Concepts in World Politics

Felix Berenskoetter, Felix Berenskoetter, Author, Felix Berenskötter

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781446294284, 9781446294277
• eBook ISBN: 9781473944305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Recognizing the vital importance of concepts in shaping our understanding of international relations, this ground-breaking new book puts concepts front and centre, systematically unpacking them in a clear, critical and engaging way.

With contributions from some of the foremost authorities in the field, Concepts in World Politics explores 17 core concepts, from democracy to globalization, sovereignty to revolution, and covers:

• The multiple meanings of a concept, where these meanings come from, and how they are employed theoretically and practically
• The consequences of using concepts to frame the world in one way or another
• The method of concept analysis

A challenging and stimulating read, Concepts in World Politics is an indispensable guide for all students of international relations looking to develop a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of world politics.

1 Unpacking Concepts

Felix Berenskoetter

Like everyone else, scholars of international relations use concepts to make sense of what they look at and to have conversation about it. While it is common to portray academic inquiry into world politics as exploring a set of salient issues with the help of a range of theories, concepts are central to this undertaking as they enable us to intellectually frame issues and formulate theories in the first place. They are devices we use to order and make sense of a messy reality by reducing its complexity and naming and giving meaning to its features; they provide mental shortcuts through which we navigate and grasp the world by allowing us to cluster, classify and categorize everything we encounter into something manageable and meaningful. In doing so, concepts guide thought and provide a language that enables scholars to communicate their theoretical arguments and empirical findings. And by guiding thought, concepts also guide action.

Most of the time, we take the meaning of our concepts for granted. Of course, we know that our conceptual language is an invention and that the meaning of key terms is not carved in stone. We are aware that a particular concept may be interpreted differently and we have seen insightful explorations of concepts prominent in the discipline of International Relations (IR), many of them covered and cited in this volume. However, existing studies dedicated to opening up concepts and showing their complexity tend to be highly specialized and rarely explore a range of concepts side by side (for a recent exception, see Adler-Nissen 2013). Moreover, these studies are only reluctantly acknowledged, let alone integrated in mainstream conversations. Usually concepts tend to be reduced to static “variables”, which are broken down into “indicators”, without taking into account the rich history and multiple meanings of the concept underpinning the variable.¹ The reasons for this range from the modern belief that we actually can arrive at the true meaning of a concept, which is singular and simple, to the more pragmatic view that opening up concepts sows unnecessary confusion and goes against their very purpose of reducing complexity. And so we usually resort to an authoritative definition that settles the matter by quoting a well-known scholar who presumably thought about the matter carefully and whose definition is popular and/or makes intuitive sense. Having fixed the meaning of our concept (or so we believe) we go on with our research.

But we cannot ignore the fact that behind each concept lurk multiple meanings that have evolved over time and space, are embedded in different theoretical frameworks and empirical expressions, and are displayed in political and public discourses and action (Connolly 1993). As students and scholars, we need to spend some time thinking about these various manifestations and how they affect our research. And so, whereas most IR textbooks focus on “issues” and “theories” without paying much attention to the multifaceted nature of concepts, this volume takes this task head on. Specifically, it has three aims. First, it seeks to display multiple meanings of a concept across historical, theoretical and cultural contexts to make students sensitive to the openness and contestedness of concepts and to processes of meaning creation. Second, it seeks to highlight the role concepts play in scholarly research and in political decision-making to remind students of the analytical and practical consequences of using a concept in one way rather than another. Third, by showcasing different ways of unpacking concepts and discussing their contingency and performativity, the volume hopes to make students familiar with different approaches to concept analysis and their potential for investigating world politics. In other words, the objective is to improve awareness of the historical evolution(s) and plural meaning(s) of key terms, to encourage critical and productive engagement with key concepts and to demonstrate how concept analysis contributes to an analysis of politics.

The study of concepts has long been prominent among historians and philosophers and has never been absent from IR, yet over the last two decades it has gained in prominence. Despite the stubborn resistance in some quarters, it has become increasingly difficult for IR scholars to ignore that our perception of and engagement with the world is structured by language(s) and that we need to pay more attention to how this affects political action and research. Specifically, two related developments make an engagement with concepts unavoidable. First, constructivist angles inspired by, above all, the linguistic turn have relentlessly pushed for a more critical attitude towards the categories and terminologies we use and the mentalities behind them. Disillusioned with grand theories as analytical devices, scholars now increasingly organize their research and, indeed, research communities around key concepts like security (Buzan and Hansen 2009; Bourbeau 2015), gender (Tickner 1992; Steans 2013) and, most recently, practice (Adler and Pouliot 2011; Ringmar 2014). Second, there is a sense that we are living through a period of social and geopolitical transformation, entering a world with late-modern features accompanied by challenges to structures of Western dominance that have shaped the IR discipline since its inception. While these changes are experienced differently depending on one’s position, they often make established concepts feel out-dated, prompting modifications and even inventions of new concepts. This can be witnessed in the formation of new terms like globalization (Held et al. 1999) and the re-reading of old ones like war (Kaldor 2012), as well as the broader critique of Eurocentric speaking and thinking and the corresponding emergence of and search for “non-Western” voices (Tickner and Blaney 2012; Hobson 2012), and the recovery of long-neglected concepts like race (Vucetic 2015).

The main objective of this introductory chapter is to assist reflection on how we might “unpack” a concept. It thus is broadly methodological in character by laying out key parameters of concept analysis and providing an overview of three different approaches, called here “historical”, “scientific” and “political(critical)”. My hope is that offering these general frameworks will serve both as a useful background when reading individual chapters and as analytical guidance for those wishing to unpack concepts themselves. They also flow from my experience on how this book developed. When inviting the authors to join the project, I asked for contributions showing the plural/complex meanings of a given concept as well as its use/performance in world politics. At that stage, I did not provide much guidance as to how this might be done, assuming that my colleagues had an approach at hand. Yet, I soon realized that few of us, including myself, had thought carefully about the methodological aspects of “unpacking” a concept or possessed the vocabulary to spell out the analytical approach. So, while I had expected (and welcomed) differences in how authors would deal with their respective concepts, it turned out that the challenges this project faced were not only disagreements about what “concept analysis” actually entails, but also the need to systematically reflect on how and why we unpack our concepts in the first place. In fact, when the question “what is a concept?” was raised at one of our workshops, the room was split between those who thought it would be a good idea to come up with a clear answer and those who argued that doing so would be detrimental to the project. From an editor’s perspective, this could be seen as an insurmountable hurdle for constructing a volume that “hangs together”. To me, it only affirmed the importance of the project as, hopefully, a contribution to an informed conversation about how we use and study concepts – not only among established scholars but, more importantly, also among students who begin to learn about the subject.

One fundamental issue such a conversation inevitably touches on is the epistemological debate around whether language can provide an accurate description of reality, draw its meaning(s) from or merely invent this reality. Different ways of conceiving of the relationship between word (concept) and world (reality) underpin the tension between positivist and non-positivist perspectives in the social sciences (Smith et al. 1996; Jackson 2011). This division overlaps with two different approaches to knowledge production: the modern view that categorization is necessary for systematic analysis and action and that diligent scholarship can provide objective categories that reflect reality; and a stance combining post-modern and critical sensitivities holding that all concepts/categories are political products, which not only are contingent in meaning but also limit the scope of thought and action. While taking its motivation from the latter position, the spirit of this volume is to leave the matter open, not least because the authors assembled here have their own reading of, and way of navigating through, these debates and the purpose of scholarship.

Parameters of Concept Analysis: Core, Web, Context

Let us begin by looking at the parameters that inform the assumptions and strategies underpinning all scholarly engagement with concepts. While the sequence in which they are discussed here might suggest a movement outwards from the thing itself in concentric circles, it is more accurate to view these parameters as three intertwined dimensions of the same thing.

So, what is a concept? At first sight, there is something paradoxical about defining a concept for a project that seeks to highlight its plurality. But, as will become clear shortly, these two tasks do not necessarily stand in contradiction to each other. In general terms, a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editor and Contributors
• 1 Unpacking Concepts
• Claims
• 2 Power
• 3 Security
• 4 Rationality
• 5 Identity
• Conditions
• 6 War
• 7 Peace
• 8 Anarchy
• 9 Society
• 10 Capitalism
• Systems of Governance
• 11 Sovereignty
• 12 Hegemony
• 13 Democracy
• 14 Religion
• Modes of Transformation
• 15 Revolution
• 16 Intervention
• 17 Integration
• 18 Globalization
• Index