Charlotta Friedner Parrat

• PhD
• Senior Lecturer (assistant professor) at Swedish Defence University

For the definite version, see http://journal-iostudies.org/sites/journal-iostudies.org/files/JIOS_Vol5Issue2_Parrat.pdf

English School theorists argue that primary institutions uphold order in international society. However, they disagree about what those primary institutions actually are. Moreover, comparatively little research tackles the links between primary institutions and secondary ones, embodied in international organizations. Yet, these different levels of...

This chapter discusses how international organizations affect change and continuity of primary institutions. It conceptualises primary institutions as fundamentally flexible over time, although subject to locking-in as well as to emergence in international organizations. Primary institutions are practice-based and therefore evolving continuously, b...

OPEN ACCESS. The English school of international relations is in large parts focused on the study of historical change; at the same time, however, it is remarkably unclear on how to understand change in between the idealist belief in progress and the realist eternal cycles of recurrence. This article seeks to avoid this dead end by questioning the...

OPEN ACCESS: This article is a reply to Bevir and Hall, who recently argued in this journal that the English School needs to reflect more on its philosophy. They are right. Yet, their preferred distinction between a structural and an interpretivist strand of the School is not a constructive way forward. This is because their distinction between a s...

Change is often taken for granted and treated as commonsensical in international relations (IR) theory, but this treatment of change obscures the fundamentally different roles that scholars’ understandings of change play. Making the underlying ontological views of history as determined- or contingent-explicit and addressing their interaction with p...

Many are now discussing the possible demise of the so called ‘liberal international order’, but how can we know whether any international order is changing? This article argues for understanding order as maintained by institutions of international society and further theorises the role those institutions play in the stability or transformation of i...

In this article, Adam Watson’s use of ideal types is revisited in order to distinguish between various kinds of international orders over time and address the different types of war which are logically possible in relation to them. The argument is that war differs between ordered and disordered circumstances, as well as among members, or between me...

OPEN ACCESS: This is a series of solicited articles requested by the editors of Vol. 51, emerging from a roundtable discussion held at the 2022 International Studies Association Convention. Each short contribution seeks to demonstrate the newest research of the English School of International Relations. These contributions tackle key questions incl...

OPEN ACCESS The world’s littorals is an important theater for all sorts of human interaction. So, also for naval warfare, which increasingly has led defense planners to focus on littoral capabilities rather than on Mahanian high-sea battles. We address the question of what littoral warfare means for different types of states. To that end, we devel...

OPEN ACCESS: This is an article on Swedish coastal defence over four centuries. It seeks to understand the changes in Swedish naval policy over time by exploring how the understanding of the nature of war visible in defence planning varies over time, due to both changing norms and changes in harder factors, such as geography, resources and adversar...

This chapter asks in what way the English School (ES) is a helpful framework for addressing questions that are likely to concern International Relations researchers in the years to come. We draw on recent scholarship to demonstrate the utility, often underestimated, of the English School in making sense of topical issues in world politics. We revis...

It is becoming customary to define the English School (ES) as a group of scholars participating in a common inquiry related to a few central concepts, notably that of international society. Although the roots of the ES are often attributed to the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, it is now said to be more of an open society...

It is debated within the English school which primary institutions are present in international society; and also how to identify a primary institution in the first place. Engaging especially with Peter Wilson’s claim that both of these issues need to be solved by ‘empirical grounding’ of primary institutions, it is argued in this paper that intern...

This article is concerned with the obligation of State Parties to report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, and discusses the politics involved in the reporting process, showing what strategy each state chooses to employ. An empirical study shows that the reported improvements in children’s rights depend not only on the State Party’s e...