An eclectic fox: IR from restrictive discipline to hybrid and pluralist field

In this contribution, I problematize the conventional understanding of the notion of discipline in IR to underline its socio-political dimension; in doing so, I also suggest an alternative (i.e. hybrid and pluralist) representation of IR. My view originates from an experience of IR from mainly within the North American context, and thus, it necessarily entails a particular rapport with the American academic field and its dominant (methodological and organizational) aspects.

Traditionally, a discipline refers to a delimited branch of knowledge that is institutionalized within a university organizational structure. As argued by Helen Louise Turton in this Forum, a discipline is also conventionally perceived as an attestation of (individual and collective) academic credentials. Beyond this institutional dimension, an academic discipline is consequently bestowed with a socio-political function, that is, it is meant to legitimize and order (i.e. to discipline) an academic community through regular forms of academic practice (e.g. peer-reviewing and teaching). This legitimizing and ordering function accords with specific, presupposed and doxic understandings of a discipline’s identity. In other words, the disciplining function reflects understandings of an academic discipline’s appropriate approaches to knowledge production, ontologies and applications.

While I recognize that the development of an academic field is necessarily shaped by complex struggles and power relations, I assert that the understanding of IR as a ‘discipline’ legitimizes the reproduction of particularly uniformizing and (epistemically) intolerant practices in the academic field. Accordingly, this contribution underlines that self-defining IR as a discipline has significant impact in terms of its normative and restrictive effects. In the following pages, I first clarify the restrictive effects of discipline as practice and explore how these effects are linked with associated self-definitions of IR. I use three dimensions of sociological analysis (i.e. the internal, organizational and external dimensions) ¹ to discuss the development of IR; these levels serve to illustrate how self-defining IR as a discipline both implies and justifies practices that restrict and contradict how the academic field is developed. I suggest that these three sociological dimensions are particularly important for understanding the development of IR and the way that power relations frame the field’s social and epistemic characters. Following these explanations, and in line with Pami Aalto’s contribution in this Forum, I suggest that an alternative (and less restrictive) identity would yield greater intellectual and social rewards. However, contrary to Aalto, I also suggest that IR scholars adopt a pluralist and hybrid collective identity, instead of Aalto’s ‘interdisciplinarity’.

Understanding the notion of discipline as practice helps to underline its restrictive effects on the ordering practices in IR. More precisely, conceiving discipline as practice highlights the ways by which this notion implies and justifies a set of ordering practices within the IR community. The effects of these ordering practices are principally twofold: (1) they restrict the diversity of actors, activities and ideas that can participate in IR and (2) they marginalize the plurality of actors, activities and ideas that currently contribute to IR thinking but that do not strictly conform to the dominant understanding of appropriate approaches to knowledge production, ontologies and applications in the field. These effects are exemplified below.

These ordering practices take several discursive and nondiscursive forms that are particularly evident in regular academic activities such as peer-reviewing, distributing calls for papers and organizing education programmes; however, they will inevitably have the practical effects not only of delimiting the field’s appropriate approaches to knowledge production, ontologies and applications but also in terms of discriminating against alternative self-definitions. Noticeably, this approach to the development of IR (and to discipline as practice more generally) echoes previous arguments made by poststructuralist and critical IR scholars; ² yet, this contribution advances a particular emphasis on the practical effects that the aforementioned ordering dynamics have on the daily lives of IR scholars and students. Indeed, engaging with this understanding of discipline as practice can have significant effects on the way we understand and practice IR. What I suggest is that despite the unavoidable presence of power relations within the academic field, IR scholars can choose to reproduce less restrictive forms of ordering practices. Moreover, I assert that IR scholars and students would benefit from a more pluralist and hybrid self-definition of their academic field.

The restrictive effects of the field’s current ordering practices can be illustrated by the three dimensions of sociological analysis, mentioned above. The first sociological dimension (i.e. the internal dimension) focuses on the ordering mechanisms that are employed by IR scholars to coordinate their specific and shared interests – namely, the production of valid knowledge about international relations. As such, one of the main mechanisms highlighted by the internal dimension of IR is the continuous debate about the appropriate methodologies for producing valid knowledge in the field. The span of legitimate methodological approaches in IR is restricted by uniformizing practices in the field, which are inspired by the self-definition of the internal dimension of IR as a discipline. These uniformizing practices tend to limit the field’s legitimate methodological approaches to one relatively coherent ‘neo-positivist’ (or rationalist) approach to knowledge production. ³ These practices have also largely limited the ability of IR scholars and students to analyse the constitutive role of IR scholars’ practices in world politics – particularly in the leading institutions of the field, at least until recently. ⁴ Interestingly, the dominance of the neo-positivist approach has also been repeatedly contradicted by IR scholars in the last three decades. ⁵

The internal dimension highlights how practices that limit IR’s legitimate methodological approach to neo-positivism (which is particularly prevalent in North American IR), or to any other arguably uniform methodological approach, should be considered arbitrary and particularly restrictive. Replacing uniformizing self-definitions with methodological pluralism, however, would reflect the fact that ‘philosophers have come to no global consensus about what defines a field of inquiry as a “science” or a practice of knowledge production as “scientific”’, and that instead of coherence and uniformity, ‘science is […] marked by radical discontinuity’. ⁶ It would also provide greater opportunities to use other rigorous, systematic and potentially innovative approaches to the production of valid knowledge in IR. ⁷

The second sociological dimension (i.e. the organizational dimension) also helps to analyse discipline as practice in IR. The organizational dimension in IR focuses on how scholars understand, write and speak about the ways in which IR is organized within the broader academic realm. This dimension highlights how uniformizing practices have traditionally self-defined and restricted IR to an American-style subfield of political science (i.e. as a field institutionalized within university Political Science departments). This self-definition has largely limited the field’s legitimate research focus to international politics and has also prioritized statist ontological perspectives and hierarchized the academic field accordingly.

However, recent literature on the way IR has developed in different locations has highlighted the arbitrariness of such a uniformizing self-definition of IR. ⁸ These new perspectives indicate that IR’s geo-epistemic diversity and international focus construct the (transnational) field in a more diverse fashion than any single, uniform organizational conception could afford. Moreover, research regarding how the social sciences have evolved and have been organized in the last few decades casts some doubt on the possibility (and desirability) of defining any fixed and uniform organizational borders in IR. ⁹ In that sense, uniformizing self-definitions of IR are contradicted by the continuous processes of specialization, fragmentation and hybridization that affect fields of knowledge and the diversity of the organizational frameworks that characterize them at the transnational level. Beyond adopting this notion of transnational diversity, I assert that IR scholars should favour hybrid and decentralized forms of self-definition and organizational practice – as is already the case in some areas of the field ¹⁰ – instead of seeking to artificially secure IR within a uniform and restrictive self-definition. Furthermore, in accordance with the analyses of authors such as Mattei Dogan and Robert Pahre, ¹¹ I suggest that such hybrid organizational frameworks would generate greater innovative potential for the community of IR scholars.

The third dimension of sociological analysis (i.e. the external dimension) focuses on the way scholars frame the appropriate application and purpose of IR knowledge. In particular, the external dimension analyses which actors IR scholars interact with and direct their work toward. Uniformizing self-definitions of IR, which frequently rely on the notion of discipline, tend to restrict the possible applications of IR knowledge and forms of engagement of IR scholars (especially in terms of their contact with ‘external’ audiences) to only what involves policy-related actors and issues. Illustrating such a stance, William Wallace writes that ‘[IR] as a discipline grew out of reflections on policy, and out of the desire to influence policy, or to improve the practice of policy’. ¹² Notably, Wallace has been echoed by other IR scholars who have also advanced a restrictive policy-oriented self-definition of IR’s appropriate applications and purposes. ¹³

The external dimension underlines how these forms of uniformizing practice delimit ‘appropriate’ (or valuable) audiences and discriminate against other types of audiences. ¹⁴ Moreover, this form of uniformizing self-definition effectively marginalizes the alternative forms of knowledge application that IR scholars have developed in the last decades. Indeed, IR scholars have only relatively recently begun to engage with diverse realms of activity (e.g. practical discourses ¹⁵ ) and audiences (e.g. women around the world ¹⁶ and students in classrooms ¹⁷ ) as valuable ways to develop alternative applications of their scholarship – although these applications are largely excluded from the restrictive notion of the appropriate application of IR scholarship. Alternately, I assert that adopting a more pluralist self-definition of IR could help to welcome such unconventional forms of public engagement (e.g. public narratives about international relations) with unconventional audiences (e.g. local or marginal groups, IR students). I also suggest that such diversity of engagement should be considered as an opportunity to develop plural complementary research agendas in IR, instead of being evaluated as a problem of coherence in the field.

These three dimensions of a sociological analysis of IR development underline the important and practical (yet largely implicit) implications associated with the self-definition of IR as a discipline. I argue that IR scholars should be more (self-) reflexive when adhering to self-definitions of IR, since such practices can be restrictive in that they exclude certain approaches, ideas and scholars that do not conform to the current dominant understandings of the field’s appropriate methodologies, organizational framework and applications. Indeed, instead of reproducing a uniformizing identity, which excludes and marginalizes potentially insightful approaches and ideas, I propose that IR scholars could find more collective rewards – and could reflect the existing diversity of IR – by adopting a hybrid and pluralist collective self-definition of IR in accordance with the internal, organizational and external dimensions of the field. Not unlike Isaiah Berlin’s famous metaphor regarding the fox who knows many eclectic things and the hedgehog who knows one big thing, ¹⁸ I suggest that IR should cultivate a hybrid and pluralistic self-definition that is less narrow in its outlook. By doing so, the field of IR (not unlike the eclectic fox) would benefit from greater capacities to account for the multiplicity of voices and generate greater intellectual innovation at the global level.