Overview
The conventional assumption in international relations holds that the sovereign state, the basic unit of contemporary international order, first emerged in Europe and then spread to other regions through colonial expansion and that the components of the sovereign state had not existed in non-Europe prior to the period of European expansion. However, this is only an untested assumption based on Eurocentrism, and it has not been made clear what was actually unique to Europe and what existed in other regions as well.
The purpose of this study is to test this assumption by examining the historical development of the sovereign territorial order in premodern Japan and comparing it with Europe during the same period. Specifically, we analyze the extent to which the components of a sovereign state, such as territory, sovereignty, and government, developed in early modern Japan, seeing it as a quasi-international system with each clan as a unit. This project is positioned within two recent trends in the field of international relations theory, namely non-Western international relations and historical international relations. It questions some of the most fundamental assumptions of existing international relations theory and is among the first attempts to investigate premodern Japan from the perspective of international relations theory.
This project is supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists) (No.23K12423) from FY2023 to FY2026. In addition to networking and collaboration among researchers in related fields, we plan to publish the final results as a book in both English and Japanese.