Weird IR: Deviant Cases in International Relations is a collection of strange phenomena related to diplomacy and world politics. The many cases comprising the chapters of this book come from years of collecting bizarre but true stories taken from the world of international relations, which we then foisted on the unsuspecting students in our International Relations (IR) classes.1 Some of these stories are contemporary, well known, or both. Others, such as the âSecond Korean Warâ of the 1960s, are more obscure and presumably new to most students of international relations.
Those familiar with our blog already know that we started the project in 2012 as a way to remember and catalog the funny and strange stories we have collected over our short careers. There, you can still find some of our favorite classic stories, like that of the Yellow Fleetâan international collection of ships that were stuck in the Suez Canal for eight years.
As avid consumers of world news, we also noticed the number of bizarre stories that occur on a regular basis, like NBA Hall of Famer Dennis Rodmanâs pseudo-diplomacy with North Korea. We realized our challenge was two-fold: We had to document the strange past of Weird IR, while also keeping up with new stories as they emerged. Between both tasks, we eventually had enough stories to justify writing this book.
Apart from simply writing about some funny stuff, our book seeks to accomplish two objectives. First, we think academics can be both useful and fun; we want to engage and excite readers with our weird stories. Just as people love odd news stories, students and scholars in our field love odd IR stories. Weird IR is also written to appeal to people outside of academia who are interested in international history and politics.
Second, we aim to start a conversation with our colleagues in the discipline about interesting and useful cases that are unknown to, or understudied by, IR scholars. Although our bookâs title and prose might sometimes seem flippant, we are truly trying to do something that we think is important and thoughtful. Weird IR is a methodological contribution to the field; it is a collection of deviant cases that challenge the conventional wisdom on international relations and the constitutive concepts that underlie it.
This chapter will reintroduce the idea of a deviant case and provide a pithy rationale for incorporating deviant cases into our professional craft. It is worth nothing that deviant cases are not necessarily cases of deviance, such as the Other World Kingdom, a Czech femdom/BDSM club located on a large estate that declared its sovereign statehood in 1997. The Other World Kingdom maintained its own currency, passports, police force, legal system, state flag, and state hymn. Unfortunately for some, it closed in 2008, depriving the world of one of its more imaginative aspirant states.
More generally, when we discuss deviant cases, we refer to cases that do not conform to the predictions of existing theories. The idea of deviant case study research has been around for a while, but the scholarly literature in IR is missing a collection of actual deviant cases. If nothing else, this is what Weird IR contributes to the discipline. Naturally, our project did not arise from nothing; it benefits from and extends some prominent work on qualitative methodology in political science and international relations (King et al. 1994; Gerring 2004; George and Bennett 2005; Elman 2005; Geortz and Levy 2007; Levy 2008; Brady and Collier 2010).
About Deviant Cases
The idea of a deviant case is the foundation of our project, but it rests upon some basic truths about social science. First is the notion of a theoryâa scientific explanation of phenomena in the natural or social world. In the scholarly study of IR, theories explain events, behaviors, or any other consequence of the politics among states. From theories, scholars derive testable hypothesesâeducated guesses that can be confirmed or disconfirmed through observation.
Good theories do not emerge from the ether; they survive rigorous empirical tests and require scholarly agreement. Of course, not all scholars support every theory. In fact, the disagreements among scholars over preferred explanations can occasionally be petty and destructive. In a sense, we are comfortable with the competition. After all, a scholar dissatisfied with one theory has a good incentive to build and test a new theory.
A good theory does not need to explain all similar phenomena, either. A quest for a grand unified theory of IR is both naĂŻve and unsupported in our discipline. With so many theories available, it is easy to assume that, if something happens in the world, then there must be at least one theory that can explain it. We are not comfortable with that claim. There are myriad phenomena that cannot be explained by extant theory.
Many cases from international relations will support any number of rival theories. But some cases fall through the cracks and are not explained by any known theories. These ones that fall through the cracks are what we call deviant cases.
An Epistemological Rationale for the Study of Deviant Cases
We maintain that the study of deviant cases is an underutilized way to assess the progress of research programs, a concept borrowed from the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos (1970). In his seminal essay on science and the accumulation of collective knowledge, Lakatos avers that any assessment of the usefulness of an individual theory in isolation is misleading because scientists sometimes rewrite theories to hide earlier claims that were falsified by evidence. In other words, scholars will update a theory to explain a previously unexplained case, thus invalidating the whole point of testing theories in the first place. Lakatos also notes that theories are often based on similar or overlapping ontologies, thus making it difficult for researchers to determine which theory might be superior to others. Thus, he develops the idea of a scientific research program (SRP), which is a cluster of theories concerned with a common problem and that share a hard core of constitutive and guiding assumptions. Lakatosâs methodology of scientific research programs (MSRP) is a prominent tool for how IR scholars assess the progress of our collective efforts to explain our subject.
Kenneth Waltz, the dean of modern American IR, calls into question (2003) whether or not IR scholars were correctly invoking Lakatos and his metatheory of scientific progress when making their own theoretical and methodological choices. Put simply, Waltz wonders whether or not scholars were choosing their cases and theories in a way that advanced our shared knowledge of IR. It is an important and useful question that often goes unasked, especially when scholars are rarely incentivized by universities and publishers to pause and reflect on their work.
Lakatos tells us that we need to think deliberately about whether our theories are extending our collective knowledge. Waltz points out that in IR, we are not. Notwithstanding a few solid efforts at the turn of the century (Elman and Elman 2003), we suspect that Lakatos and Waltz are correct.
Indeed, it is difficult to assess whether a discipline is making progress. In political science, where most IR scholars are trained, research projects are developed haphazardly. Which questions are asked? How are plausible answers hypothesized and operationalized? How are inferences assessed and compared? There is no shared answer to these questions in IR, nor is there one in political science or even the entire social sciences. We do not advocate ontological, epistemological, or methodological homogeneity, but we do emphasize that the vast diversity and lack of coordination in our discipline means that assessing and achieving progress is problematic. It also means that new research projects are not always designed to progress a scientific research program.
Instead, new research (and new knowledge) is more likely to reflect the âscientific paradigmâ envisioned by another philosopher, Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn (1962) sees the march of scientific progress not as an intentional, goal-driven enterprise, but instead as a type of mob mentality. Scholars share a particular world view, which they reify by developing new theories and then testing them against the same reality that inspired them. As a result, theories are rarely wrong and rarely advance collective knowledge. In essence, science is a self-fulfilling enterprise where scientific truth is more of a reflection of a shared mentality than a rational attempt to build knowledge.
Kuhn writes that paradigms might shift and worldviews might change, but they do so because of changes in the subject, not because of the failure of an SRP to progress objective knowledge. One illustration of Kuhnâs metatheory is the end of the Cold War, when the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bi-polar system created a crisis of confidence in neorealist theory. IR scholars flocked to social constructivism, previously an obscure set of concepts, which up to then languished on the fringes of the discipline. Constructivist theories went from zero to hero status because they were much better equipped to explain the changes in Soviet society and the international system that realism failed to explain. Confirming Kuhnâs notion of the paradigm shift, the next decade saw a boom in constructivist scholarship and the abandonment of neorealist theories that were previously front and center.
How do deviant cases fit into all of this? We have a simple suggestion. Whether IR scholars are rational (Lakatos) or irrational (Kuhn) scientists, they can all progress their research programs and improve theories by studying deviant cases. Regardless of oneâs epistemological perspective, we maintain that the use of deviant cases in research designs can ultimately improve extant theory. By continuing to ignore deviant cases, scholars might be redundantly confirming and reconfirming the stronger parts of their theory while passing on opportunities to put the weaker parts to the test, which would be much better for those who seek to advance knowledge.
What Is a Deviant Case and How Can It be Used?
Deviant cases are those that cannot be explained by extant theories. What can we learn from deviant cases? We have yet to see. Unfortunately, case study research that explicitly utilizes deviant cases has been few and far between. In the mid-twentieth century, there was some talk though about the use of deviant cases among sociologists (Cantril et al. 1940; Komarovsky 1940; Horst 1941; Gordon 1947; Merton 1947; Kendall and Wolf 1949).
One example of early sociological research that utilized the deviant case approach is Ca...