The limits of international relations: R. B. J. Walker’s Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory

Abstract

While R. B. J. Walker’s Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Inside/outside) is in many ways a classic, there are several difficulties – and indeed ironies – in referring to it as a classic of International Relations (IR).2 Here, we are not dealing with a work that seeks to improve on contemporary theories of IR, either by providing better and more accurate explanations of ‘international relations’, or by offering new visions of ‘world politics’. Such criteria might usually be employed to judge whether a particular contribution to IR is worthy of the accolade of being a ‘classic’, but they do not apply in Walker’s case. Rather, his is a collection of essays that engage critically with some of the underlying assumptions upon which the very notion of IR as a separate ‘discipline’ relies. Perhaps most of all, it is a text that questions the constitutive limits of IR – understood as a discipline that concerns itself with what is said to happen ‘outside’ rather than ‘inside’ the sovereign territorial state, in the realm of ‘international’ as opposed to ‘domestic’ politics. Through the establishment and maintenance of these limits Walker argues that IR is (re)produced as a separate field of study and is distinct from Political Theory. By refusing to take the distinctions between inside and outside, International Rela-tions and Political Theory for granted, Inside/outside is not so much a classic of IR – indeed Walker is highly sceptical of the practice of canonizing in scholarship – but rather a particular (and political) intervention that opened up new ways of thinking about the very (im)possibility of IR as a separate discipline: a move that, ultimately, can either be read as a victory for Walker or the discipline depending on whether one accepts the former’s bold critique of the latter. It encourages scholars and students alike to challenge the limits that the notion of a separate discipline relies upon, not least by examining the underlying assumptions upon which theories of IR either claim to speak the ‘truth’ of the eternal realities and structural necessities of the international system of sovereign states, or construct visions of how the world should be organized differently. Understood in this light, Inside/outside stands as one of the most important – and certainly most subversive – contributions ever made to the theoretical body of literature produced by the ‘discipline’ of IR. One of the greatest contributions of Inside/outside lies in its refusal to rely on one masternarrative, particular explanation or specific starting point for questioning the disciplinary boundaries of IR. While the text is sometimes associated with the positivism/post-positivism debate in IR theory, any attempt to categorize it using terms like reflectivism, post-modernism, post-structuralism or post-positivism is highly problematic – not least because Walker himself staunchly rejects these labels. Indeed, none of these terms – nor any other ‘ism’ – offers an adequate reflection of Walker’s critique, whichdoes not stem from one particular approach. Instead, Walker draws from a rich tapestry of philosophical traditions, including the history of ideas, ideology critique, immanent critique, as well as a more general literature on alterity, running from G. W. F. Hegel through to Michel Foucault, Edward Said and Tzvetan Todorov, among others.3