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From the beginning of horseback riding some three thousand years ago and into the 18th century, the Eurasian steppe was home to polities, frequently sizeable and long-lasting.1 By the Eurasia steppe we mean that vast tract of land which stretched from the original Mongolian-Turkic lands around Karakorum, north of the agricultural lands of the Chinese, the Persians and the Byzantines, all the way to where the grasslands started to give way to forest in the west, and where Finno-Ugric and later also Slavic tribes lived. Steppe polities were part of a tradition, with patterns of leadership, succession, and foreign relations that differ from what we find among sedentary polities. They also had patterned interaction with sedentaries, first and foremost with China, Persia and Byzantium.
The Eurasian steppe should be of interest to the discipline of International Relations, not only for the relations (including the successions) between steppe polities, but also for steppe-sedentary relations. This piece, which is an exploratory one, addresses the fact that, although clearly important as a case for social scientists in general and for the discipline of International Relations in particular, the Eurasian steppe has so far been roundly neglected.
The first section of the article discusses why IR, and the social sciences in general for that matter, has not studied the steppe. We find the reason for this in 19th-century understandings of world history as a teleological process driven by the civilising force of the state. The state was, by definition, sedentary. Other kinds of polities were therefore doomed to be either the precursor, or the unwelcome competitors, to the state, and so not worthy of serious attention.
In the second section, we go on to give a highly stylised outline of extant knowledge of the steppe produced within other fields, first and foremost archaeology, linguistics, and history, with the emphasis being on political organisation. This section ends with us postulating what we call a steppe tradition of ordering politics. From around the year 1000 BC, there arose a political tradition on the Eurasian steppe which had its origins in the nomadic empires (which from the 6th century onwards can be identified Turko-Mongolic),2 but whose form also came to owe much to sedentary, Persian bureaucracy.
The third section of...