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11. Introduction to the sociology/ies of international relations

Author:
Anne-Marie D'Aoust
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The study of the history of the discipline of International Relations (IR) has come a long way since Stanley Hoffmann's 1977 seminal article 'An American Social Science: International Relations'. With its focus on the development of IR in the United States, Hoffman's analysis sparked an incendiary debate that still goes on today about the discipline's origins, nature, goals, and assumptions. His insights hinged on fundamental questions about our work as IR scholars, ranging from the kind of valid scientific inquiries IR scholarship represents and/or requires (scientific dimension) to the aims of IR scholarship (normative dimensions), as well as the intellectual and social milieux in which IR scholars evolve and the practices they use and enact (sociological dimensions).
Topic:
International Relations and Development
Political Geography:
United States and America

12. From epistemology to practice: a sociology of science for international relations

Author:
Christian Bueger
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Without question there is no shortage of reflexivity in the discipline of International Relations (IR), to the extent that after several 'grand debates' and numerous 'turns', it seems to have reached a certain intellectual 'surfeit'. One of the reasons is certainly that many of the questions concerned are not logically solvable, and that debates on reflexivity tend to become affective if not religious from time to time. Another reason is that debates are often scholastic, and have nothing to do with either the social life of the researchers or the objects studied. This surfeit should not, however, be an argument for refraining from reflexive exercises. After all, standards of reflexivity are what distinguish scientific practices from those of other knowledge producers. Instead, this observation should lead us to reconsider the connection between the abstract, theoretical, conceptual and the practical everyday. Therefore, this contribution argues for an extended understanding of reflexivity centred on practice and taking advantage from works in the sociology of science.
Topic:
International Relations and Sociology

13. Everyday practices of international relations: people in organizations

Author:
Oliver Kessler and Xavier Guillaume
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The idea that there are biases, blind spots or exclusionary if not oppressive forces in the very way scientific endeavour is organised still appears to be a rather strange idea. It runs counter to the ingrained idea that science is reflective. Science is still predominantly associated with the idea of a separation between values and facts and a clear separation between subject and object, that is, the normative ideal that researchers are detached from their 'object of study'. With it comes the idea that knowledge and power need to be separated before the scientific enterprise can enjoy the fruits of objectivity and neutrality. True knowledge can only be produced where power is absent. Yet, regardless of whether one subscribes to, for instance, the Kuhnian notion of paradigm shifts, Wittgenstein's idea of therapy, or Foucault's arché, as soon as the well-trodden paths of positivist philosophy of science are re-situated within a series of relations, practices, institutions, and persons, questions regarding scientific endeavour stop being solely confined to objectively instituted rules of evaluation.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
Europe

14. Accounting for the politics of language in the sociology of IR

Author:
Anne-Marie D'Aoust
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
With its 2009 report on the state of the discipline of International Relations (IR), the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project of the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations aimed to tackle directly Ole Wæver's claim that IR 'is and has been an American social science' (Wæver 1998: 687). Driven by the question of whether or not one could see national variations in the way scholars think about the discipline, and if one could agree on the existence of a single IR discipline, the TRIP project engaged in an ambitious ten-country survey about 'the state of the discipline' (Jordan et al. 2009). The choice of the ten countries surveyed then (Australia, Canada, Ireland, Israel, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the United States) reflects an obvious yet unmentioned selection criteria: these countries use English as the main language of scientific communication. If no consensus could be reached as to whether IR was an American discipline per se, there could at least be an implicit consensus that to be considered and acknowledged — and thus evaluated, measured, and assessed — the discipline(s) of IR had to be Anglophone by definition. This presumption also underpinned Stephen Walt's recent commentary on the persistent dominance of Anglo-Saxon scholarship in IR. 'I'm still struck', he admitted, 'by the relative dearth of “big thinking” on global affairs from people outside the trans-Atlantic axis, including continental Europe. And by “big thinking” I mean ideas and arguments that immediately trigger debates that cross national boundaries, and become key elements in a global conversation' (Walt 2011).
Topic:
International Relations and Sociology
Political Geography:
United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Israel, South Africa, Australia, Ireland, Singapore, New Zealand, and Hong Kong

15. Beyond geography and social structure: disciplinary sociologies of power in international relations

Author:
Kevin McMillan
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Throughout their relatively brief history, studies examining the academic International Relations (IR) discipline have manifested an abiding concern with power and its uneven 'distribution'. In this, of course, they mirror the object of their analysis. The same might also be said of the approach they typically use to study disciplinary power: as within IR theory itself, studies of the IR discipline have primarily identified and assessed power in geographical and territorial terms. There are two principal (and often overlapping) variants of this approach: the first, and most familiar, is national (state-centric); the second, increasingly popular, is imperial (world-systemic).
Topic:
International Relations

16. The liberal renaissance and the end(s) of history

Author:
TIm Di Muzio
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Addressing the historical turn in International Relations (IR), this article offers a critical appraisal of what I call the liberal renaissance by interrogating liberal discourse and its renderings of history. The main argument advanced is that whether implicitly or explicitly, liberal perspectives in IR are heir to two overlapping and often contradictory narratives of history that masquerade as universals when they can be shown to be particular (and indeed peculiar). The first narrative is animated by a juridico-philosophical discourse while the second is informed by a stadial-historical discourse. I suggest that both of these narratives contribute to a triumphant, universal and relatively pacific reading of the liberal project, the aim of which is to encourage — through a variety of strategies, tactics and technologies — liberal democratic market societies so that the world will one day be united by capitalist commerce and the institutions of polyarchical democracy. I conclude the article by considering some of the consequences of holding to these historical appreciations for contemporary IR and advocates of the liberal project.
Topic:
International Relations

17. Hierarchy in World Politics

Author:
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and George Lawson
Publication Date:
04-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
With this Special Issue the editorial team fulfils a campaign promise, so to speak. In our original proposal to assume the editorship of the Journal of International Relations and Development, we proposed three special features: a Forum on IR in Eastern and Central Europe (published in issue 12:2), a Forum on post-Communist and post-Socialist transitions (published in issue 12:4), and a Special Issue on hierarchy in world politics. The four papers collected here represent the end result of a process of soliciting proposals for manuscripts, putting those manuscripts through the regular peer-review process, and selecting papers that would allow a multi-faceted exploration of a complex topic that has made its way back into IR after the long interregnum of theories and models that focused on presumptively equivalent states operating under conditions of anarchy. But this is more than simply 'bringing hierarchy back in'; the new focus on unequal relations of power in world politics is a good deal more sophisticated than the sometimes blunt assertions of dependency theory and early world-systems accounts. The papers that we have assembled for this Special Issue represent some, but by no means all, of the rich analytical diversity in contemporary accounts of hierarchy in world politics.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
Europe

18. The state as citizen: state personhood and ideology

Author:
Jorg Kustermans
Publication Date:
01-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
An important debate in International Relations and International Law is whether states are persons. In this article, it is argued that they are. That is, they are real persons-as-status. Furthermore, state personhood is argued to be an ideological category, marked by ideological variety. Roughly, one can tell apart liberal and republican conceptions of state citizenship. In a case study, the conceptual toolkit of state citizenship is put to work to assess the liberal credentials of modern international society. While modern international society rests on firm liberal principles, expressed most clearly in the Charter of the UN, important republican elements can be discerned, not in the least in the constitution of NATO.
Topic:
International Relations, NATO, International Law, and United Nations

19. Civilianising warfare: ways of war and peace in modern counterinsurgency

Author:
Colleen Bell
Publication Date:
07-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
This article examines the emergence of counterinsurgency doctrine in Coalition interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While counterinsurgency is complimentary to the tenets forwarded by its classical military predecessors in several respects, the article shows that it is also more than a refashioning of conventional military practice. Counterinsurgency is intimately tied to institutional practices that shape global liberal governance. It can be traced to dominant trends in international humanitarian, development and peace interventionism since the end of the Cold War and it deepens the links between the social development of war-affected populations and the politics of international security. Rather than simply a shift in military practice, counterinsurgency is distinguished by its investment in civilian modes of warfare. Counterinsurgency retells the narrative of intervention as part of the evolution of political and economic liberalisation, marking a passage from interventionary force to post-interventionary governance. Modern counterinsurgency, it is concluded, exposes the widening indistinction between contemporary modes of peace and those of war in international relations.
Topic:
International Relations, Cold War, Economics, War, Counterinsurgency, and Governance
Political Geography:
Afghanistan and Iraq

20. 'What's "critical" about critical theory': capturing the social totality (das Gesellschaftliche Ganze)

Author:
Daniela Tepe and Anita Fischer
Publication Date:
07-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
This is neither the first article to address the nature of Critical Theory,1 nor the first article to address the necessarily feminist character of Critical Theory. Given that most of the writing concerned with the latter was (largely) neglected in International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship, it seems appropriate to do so again.
Topic:
International Relations and International Political Economy