| Summary: | "Neumann and Wigen counter Euro-centrism in the study of international relations by providing a full account of political organisation in the Eurasian steppe from the fourth millennium BCE up until the present day. Drawing on a wide range of archaeological and historical secondary sources, alongside social theory, they discuss the pre-history, history and effect of what they name the 'steppe tradition'. Writing from an International Relations perspective, the authors give a full treatment of the steppe tradition's role in early European state formation, as well as explaining how politics in states like Turkey and Russia can be understood as hybridising the steppe tradition with an increasingly dominant European tradition. They show how the steppe tradition's ideas of political leadership, legitimacy and concepts of succession politics can help us to understand the policies and behaviour of such leaders as Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey"--
"Book introductions speak in headlines. When the introduction is over, the reckoning is at hand. The onus of demonstrating what we have before only asserted, is now upon us. In this chapter, we will discuss how, since its inception in the second half of the nineteenth century, the academic study of political organisation has systematically and wilfully left out the steppe experience. There is, therefore, relatively little for us to build upon. One exception to this is Weber's concept of sultanism, which he defines as an extreme form of patrimonialism (that is, a form of rule where the ruler ideally inherits the polity from his father as something to own and use for his own benefit as well as for that of his relatives and friends). Weber is useful to us because, exceptionally for European social theorists, he actually includes polities with a steppe pedigree in his theorising, and so opens space for an undertaking such as ours. The other towering figure when it comes to institutionalising the social sciences, Durkheim, is more typical in totally neglecting the steppe, but he has things to say about the early state that we can draw on, and one of his students, Rene Grousset, went on to write the first theorised treatment on the matter"--
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