Chapter 17 Revision Guide

  • In the previous chapters a number of theoretical approaches in International Relations and their contributions to our understanding of international relations have been examined. This chapter studies the question: what do these theories tell us about IR as a discipline?
  • To understand international relations (‘i.r.’) we need to also understand the discipline of IR, where different kinds of knowledge about ‘i.r.’ are produced.
  • This helps us to answer a number of puzzles, for example, the question ‘in what sense are IR theories theories of ‘IR’? The key questions delved into here are: ‘Is IR still a discipline and is it likely to remain one?’ In other words, Is the whole more or less than the parts?
  • IR is often conceived to have been overtaken by fragmentation and multi-disciplinarity and many theorists have pointed to the disappearance of the domestic/international distinction.
  • An academic discipline is often defined according to three characteristics:
    1. having a clear object and agreement on the definition of an object
    2. reproducing consensus among scholars within a field
    3. seeing disciplines as focused on power and institutions.
  • In this chapter, IR scholars are examined from a sociological perspective through which the discipline is treated as a social structure.
  • Disciplines not only organize knowledge but also scholars and universities.
  • In the 20th century, the university system has developed in such ways that disciplines have become self-reinforcing and, hence, disciplines have remained very stable.
  • IR has been a very stable self-producing discipline and has a strong sense of disciplinarity. A disappearance of the field is therefore unlikely.
  • Academic disciplines are social and intellectual structures.  Different sciences vary in their structure and vary over time.
  • In terms of social structure IR is an American social structure as the US houses the leading journals and produces most of the funding.
  • There are other regional and national centres too, however. Dilemmas emerge in attempting to move beyond a Western-centricism, where theoretical contributions from scholars situated in the ‘West’ are more likely to be recognized as IR.
  • The key institutions of the (American based) IR are characterized by strategic dependence. In IR dependence is centrally a question of access to publications.
  • IR has a hierarchy of journals and universities. Journals are mainly defined, structured and to an extent controlled by theorists, although theory articles do not rank higher than applied ones.
  • So-called great debates have tended to structure theoretical debates in the discipline as well as empirical work.
  • What could upset the structure of IR?
    1. Rational choice could be said to have posed a supra-disciplinary movement in IR as in social sciences in general.
    2. Challenge of increasing lay audiences might disrupt the control of IR elites.
    3. A utilitarian call for ‘impact’-driven and ‘strategic research’: In a knowledge society, external economic and political voices count perhaps more than ever before.
  • The main factors point towards loosening of central control in the discipline.
  • We should not assume that we have no control over which way disciplines are shifting. However, even revolutionary movements should aim to understand the context of their challenges to the discipline by analysing them as social structures that carry within structures of power.
  • IR has neither clear agreement on its central objects of inquiry, nor strict techniques or priorities. Great debates have organized the discipline instead. Great debates are often decried but we cannot simply get away from them for three reasons:
    1. Critics falsely assume that a discipline following great debates is more unanimous.
    2. ‘Debatism’ is part of the structure, power and privileges in IR.
    3. These debates help us to understand theories in IR.
  • Great debates with shifting fronts and axes of debate are likely to characterize the long term picture of IR as a discipline as it has characterized some other disciplines too.
  • However, currently, many researchers in the US mainstream do not follow classical great debates in IR. Rather, the discipline is characterized by debates internal to schools of thought. Further, the range of IR theories is narrower within the US, with many of the alternative theories being represented more heavily in Europe and the UK. Mostly researchers in the US focus on testing a selection of key theories.
  • The picture of no single great debate is reinforced by this book: the picture changes chapter by chapter.
  • Some key trends in IR as a discipline include:
    1. Structural realism is engaged with debates within the school. Yet it is not free of contesting debates within itself.
    2. Neoliberalism does not tend to do general theory but tests a particular theory or a model from organization theory or economics.
    3. Rational choice has lost its previous centrality in IR through the waning of the neo-neo debate.
    4. Constructivism is marked by the different degrees of constructivism (‘rationalism vs. reflectivism’ debate), as well as engaging in debate with some neoliberals and poststructuralists.
    5. Poststructuralism shows tendencies to engage with specific subjects and engages in less general theory debates both internally and externally.
    6. Feminism, critical theory, neo-Marxism, postcolonialism and green theory tend to follow the pattern of poststructuralism positioning themselves against the mainstream IR theories and the epistemological assumptions they are premised on.
  • The general picture is that the fourth debate is being transformed into a continuum: a series of debates along the same axis. We can see the same debates re-emerging at different points of the rationalism-reflectivism axis.
  • We still live in the after fourth debate era. The orientation still operates via the categories of the fourth debate, but there is not the lively and intense debate of the 1980s and 1990s. We are not in a total interregnum, nor in the fifth debate.
  • New development has been a debate between theorists and others. Some have asked whether we are headed towards an ‘end of theory’.
  • There seems to be agreement amongst IR theorists over the necessity of dealing with theory in order to understand political questions.
  • There seems to be consensus on that we should not do IR for IR’s sake and that we should not give up theory for immediate relevance.
  • As such, a final candidate for the future pattern could be a struggle over the role and character of theory. The ideal in the discipline is relevance through theory, not through excessive policy-orientation.
  • Though students may be frustrated with the amount of theory in IR they should not disregard theory.
  • Theory helps us understand both the world and the processes through which our understanding of it came about: By knowing how we know, we know more about what we know.
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