Abstract
AbstractThis article addresses the call made by the ISA Sapphire panel to focus on “the opportunities and the challenges of theory-building in interdisciplinary scholarship.” The article focuses on the multiple anxieties that exist in the discipline of IR, its departmental subalternity, its fragmentation of content, its methodological diversity, and its hybrid constitution of practical and observational knowledge. However, rather than arguing for any restriction, the article pleads for these anxieties to be embraced and for IR to be treated as a privileged space in which to integrate that knowledge. It invites scholars to link three distinct yet important domains of IR theorizing: the philosophical, the explanatory, and the practical. It invites the discipline to see the three domains as equally fundamental for its identity. Using Morgenthau's theory of power as a foil, the article shows the need to think about these three domains of theorizing concomitantly, despite the difficulties involved in providing a coherent link between them, something Morgenthau did not achieve.
Highlights
This article addresses the call made by the ISA Sapphire panel to focus on “the opportunities and the challenges of theory-building in interdisciplinary scholarship.” The article focuses on the multiple anxieties that exist in the discipline of international relations (IR), its departmental subalternity, its fragmentation of content, its methodological diversity, and its hybrid constitution of practical and observational knowledge
In a somewhat parallel manner to his critique of legal self-sufficiency, Morgenthau criticized the academic study of politics in the United States for being both too detached from its philosophical underpinnings and yet not empirical enough, mistaking its hopes for reality
Economics cannot be the model for a science of international politics, being a science misapplied to different conditions and having a mere residual conception of politics to start with
Summary
This article addresses the call made by the ISA Sapphire panel to focus on “the opportunities and the challenges of theory-building in interdisciplinary scholarship.” The article focuses on the multiple anxieties that exist in the discipline of IR, its departmental subalternity, its fragmentation of content, its methodological diversity, and its hybrid constitution of practical and observational knowledge. When the paradigms no longer informed the debates, the discipline returned to its underlying default position of self-reflection, as seen in the anniversary issue of the European Journal of International Relations that asked: “the end of theory?”. This soul-searching is arguably more pronounced in IR than in its sister disciplines in the social sciences (except perhaps in geography).
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