Neutral Actors in History

This book presents historical case studies on state practice of neutrality, showing how neutrality has been used to navigate empire, war and shifting international orders.

This open access book repositions neutrality as a globally embedded political practice, legal instrument and identity-forming strategy across a wide array of historical and geopolitical contexts. Focusing explicitly on the experiences of individual neutral and non-aligned states, it offers in-depth discussions about the conceptual challenges faced in the past by actors who tried to chart a viable third-party course towards belligerent environments, and offers a fresh, global and cross-disciplinary look into the practice of neutrality.

Interrogating the legal and political agency of states under occupation, such as Hawai’i and China, it revisits the role of neutrality in the Pacific War, the First World War and Cold War diplomacy. Investigating examples such as the tensions between ideology and pragmatism in Indonesian and Irish foreign policies, and the empirical shifts in public perception toward neutrality in places like Switzerland and Luxembourg, it offers case studies from around the globe.

By tracing how states from diverse historical trajectories used neutrality to navigate imperial pressures, shifting alliances, and great power politics, the volume highlights both the adaptability and vulnerability of neutrality as a global concept. Collectively, the chapters argue that neutrality has been—and remains—an active expression of agency within an unequal international order, and that its global history must be reclaimed to better understand the possibilities of non-alignment in the present.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on Bloomsbury Collections. Open access was funded by Kyoto University, Japan