A Big Picture of the Standard of Civilisation

One of the advantages of the ‘big picture’ approach adopted by Barry Buzan (and his collaborators) is to be able to grasp the profound, macro-changes of social and inter-polity relations over history. This approach is particularly helpful when it comes to the structures of international society, its actors, its fundamental normative architecture, and the main trajectories of its changes and developments. Arguably, the big picture over time is also a big picture of insides and outsides, with standards of civilisations being some of the most crucial markers of those belonging to a given (historical) social order, and those not. The chapter intends to reflect on Barry Buzan’s view of the Standard of Civilisation as a concept and as a practice from a ‘big picture’ perspective, analysing its fundamental components but also engaging with the limitations and the lacunae that such a view inevitably entails.