Discipline Of IR Research Articles

Des RI françaises en émergence ?

This article purports to study the situation of French International Relations, both inside French academia and in the global discipline of IR, on the basis of the answers obtained by the fourth TRIP ( Teaching, Research, and International Policy ) survey to which 3 466 IR scholars from 20 different countries – and, among them, 101 French IR scholars – have participated in Sep- tember 2011. The answers provided to questions concerning the place of IR in French academia, the so-called French school of IR, multidisciplinarity, French inscription in the global discipline, the link between theory and practice and the effect of lan- guage, show an ambiguous picture: there are clear indications that French IR are emerging, even though some indicators show that this emergence remains partial.

Getting Asia Right and Advancing the Field of IR

Why, we have to ask, have putatively inadequate ‘Western’ IR theories been applied over and over again to explain and understand Asian international relations? How can we develop more satisfying explanations of the international politics of Asia? In relation to such questions, this article demonstrates how academic disciplinary socialisation entails competition and selection, which tends towards the elimination of approaches or explanations that do not fit into the socialised practice, without generating new ones. It is argued here that interweaving existing IR theories with Asia's empirical material and remoulding the theories through gathering empirical evidence on the regional reality and converting it into theoretical variables, comparable in the field of IR, should be our goal. In order to apprehend Asian international relations better and to contribute to advancing the discipline of IR, we need an accumulation of theoretical knowledge sensitive to and attentive to local difference.

Kultura strategiczna, czyli o kulturowych uwarunkowaniach polityki zagranicznej i bezpieczeństwa

Reflections on cultural conditioning of foreign and security policy has a long and rich tradition. Its modern expression can be found in the strategic culture studies, which have, during more than three decades, left their mark on the discipline of international relations. During that time, it has been subject to considerable evolution and undoubtedly enriched the workshop for interstate relations analysis. The purpose of this paper is to present history of thought on relations between culture and foreign policy, trace the evolution of strategic culture concept in the discipline of IR and outline some issues which promise to open interesting avenues for further studies in this field.

Citing Old and New IR: From Positivism to Post-Colonialism

Using citation data from Google Scholar (GS) this article reveals a picture of IR which contrasts sharply with how the discipline currently understands itself. Over a period of two years, GS citation numbers were collected from major publications across a range of IR theories. What is exposed challenges the core/periphery assumption endemic to the discipline of IR. The data suggests a realignment of discursive power in IR behind the periphery rendering the core increasingly isolated in what has become an inter-discipline. What emerges is a picture of IR which is decidedly internationalized and democratized ' reaching far beyond its heretofore patrolled gates of the Anglo-American dominated academy and its associated onto-methodology. The citation data situates IR within a much larger field of scholarship which claims a significant stake and contribution to matters pertinent to understanding International Relations. All of this points to a post-colonial moment in the story of the discipline of IR which is increasingly being written far from its assumed 'core'.

Conversations in and on IR: Labeling, Framing and Delimiting IR Discipline

<p>Calling for genuine and open dialogues between research agendas and theoretical orientations, this article seeks to put “conversations” at the center of the process of discipline-building. Just as Steve Smith declared: “We construct, and reconstruct, our disciplines just as much as we construct, and reconstruct, our world” (2004: 510), we intend to convene researchers in IR to reflect on the way we build and represent our discipline, our object of study and our community’s purposes. Applying discursive analysis and Emanuel Alder’s communitarian constructivist approach to the discipline of IR, this article will particularly discuss the use of mechanisms of labeling, cognitive structuring, and disciplinary debates to the framing of IR itself. It will propose some answers to questions such as: “What is the content and appropriate label of the discipline?”, “Who constitutes the disciplinary community?”, and “What is the legitimate purpose of the discipline?” and finally underlie some questions and contradictions in the way we understand such issues.</p>

On Teaching Ethics in International Relations: Questions and Answers

Frost, Mervyn. (2011) On Teaching Ethics in International Relations: Questions and Answers.International StudiesPerspectives,doi: 10.1111/j.1528-3585.2011.00450.x © 2011 International Studies Association There is an ethical imperative to analyze the ethical issues built into every aspect of the discipline of IR. Also, the “Ethics of IR”? is not a sub-discipline of IR, but is core to the whole discipline.

Intellectuals, International Relations and the Constant Emergency

In this essay, I return to Hans Morgenthau's and Hannah Arendt's writings on the Vietnam war and US foreign policy, which explored questions of bureaucracy, technology, emergency. On one level the essays they wrote illustrate the extent to which the discipline of International Relations (IR) has now caught up with the analyses of politics and war that they were developing in the 1960s and 1970s. We begin to see how lines of thought in Morgenthau's writing connect directly with the work of a younger generation of scholars interested in the work of intellectuals like Giorgio Agamben on the dangers of a security-obsessed politics in a ‘state of emergency’ or ‘state of exception’, or how Arendt's and Morgenthau's work on bureaucracy and war is explored in contemporary work; from a pedagogical perspective, drawing out these connections creates the possibility of a different, potentially more subversive, way of introducing students to the discipline of ir.

Moctezuma's Revenge: The State of IR in Mexico

In 1519, Hernan Cortes landed on the east coast of the Aztec Empire ruled by Moctezuma II. According to the Florentine Codex, written fifty years after the Spanish conquest, the Aztecs believed the Spaniards to be gods and Cortes to be the returned god Quetzalcoatl. Altough the historical accuracy of the Codex is open to debate, there is little doubt that the Aztecs ontology included only Indians and gods, and therefore the Spaniards had to gods. This musunderstanding played an important role in the Spanish conquest and subsequent decline in the Aztec Empire. The point being that how we understand the world goes far in contributing to how that reality unfolds, and incorrect understanding can have dire consequences.The purpose of this essay is to examine the of IR in Mexico, and the experience of Moctezuma and the Aztecs is relevant. It is argued here that IR in Mexico has followed too closely the IR discipline in the United States, and as a result has misunderstood and misrepresented domestic and international realities that define Mexico's place in the world. Such misunderstanding may be said to constitute Moctezuma's revenge. The fault lies not merely within the Mexican IR discipline, but equally (if not more so) with how the discipline of IR has developed in the United States. Of couse, such claims about the IR discipline in Mexico and the United States cannot be fully elaborated or supported in an essay of this lenght, and therefore this work should be seen as merely a preliminary attempt or propedeutic to reveal questions and concerns about the state of IR in Mexico in the hope that other scholars will begin to reflect seriously upon these issues.

Forget Foucault, Forget Foucault, Forget Foucault…

It is a mantra, doomed to be repeated. It is not a plea. It is not an injunction. We cannot “forget” Foucault in the same way as, in another era, Marx could only repeat his distance from “Marxists” and the defeats of that other era turned Marxism into a dogma. In our era, the transformation of Foucault into the dogmas of “Foucaultians” and “post-Foucaultians” cannot be ended by the work of academics; it is not an academic problem. In the same way, the bloating of the discipline of IR, and the boom of dogmatic Foucaultianism within this, have nothing to do with academia per se, but how the world impinges upon and is reflected within disciplines, overdetermining the transformation of both what we call “IR” and what we call “political theory” and their inter-relationship. As Marxists, it is possible for us to understand how the transformation of Marxist thought into dogma was a necessary reflection of the degeneration of the liberatory political project of The Communist Manifesto , and, as Foucaultians, it is possible for us to understand how, in our era, the “disciplining” or “colonizing” of Foucault, within IR, is not a contradiction or a puzzle or an occasion for the allocation of blame but is a necessity. Why has IR “colonized” Foucault so easily, and yet found Marx so indigestible that he has been a constant mystery to the discipline itself? What is it about IR today that facilitates an appropriation of Foucault's epistemological framework in ways which have been much more problematic within political theory (which, of course, had no difficulty institutionalizing Marx in the academy)? Foucault tells us …

Gender, Violence and Global Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies

In this essay I develop a critique of the war/peace dichotomy that is foundational to conventional approaches to IR through a review of three recent publications in the field of feminist security studies. These texts are Cynthia Enloe's (2007) Globalization and Militarism, David Roberts' (2008) Human Insecurity, and Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics by Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry (2008). Drawing on the insights of these books, I ask first how violence is understood in global politics, with specific reference to the gendered disciplinary blindnesses that frequently characterise mainstream approaches. Second, I demonstrate how a focus on war and peace can neglect to take into account the politics of everyday violence: the violences of the in-between times that international politics recognises neither as ‘war’ nor ‘peace’ and the violences inherent to times of peace that are overlooked in the study of war. Finally, I argue that feminist security studies offers an important corrective to the foundational assumptions of IR, which themselves can perpetuate the very instances of violence that they seek to redress. If we accept the core insights of feminist security studies – the centrality of the human subject; the importance of particular configurations of masculinity and femininity; and the gendered conceptual framework that underpins the discipline of IR – we are encouraged to envisage a rather different politics of the global.

Introduction: prendre au serieux la culture dans les relations internationales

Culture and international relations are related in all circumstances. On the one hand, if one refers to the discipline of International Relations, culture is an important parameter that influences knowledge production and paradigmatic elaboration. The discipline of IR is therefore culturally situated. On the other hand, when one is dealing with the phenomenon of international relations, it appears as if all social relations, international relations are orientated by the ways of thinking, beliefs and representations of its actors. At the same time, international relations create opportunities for cultural invention in order to regulate the interaction among actors.

Popular visual language as global communication: the remediation of United Airlines Flight 93

AbstractThis article argues that while the linguistic turn in mainstream IR is important in broadening how IR approaches global communications, the linguistic turn has its limitations because mainstream IR tends to, in Mattelart’s terms, ‘ex-communicate’ the visual from the linguistic. This is highly problematic, considering, firstly, that popular visual language is increasingly the language that amateurs and experts rely upon in order to claim contemporary literacy and, secondly, that much politics is conducted through popular visual language. If the challenge of this Special Issue is to think about how to bring the discipline of IR to meaningful, political life, then a very good place to start is by asking mainstream IR (again) to take popular visual language seriously as an important aspect of contemporary global communication. This article makes this demand of the discipline of IR. It does so by presenting a case-study – the official US remediation of United Airlines Flight 93 – as an illustration of how contemporary global communications move from the textual to the visual and of what is lost in not taking this move seriously. In particular, it claims that by failing to analyse popular visual language as integral to global communications, mainstream IR risks misunderstanding contemporary subjectivity, spatiality, and temporality.

Contributions to the Forum

One cannot but applaud the ambitions of the first IPS editorial which are to extend the reach of international relations by engaging with sociology and social theory and to bring the approaches of European social theory to bear on the traditions of Anglo-American social science in the expectation that these engagements will work to the benefit of all parties. It is impossible to deny that the IR discipline “remains closely tied to specific traditions of political science” and that this “inhibits” its “appreciation of other disciplinary resources.” Sociologists have certainly made major contributions to contemporary understanding of the state, and these have not always been acknowledged by the discipline of IR. The difficulty of the enterprise is also undeniable for it would be naive to assume that the approaches which IPS aims to bring together are already “at play in a common field of knowledge.” I agree, too, that these cannot be the limit to the journal's ambitions. In addition to the issues noted in the editorial, I would want to add the concern that the conjunction of distinct disciplinary perspectives cannot be expected to unravel the difficulties in which they are most complicit. It goes without saying that both the word “politics” and political science's understanding of what politics is and should be are derived from idealizations of the Greek and Roman societies of Western classical antiquity.1 Classical sociology's view—from Fustel de Coulanges through Emile Durkheim to Claude Levi-Strauss—that the simplest kind of society is an apolitical federation of groups united by intermarriage rests on idealizations of the same Greek and Roman communities. It is hardly surprising then that, as Michael Mann notes, sociologists commonly “take polities, or states, as their ‘society,’ their total unit for analysis” (Mann 1986:2).

Conclusion: On the possibility of a non-Western IR theory in Asia

AbstractIn the conclusion, we seek to ascertain the possibility of a non-Western International Relations theory (IRT) in Asia. We find while there is a good deal of writing that can be regarded as ‘pre-theoretical’, these have not been fully exploited or exported to other parts of Asia and beyond. There is certainly little that can be called an Asian IRT. This is not because scholars in the region accept that Western IRT is unchallengeable nor that it has found all the answers to the major problems of international relations. Nor is it because non-Western theories are ‘hidden from the public eye’. It is rather due to a lack of institutional resources, the head-start of Western IRT, and especially the hegemonic standing of Western IRT. At the same time, the case studies point to the existence of abundant intellectual and historical resources that could serve as the basis of developing a non-Western IRT that takes into account the positions, needs and cultures of countries in the region. There is room in Asia for the development of non-Western IRT, but not an ‘Asian School of international relations’ (although national perspectives such as a ‘Chinese School’ are possible) which would assume a degree of convergence of perspectives and interactions among Asian scholars, which clearly does not exist. This development should and could go beyond simply ‘joining in to the existing game seeking to add local colour and cases to existing theory’, or developing a localist exceptionalism (‘Asian values’) or organizing local thinking into rebellions against prevailing orthodoxies (especially realism and liberalism) in the manner of the dependencia theory. Western IRT does not need to be replaced, but can and should be enriched with the addition of more voices and a wider rooting not just in world history but also in informed representations of both core and periphery perspectives within the ever-evolving global political, economic and social order.In the conclusion, we first offer some generalizations from the four case studies with a view to addressing the main question posed in the introduction: the apparent absence of IRT in Asia and possible explanations behind it. We then reflect on whether the question of a non-Western IRT in Asia is a meaningful one, and whether the way it is approached in this special issue could result in a productive debate that would advance the discipline of IR. Although our empirical focus is on Asia, we suggest some insights that have more general relevance for non-Western IRT.

International Relations and the Problem of Difference

International Relations and the Problem of Difference. By Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney. New York: Routledge, 2004. 276p. 27.95 paper.Can scholars of international relations dig themselves out from under the weight of several hundred years of world history and their own analytic baggage and remake themselves? This book asks for precisely this, delivering an important message for the discipline. Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney's opening premise is that IR, in spite of what one might logically expect, has always in fact been stymied and wrong-footed by the “problem of difference.” Far from being able to understand and deal sensitively with diversity and the other, the practices and discipline of IR have squashed it—internally the state has become an engine of homogenization, while externally international society is a hostile realm of danger and hierarchy, in which forces of an “empire of uniformity” operate to stigmatize difference and tame it. Instead of embracing and theorizing difference, IR is associated from the time of early modern Europe with the crippling dual “legacy of colonialism and religious cleansing” (p. viii). The authors are advocates instead of “heterology,” of the study of IR as a “study of differences” in which dominant Western perspectives and leaders are not afraid to be challenged and changed by encounters with diversity and the other, in which such encounters are open questions.

IR: The Resurrection

By giving center stage to popular films rather than to IR theory, this article examines the processes of political evacuation and disciplinary incorporation as they occur to postmodernism and feminism in relation to the discipline of IR, and particularly in relation to Wendtian constructivism and Jonesian gender. This approach enables me to pose two provocative (if necessarily illusive) questions — `What constitutes mainstream IR these days?' and `How is this mainstream socially, culturally and popularly constructed?' The article's contribution is threefold. It is familiarly `critical', for it draws critical attention to mainstream IR theory, whatever that may be. It is `functional', for it exceeds critique by demonstrating how IR blunts radical critiques like postmodernism and feminism, all the while pointing to their incorporated albeit politically evacuated remnants as evidence of the seriousness with which IR takes pluralized debate. And it is what I would term `everyday pedagogical', not because it uses popular films to illustrate IR examples but because by emphasizing the everydayness of film over the disciplinarity of IR it teaches us how the social, cultural and popular simultaneously enable and disable IR theory to `be'.