Abstract
Sil and Katzenstein present analytic eclecticism as a pragmatic, problem-driven, policy-oriented heuristic, posed against the paradigmatism and parsimony inhibiting the study of world politics. I argue that Sil and Katzenstein’s approach is both promising (in that it is one of the more flexible available frameworks to bring separate research traditions into fruitful dialogue) and potentially problematic (if it limits itself to the triad of realism, liberalism, and constructivism). Informed by a recent methodological turn in post-positivist International Relations (IR) and Political Science, this essay takes seriously eclecticism’s commitment to theoretical multilingualism by imagining an eclectic engagement beyond the heuristic’s original purview and calling for eclectic attention to reflexivity, constitutive theorizing, and the dynamics of power and ethics. The article reflects on existing disciplinary power dynamics and disparities and the urgent demand for scholars to more fully contribute to developing effective approaches to real-world threats, such as climate change.
There comes a moment in the graduate training of many International Relations (IR) scholars, I imagine, when they are confronted by the published encounter between eminent scholars from two broad camps, Robert Gilpin and Richard Ashley. 1 They spared over the soul of mid-1980s political realism, Ashley brandishing post-structuralism and critical theory to decry the betrayal of classical realism he saw perpetrated by neo-realism and Gilpin feeling indicted by a “Kafkaesque prosecutor.” 2 Gilpin laments that the editors of the journal that originally facilitated the exchange failed to “send an English translation” of Ashley’s elaborate and polemical critique of neo-realism, writing that “if I fail to respond to some of Ashley’s more telling points, it is not that I am deliberately avoiding them but rather that I failed to understand them.” 3 While the rest of Gilpin’s discussion makes plain that he does grasp at least some of Ashley’s charges, it is evident that, in Gilpin’s view, it is Ashley who “does not really know what he’s talking about.” 4 Depending on where one sits, this episode represents either the beginnings of an intellectual guerrilla insurgency that would provoke and eventually wear down an already overstretched academic empire, or a puzzling violation of decorum, which succeeded only in misrepresenting a venerated intellectual tradition. But beyond the hostile, if bemused, tone and rich and emotive language, the state of incomprehension on view in the Ashley–Gilpin scuffle raises important, related questions at the heart of IR as an intellectual project: How can we structure spaces of dialogue where diverse positions are engaged and treated as worthy and cultivate the respectful responsiveness lacking in the Gilpin–Ashley exchange? What sort of engagements do we want to have? How can we leverage the contributions of a variety of research programs, traditions, schools, ontologies, and epistemologies to make the world a better place?
In Beyond Paradigms, Rudra Sil and Peter J. Katzenstein 5 present one promising approach to these questions: analytic eclecticism, a pragmatic, problem-driven, policy-oriented heuristic that offers a chance for scholars to transcend the musty, artificial, and stultifying paradigmatism that often inhibits the study of world politics. The promise of eclecticism in IR that I wish to highlight was hinted at long ago by Hayward Alker and Thomas Biersteker, who developed the notion of international savoir faire—“the ability rationally and persuasively to navigate one’s scientific investigations across and through a variety of paradigmatic contexts”—which, they argued, is the only path to genuine knowledge cumulation. 6 While such a period of international savoir faire may not be imminent, Sil and Katzenstein’s project is certainly a hopeful step in this direction.
However, if IR is to inaugurate such an era, scholars at the centre of power and on the margins will need to take risks, and scholarly exchange will have to shift away from the Ashley–Gilpin model of mutual incomprehension. 7 In the process of elaborating their heuristic, Sil and Katzenstein coin the phrase “theoretical multilingualism,” 8 which I take up in this essay because I think it best captures one of the ways forward for mainstream scholars to become conversant in the discourse and concepts of those on the margins of the discipline. While Sil and Katzenstein’s eclecticism is pitched in part as an antidote to assumptions of theoretical incommensurability, 9 in what follows I am interested in how IR scholars can avoid being held incommunicado by the limited scope of their efforts at dialogue and cooperation.
Sil and Katzenstein’s approach represents a promising alternative to a static, strictly paradigmatic existence in that it is one of the more flexible, philosophically grounded, available mainstream heuristics for bringing separate research traditions into fruitful dialogue. However, I argue that eclecticism is less useful if the scope of its theoretical multilingualism is limited to realism, liberalism, and constructivism, or what the authors call “the triad” of dominant approaches to the field. Interrogating this limitation, I follow in the footsteps of several previous assessments, 10 offering a friendly critique of Sil and Katzenstein’s advocacy of paradigmatic boundary transgression by asking how, in the interests of opening “new channels for communication,” 11 an analytic eclectic ethos might accommodate or partner with a number of approaches largely excluded from the original formulation of analytic eclecticism, including critical constructivist, interpretivist, feminist, post-structuralist, and other “post-positivist” approaches. Puzzlingly, Sil and Katzenstein’s approach did not extend past the “triad,” though they clearly appreciate the richness and scope of IR theory, are genuinely committed to commensurability, and recognize the significance of many phenomena (e.g., discourse, “ideational structures,” identities) emphasized by less central IR traditions. Moreover, many of the alternative research traditions informing this article were well established by the publication of Beyond Paradigms. It is also reasonable to ask whether Sil and Katzenstein’s (and by extension, this article’s) invocation of the familiar tribes of IR and acceptance of existing ways of mapping the subfield of IR (the “isms”) shouldn’t be jettisoned in favour of other organizing schemes, such as theoretical clusters of choice-theoretic, experience-near, and social-relational approaches 12 that do not reproduce such problematic conventions. In this essay, I leave these important questions aside, attempting to meet Sil and Katzenstein’s approach on its own terms to focus on the question of how a wider engagement might usefully expand analytic eclecticism while retaining meaningful space for perspectival contrast and competition. 13 This question points to the larger issue of the potential for the IR community to foster an “ability to see beyond the length of [our] own tools.” 14
Of course, eclecticism is unlikely to gain universal approval among critical scholars. Many scholars do not share Sil and Katzenstein’s impatience with metatheoretical debates that resist resolution. For example, Anne Norton argues that, while mainstream scholarship is organized so as to solve problems and to look for answers, “we should not look in scholarship for answers, resolution, and closure but for questions, debates, and the opening of new inquiries.” 15 Other scholars might embrace a move past disciplinary boundaries but promote a different view of intellectual pluralism, rejecting the imperialism of a US-dominated discipline, observing that IR’s metatheories do not travel well into the world and that non-Western authors of “peripheral scholarship” are underrepresented. 16
This rest of this contribution proceeds as follows: The first section reviews briefly Sil and Katzenstein’s effort and highlights its strengths and limitations. The second section identifies several areas that would pose problems for the analytic eclecticism project should it develop its “outreach” to non-triad scholars and, in the process, illustrates the contributions of non-triad scholarship by reference to the international security implications of climate change. In lumping these non-triad traditions together for analytic convenience to explore broadly shared elements and tendencies, in ways that may be read as reinscribing existing disciplinary divisions, I do not wish to suggest there exists any unified or homogenous non-triad tradition. Nor do I wish to obscure differences among participants in a particular tradition, for example between first and second “generations” of constructivists 17 or, as seen in current debates, among its critics and practitioners over whether constructivism should be associated with progressive politics. 18 Space precludes a more thorough investigation of the methodological debates in other significant alternatives to the mainstream, such as English School, Marxist approaches, Global IR, and postcolonialism. Such methodological texts 19 should be part of any future expansion of an eclectic approach. While not all critical approaches will stress the three themes I emphasize—reflexivity, constitutive theorizing, and ethics—to the same degree, my bet is that many will recognize these commitments and that this can form the basis for a continuing conversation.
Partial pluralism: The advantages and limitations of analytic eclecticism
According to Sil and Katzenstein, eclectic scholarship is marked, first, by a commitment to open-ended problem formulation that reflects both real-world problems and the actual complexity of social life rather than the impulse to fill gaps in existing knowledge conceived in paradigmatic terms. 20 It aims to answer questions of a scope and complexity that transcend those conceived narrowly through conventional research traditions. Second, eclectic analysis offers flexible causal accounts, which may range across levels of analysis and ideational and material distinctions, at the “middle range” level (not aspiring to grand theory or aiming to produce a general model). Third, eclectic scholarship addresses a perceived relevance deficit by going beyond the academy, directing IR scholarship outwards to “ordinary actors” and, in particular, policy-makers, leaders, and public intellectuals. 21 Because it “extricates and recombines elements of theories embedded [in dominant paradigms]” without being bound by those paradigms’ parochialisms or scholasticisms, analytic eclecticism can be experimental and innovative, making it more likely that scholars will “collectively generate” more useful answers to significant questions. 22
The approach is anchored in a pragmatist conception of social inquiry that views knowledge production as “a social project,” engaging in the contextual pursuit of tentative truths over the metaphysical search for consensus on “final” truths. It encompasses the intersubjective grounding of theoretical knowledge claims in the distinctiveness of everyday life, the emphasizing of dialogue and inclusivity, and an ontological highlighting of dialectical interactions of self and society, agency and structure that is based on symbolic interactionism. 23 Ideally then, pragmatist eclectic scholarship focuses on “the practical consequences of knowledge claims for the experiences and problem-solving efforts of actors in the social world.” 24 Elsewhere, Sil describes a pragmatist epistemology that sees “social reality as essentially intersubjective and consider[s] the articulation of explanatory theory to be fundamentally intertwined with the search for understanding.” 25
Advantages of eclecticism
Such commitments and epistemological starting points should be welcome to a number of non-triad scholars comfortable with exploring positions between causal explanation and interpretive understanding or positivism and subjectivism, as Katzenstein and Sil prefer. 26 Sil and Katzenstein’s emphasis on the democratic production of useful, “successful” knowledge should interest engaged scholars beyond the dominant traditions. Following Anne Norton, they note, however, the dangers of the unbalanced pursuit of policy relevance that “can end up enlisting scholars in the unreflective service of those exercising power.” 27 Sil and Katzenstein’s response to Norton’s warning is that it must be balanced by a concern with “the very real danger of scholarship getting overly preoccupied with purely academic disputes that are hermetically blocked off from public discourse and policy debates.” 28
The main advantage of eclecticism, Sil and Katzenstein argue, is that the strategy allows scholars to transcend the parochialisms of compartmentalized research programs—concepts, logics, mechanisms, interpretations, and levels of analysis—to focus on problems without paradigmatic constraints. Thus, eclecticism enters an increasingly crowded field of bridge-building efforts, 29 including but not limited to inclusive reconceptualizations of (social) scientific practice, 30 the reconciliation of divergent theoretical vocabularies through translation, 31 the establishment of a scholarly or intellectual division of labor, 32 and efforts to catalogue and champion one or another vision of pluralism in IR. 33 What advantages does eclecticism potentially offer those in the field who do not identify with its dominant theories? Through its critique of incommensurability and positive program for scholarly exchange, eclecticism presents an opportunity for an important discussion of the relative merits of approaches that seek the common ground necessary to foster interparadigm communication, if not cooperation. As a bridging effort, eclecticism aims at complementing existing research traditions, but its main strength for present purposes is its promotion of “inclusive forms of deliberation among all who show interest in aspects of a given problem.” 34
Limitations and opportunities
The promise of eclecticism as a facilitator of scholarly communication, however, is limited by Sil and Katzenstein’s decision to limit its scope to realism, liberalism, and constructivism without giving sustained consideration to the wide range of potentially eclectic approaches to world politics. The authors justify limiting the purview of their pluralist project to the triad by arguing these represent the “most prevalent approaches in the United States and worldwide.” 35 However, as Cornut has noted, this choice opens Sil and Katzenstein to charges “of using problem-driven pragmatism to appear more pluralist while creating strict disciplinarian boundaries that render challenges to the mainstream illegitimate.” 36 Since a partial pluralism is ultimately self-defeating, it makes sense to promote Sil and Katzenstein’s stated efforts to produce a “greater scope for deliberation among a more inclusive community of inquirers” 37 by involving as many outsiders as possible who roughly fit the three main commitments (noted above).
Limiting the relevant paradigms to those currently dominant also misses an opportunity to interact with a set of interlocutors ignored in the original formulation of eclecticism. Ten years after the publication of Beyond Paradigms, eclecticism has the opportunity to live up to its communicative promise by engaging the products of a maturing methodological turn in critical approaches to IR and Political Science. There are a number of excellent works addressing research design, argument, and metatheory in IR and Political Science that include consideration of non-triad approaches within the framework of philosophy of social science. 38 In addition, there exists a first generation of high-quality methodological primers on what it means to engage in the practice of critical research produced by authors working under the banners of interpretivism, constructivism, feminism, post-structuralism, and political theory. 39 This literature is remarkable in that it emanates from traditions that had long resisted the imperatives of systematization, methodologism, and scientism, recognizing the negative effects that adherence to standardized cannons or procedures can have on scholarship. 40
Eclectic outreach and the challenge of climate change
One upshot of the development of a methodological turn in critical approaches to IR is that there is a potential audience for eclecticism among non-triad scholars—one equipped with the clarifying vocabularies necessary for engagement with methodologically sophisticated, mainstream approaches to interparadigm pluralism. Analytic eclectic outreach will likely have more success if eclecticism can begin to address the shared concerns of non-triad scholars discussed below while offering creative responses to pressing global challenges.
The recognition of both the dawning of the Anthropocene, “a new era of natural history in which human actions are the decisive force ecologically and geologically,” 41 and the threat posed by climate change to international security seem to offer analytic eclecticism a tailor-made and undeniably policy-relevant opportunity to foster the necessary space for creative cross-paradigm communication. Political Science and IR are part of “a world bound largely by conventions devised in an age of climate stability.” 42 Yet, without a significant effort to overcome this quiescence, and an investment in a multi-faceted response, IR as a scholarly community risks a catastrophic complicity.
Political Science and IR have yet to rise to the occasion and have arguably ceded the issue of climate change to scientists and economists. As Debra Javeline observes, political scientists have been sidelined from interdisciplinary debates about aspects of climate change among climate scientists and policy-makers, such as climate adaptation, despite the profoundly political nature of the questions raised. 43 Going further, Anthony Burke et al. argue that, blinded by statist commitments and “unified by an investment in the institution of diplomacy and an anthropocentric ontology in which the field of human agonism, bargaining, and conflict works at some distance from nature rather than being deeply, causally, enmeshed in its processes,” 44 realism, liberalism, and constructivism are unequipped to deal with the gravity of climate change. The authors situate this triadic failure in the wider failure of security studies; as they note, we must question a discipline dedicated to survival with “almost nothing to say in the face of a possible mass extinction event.” 45 If the pages of Foreign Affairs are any indication, existing climate change policy debates are dominated by the familiar paradigm-bound concerns of institutional design, global public goods and free riding, pro-business market solutions, technological solutions, US leadership, and climate conflict. 46
Reflexivity
If analytic eclecticism is to successfully engage post-positivist research, it must continue to engage in debates over “reflexivity,” debates which have been mostly confined to the field’s dissident periphery. But to do so, it will have to more fully engage the “double hermeneutic,” which denotes the “slippage”—between the meaningful frames of lay actors on the one hand and the metalanguages of social scientists on the other—that a researcher will encounter while practising social science. 47 Meaning is imposed doubly, by the objects of research upon the relevant events situated in their own context and by the researchers. This is challenging to forms of triad scholarship modelled on natural sciences, which, being concerned with unreflective physical objects and a world that “does not answer back,” need neither take into account the self-interpretations of the people being studied nor weigh the researchers’ self-interpretations, as do the social sciences.
Eclecticism will also have to navigate myriad conceptions of “reflexivity” and, as Michael Lynch suggests, there is “a confusing array of reflexivities” but “no single way to be, or not to be, reflexive.” 48 In IR, reflexivity has been deployed to signal the self-conscious situating of a researcher in their research, attending to the premises of one’s process of theorizing and researching (including one’s cultural-political prejudices), the submission of favoured theories to contextualization and historical reflection, and recognition of how analytic and data-gathering choices condition the data produced, among other definitions. 49 Though variously conceived, reflexivity is a key value commitment of non-triad research traditions in IR. Constructivists Audie Klotz and Cecelia Lynch urge that scholars recognize the inevitability of “bias,” yet “strive to be self-aware, in order to understand the moral and methodological implications of our choices.” 50 Patrick Thaddeus Jackson argues that the recognition that methodology is “complicit in the production and reproduction of the world” commits the scholar who wants to research this world to reflexivity, “an awareness of how the habits and experiences that one is bringing to bear on a situation shape and construct that situation.” 51
Feminist IR theory offers perhaps the most sustained reflection on reflexivity and IR research. For example, Ackerly, Stern, and True place reflexivity, which they define as the continual re-interrogation of one’s own scholarship, at the core of the feminist approach to methodology. 52 Following the work of Sandra Harding and others, Ann Tickner describes feminist reflexivity as a posture that recasts the relationship between researcher and subject, attends to related power disparities, and resists the assumption of scholarly detachment. 53 Thus, eclecticists must be willing not only to countenance a broad rejection of the belief in any transcendent, universally valid knowledge, 54 but also to open their own scholarly practices up to scrutiny and consider their own normative influences. As Cai Wilkinson observes, since reflexivity cannot “be retrospectively bolted on to our research” analytic eclectics can start from an “explicit articulation of how the research was actually done, why and with what effects for the resulting interpretation that is presented.” 55
Reflexivity may prompt a variety of reappraisals regarding the ways scholars are bound up in the production of knowledge about climate change. Directed at institutions, reflexive attitudes may inspire us to inquire into the funding sources of the modern university system, colonized as it is by corporate sponsorship of academic institutions and foundations funded by energy extractive industries with a pronounced “interest in staving off any government action on climate change and weakening environmental safeguards.” 56 Individual-level approaches to scholarly reflexivity are diverse and defy summary, but Heather A. Smith’s work is illustrative. Writing in a post-positivist feminist vein, Smith presents Indigenous voices and ways of knowing, which, she argues, disrupt the “global” discourse of climate change in a way so as not to colonize or exoticize their discourse while at the same time flagging the contested and political nature of the term “Indigenous.” Smith further emphasizes how un-reflexive scholarly practices can reinforce dominant discourses, seen for example in discussions of climate inequality that ignore Indigenous peoples from the global North. 57
Causality and constitutive theorizing
In Beyond Paradigms, Sil and Katzenstein review the positions taken by constructivists who “adopt a constitutive epistemology” 58 and imply that constitutive explanations and norms could fit under the umbrella of eclecticism. However, in practice their focus is largely on producing causal logics and arguments. 59 A survey of the critical literature on research methods and philosophy of social science issues reveals a range of positions on causality, including the denial of its utility altogether, a critique in light of its differences with “constitutive” theorizing, and efforts to reclaim the concept of causality for critical and interpretivist approaches. 60 Post-structuralist Anne Norton, following Wittgenstein, argues that although causality may be a useful “analytic convention, metaphor, or hermeneutic device,” 61 for some it is susceptible to the “allure of the single explanation” and represents a false form of analytical closure that denies the reality of multiple causation in the political realm. Peregrine Schwartz-Shea hints at a movement to reclaim for interpretivists causality as understood in its variable-oriented, hypothetical-nomological sense along two lines, involving the revision of our understanding of causation from general laws to particular cases and the recognition of the part human meaning plays in constituting action. 62 While identifying it as the “main dividing line among constructivists,” Klotz and Lynch question the utility of the “putative” distinction between causal and constitutive claims, which they view as reminiscent of the unhelpful distinction between explanation and understanding. 63
Many non-triad scholars have embraced the distinction Alexander Wendt made in the late 1990s between causal and constitutive theorizing, which aims “to account for the properties of things by reference to the structures in virtue of which they exist.” 64 Wendt’s position on constitutive theorizing—a confusing blend of definitional and productive uses of the term “constitute” 65 —has come under critique and revision. 66 Constitutive theorizing has since been adopted across a wide range of post-positivist IR theory, defended in a diverse and valuable set of works, and taken its place among the field-defining theoretical approaches to IR. 67 The facilitation of an exchange between eclectic and non-triad approaches may depend on either relaxing the insistence on causality, negotiating a truce vis-à-vis a shared mistrust of overly Humean conceptions of causation, or engaging in serious “theoretically multilingual” diplomacy. 68
Approaching climate change, we may ask how the conceptual apparatus relied upon to process the consequences of environmental changes help constitute the world as well as our policy responses. Broadly, the usual conceptual suspects, such as greenhouse metaphors or tragedy of the commons narratives, help us comprehend what would otherwise present as a disparate and overwhelming set of facts and processes—deforestation, rising oceans, wildfires, state death, water wars, etc.—as a problem. Specific critiques attend to the constitution of “natural disasters,” for example asking how the political economy of gender inequality, in concert with race, ethnicity, and class and reflected in political decisions preceding events such as earthquakes and tsunamis, helps produce vulnerabilities. 69 Non-triad eclecticism can benefit from studies of the constitution of particular actors, such as climate refugees, within varying discourses of climate change. Giovanni Bettini, maintaining that “that although climate change exists and has physical effects whether one thinks about it or not, it becomes an object of social meaning and practices only through human signification,” examines the construct of climate migrants, showing how conflicting discourses construct such people as “a threat, a source of cheap labour, or the subject of an emancipatory struggle,” often ending up “reinforce[ing] the representation of migration as a threatening dysfunction.” 70
Ethics and power
Christian Reus-Smit has argued that Sil and Katzenstein’s epistemologically “empirical-theoretic project” is not equipped to deal with normative reflection and thus unable to produce the kind of practical knowledge that can “animate social and political action.” 71 This lack of “systematic reflection on values,” 72 according to Reus-Smit, hobbles analytic eclecticism’s efforts to produce policy-relevant knowledge as it intends, in the spirit of Aristotelian phronesis. Relatedly, an avowed concern with ethics is never far from the top of the intellectual priority list of many non-triad scholars. For instance, feminist IR approaches to research methods place ethics among epistemology, ontology, and choice of method as primary elements of a definition of methodology. 73 Constructivists Klotz and Lynch recognize what they see as the unavoidable ethical dimension of constructivist scholarship, though they warn “against translating ethical assumptions into particular tools of analysis” and against granting any particular method the “moral high ground.” 74 Ethical motivations are certainly not the monopoly of critical scholars, but this community tends to foreground ethical concerns in its publications more prominently than realist, liberal, and causal-oriented constructivists. Sil and Katzenstein’s discussion of ethics (in their review of the work of Hoffmann and Finnemore) is scattered, lacks focus, and could be enriched through dialogue with non-triad approaches. 75
This is not to say it will be easy to surface ethics in the eclectic analytic heuristic. The urgency of climate change clearly raises enormous ethical issues: intergenerational responsibilities, the morality of population growth, the commitment to exuberant consumption and carbon-intensive transportation practices, and obligations to (distant) humans and non-human life, to name a few. Generally, the commitments of the dominant paradigms of IR, with their group-centric power politics and free-trade-centred pursuit of progress, sit uneasily with the range of anthropocentric and ecocentric approaches to environmental ethics. Burke et al. suggest we develop an ethics of climate change, one worthy of the unprecedented challenge, one that goes beyond “visions of the good life” to address “the goodness of life itself.” 76 At a more modest scale, ethical approaches to climate change scholarship align with reflexive postures that acknowledge and foreground researcher positionality and entail giving respectful voice to marginalized peoples and impacted positions. Given the demand for ethics in a chaotic present and uncertain future, non-triad approaches are arguably better placed to cultivate the necessary ethical imagination or identify the constitution of nascent planetary identities, but they certainly complicate the picture we have of climate change beyond states and markets, geopolitics, and public goods, making the boundaries of policy relevancy particularly salient.
Critical and post-positivist scholars might naturally be suspicious of the eclectic project, directed at climate change or as a general program, if it seems to reify existing power-laden disciplinary structures by policing the borders of legitimate scholarship. This particular emphasis on power relates to a possible post-positivist concern with the eclectic impulse toward policy relevance. Recall Sil and Katzenstein’s argument that the value-added of eclecticism involves relating research to ordinary actors and policy-makers. Sil and Katzenstein suspect the “compartmentalization of knowledge” prohibits the beneficial sharing of insights that address real-world dilemmas. Yet a move toward policy relevance as a criterion for research may strike many who self-identify outside of the mainstream as political and even disciplining. Steve Smith argues that when “one party announces that approaches have to be policy relevant, [it is] usually defined as relevant for activities of the state. Dismissing work as being irrelevant to policy choices is a powerful disciplining device.” 77 This issue evokes further discussion of the ethics of useful knowledge, of its “relevance” (to the state? to ordinary or marginal people? to whom?) and intelligibility. From Sil and Katzenstein’s text, it seems eclecticism emphasizes an appeal to policy-makers more than “ordinary actors,” but this need not be the case. Feminist IR scholars, for example, can argue that their theories and scholarship, developed in close consultation and interaction with real-world activists, policy-makers, and ordinary women, does not “sit on the sidelines” and suffers no such relevance deficit (witness titanic efforts to theorize “gender mainstreaming” in global governance, attention to rape in warfare and other forms of sexual violence, and projects to enable women by making them “productive” in the global economy).
Conclusion
Every research strategy has costs and benefits, and interparidigmatic frameworks and the encounters they engender are no different. Without being naïve about the palliative effects of dialogue, I hope this essay has highlighted the challenges involved, as well as gestured at certain possible benefits. Katzenstein and Sil
78
review the costs of taking up analytic eclecticism, including an increased vulnerability to a broad range of criticism and the risk of conceptual muddiness inherent in working across research traditions. They note that trafficking in more than one research tradition typically takes considerable time and effort, requiring scholars not only to read widely but also to engage in shifting “multilingual” conversations with diverse scholarly communities, each confidently speaking a single theoretical language [they] … have been wedded to for their entire careers.
79
Eclecticism’s mission, as I understand it, is to break the hold research programs have on scholars’ ability to go about addressing significant problems while broadening the appeal of IR scholarship outside the academy. An eclectic encounter between the triad and non-triad camps might inspire more consideration to which problems are “significant” and which theories are “relevant.” Are we really all “combing the same beach” (i.e., empirical referents), only with “different intuitions and tools” as Sil and Katzenstein put it? 80 Might that beach be soon lost to rising oceans, perhaps in part because our dominant IR theories were as blind to dissidence as they were to existential threats, such as climate change, to our “planetary reality” as Burke et al. suggest? These do seem questions best addressed by the broadest possible swath of the IR community, and Sil and Katzenstein offer a promising framework where hitherto alienated scholars approaching related substantive questions can find each other. The success of this partnership depends, in part, on some conversations about which problems count as substantive. Beyond that, if the hope is to build a specific, inclusive community dedicated to pragmatic, extra-paradigmatic excursions, then eclecticism seems a bridge worth constructing, particularly if the promise of multilingualism can attract a diversity of interest from scholars outside the liberal, realist, and constructivist orthodoxies that Sil and Katzenstein aim to transcend.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Patrick Jackson, Felix Berenskoetter, and the anonymous referees and editors of this forum for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this essay. None is responsible for any errors that remain.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1
See Robert G. Gilpin, “The richness of the tradition of political realism,” and Richard K. Ashley, “The poverty of neorealism,” in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 301–321, 255–300.
2
Gilpin, “The Richness,” 302.
3
Ibid., 303.
4
Ibid., 316.
5
Rudra Sil and Peter J. Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
6
Hayward R. Alker Jr., and Thomas J. Biersteker, “The dialectics of world orders: Notes for a future archeologist of international savoir faire,” International Studies Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1984): 137.
7
Sil and Katzenstein celebrate Gilpin as a primogenitor of the eclectic approach (Ibid., 37–8).
8
Ibid., 25; Peter J. Katzenstein and Rudra Sil, “Eclectic theorizing in the study and practice of International Relations,” in Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, eds., Oxford Handbook of International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 125.
9
Sil and Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms, 13–6.
10
Including Daniel J. Levine, Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Christian Reus-Smith, “Beyond metatheory?” European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 3 (2013): 589–608; Jérémie Cornut, “Analytic eclecticism in practice: A method for combining International Relations theories,” International Studies Perspectives 16, no. 1 (2015): 50–66; Craig Parsons, “Before eclecticism: Competing alternatives in constructivist research,” International Theory 7, no. S3 (2015): 1–38.
11
Sil and Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms, 23.
12
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon, “International theory in a post-paradigmatic era: From substantive wagers to scientific ontologies,” European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 3 (2013): 543–565.
13
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations (New York: Routledge, 2011), 33; Craig Parsons, “Before eclecticism,” 3.
14
Kirstie M. McClure, “Reading 95 theses on politics, culture, and method,” Perspectives on Politics 4, no. 2 (2006): 348.
15
Anne Norton, 95 Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 69.
16
Arlene B. Tickner, “Core, periphery and (neo)imperialist International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 3 (2013): 627–646.
17
David M. McCourt and Brent J. Steele, “World of our making and second-generation constructivism,” in Harry D. Gould, ed., The Art of World-Making: Nicholas Greenwood Onuf and His Critics (New York: Routledge, 2017), 1–13.
18
Alexander D. Barder and Daniel J. Levine, “‘The world is too much with us’: Reification and the depoliticising of via media constructivist IR,” Millennium 40, no. 3 (2012): 585–604; Laura Sjoberg and J. Samuel Barkin, “If it is everything, it is nothing: An argument for specificity in constructivisms,” in Mariano E. Bertucci, Jarrod Hayes, and Patrick James, eds., Constructivism Reconsidered: Past, Present, and Future (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 227–242.
19
E.g., Cornelia Navari, ed., Theorising International Society: English School Methods (Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
20
The IR use of Kuhn’s formulation of “paradigms” is hotly contested; see Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon, “Paradigmatic faults in International Relations theory,” International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2009): 907–930.
21
Sil and Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms, 20, 22.
22
Ibid., 37, 23.
23
Ibid., 43–7; Katzenstein and Sil, “Eclectic theorizing,” 114.
24
Rudra Sil, “Forum: Simplifying pragmatism: From social theory to problem-driven eclecticism,” International Studies Review 11 (2009): 651.
25
Rudra Sil, “Problems chasing methods or methods chasing problems? Research communities, constrained pluralism, and the role of eclecticism,” in Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, eds., Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 316.
26
Katzenstein and Sil, “Eclectic theorizing,” 113.
27
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing this point. Sil and Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms, 13.
28
Ibid.
29
On bridge-building, see Jeffrey T. Checkel, “Theoretical synthesis in IR: Possibilities and limits,” Simons Papers in Security and Development No. 6 (Vancouver: School for International Studies, Simon Fraser University, 2010) and Milja Kurki et al., “Roundtable: The Limits of Bridgebuilding,” International Relations 23, no. 1 (2009): 115–140, especially Siba Grovogui on the problems with this metaphor.
30
Jackson, Conduct of Inquiry.
31
Audie Klotz and Cecelia Lynch, Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2008), 8–9, 22.
32
Sil, “Problems chasing.”
33
Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen, and Colin Wight, “The end of international theory?” European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 3 (2015): 405–425; Daniel J. Levine and David M. McCourt, “Why does pluralism matter when we study politics? A view from contemporary International Relations,” Perspectives on Politics 16, no. 1 (2018): 92–109.
34
Rudra Sil, “Simplifying pragmatism,” 651.
35
Sil and Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms, 36.
36
Cornut, “Analytic eclecticism,” 53.
37
Rudra Sil and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Analytic eclecticism: Not perfect, but indispensable,” Qualitative & Multi-Method Research 8, no. 2 (2010): 20.
38
Fred Chernoff, Theory and Metatheory in International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 131–178; Craig Parsons, How to Map Arguments in Political Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 94–132; Jackson, Conduct of Inquiry.
39
Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, eds., Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, 2nd ed. (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2014); Klotz and Lynch, Strategies; Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True, Feminist Methodologies for International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Brooke A. Ackerly and Jacqui True. Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (New York: Routledge, 2006); Norton, 95 Theses.
40
Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, “Doing social science in a humanistic manner,” in Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, eds., Interpretation and Method, 438; Hansen, Security as Practice, xix.
41
Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (New York: Verso Books, 2020), x.
42
David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019), 138.
43
Debra Javeline, “The most important topic political scientists are not studying: Adapting to climate change,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 2 (2014): 420–434.
44
Anthony Burke et al., “Planet politics: A manifesto from the end of IR,” Millennium 44, no. 3 (2016): 15.
45
Ibid., 19.
46
William Nordhaus et al., “Forum: The fire next time,” Foreign Affairs 99, no.3 (2020): 8–68; Joshua Busby, “Warming world: Why climate change matters more than anything else,” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 4 (2018): 49–55.
47
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 374.
48
Michael Lynch, “Against reflexivity as an academic virtue and source of privileged knowledge,” Theory Culture Society 17, no. 26 (2000): 46.
49
For useful recent discussions, see Inanna Hamati-Ataya, “Reflectivity, reflexivity, reflexivism: IR’s ‘reflexive turn’—and beyond,” European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 4 (2012): 669–69 and Jack L. Amoureux and Brent J. Steele, Reflexivity and International Relations: Positionality, Critique, and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016), which offers a framework that captures feminist, poststructuralist, constructivist appropriations of the concept. For earlier valuable discussions, see Mark Neufeld, “Reflexivity and International Relations theory,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 22, no. 1 (1993): 53–76; Hayward R. Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Jackson, Conduct of Inquiry, and Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, Interpretation and Method, particularly essays by Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, Patrick Jackson, Cecelia Lynch, and Ido Oren, as well as Ted Hopf, “Book review of Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, eds., Interpretation and Method: Empirical Methods and the Interpretive Turn,” Journal of Politics 70, no. 1 (2008): 289–291.
50
Klotz and Lynch, Strategies, 37.
51
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “Making sense of making sense: Configurational analysis and the double hermeneutic,” in Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, eds., Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, 2nd ed. (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2014), 271.
52
Ackerly, Stern, and True, Feminist Methodologies.
53
J. Ann Tickner, “Feminism meets International Relations: Some methodological issues,” in Ackerly, Stern, and True, Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, 27–28.
54
Hamati-Ataya, “Reflectivity, reflexivity,” 8.
55
Cai Wilkinson, “On not just finding what you (thought you) were looking for: Reflections on fieldwork data and theory,” in Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, Interpretation and Method, 402.
56
Jane Mayer, Dark Money (New York: Anchor Books, 2017), 21.
57
Heather A. Smith, “Disrupting the global discourse of climate change: The case of Indigenous voices,” in Mary E. Pettenger, ed., The Social Construction of Climate Change: Power Knowledge, Norms, Discourses (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 211.
58
Sil and Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms, 30.
59
Ibid., 1, 2, 15, 16, 21, 37, 38, 45, 58; Rudra Sil and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Analytic eclecticism in the study of world politics: Reconfiguring problems and mechanisms across research traditions,” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 2 (2010): 419–421.
60
E.g., Hansen, Security as Practice; Norton, 95 Theses, 120.
61
Norton, 95 Theses, 120.
62
Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, “Judging quality: Evaluative criteria and epistemic communities,” in Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, Interpretation and Method, 120–46.
63
Klotz and Lynch, Strategies for Research, 15.
64
Alexander Wendt, “On constitution and causation in International Relations,” Review of International Studies 24, no. 5 (1998): 105.
65
Jackson, Conduct of Inquiry, 106–7.
66
David Dessler and John Owen, “Constructivism and the problem of explanation: A review article,” Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 3 (2005): 597–610; Craig Parsons, How to Map; see also Nina Tannenwald, “Ideas and explanation: Advancing the theoretical agenda,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 2 (2005): 13–42.
67
E.g., Hansen, Security as Practice; Richard Ned Lebow, “Constitutive causality: Imagined spaces and political practices,” Millennium 38, no. 2 (2009): 211–239; Dunne, Hansen, and Wight “The end,” 411.
68
See Edward Schatz, ed., “Symposium: Linking interpretation and causal inference,” Qualitative & Multi-Method Research 13, no. 2 (2015): 3–28; Milja Kurki, “Causes of a divided discipline: Rethinking the concept of cause in International Relations theory,” Review of International Studies 32, no. 2 (2006): 189–216; and Andrew Bennett, “The mother of all isms: Causal mechanisms and structured pluralism in International Relations theory,” European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 3 (2013): 467–470 for significant efforts to promote dialogue between causalist, critical realist, interpretivist, and post-positivist theories.
69
Jacqui True, The Political Economy of Violence Against Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
70
Giovanni Bettini, “(In)convenient convergences: ‘Climate refugees’, apocalyptic discourses and the depoliticization of climate-induced migration,” in Chris Methmann, Delf Rothe, and Benjamin Stephan, eds., Interpretive Approaches to Global Climate Governance (New York: Routledge, 2013), 123, 124, 130.
71
Reus-Smith, “Beyond metatheory?” 591.
72
Ibid.
73
Ackerly, Stern, and True. Feminist Methodologies, 6.
74
Klotz and Lynch, Strategies for Research, 111.
75
Sil and Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms, 39, 71.
76
Burke et al., “Planet politics,” 19–20.
77
Steve Smith, “Forum: Dialogue and the Reinforcement of Orthodoxy in International Relations,” International Studies Review 5 (2003), 142.
78
Katzenstein and Sil, “Eclectic theorizing,” 125.
79
Ibid.
80
Sil and Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms, xiii.