Debating the identity of IR: Concluding reflections

Abstract

As the contributions to this Forum show, the debate over the identity of International Relations (IR) is passionate, complex and, perhaps even as the title heralds, a ‘struggle’. ‘Struggle’ may refer to the difficulty of coming to terms with IR itself or to disagreements among the contributors, in either case, by linking ‘struggle’, ‘identity’ and ‘IR’, this Forum connects with a wider set of current debates over the status of IR, whether it exists as a distinct discipline, how it is taught and practised, and why it is underused by scholars from related disciplines.¹ Three themes are central to this Forum: IR’s institutionalization, its concern with the international and its disciplinary plurality.

One way to answer the question whether IR exists as a discipline is through examining its institutionalization. The contributor who most explicitly adopts this lens is Helen Louise Turton, who holds that ‘the institutions, discourses, professionalization and the identity of academics who self-identify as belonging to a given discipline’ are what matters for whether academic disciplines are formed or not. According to these structural and sociological criteria, she argues, IR is a discipline. Referencing Ole Wæver, Turton also points out that disciplines do not need agreement on subject matter, methodology or theoretical approach to function institutionally. Ilan Zvi Baron challenges Turton on whether IR is a discipline – in his view, ‘attempts at defining its parameters, set out its limits, and identify its normal modes of research, are ultimately futile and are more akin to acts of simulation’ – but he agrees that in terms of journals, associations and undergraduate and graduate degrees, IR could be a discipline. The disagreement between Turton and Baron is, thus, less over whether IR exists or not than how much processes of institutionalization should count in this assessment.

Taken to the extreme, processes of institutionalization may act as the sole explanation of how disciplines and fields of study are created, develop and potentially disappear. In other words, as long as departments, degree programmes, funding bodies, publication outlets and professional associations exist and scholars self-identify as belonging to a field of study, it matters less – or not at all – whether there is a shared substantial focus or content. Yet, few would go so far as to bracket content completely as it would be difficult to sustain self-identification and recourse allocation without a substantial narrative that identifies what one does as at least distinctive if not better than other fields or disciplines. This is where the intertwined concern with the interdisciplinary status of IR and its claim to be studying the international come into the Forum. Again, Turton is the one to defend the existence of IR as a discipline on the grounds that all disciplines are interdisciplines to some degree; again, Baron is the sceptic holding that IR is ‘more of a trans-disciplinary field than a unique discipline’ and that it is questionable whether it can lay claim to a distinct subject area, that is, ‘the international’. Using the Arctic as an illustrative case in point, Pami Aalto argues that IR must embrace its own history of interdisciplinarity and propel that forward into strengthened collaborations with other disciplines as none are single-handedly able to produce adequate understandings of the international. The future of IR lies, in other words, in more interdisciplinarity rather than less. Félix Grenier seconds Aalto, yet wants to push even further for ‘the adoption of a pluralist and hybrid collective identity by IR scholars’. Philippe Beaulieu-Brossard paints a bleaker picture of the future and identity of IR: IR scholars are losing their prerogative as performers of ‘the international’ and performing IR ‘implicitly encourages silencing other disciplines and translating their knowledge in IR terms’.

Looking to IR as a whole, it seems hard to disagree with Baron’s assessment that IR’s traditional focus on interstate relations has been challenged by referent objects, processes and phenomena located at non-state levels of analysis. Feminist IR, for example, has been instructive in drawing attention to the way international relations are practised by embodied human beings in their everyday life.² Whether one sees the expansion of the international as a dilution of IR’s original purpose or as desirable on political, normative and analytical grounds is obviously contested within IR itself.³ In terms of disciplinary identity those who stick with the traditional, narrow definition of the interstate system confront fewer problems as they have a clear story of what is international and what is not. For those who expand the international by contrast the question becomes more challenging. If the international is what constitutes IR and identity is relational, what or where is the non-international from which IR steps back and what is the specificity of this ‘international’ that sets IR aside from say Anthropology or Law?

The strength of this Forum is that it shows that debates over IR’s disciplinary status must involve analysis of processes of socialization and institutionalization, of claims to the substantial focus that unites IR and of normative views on IR’s mono or multi-disciplinarity. As debates on IR are far from over, let me draw attention to three issues which have been downplayed within the Forum but might be brought in as the discussion continues. First, as Christian Reus-Smit has recently argued, although IR scholars have disagreed on how politics should be understood, the concern with how we should act runs as an ‘animating interest’ across IR’s approaches.⁴ Thus, where IR’s distinctiveness might be found is not in ‘the international’ alone but in its nexus with ‘politics’. Foregrounding the understandings of politics within IR may, thus, generate additional insights into the discipline itself as well as the way in which institutionalization, ‘the international’ and disciplinarity affect each other. Second, the Forum includes a series of comparative claims about the status and identity of IR vis-a-vis other disciplines: its interdisciplinary genesis and present, its ‘lack of disciplinary self-assurance’ (Turton’s words) and its habit of ‘self-introspection’ (Baron). Would it not be valuable to turn these statements into assumptions in a comparative disciplinary sociological research project including, for example, Anthropology, Economics and Law? Third, the Forum’s Introduction faulted the recent special issue of European Journal of International Relations for making the question of IR’s disciplinary status identical to the question of the status of theory in IR. Yet, while the editors might be right that theory is one among many components that sustain a disciplinary identity, the Forum stops short of engaging this issue right on. Theory is arguably not only one among many but a very important component in IR: theorists are seen as leading the discipline and theoretical (including epistemological) issues from the basis of the legendary ‘great debates’.⁵ A series of recent interventions have raised the issue of what kind of theory – substantially, epistemologically and abstract or general or middle range – that IR scholars should pursue.⁶ Coupling this debate to the question of the (inter)disciplinary status of IR as raised by this Forum might push both debates.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biographies

Félix Grenier is a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa. His thesis studies the articulations between methodological and functional discourses in International Relations (IR). He conducts research on sociology and historiography, sociology of higher education, and methodologies in IR and political studies.

Helen Louise Turton is a University Teacher in International Relations and Security Studies at the University of Sheffield. She is the co-convener of the BISA Working Group IR as a Social Science. Helen is currently working on a manuscript titled International Relations and American Dominance which will be published with Routledge in 2015.

Philippe Beaulieu-Brossard is a PhD in IR from the University of St Andrews. His research explores the politics of knowledge in and on the Middle-East. He currently pursues this research agenda by undertaking a SSHRC-funded research project titled ‘The Relationship between Theory and Policy in a Paradox: How the Use of Critical Ideas in Military Strategies is Becoming a Global Phenomenon’ at the University of Ottawa.

Pami Aalto is a Professor in the School of Management (on leave of absence from a Jean Monnet Chair until 2016), University of Tampere, Finland. His research interests include interdisciplinarity, energy policy, and the wider European area including Russia and the Arctic. Recent publications include (ed. with V. Harle and S. Moisio) Global and Regional Problems: Towards an Interdisciplinary Study (2012) and (ed. with V. Harle and S. Moisio) International Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches (2011).

Ilan Zvi Baron is a Lecturer in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. He has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for International Studies at the London School of Economics and a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. His next book is Obligation in Exile: the Jewish Diaspora, Israel and Critique (Edinburgh University Press 2015).

Lene Hansen is a Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. She, Colin Wight and Tim Dunne edited a recent special issue of European Journal of International Relations on ‘The End of International Relations Theory?’ She is currently working on a project on ‘Images and International Security’ funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research (more information at ).