The SAGE Handbook of the History, Philosophy and Sociology of International Relations

Andreas Gofas, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Nicholas Onuf, Andreas Gofas, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Nicholas Onuf, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781473966598
• eBook ISBN: 9781526415608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The SAGE Handbook of the History, Philosophy and Sociology of International Relations offers a panoramic overview of the broad field of International Relations by integrating three distinct but interrelated foci. It retraces the historical development of International Relations (IR) as a professional field of study, explores the philosophical foundations of IR, and interrogates the sociological mechanisms through which scholarship is produced and the field is structured.

Comprising 38 chapters from both established scholars and an emerging generation of innovative meta-theorists and theoretically driven empiricists, the handbook fosters discussion of the field from the inside out, forcing us to come to grips with the widely held perception that IR is experiencing an existential crisis quite unlike anything else in its hundred-year history. This timely and innovative reference volume reflects on situated scholarly practices in a way that projects our collective thinking into the future.

PART ONE: THE INWARD GAZE: INTRODUCTORY REFLECTIONS
PART TWO: IMAGINING THE INTERNATIONAL, ACKNOWLEDGING THE GLOBAL
PART THREE: THE SEARCH FOR (AN) IDENTITY
PART FOUR: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AS A PROFESSION
PART FIVE: LOOKING AHEAD: THE FUTURE OF META-ANALYSIS 

 

Part I The Inward Gaze: Introductory Reflections

1 The Struggle for the Soul of International Relations: Fragments of a Collective Journey

Andreas Gofas

Inanna Hamati-Ataya

Nicholas Onuf

After much deliberation, the editors of this book have chosen a ponderous but apparently unambiguous title, one that will encourage casual browsers or curious students to pull another bulky book off the library shelf, read here and there, and get some sense of International Relations (hereafter IR) as a field of study. The title will also signal scholars and advanced students that the book is a handy reference volume – an entrée into a world of specialised and often arcane scholarly concerns. Yet we, as editors, sought from the beginning to make the HPS Handbook (as we call it among ourselves) something more than a fixture in library reference rooms. Our goal is to foster discussion of the field from the inside out and, even more, to force our colleagues to come to grips with the widely held perception that the field – our field – is experiencing an existential crisis quite unlike anything else in its hundred-year history. To convey this feeling that something big is happening, we have given this introduction an extravagant, even romantic title. By doing so, we hope to engage our peers, the people for whom IR is an occupational niche and a daily preoccupation. Judging from our own concerns, these people find themselves asking soul-searching questions: What are we doing in the name of IR? Does it matter?

When we use the word soul, we do not mean a classical psuche or Christian anima. We use it for metaphorical punch, just as we use the word struggle. We take IR to be a corporate entity, constituted over the last century through the more or less self-conscious, diversely motivated activities of many individuals. We might even say that IR is, or has become, self-defining as a field of study. At least for some of the individuals involved in this process (ourselves, in the first instance), how IR defines itself matters a great deal. That we (the editors, our contributors and a good many of our readers) struggle within ourselves and with each other over IR – its shape, content, direction, use, value and standing as a field of study – tells us that the stakes are not just academic. They are political and moral, as such implicated in the many larger struggles constituting modernity as our lived-in world.

When we editors started this project, we did not articulate our goals and plans in an overtly political language. Along with most of our peers, we are disposed to think that politics is integral to social life, that international relations are ipso facto political relations, that IR is therefore centrally concerned with politics, that scholars in the field are politically motivated to study what they do, that defining politics to everyone's satisfaction is impossible, that seeking, reaching and failing to reach agreement is nevertheless at the heart if not the soul of politics, that none of this has to be said. And so we said none of it to each other. Indeed we did not then know each other well enough to be sure whether and to what extent we agreed on basic issues and terms – on matters of politics.

Andreas Gofas is responsible for thinking up the project in the first place. He was organising summer workshops for graduate students in IR (meta-)theory where the central rationale was of a somewhat Lakatosian persuasion: philosophy of IR without history of IR is empty; history of IR without philosophy of IR is blind. During these workshops, he realised that participants benefited greatly from discussions on how the flow of theoretical ideas in the history of IR connects with issues in the evolution of the philosophy of social sciences. Nick Onuf participated in one of these workshops. When a couple of years later he told Andreas that he might be able to come to Athens for several months as a Fulbright professor, Andreas proposed working together on a handbook of the history and philosophy of IR; Nick thought this was a great idea.

Soon enough it was clear that something was missing – a sociological perspective on the field, its history and philosophical underpinnings. Andreas realised the solution was to bring Inanna Hamati-Ataya aboard. Just a few months earlier, Andreas had participated in the workshop ‘After Epistemology: Bringing Practice to the Sociology of IR’ that Inanna and Christian Bueger had organised for the 1st European Workshops in International Studies, in Tartu. He had suggested that she could put together a handbook on the sociology of IR, an idea she had found quite appealing but potentially premature. Andreas's new, interdisciplinary project, however, opened up a quite different prospect. The three of us quickly came to the conclusion that as scholarship on the history, philosophy, and sociology of the discipline (as three separate areas) was developing exponentially, now was the time to provide the community with a referential volume that draws on the most up-to-date and advanced research in these three fields, as well as brings them into a common conversation that can prevent further fragmentation.

It would be a year and a half before Nick got to Athens – long after the three of us had exchanged hundreds of lengthy emails, learned quite a bit about each other, vetted the idea of an HPS handbook with friends and colleagues, worked out a plan of action, drafted an overview of the project, found a publisher and recruited contributors. The overview went through many drafts as we struggled with an apparently simple yet obviously political issue: in what order do we consider the field's three meta-discourses, as we began to call them. History first, because it is the easiest first cut? Philosophy first, because it is foundational? Sociology first, because it gets to the heart of what we actually do? HPS because that sequence reflects the way scholars in most fields are socialised? We thought about disrupting the sequence by scrambling the parts of the handbook. Finally we gave up on finding a ‘neutral’ ordering and title for it.

Instead we devised an arrangement of parts that effectively puts sociology first, thereby confounding the established tendency to start elsewhere. A quick inspection shows history informed by sociology (HS) to be a major feature in many of the book's chapters. Overall, philosophy is less important, although it informs sociology in many chapters (SP). We take this implicit sequencing (S, HS, SP) to map the field's recent development as a field. We also think younger scholars are more sensitive to the politics of this development and dedicated to pushing it forward. They have good reason – the field's rapid growth means that the field and its future belong to them. We editors made a particular point of recruiting younger contributors with diverse backgrounds – for the same reason.

The overview we worked on so laboriously speaks of integrating history, philosophy and sociology as distinct foci. Integration, like pluralism, is a feel-good term for most of us. Retrospectively, we are not so sure that integration is feasible or, for that matter, desirable. After launching the overview with a brief, rhetorical overture, we put our goal on the table: retrace IR's historical development as a professional field of study, explore the philosophical foundations of IR, and interrogate the sociological mechanisms through which scholarship is produced and the field is structured. We pointed out that many scholars work on philosophical, historical or sociological issues with no apparent interest in other aspects of the big picture. As planned, the HPS Handbook would be the first book of any size to bring these three disciplinary meta-discourses together and show systematically how each affects the other.

Then the overview proceeded to the task at hand – not integration, but bringing history, philosophy and sociology, as distinct foci, into dialogue. Starting with three highly developed conversations in the field, our goal was to encourage second-order conversations about the field. Here is what we wrote. The lack of a dialogue among philosophy, historiography and sociology is symptomatic of a wider tendency in the field as currently constituted. Although there are signs that the field's theoretical and methodological logic is moving towards the transcendence of dichotomies and the consideration of various forms of pluralism, heated polemics too often prevail when it comes to the relationship between the field's meta-discourses. We hoped the HPS Handbook would reinforce the move beyond dichotomies, and this is what we asked contributors to bear in mind.

Looking back on what we said to ourselves and to contributors, we believe the HPS Handbook has achieved these goals. No other book, large or small, examines the deep, generally unacknowledged connections among these three meta-discourses because the scholarly community currently has no clear framework for reflecting on the field as a whole. The HPS Handbook aims to delineate the overlapping, reciprocally constituted territories of the philosophy, history and sociology of IR simultaneously from within and above. At the same time, it documents the state of the art in each sub-field through contributions from both established colleagues who have contributed to defining these fields and an emerging generation of innovative meta-theorists and theoretically driven empiricists.

The overview went on to claim that the HPS Handbook will make an important contribution that cannot be achieved by separating the three meta-discourses addressing IR as a field of knowledge. Philosophical meta-discussions in the discipline have so far operated in a socio-historical vacuum, making the philosophy of IR barely distinguishable from the philosophy of any other social science. The book shows how these discussions gain new meanings once they are situated within the social, historical and political conditions that IR scholars are especially concerned with. The philosophy of IR gives a new dimension to the foundational insights from the reflexive sub-fields of the history and sociology of IR, which actively complement each other and have been developing without any systematic conversation between them. Focusing on the then/now and there/here of IR as a situated field and community of practice raises philosophical and normative questions that we can better address once we learn more about the origins and trajectory of our scholarly endeavours. The HPS Handbook, then, makes systematically visible and intelligible a realm of meta-discourse that pushes our self-understanding and critical thought forward.

Again looking back, we think we may have placed too much emphasis on ‘the philosophy of IR’, as if there were anything in the literature coherent enough to warrant the label. Yet this conclusion very much supports our stress on sociology, and its relation to history and philosophy, as the key to the field's recent developments. Here again, the book follows through on what we editors hoped our contributors would collectively achieve. None of this is to suggest that we, as editors, have a shared vision of where the field is, what is next and why it matters. We come to our work and the field with different life-experiences and cultural legacies. Gender matters, and so does age. We strongly agree that the field's identity is unduly shaped by the field's oldest active generation (of which one of the editors is a member), and we have endeavoured to tilt the (playing) field in favour of the generation of which the two other editors are members. Our disagreements, such as they are, have encouraged each of us to reconsider and, in some instances, shift ground on various issues. Indeed, we like to think that our differences have sparked each of us to think harder and talk more precisely about IR's very soul.

Even so, we would never pretend to have entered an ‘ideal speech community’. All three of us very much agree that anyone harbouring this ambition misconceives the history, philosophy and sociology of knowledge-making in any field of study. In the circumstance, we believe that we, as editors, cannot produce in this introduction a convincing synthetic account of the struggle for IR's soul, any more than we gave our contributors a robust set of guidelines. Instead we conclude these few introductory pages, not with the usual, utterly superfluous pocket summary of each chapter, but with a brief consideration of four questions that this book points up – questions that motivated us from the beginning, questions that come to the surface in various chapters, questions that are unlikely to go away very soon.

First is the ‘discipline question’. How can a field of study, or claimant discipline, such as IR draw so extensively from other disciplines and maintain its integrity (integration's cognate) as an indispensable producer of world-relevant knowledge? Second is the ‘language question’. To what extent has IR come to grips with the so-called linguistic turn so much in evidence in contemporary philosophy and sociology? Third is the ‘science question’. How can we reconcile IR as a social practice with the demands of science? Last is the ‘theory question’. What do we even mean by theory? Does what we do in the name of theory deserve the prestige it seems to have? The theory question would seem to be the big question, around which the other questions circle. Depending on how one answers the discipline, language and science questions, the theory question might prove to be the wrong question. Asking it over and over again, failing to answer it convincingly, is a perfect recipe for the existential crisis looming over the field.

The first question first. As an academic institution and scholarly undertaking, IR (by convention upper case) would seem to address something about the world, some more or less coherent domain of human activity, called international relations (always lower case). It does not – at least, not in any straightforward way. It does not for many reasons. Among them is the realisation in many fields of study, or disciplines, that those terms – fields and disciplines – do not suit contemporary circumstances well. The first of these terms suggests that diverse features of the world ‘out there’ require distinctive ways of talking about those features and result in discrete bodies of knowledge about the world. The second term suggests that the world out there is already divided up and that its tidy boundaries are reflected in the way we see and thus talk about the world; as we see more, we see those boundaries more clearly. Both terms point to a close correspondence between what we say and what we think we see that many scholars have come to consider illusory or perhaps even invented by themselves to justify their toils. In short, specialists in bounded bodies of knowledge have taken issue with the very idea of bounded bodies of knowledge, and desperate calls for ‘interdisciplinarity’ only confirm the severity of the situation.

The social sciences find this tendency toward auto-critique all the stronger. More or less at the same time in the last decades of the 19th century, the several social sciences emerged with the proliferation of research universities in the German model. In effect, we see a partitioning of the study of society along familiar lines. This event took place at the very moment that philosophically inclined scholars began to wonder if the study of society could proceed as would any science. This is an integral feature of the science question, for which, as we will see, there is no easy answer. Its endless, often bitter discussion has had an unsettling effect on the sense of common purpose that disciplines inculcate. In the circumstance, scholars use the science question to make invidious comparisons across fields and to challenge the seemingly arbitrary, dated partition of the study of society.

Peculiar features of IR as a field of study aggravate this situation. Whatever it is that we now conventionally call international relations has been around for hundreds of years. Yet these relations were sim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• International Advisory Board
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The Inward Gaze: Introductory Reflections
• 1 The Struggle for the Soul of International Relations: Fragments of a Collective Journey
• 2 Crafting the Reflexive Gaze: Knowledge of Knowledge in the Social Worlds of International Relations
• Part II Imagining the International, Acknowledging the Global
• 3 From the International to the Global?
• 4 Coloring the Global: Race, Colonialism and Internationalism1
• 5 Liberal International Political Economy as Colonial Science
• 6 International Relations as a Historical Social Science
• 7 International Relations and the Gendered International
• 8 Beyond the ‘Religious Turn’: International Relations as Political Theology
• 9 Between ‘East’ and ‘West’: Travelling Theories, Travelling Imaginations
• 10 International Relations and the Rise of Asia: A New ‘Moral Imagination’ for World Politics?
• 11 Confucian Pacifism or Confucian Confusion?1
• 12 The Challenges of ‘Contextualism’
• 13 Imagining International Relations Through Alternative Worlds
• Part III The Search for (an) Identity
• 14 The Origins of International Relations: Idealists, Administrators and the Institutionalization of a New Science
• 15 ‘Canon’ Fodder: The Founding Fathers, Classics and ‘isms’ of International Relations
• 16 The Function of Myths in International Relations: Discipline and Identity
• 17 Identity and Theory: Towards Sociological Explanations of ‘Schools’ in International Relations1
• 18 International Relations’ Crystal Ball: Prediction and Forecasting1
• 19 The Problem of Social Utility: International Relations and the ‘Policy Gap’
• 20 A Fear of Foundations?
• 21 After First Principles: The Sociological Turn in International Relations as Disciplinary Crisis
• 22 International Relations and the Challenges of Interdisciplinarity
• 23 ‘Does It Matter if It's a Discipline?’ Bawled the Child
• Part IV International Relations as a Profession
• 24 The Unequal Profession
• 25 From Community to Practice: International Relations as a Practical Configuration
• 26 Rule by Referees? The Curious World of Academic Judgment
• 27 International Relations Expertise at the Interstices of Fields and Assemblages
• 28 International Relations Ideas as Reflections and Weapons of US Foreign Policy
• 29 For an Undisciplined Take on International Relations: The Politics of Situated Scholarship
• 30 Counter-Mapping the Discipline: The Archipelago of Western International Relations Teaching*
• 31 E pluribus unum? How Textbooks Cover Theories
• 32 International Pedagogical Relations in Fragments: Politics and Poetics in the Classroom and Beyond
• 33 Training in Critical Interpretivism, Within and Beyond the Academy
• 34 The Dialectic of Politics and Science from a Post-Truth Standpoint: An Outsider's Perspective on the Field of International Relations
• 35 What We Do: International Relations as Craft
• Part V Looking Ahead: The Future of Meta-Analysis
• 36 A Historiographer's View: Rewriting the History of International Thought
• 37 Meta-analysis: A Philosophical View
• 38 Keeping It Worldly: A Sociologist's View
• Index