(2016) PSA blog: 'Do IR scholars engage with the same world?' (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Continuing Failure of International Relations and the Challenges of Disciplinary Boundaries
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2014
This article is concerned with addressing the following hypothesis, originally presented in Millennium in 2001: International Relations theory does not influence other academic fields to the extent that it suggests that it should. This claim is re-examined in light of the growth of IR over the past decade. Using a variety of evidence, including a close examination of the Social Sciences Citation Index, I conclude that IR (still) does not have much influence outside of the IR academic community. I also argue that while it is not reasonable to expect scholars who write on global politics but belong in other academic fields or disciplines to turn to IR, the way that IR defines itself suggests that they should. Consequently, it follows that IR needs to be doing more in order to make our work of greater relevance to, at minimum, those fields of scholarship that IR borrows from. I suggest that the reason why IR has continued to have little influence in other fields is because of the way I...
Mind the gap: IR and the challenge of international politics
Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 2015
Introduzione The discipline of International Relations (IR) for a long time of its history has developed in the form of Great Debates that involved competing paradigms and schools. More recently, it has been described as a cacophony of voices unable to communicate among themselves, but also incapable to provide keys to understand an ever more complex reality. This collection aims at evaluating the heuristic value of a selection of traditional paradigms (realism and liberalism), schools (constructivism), and subdisciplines (security studies and international political economy) so as to assess the challenges before IR theory today and the ability of the discipline to provide tools to make the changed world still intelligible.
Introduction: Interdisciplinarity and the International Relations event horizon
European Journal of International Relations
This Introduction contextualises this special anniversary issue of the journal. The Editors of a previous 2013 special issue of the EJIR (The End of International Relations Theory?) asked if the paradigmatic “theoretical cacophony” in IR was deep and irresolvable. We argue that there is still very much a conversation going on across ‘generalist’ and specialised IR journals, and that renewal and broadening is more important than boundaries per se. Meanwhile the field of International Relations has continued to broaden, absorbing much from other social science disciplines in the process. Yet IR has a problematic relationship with interdisciplinarity, often discovering as ‘new’ what other fields have long debated and in turn ‘domesticating’ these insights from other fields by fitting them into existing IR paradigms. This special issue is thus aimed above all at what ‘we’ in IR are not seeing from other disciplines, and we go on to argue how IR scholars might best employ ‘transdisciplin...
The field of IR has been described as an “‘inter’-type discipline,” in the sense that it is devoted to studying the interactions of different kinds of international actors. However, despite the fact that the discipline has never been blind vis-à-vis the “in-between” (or relational) dimension of the subject matter, much of the focus in recent years’ discussions has, in various ways, been directed to the international in IR-theory. While acknowledging that this has alerted the discipline about the prevalent Western-centrism in much IR-theory and how it helped foster an awareness of the diversity of IR-communities around the globe, the present forum takes its point of departure in the view that in order to make the academic field of IR-theory worthy of its own name, it is now time to move the debate about global IR a step further and connect it to what has been unearthed in recent decades’ mapping of IR around the globe. To succeed in this endeavor, this forum suggests that it is necessary to both refocus and recalibrate the “inter” in IR-theory. Thus, in addition to bringing attention back to the inter-national dimension of IR-theory, it is also necessary to examine the conditions that determine how relevant actors (e.g., scholars and practitioners) interact in producing knowledge about “the international,” that is, the forms, formats, and foci of intellectual interactions. In this introduction, we will first elaborate the background for this call in order to explain why it is necessary and how it relates to, but also aims at transcending, the discussions about (post)-Western IR-theory in recent decades. We conclude with a sketch of how a recalibration of the “inter” in IR-theory involves a range of dimensions to be taken into consideration and how these are examined in the various contributions to this forum.
It has become commonplace to refer to the study of International Relations (IR) as a not-so-international discipline. As an academic field, its most influential and prestigious publications as well as its main forum—the International Studies Association—are dominated by Western scholars, particularly Americans. Thus, the discipline has been called an “American Social Science”. Numerous studies have shown this phenomenon in peer-reviewed publications, course syllabi and among the participants of the International Studies Association’s main conferences. In our own study, we recently found that even on a subject of regional concern like North Korea, Western, especially American, authors dominate. American power over the discipline is reflected not only in participation in its main scholarly forum and peer-reviewed articles, but also in the number of PhDs it grants and the role the recipients of U.S.-based PhDs play in universities throughout the world.
The field "International Relations" (commonly abbreviated IR) focuses on a variety of subject matters. The many connotations which are usually associated with the term "relations" (one of the most underspecified terms in the field itself) and the aesthetic quality which accompanies relating the name of the field (IR) to a broad set of subject matters subsumed under the same term in minor letters, "international relations", help explain why both IR and "international relations" are still widely accepted. Of course, this is not to say that there is consensus. As a matter of fact, and unsurprisingly so, both the name of the field as well as any succinct description of its subject matter(s) have always been contested. Different observers have argued that the "international" ought to be replaced by "inter-state", "trans-national", or "global" -just to name a few. Others would like to see "relations" replaced by "studies" or "politics". A brief look at some of these alternative combinations -eg. "inter-state relations", "trans-national politics", or "global studies" -would give any reader a quick idea as far as different emphases is concerned even if he or she would not be familiar with the normative and theoretical underpinnings which inform these alternative descriptions of the field of study and its subject matter(s). For this very reason conceptual contestation is unsurprising: it is already an expression of the inevitable and recurring ascertainment of the borders of a field of study by the community of scholars belonging to it and claiming it as their own.
“International Relations” in The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies
International Relations (IR) is commonly understood as the study of behaviors and interactions of nation-states (such as the United States or China), regional organizations (such as the European Union or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), international organizations (such as the United Nations or World Bank), and multinational corporations (such as Google or McDonalds). The question whether these examples may further be characterized as governmental, intergovernmental, or nongovernmental in nature depends on the hybridity of the tasks and roles they undertake and the mission-vision of these organizations. It is apparent that other social science disciplines have had a marked influence on IR in terms of its theoretical and methodological development. IR is described as an interdisciplinary field mostly influenced by philosophy, political science, history, economics, and sociology. Thus, the individual, the community (cultural, religious, or secular), civil society, world society (cosmopolitan and universal), and the international system and their interactions are also part of the study of IR. In addition, it is concerned with the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. Its motivations, objectives, national interests, and the involvement of its agents such as political elites in decision-making are all part of the foreign policy of a given nation-state. IR may also utilize positivistic or normative tools for its research design and methodology. Some treat it as still a branch of political science, but although IR is a relatively young discipline, scholars from the United Kingdom and the United States have established their own institutes and departments independent of the other social sciences. Almost all the books, journal articles, and textbooks in IR used all over the world were authored by American or British scholars, or by UK or US graduates. The extant literature in the West is therefore much more extensive than that in the rest of the world. IR is therefore considered by some scholars as a US-or Europe-centric discipline which ignores or downplays the experience of other parts of the world, such as the Muslim world, and its principal actors, such as China, India, and Brazil. Another significant aspect of IR is the difference between theoreticians and practitioners in the approach to international issues. Who has more weight, credibility, and influence in a given case (e.g., Iranian nuclear talks, or issues of climate change or crimes against humanity)? Theoreticians may guide and provide explanatory precedents to practitioners, while practitioners will always be in the forefront of the hands-on implementation of solutions suggested by theoreticians. In short, both play a vital role in shaping and/or carrying out the study of IR. Below is an overview of the historical development of IR as a discipline and guidance to practitioners or policymakers, including the major debates that have taken place and the future prospects for the discipline of international relations.
Two World of International Relations Study
My original intent in this paper was to highlight some of the historical trends and development in theories that characterize the study of IR in each of these equally important worlds. But as I began to pull together my thoughts on these three worlds of IR study, I became increasingly hard-pressed to find materials of sufficient analytic depth and scope in the Marxist and Third World communities to match the scholarly excellence of the West. In the end, because of the pressure of time, I found that I simply could not do justice to all three bodies of writing, so I have limited this paper to a comparison, sketchy as it might be, of Western and Marxist theories of IR. Nevertheless, the effort was worthwhile even if the results were for me personally disappointing. Despite these problems, my conviction has not been lessened that examining IR theory cross-culturally is extremely important because of the unavoidable relativism in theory building in the social sciences. No social scientist can escape the fundamental influences of culture and society. Every individual is conditioned by a set of historical and cultural "screens" which limit his or her vision of the total