Book review : Theorizing medieval geopolitics: war and world order in the age of the Crusades

Abstract

International Relations (IR) scholars' interest in medieval politics varies between enthusiasm and neglect. After a serious debate between neorealists, Marxists and constructivists in the 1990s, a relative silence fell on the subject. The victory of constructivists, who argued that the medieval state—if such entity even existed—was an altogether different polity from its modern incarnation and therefore not really interesting for understanding contemporary processes, seemed definitive. In this climate, Andrew Latham's thesis in Theorizing medieval geopolitics comes as a necessary and interesting reinterpretation aimed at restarting the debate and at introducing new questions and avenues for research.