Stubbornly stumbling into making history

On the first lecture in International Relations (IR) we attended, we were met by the number 1648 written large over the whiteboard. This date, we were told, marked a supposed watershed in international affairs, the birth of international affairs as we know them. To Halvard, who had come to Political Science from studies in History, this did not resonate well. To Benjamin, for whom IR was the first topic studied at the University of Oslo, this only became problematic once he discovered that even Stephen Krasner – who was generally talked about in quite laudable terms by his professors – had, years before Benjamin embarked upon his studies in IR, sought to debunk the creationist myth of Westphalia (Krasner 1993). The feeling that the mainstream had an issue with history, pushed us towards it. The fact that this issue was reflected even in some of the biggest questions we were asked to grapple with as first year political science students, made us interested in how big things came about and changed.