealth and power. The book counters the view that international relations has no theoretical tradition and shows that scholars, soldiers and statesmen have been speculating about the subject for the last 700 years. Beginning with the roots of the state and the concept of sovereignty in the Middle Ages, the author draws upon the insights of outstanding political thinkers - from Machiavelli and Hobbes to Hegel, Rousseau, and Marx and contemporary thinkers such as Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Morgenthau and Walt - who profoundly influenced the emergence of a discrete discipline of International Relations in the twentieth century. Fully revised and updated, the final section embraces more recent approaches to the study of international relations, most notably postmodernism and ecologism.

Where previous histories of Ireland in the war years have focused on high politics, That Neutral Island mines deeper layers of experience. Stories, letters, and diaries illuminate this small country as it suffered rationing, censorship, the threat of invasion, and a strange detachment from the war.

The 1954 Conference on Theory, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, featured a 'who's who' of scholars and practitioners debating what would become the foundations of international relations theory. Assembling his own team of experts, the editor revisits a seminal event in the discipline.

This book examines the evolution of British - Irish relations since 1921 and applies theories from political and social sciences, including international relations to the Irish/Northern Irish case. The book includes the generation and analysis of primary data on violence and constitutional debate; the analysis of primary sources such as state papers; and elite interviews with British and Irish officials, representatives of constitutional political parties in Northern Ireland, and leaders and activists of republican and loyalist parties/organisations. Part 1 looks at how the attempt to regulate the Irish nationalist challenge to the British state (through dominion status for the Irish Free State and partition) impacted on governance in both jurisdictions. The re-opening of the (Northern) Irish Question in the late 1960s is then analysed to demonstrate the continued primacy of opposing claims to national self-determination and their impact on subsidiary levels of conflict. The final part, covering the year 1985 to the present, then demonstrates how the relative equalization of national status, reflected in the bi-national, inter-governmental relationship, has been successful in regulating conflict by integrating vertically the bi-nationality at state, governmental, and societal levels. Finally, implications of the British-Irish approach are developed as contributions to the comparative theory and practice of ethno-national conflict regulation. Ã?Â?Ã?Â?

Acclaimed political, social, cultural and economic history of Ireland from prehistory to the present by one of Ireland's leading historians.