Description
This paper presents Conceptual Antiquing as a new framework for understanding how historical ideas acquire, retain, and transform symbolic value across academic fields. Using the Peace of Westphalia (1648) as its central case, it explores how “Westphalia” became not only a historical reference point but a tradable conceptual artifact within the discipline’s evolving discourse. Through close readings of seventeenth-century commemorations, nineteenth-century periodization, and post-Cold War critique, the project traces how scholars and political actors have repeatedly reappraised and situated Westphalia to inform particular visions of international order.
By combining conceptual history, discourse analysis, and rhetorical interpretation, the study reveals how Westphalia’s afterlives illuminate broader processes of conceptual inheritance and myth-making in global politics. It argues that conceptual discourse sustains a “heritage economy” of ideas in which canonical events and concepts are continually re-curated to meet contemporary symbolic demand. This approach offers both a methodological tool for diagnosing conceptual change and a reflexive critique of how the discipline narrates its own origins. In doing so, it asks whether International Studies can rethink its inherited conceptual repertoire and what such rethinking might mean for the discipline’s readiness for the next fifty years.
Keywords: Conceptual history; sovereignty; Peace of Westphalia; discourse analysis; disciplinary myth-making
