Abstract
This article approaches ‘neutrality’ as an essentially contested concept and traces its meaning and purpose over centuries-long historical timelines and situated political, societal and security contexts. It distinguishes neutrality from other concepts such as ‘neutralization’ ‘non-belligerency’, ‘non-alignment’, ‘military non-alignment’, ‘military neutrality’ and ‘non-allied’. The article explains the politics of defining neutrality in the current European political and legal landscape and in the context of shifting definitions and practices of war, peace, security and state sovereignty. This episteme-based analysis focuses on changes to neutrality in accordance with the rise and fall of particular empires and international actors over time, and changes to its status linked to the development and reification of particular meta-theoretically-based subfields of International Relations and Political Science, setting the background to this special issue of
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
