Wager upon wager: Assessing Iver B. Neumann’s contribution to International Relations

Abstract

A key player in the Scandinavian rise in the International Relations discipline, Iver B. Neumann has made significant contributions to several research programs, from Russian and European identity politics to practice theory and discourse analysis, through longue durée analyses of governmentality and diplomacy. At the theoretical level, Neumann has borrowed multiple social-theoretical resources that have allowed him to make a variety of epistemological and ontological wagers as his gaze shifted from one topic to the next. Original and wide-ranging as it is, this scholarship is also full of tensions that illustrate the value and pitfalls of a pragmatic attitude to theorizing. By revealing Neumann as an intellectual fox (in Berlin’s sense), we critically assess his scholarship, including the epistemological stretches it contains and the many difficult challenges that it struggles to meet. Overall, Neumann’s overarching method, which he consistently follows despite all its internal contradictions, seems to be what anthropologists call to “make strange”—a relentless drive to transform the conventional, habitual, and self-evident into a puzzle, and then make this puzzle relevant to, or have import for, both scholarly debates and contemporary political practice.