International, Political, Sociology

Abstract

This journal responds to a broadly acknowledged sense that scholars engaging with problems understood to be international in scale and character increasingly reach beyond the established resources of the institutionalized discipline of international relations. Specifically, it responds to the judgment that much is to be gained by engaging with sociology and social theory as broad arenas of scholarship that have so far played only a marginal role in the development of international relations as an institutionalized discipline. The three terms that make up the title of the journal—international, political and sociology—are intended to work, in part, to affirm such expectations. Sociological traditions have indeed been neglected in and even assumed to be insignificant for the analysis of international relations and we think that much is to be gained by engaging with them now. Similarly, we think that sociological scholarship might usefully extend its engagement with literatures on international relations, for reasons that are at least equally pressing. In this respect, we hope that the journal will be able to play an encouraging role in bringing together important scholarly communities that do seem to have much in common even if interaction and collaboration have so far been rather sporadic. This is not, however, the limit of our ambition for the opportunities we hope will be opened up through this new venture: a venture, we want to stress at the outset, in which we have been supported by so many extraordinary people. We recognize that the discipline of international relations has long been characterized by powerful currents of interdisciplinarity. It would nevertheless be fair to say that it also remains closely tied to specific traditions of political science in ways that still seem to inhibit appreciation of other disciplinary resources, sociology and social theory among them. It has also been losing some …