Abstract
‘So’, asked a questioner at ISA 2017, ‘how would you teach International Relations (IR) outside “the prison of Political Science”? What would IR 101 look like?’ Here, with apologies for the delay, is a reply.
IR is the study of societal multiplicity and its consequences for the human world. IR 101 should therefore provide an introduction to these consequences. Four stand out
The existence of a distinctive lateral field of co-existence and interaction among societies;
Its extension beyond the domains of politics and economics traditionally studied by an anarchy-focussed IR;
Its methodological significance for other disciplines;
Its role in world history.
First, then, at its highest organisational level the human world is not unitary but multiple. It is this simple fact that creates the formal domain of ‘the international’ – and with it the security dynamics studied by realism, the co-operative development emphasised by liberalism, and the imperialism, coloniality and othering revealed by critical approaches.
The international is thus a definite social structure of the human world, but its dimensions extend, second, beyond those already mentioned. Literature, art, music, medicine, religion, philosophy – even language itself: all these occur in a context of multiple societies, where people are conscious of other paths of development than their own, and where ideas, techniques and resources are continually being lifted out of one social setting and then recombined with different ones to produce new and original outcomes. There is an IR of just about everything.
Third, this has radical implications for other disciplines too. For multiplicity precludes the possibility of self-contained societal development. Geology notwithstanding, no society ‘is an island, entire of itself’. And IR’s vocation is thus not only to study the ‘delimited field’ of international structures; it is also to solve the ‘methodological nationalism’ of other disciplines – just as Geography corrects their aspatial conceptions, and History exposes their anachronisms and static premises.
Finally, societal multiplicity impacts the shape of world history – past and present. Creative borrowing from (and exploitation of) other cultures was fundamental to the rise of the West, and of others before it. But ‘uneven and combined development’ is no less a mainspring of world affairs today – as the Great Recession intersects both the ‘war on terror’ and Chinese industrialization in a complex international conjuncture. In a multiple world, historical process is neither uni- nor even multi-linear, but necessarily dialectical.
So perhaps IR 101 could look like this:
1. Introduction: Multiplicity and the international imagination
The International as a Social Structure
2. ‘Anarchical’ politics
3. The economics of ‘interdependence’
4. Imperialism, coloniality and othering
5. Knowing in a world of multiple epistemologies
The IR of Everything
6. Identity and the Pluriverse
7. Multiplicity, sexuality and gender
8. The interactive life of languages
9. The structures of world literature
10. The uneven and combined development of music
11. The international relations of food and cooking
12. IR and the dialectical shape of world history
This ‘IR 101’ does not discount the insights already produced by realism and its many competitors. But in the face of anxieties about a disintegrating ‘campfire’ discipline, it stakes out a new common ground for IR theories – a positive ground of ‘multiplicity’, to replace the negative one of ‘anarchy’ which so many have already rejected. It also develops the disciplinary standing of IR, revealing its unique contribution to the human sciences. It gives a hint, perhaps, of what IR could be, outside the prison of Political Science.