Abstract
It is now commonplace to bemoan our field’s lack of practical relevance, and to blame this sorry situation on our penchant for ever-more abstract theorising over the analysis of real-world phenomena. This article challenges this rendition of the problem. Not only is the theory versus relevance thesis difficult to sustain empirically, there are good reasons to believe that even the most abstract forms of metatheory are relevant to sound practical knowledge. More than this, though, the theory versus relevance thesis misconstrues the problem. The obstacle to practical relevance is not theoretical abstraction, but a series of other disciplinary problems: our lack of any real interest in the nature of politics as a distinctive form of human action (which so animated early scholars in the field); the loss of the field’s early practical intent; the sadly too common bifurcation of explanatory and normative inquiry; and the disappearance of the figure of the international public intellectual.
It is now commonplace to bemoan our field’s lack of practical relevance, and to blame this sorry situation on our penchant for ever-more abstract theorising over the analysis of real-world problems. Sometimes this criticism comes from the outside, from governments demanding that research serve the ‘national interest’, from universities keen to demonstrate ‘impact’, and from media commentators taking easy shots at opaque language ordaining seemingly irrelevant topics. Yet the critique increasingly comes from the inside as well. International Relations (IR) has always had its anti-theorists; those who like Dickens’ schoolmaster, Thomas Gradgrind, ‘want nothing but Facts’. 1 We are in a period, however, when high theory is particularly on the nose. Not only do self-styled ‘policy wonks’ call for research that bureaucrats can easily digest, but many in the field have developed an allergy to metatheoretical debate, especially of an epistemological kind, and grand theorising has been displaced by ‘middle-range’, problem-specific forms of understanding. An assumption underlying much of this is that theory and practical relevance stand in a zero-sum relationship, in which excesses of the former detract from the latter.
This article questions this all-too-common rendition of the problem. IR scholars should worry about the practical relevance of our field. We should be proud of the fact that when IR first emerged as a self-conscious disciplinary project it was explicitly committed to the cultivation of knowledge in the service of fundamental human ends – principally, understanding the causes of war and establishing the conditions of peace. Furthermore, if we want IR to be the field of social inquiry most centrally concerned with comprehending the political dynamics of the globe, it would be odd if speaking to the core challenges of global politics was not an abiding disciplinary ambition.
Yet if IR is suffering a relevance deficit, it is not because of excessive theorising. Nowhere here do I defend the cultivated obscurantism that enchants small but diverse pockets of our field, in which ornate language is deployed as a badge of membership more than a medium of communication. Nor do I deny that IR scholars could do more to make their ideas accessible to audiences beyond the academy. As we know from the classroom, the mark of the great teacher is the ability to make complex ideas and phenomena understandable, but all too often this fundamental insight is lost when we write. My purpose is thus not to defend the arcane, ornate or esoteric; it is to point out, firstly, that the theory versus practical relevance thesis rests on assertion more than evidence, and, secondly, that it misconstrues the problem. If we are concerned about IR’s practical relevance, we should reflect instead on its status as a realm of practical discourse, as an engine of ideas constitutive of political action and debate within a broadly conceived public sphere. IR’s status in this regard, I shall suggest, is undermined not by excessive theorising, but by a series of other disciplinary handicaps: by IR’s marginal interest in the nature of politics as a distinctive form of social action; by the dissipation of the field’s early practical intent; by the persistent bifurcation of explanatory and normative inquiry; and, symptomatic of these problems, by the virtual extinction of the figure of the international public intellectual.
Anxieties and Intuitions
Before proceeding, a word is needed on the status of the claim that IR is a field lacking in practical relevance, leaving aside for a moment the question of what might be responsible for this. The notion is certainly widespread. Numerous authors have pointed to the problem, 2 and the most comprehensive survey of IR scholars reports that 85% of respondents believe that there is a gap between the kind of research we produce and what the policy community finds useful, and roughly half of these think the gap is widening. 3 It is important to note, however, that these views are largely intuitions. We lack any good data on the field’s practical relevance; indeed, we are unlikely to agree on what the appropriate measures would be: documented impact on policy outcomes; social and political critique; teaching ever-increasing numbers of undergraduate, masters and doctoral students; and so on. Even if practical relevance is defined narrowly, as impact on national or international policy, impact itself becomes less tangible the closer one inquires. Is impact advice efficiently translated into policy outcomes, does it include how teaching shapes the ways of thinking and intellectual orientations of those who will one day assume policy making roles, or does it encompass all of this and more? Our worry that IR is suffering a relevance deficit is thus an anxiety founded on an intuition. Nothing in this article questions this intuition, however. Nor do I provide the kind of data that would place it on a secure footing (a project well beyond the scope of a short article). Our intuitions often sense something that is real, however, and I will treat this particular intuition as one such example. We are right, I believe, to worry about the field’s practical relevance; the question that concerns me here is what might be the source of this deficit.
More Theory, Less Relevance
Many reasons have been identified for the field’s relevance deficit: the increasingly congested marketplace of ideas; the incentive system of the academy; differences between the temporal universes inhabited by the scholar and the policy maker (with the former taking a long time to understand longer-term patterns, and the latter having to respond today to today’s problems); contrasting cultures and media of communication (with the academic penchant for jargon singled out as particularly problematic); the widespread belief that scholarly integrity and objectivity depends on a healthy distance from the world of policy; and so on. The most commonly cited reason, however, is excessive theorising; the privileging of highly abstract ideas, introspective in focus, and seemingly unrelated to real-world issues and problematics. Such arguments came to the fore during the ‘Third Debate’ of the 1980s and 1990s, in response to the metatheoretical critiques of poststructuralists and critical theorists, and have received renewed, if varied, expression in the recent writings of analytical eclecticists, among others.
William Wallace’s oft-cited and much-echoed article of 1996 is a good example of the earlier renditions. 4 Writing at the tail end of the Third Debate, Wallace saw IR drifting ever further into irrelevance. In the good old days, the field had been populated by ‘men’ of practice; scholars who maintained a relative autonomy from the policy universe, but who had either come from it, through government (often war time) service, or were actively engaged with it. As IR grew, this early cadre disappeared, replaced by children of the discipline; scholars whose world was the academy, and whose animating concerns were intra-disciplinary debates, often of a theoretical nature. While young disciplines commonly establish their credentials by flexing their theoretical muscles, Wallace argued, IR had gone too far: scholarship had been displaced by scholasticism, the principal mark of which was the fetishising of theory for theory’s sake. Theory was important, he conceded, but only when it takes the form of empirically testable hypotheses, with the hard labour of empirical research being the only true measure of a theory’s value. 5 IR scholars had become enamoured with a different kind of theory, though. They had been drawn into the high esoterics of metatheoretical debate, questioning the very validity of Wallace’s preferred model of empirical theory, and seeing as corrupting any engagement with the policy world. ‘The preoccupation with word games among theorists of International Relations, the element of flippancy (or fun, as some followers of Foucault or Baudrillard would put it) in postmodern writing, the celebration of theory at the expense of empirical work’, all pull towards scholasticism: ‘the multiplication of fine distinctions without new knowledge’. 6 The net result, according to Wallace, was that IR has ‘become too detached from the world of practice, too fond of theory (and meta-theory) as opposed to empirical research, too self-indulgent, and in some cases too self-righteous’. 7
The nature of debate in IR has shifted substantially since Wallace wrote. The metatheoretical arguments that attended the rise of critical theory and poststructuralism in the 1980s are no longer central axes of debate, and middle-range theorising is increasingly the norm. Yet, despite Wallace’s target receding over the horizon, the theory versus relevance thesis has not disappeared; indeed, it now finds expression in a new, and perhaps more interesting, quarter.
After decades of increasingly ritualised paradigm wars, a new approach to the study of international relations is gaining momentum within the American mainstream of the field. Mining the rich philosophical veins of American pragmatism, ‘analytical eclecticists’ are calling for a renewed emphasis on problem-driven research, in which the pursuit of understanding leads scholars to mix and match insights from contending research paradigms. 8 It is important to note that analytical eclecticists are not anti-theoretical; they themselves pursue middle-range theoretical explanations of international political phenomena, and they insist that the hard theoretical work done within existing research paradigms is a necessary precursor to eclecticist mixing and matching. They are opposed, however, to endless metatheoretical debate, and it is here that the theory versus relevance thesis kicks in. Middle-range theorising, seeking to explain or understand real-world problems, is desirable, but as one becomes more abstract, as one ventures onto the terrain of metatheory in particular, practical relevance is thought to decline.
Analytical eclecticists have a laudable commitment to the practical; to the orientation of scholarship towards comprehending and addressing concrete political problems, and to the location of scholarship within the realm of broader social debate and practice. This leads them, quite unnecessarily in my mind, to see metatheoretical debate as an academic parlour game; a sideshow drawing good minds away from the proper social purposes of the academy. This is reinforced by a belief that fundamental issues of epistemology and ontology are ultimately unresolvable. There is no way, in the end, to settle millennia-old arguments about what constitutes truth, and whether ideas or material factors are more fundamental, about the relationship between agents and structures, or about the epistemological status of moral claims. Analytical eclecticists thus argue that we should bracket metatheory; that we should ‘separate foundational metatheoretical postulates from specific substantive claims or interpretations’, mixing and matching the latter to gain richer understandings of concrete political phenomena. An important consequence of such a move – and a primary eclecticist motive – is that it would make IR more relevant. It ‘offers a means to reduce the gap’, Rudra Sil and Peter Katzenstein argue, ‘between the practical knowledge required by policymakers and everyday actors, and the research products generated by academic disciplines and subfields’. 9
If the Third Debate version of the theory versus relevance thesis was directed primarily against poststructuralism and critical theory, the version articulated by analytical eclecticists targets the inter-paradigm contestation that structures scholarship in the field more generally – realists, liberals, constructivists, critical theorists and poststructuralists all are in their sights. Whatever substantive insights these paradigms might have, they are, in essence, metatheoretical fortresses; their battlements defended by rival assumptions about what constitutes true social-scientific knowledge, how one obtains it, whether material or ideational factors matter more, and how agents and structures relate. For Katzenstein and Sil, the only way to move beyond inter-paradigm warfare is to shift the terrain of debate away from these metatheoretical impasses.
In Defence of Theory
However widespread it might be, the notion that IR’s lack of practical relevance stems from excessive theorising rests more on vigorous assertion than weighty evidence. As noted above, we lack good data on the field’s practical relevance, and the difficulties establishing appropriate measures are all too apparent in the fraught attempts by several governments to quantify the impact of the humanities and social sciences more generally. Beyond this, though, we lack any credible evidence that any fluctuations in the field’s relevance are due to more or less high theory. We hear that policymakers complain of not being able to understand or apply much that appears in our leading journals, but it is unclear why we should be any more concerned about this than physicists or economists, who take theory, even high theory, to be the bedrock of advancement in knowledge. Moreover, there is now a wealth of research, inside and outside IR, that shows that policy communities are not open epistemic or cognitive realms, simply awaiting well-communicated, non-jargonistic knowledge – they are bureaucracies, deeply susceptible to groupthink, that filter information through their own intersubjective frames. 10
Beyond this, however, there are good reasons to believe that precisely the reverse of the theory versus relevance thesis might be true; that theoretical inquiry may be a necessary prerequisite for the generation of practically relevant knowledge. I will focus here on the value of metatheory, as this attracts most contemporary criticism and would appear the most difficult of theoretical forms to defend.
Metatheories take other theories as their subject. Indeed, their precepts establish the conditions of possibility for second-order theories. In general, metatheories divide into three broad categories: epistemology, ontology and meta-ethics. The first concerns the nature, validity and acquisition of knowledge; the second, the nature of being (what can be said to exist, how things might be categorised and how they stand in relation to one another); and the third, the nature of right and wrong, what constitutes moral argument, and how moral arguments might be sustained. Second-order theories are constructed within, and on the basis of, assumptions formulated at the metatheoretical level. Epistemological assumptions about what constitutes legitimate knowledge and how it is legitimately acquired delimit the questions we ask and the kinds of information we can enlist in answering them. 11 Can social scientists ask normative questions? Is literature a valid source of social-scientific knowledge? Ontological assumptions about the nature and distinctiveness of the social universe affect not only what we ‘see’ but also how we order what we see; how we relate the material to the ideational, agents to structures, interests to beliefs, and so on. If we assume, for example, that individuals are rational actors, engaged in the efficient pursuit of primarily material interests, then phenomena such as faith-motivated politics will remain at the far periphery of our vision. 12 Lastly, meta-ethical assumptions about the nature of the good, and about what constitutes a valid moral argument, frame how we reason about concrete ethical problems. Both deontology and consequentialism are meta-ethical positions, operationalised, for example, in the differing arguments of Charles Beitz and Peter Singer on global distributive justice. 13
Most scholars would acknowledge the background, structuring role that metatheory plays, but argue that we can take our metatheoretical assumptions off the shelf, get on with the serious business of research and leave explicit metatheoretical reflection and debate to the philosophers. If practical relevance is one of our concerns, however, there are several reasons why this is misguided.
Firstly, whether IR is practically relevant depends, in large measure, on the kinds of questions that animate our research. I am not referring here to the commonly held notion that we should be addressing questions that practitioners want answered. Indeed, our work will at times be most relevant when we pursue questions that policymakers and others would prefer left buried. My point is a different one, which I return to in greater detail below. It is sufficient to note here that being practically relevant involves asking questions of practice; not just retrospective questions about past practices – their nature, sources and consequences – but prospective questions about what human agents should do. As I have argued elsewhere, being practically relevant means asking questions of how we, ourselves, or some other actors (states, policymakers, citizens, NGOs, IOs, etc.) should act. 14 Yet our ability, nay willingness, to ask such questions is determined by the metatheoretical assumptions that structure our research and arguments. This is partly an issue of ontology – what we see affects how we understand the conditions of action, rendering some practices possible or impossible, mandatory or beyond the pale. If, for example, we think that political change is driven by material forces, then we are unlikely to see communicative practices of argument and persuasion as potentially successful sources of change. More than this, though, it is also an issue of epistemology. If we assume that the proper domain of IR as a social science is the acquisition of empirically verifiable knowledge, then we will struggle to comprehend, let alone answer, normative questions of how we should act. We will either reduce ‘ought’ questions to ‘is’ questions, or place them off the agenda altogether. 15 Our metatheoretical assumptions thus determine the macro-orientation of IR towards questions of practice, directly affecting the field’s practical relevance.
Secondly, metatheoretical revolutions license new second-order theoretical and analytical possibilities while foreclosing others, directly affecting those forms of scholarship widely considered most practically relevant. The rise of analytical eclecticism illustrates this. As noted above, Katzenstein and Sil’s call for a pragmatic approach to the study of world politics, one that addresses real-world problematics by combining insights from diverse research traditions, resonates with the mood of much of the field, especially within the American mainstream. Epistemological and ontological debates are widely considered irresolvable dead ends, grand theorising is unfashionable, and gladiatorial contests between rival paradigms appear, increasingly, as unimaginative rituals. Boredom and fatigue are partly responsible for this new mood, but something deeper is at work. Twenty-five years ago, Sil and Katzenstein’s call would have fallen on deaf ears; the neo-neo debate that preoccupied the American mainstream occurred within a metatheoretical consensus, one that combined a neo-positivist epistemology with a rationalist ontology. This singular metatheoretical framework defined the rules of the game; analytical eclecticism was unimaginable. The Third Debate of the 1980s and early 1990s destabilised all of this; not because American IR scholars converted in their droves to critical theory or poststructuralism (far from it), but because metatheoretical absolutism became less and less tenable. The anti-foundationalist critique of the idea that there is any single measure of truth did not produce a wave of relativism, but it did generate a widespread sense that battles on the terrain of epistemology were unwinnable. Similarly, the Third Debate emphasis on identity politics and cultural particularity, which later found expression in constructivism, did not vanquish rationalism. It did, however, establish a more pluralistic, if nevertheless heated, debate about ontology, a terrain on which many scholars felt more comfortable than that of epistemology. One can plausibly argue, therefore, that the metatheoretical struggles of the Third Debate created a space for – even made possible – the rise of analytical eclecticism and its aversion to metatheoretical absolutes, a principal benefit of which is said to be greater practical relevance.
Lastly, most of us would agree that for our research to be practically relevant, it has to be good – it has to be the product of sound inquiry, and our conclusions have to be plausible. The pluralists among us would also agree that different research questions require different methods of inquiry and strategies of argument. Yet across this diversity there are several practices widely recognised as essential to good research. Among these are clarity of purpose, logical coherence, engagement with alternative arguments and the provision of good reasons (empirical evidence, corroborating arguments textual interpretations, etc.). Less often noted, however, is the importance of metatheoretical reflexivity. If our epistemological assumptions affect the questions we ask, then being conscious of these assumptions is necessary to ensure that we are not fencing off questions of importance, and that if we are, we can justify our choices. Likewise, if our ontological assumptions affect how we see the social universe, determining what is in or outside our field of vision, then reflecting on these assumptions can prevent us being blind to things that matter. A similar argument applies to our meta-ethical assumptions. Indeed, if deontology and consequentialism are both meta-ethical positions, as I suggested earlier, then reflecting on our choice of one or other position is part and parcel of weighing rival ethical arguments (on issues as diverse as global poverty and human rights). Finally, our epistemological, ontological and meta-ethical assumptions are not metatheoretical silos; assumptions we make in one have a tendency to shape those we make in another. The oft-heard refrain that ‘if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter’ is an unfortunate example of epistemology supervening on ontology, something that metatheoretical reflexivity can help guard against. In sum, like clarity, coherence, consideration of alternative arguments and the provision of good reasons, metatheoretical reflexivity is part of keeping us honest, making it practically relevant despite its abstraction.
Identity and Purpose
If there is scarce evidence that excessive theorising is undermining IR’s relevance, and if we have good reasons to believe that metatheoretical reflection – the most abstract form of the art – offers something valuable to sound practical knowledge, then what is responsible for the field’s declining relevance (if our intuitions are correct that this is indeed occurring)? While the host of factors identified by other authors (and summarised earlier) have no doubt played their part, the problem, I would suggest, is ultimately one of identity and purpose. When IR was first constituted as a self-conscious social-scientific project at the beginning of the 20th century, it was imagined as a realm of practical inquiry; as a field of scholarship explicitly committed to bringing research and reflection to bear on fundamental international political problems, and generating ideas that might inform debate with the public sphere. Contrary to the depictions of Wallace and others, IR’s founders understood this sphere as broader than the narrow realm of government policy making so emphasised today; they saw it as a wider social realm of communication and argument, and it was not uncommon for these figures to move between the academy, journalism, non-governmental activism and engagement with policy formulation in government or international organisations. While they would not have conceived of it in quite the same social-scientific terms, they may well have agreed with Habermas in defining the public sphere as that realm of social life ‘which mediates between society and the state’. 16 Whether IR has ever lived up to these early ambitions of influencing debate within such a sphere is questionable, but today the ambitions themselves have receded well into the background. More importantly, perhaps, IR’s ability to realise such purposes, even if recovered and re-embraced, is handicapped by a series of disciplinary orientations.
A Lack of Interest in the Nature of Politics
There was a time when fathoming the nature of politics was an abiding concern of IR scholars. It was commonplace to preface treatises on international relations with extended meditations on the subject, as if reflecting on the distinctiveness and complexities of the political was foundational knowledge in understanding international relations. In The Twenty Years’ Crisis, E.H. Carr devoted a chapter to ‘The Nature of Politics’, following Aristotle in arguing ‘that man was by nature a political animal’. 17 Bernard de Jouvenel’s classic work on sovereignty opens with a discussion of ‘The Essence of Politics’. If political science is ‘a species of knowledge’, he argued, we must first determine the nature of the political. 18 Hans Morgenthau famously declared that ‘International Politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power’, and Chapter 3 of Politics among Nations is an elaboration of this distinctive understanding. 19 Martin Wight’s oft-quoted article, ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’, is in essence a reflection on the nature of politics and its differing domestic and international manifestations. 20 Before beginning his long tenure in the Chair in International Relations at the Australian National University, J.D.B. Miller penned an entire book on the subject. ‘What do we mean when we say that something is political?’, he asked in the first line. ‘What kind of human activity have we in mind? Faced with the things that men do, we call them artistic, or economic, or religious, or educational – or political. Why is this?’ 21
Carr, Jouvenel, Morgenthau, Wight, Miller and others did not, of course, agree about the nature of politics. For some it was about power, for others about government, and for still others about the tensions between morality and material interest. Yet this disagreement was important. What constitutes politics was a site of contestation; all the more heated because of its perceived conceptual importance.
Reflections such as these, and the debates they engendered, have all but disappeared from our field. The scope of what we study in IR has expanded dramatically. ‘External’ relations between sovereign states are no longer our sole concern, even if they remain central. It is now taken as given that the domestic and the international are mutually constituted, and many of us are primarily concerned with the complex webs of transnational relations that enmesh diverse state and non-state actors. By our own declaration, we are students of ‘global politics’ as much as international relations. Yet our embrace of the global has been matched by a declining interest in the political. The number of books and articles published in IR increases every year, and these are peppered with references to ‘political’ practices, ‘political’ institutions, ‘political’ actors, ‘political’ power and the ‘political’ realm. One struggles to find IR scholars discussing explicitly the nature of politics, however. Like the concept of power, we use the terminology constantly while seldom probing its meaning.
One reason for this pervasive disinterest in the nature of politics is the colonisation of large sectors of IR by economistic thinking. Drawing insights and inspiration from economic theory, IR scholars (particularly within the American mainstream) have embraced the concept of homo economicus, imagining individuals as utility-maximisers, and political outcomes as the products of strategic interaction. While seldom stated explicitly, politics is reduced here to a form of strategic rationality and practice. Moreover, when the further assumption is made that rational individuals are primarily motivated by material interests, often of an economic nature, politics seems to dissolve altogether, subsumed into a larger field of economic bargaining and exchange. Missing from this conception are a host of human dispositions and practices that we might also wish to consider political. Identity formation, the social constitution of interests and contestation over values; our intuitions tell us that all of these are implicated in the political. Yet from a rationalist standpoint, these are not only neglected, they are explicitly bracketed. Andrew Moravcsik argues, for example, that interest formation occurs in a pre-political realm: ‘Socially differentiated individuals define their material and ideational interests independently of politics and then advance those interests through political exchange and collective action.’ 22
This disinterest in the nature of politics is not restricted to IR alone; it is an unfortunate trait of contemporary political science more generally (bar some interest among political theorists). Yet how we conceive of politics cannot but affect whether and how we engage with the political universe of the public sphere. A disinterest in the nature and complexity of politics is unlikely to go hand in hand with a yearning for engagement. Furthermore, our conceptions of politics will affect the universe of human practices we seek to engage, as well as our modes of engagement. If politics is indeed reduced to a form of strategic action, and the political realm to that of government, engagement will, in all likelihood, take one form. If politics is cast more broadly, however, as encompassing the constitution of social identities, processes of interest formation, moral and ethical deliberation, as well as instrumental action, for example, then we end up with a very different understanding of the ideas that are politically relevant, and of the political universe with which we might engage. 23
IR’s Forgotten Practical Intent
As noted above, when IR emerged as a self-conscious disciplinary project in the first half of the 20th century, 24 it had a strong practical intent. The first Chairs in IR were established in the wake of the First World War, a deliberate attempt to bring knowledge to bear on problems of war and peace. The trust deeds for the Woodrow Wilson Chair at Aberystwyth defined International Politics as ‘Political Science in its application to IR with specific reference to the best means of promoting peace between nations’. Carr, the fourth and most famous of the Wilson Professors, wrote of IR that it ‘took its rise from a great and disastrous war; and the overwhelming purpose which dominated and inspired the pioneers of the new science was to obviate a recurrence of this disease of the international body politic’. 25 However critical Carr was of the utopianism of these early pioneers, he held true to this purpose; seeking only to temper it with a sober dose of realism. For realists and idealists alike, IR was a realm of practical reason.
This practical intent, which so animated IR in its infancy, has been all but forgotten. Indeed, suggesting that IR has, or should have, animating social purposes sounds quaint. For many, it is to speak with the voice of the activist not the scholar. From one direction, IR’s practical intent has been swamped by the obsession with method that now pervades much of the field. Being self-conscious and systemic about the methods we employ is essential to good scholarship, but we often forget that methods are of value, and only of value, because they help us answer questions. Yet in significant sectors of the field, what matters is your skills as a technician; your ability to apply a given set of methods, with a premium now attached to so-called ‘mixed-method’ analysis. Whether or not one is asking important questions is secondary, and as the primacy of questions declines, so too does IR’s ability and willingness to grapple with issues of global social and political importance. From an opposite direction, IR’s practical intent has been eroded by a widespread scepticism in the field towards Enlightenment projects in general. The very idea of reason deployed in the service of social and political ends raises alarm bells about knowledge in the service of power; about the academy being implicated in the constitution of new forms of hegemony. Ironically, therefore, a particular brand of scienticism has converged with anti-Enlightenment impulses to subsume IR’s original practical intent.
But if IR’s practical intent has been forgotten or subsumed, it is not gone altogether. In one important respect, IR remains a realm of practical discourses. More than most field’s of social inquiry, IR’s principal approaches – its paradigms, schools of thought, and ‘isms’ – retain an animating interest in the question of how we should act. This is true of realists and liberals, feminists and Gramscians. They differ over who the ‘we’ is (states, scholars or other social actors), over the purposes of action (order, cooperation or justice), and over what counts as action (state practices, social resistance or critique), but they nonetheless share this orientation. In almost all cases, however, it is sublimated; a subconscious interest, seldom articulated. Consequently, the full implications of pursuing the question of action have remained unexplored; in particular, its contradictory relationship to common epistemological and ontological commitments.
The Persistent Bifurcation of Analytical and Normative Inquiry
One of the most interesting features of The Twenty Years’ Crisis is Carr’s discussion of what constitutes mature thought, particularly in the study of politics. In their early years, sciences were characterised by naive utopianism; by a preoccupation with lofty purposes. Eventually, this was displaced by a crude realism, which could not ‘accept any standard value save that of fact’. 26 Neither of these dispositions characterise mature thought, however. If utopianism is naive, unalloyed realism is sterile; the former the mark of immaturity, the latter the sin of old age. Mature thought, by contrast, encompasses the essential features of both utopianism and realism: namely, purpose and analysis. ‘Sound political thought and sound political life’, Carr insists, ‘will be found only where both have their place’. 27 This is because mature thought, particularly in a political science such as IR, is thought that can inform political action. Utopianism tells us nothing about context and circumstance, and ‘realism breaks down because it fails to provide any ground for purposive or meaningful action’. 28 Carr’s message in The Twenty Years’ Crisis is thus not that realism trumps utopianism, as the standard interpretation holds, but that IR ought to be a field of practical inquiry, one concerned with basic questions of how we should act. To realise this vision, however, IR must address not only what is, but also what ought to be.
By Carr’s standards, it would be difficult to describe contemporary IR as a realm of mature thought. Several approaches consistently seek to occupy the difficult terrain between normative and analytical inquiry: critical theory, variants of constructivism, feminism, some international political theory, the English School and strands of contemporary liberalism being the most prominent examples. The overwhelming tendency, however, is to try to quarantine these two forms of inquiry, and to privilege the analytical over the normative. This is all too apparent in leading IR textbooks (on both sides of the Atlantic). Most chapters are devoted to explicating contending empirical (or positive) theories, and to surveying key issue areas. Somewhere towards the end there is often a chapter or two on ‘ethics and international affairs’ or ‘justice and world politics’, but these are residual categories at best. 29 It is also apparent in the organisation of most North American political science departments, where IR is traditionally studied. Scholars like Charles Beitz, Henry Shue and Michael Walzer – America’s most prominent students of ethics and world politics – have not held ‘IR’ appointments; they have lived in the political theory sub-field or outside the walls in philosophy departments.
Of course, quarantining analytical from normative inquiry is difficult, however determined we might be, and whatever institutional fences we build. As others have demonstrated, all existing theories of international relations have normative dimensions. In addition to propositions about the nature of international relations, why actors do what they do and what causes particular phenomena, they include assumptions about how the world ought to be and what actors should do. 30 Realists privilege the values of order and the national interest, liberals that of institutional cooperation, critical theorists that of emancipation, and so on. But just as the animating practical interest of most approaches is sublimated, so too are their normative dimensions; so much so that they attract little remark in most surveys of the field.
The persistent bifurcation of analytical and normative inquiry is arguably the greatest impediment to IR being practically relevant. 31 As noted earlier, being practically relevant means asking questions of practice, including prospective questions of how human agents should act. Answering such questions requires empirical analysis and positive theory, as these tell us about the contexts and conditions of action. But alone they can never tell us what actors should do. On the issue of humanitarian intervention, for example, empirical analysis can tell us when states are more or less likely to undertake such missions, what form they are likely to take, and under what conditions they are successful. But it cannot tell us whether they are the right thing to do; whether states should intervene in the domestic affairs of another state for humanitarian purposes. This is the task of normative inquiry, where values of sovereignty, order and human rights must be weighed. Failing to grasp this necessity of melding analytical and normative inquiry is the principal weakness of the current analytical eclecticist project. Eclecticists want IR to be more relevant, and they think the solution is answering real-world questions by mixing and matching insights from diverse research traditions. They are not wrong. The problem is that their eclecticism does not extend to normative theory; the menu of research traditions from which they draw is purely empirical or positive.
There are several examples of eclectic work that breaks this mould, however. Robert Keohane’s recent work with Allen Buchanan on the preventive use of force is one such case. Combining insights from Keohane’s earlier work on institutional cooperation with arguments from moral philosophy, they develop what they term a ‘cosmopolitan institutional proposal’ about when preventive force might be used legitimately. 32 From another sector of the field, Richard Price explores how assumptions about what is morally possible or impossible condition arguments about how actors should respond to fundamental ethical dilemmas in world politics. He shows how constructivist insights into how actors construct social norms, and about how norms condition political action, can be fruitfully integrated into normative arguments about right conduct. 33 Different as these examples are, they demonstrate that despite our disciplinary injunctions to preserve academic objectivity and not to confuse the is with the ought, systematic and insightful scholarship is possible on the terrain between the empirical and the normative.
The Lost Figure of the International Public Intellectual
One barometer of IR’s declining status as a realm of practical discourse is the scarcity of scholars we might describe as international public intellectuals. For Wallace, as we have seen, the field was more relevant when it was populated by ‘men’ of practice; scholars who knew the policy world, were comfortable wandering its halls and saw their role as shaping national and international policies and practices. Yet Wallace miscast the generations he lauded. Angell, Carr, Zimmern and others were not policy wonks; they were public intellectuals. They exhibited the three essential characteristics of such figures: knowledge, animating values and a commitment to engagement in a broadly defined public sphere. Many, if not most, had government experience, which conditioned their knowledge in distinctive ways. But this was, in each case, alloyed to strong normative commitments which propelled their engagement beyond the academy. More than this, though, their field of engagement was not limited to the bureaucratic processes of government. They were, as noted earlier, engaged in the broader public sphere, as columnists, speakers and, above all else, protagonists in major public debates over critical issues of international affairs: from the political economy of arms-racing to the virtues of appeasement.
There is, of course, no shortage of academic talking heads in today’s media; a learned sound bite is found for every issue, in every broadcast. And our universities seem particularly keen to encourage such activities, creating ever-expanding media units to coach scholars in how best to communicate their ‘message’. It is ironic, therefore, that genuine international public intellectuals should be relatively rare. We can all think of examples, like the late Fred Halliday, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. This is hardly inexplicable, though. It is, perhaps, symptomatic of a field handicapped by the preceding orientations. If we have lost interest in politics as a distinctive form of social action, if we have forgotten, or sublimated, IR’s early practical intent, and if we systematically quarantine analytical from normative inquiry, depreciating the latter, then we should expect public intellectuals to be the rarest of our progeny. This is not, by the way, a recommendation that we all assume such a role. Far from it. But if we are worried about IR’s practical relevance, we should, at the very least, reflect on the scarcity of such individuals among our burgeoning ranks.
Conclusion
If IR is suffering a relevance deficit, blaming theory misdiagnoses the problem. The theory versus relevance thesis is strongest when said loudly, and weakens the more we search for evidence. More than this, we have good reasons to believe that theory, even abstract metatheory, can aid sound practical knowledge. Theory is not the culprit, therefore. The real problem is IR’s declining status as a realm of practical discourse – it is a problem of identity and purpose, not abstraction. The solution thus lies not in less theory, but in a series of reorientations. As our focus shifts from international relations to global politics, we should position IR as a primary, and uniquely well-placed, site for reconsidering the nature of the political itself. We should re-embrace the field’s early practical intent, asking big and important questions about the nature and development of world politics first, and honing our methods second. Making this move will bring questions of practice to the fore, including prospective questions about what actors should do. We cannot address such questions, however, unless we occupy the difficult terrain between analytical and normative inquiry. This was, of course, the chosen terrain of classical thinkers in the field – including Aron, Carr and Morgenthau – and even the most empirical of our theories have never been devoid of normative content. While prediction is a risky art, reorienting IR along these lines may well revitalise the field as an engine of ideas constitutive of political argument and debate within evolving national and global public spheres.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article is based on an address delivered at the Millennium Conference on ‘Theory and Practice’, held at the London School of Economics on 22–23 October 2011, and a later version was presented to the International Relations Working Group at the European University Institute. I thank participants at both events for their insightful feedback. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers and the Millennium editors for their comments and guidance.
1.
Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 47.
2.
See, for example, Alexander L. George, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1993); Bruce Jentleson, ‘The Need for Praxis: Bringing Policy Relevance Back In’, International Security 26 (2002): 169–83; Joseph Kruzel, ‘More Chasm than a Gap, But Do Scholars Want to Bridge It?’, Mershon International Studies Review 38, no. 1 (1994): 179–81; Joseph Lepgold, ‘Is Anyone Listening? International Relations Theory and the Problem of Policy Relevance’, Political Science Quarterly 113, no. 1 (1998): 48–62; Stephen Walt, ‘The Relationship between Theory and Policy in International Relations’, Annual Review of Political Science 8 (2005): 23–48; Henry R. Nau, ‘Scholarship and Policy-Making: Who Speaks Truth to Whom?’, in The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, eds Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 636–47; and Joseph S. Nye, ‘International Relations: The Relevance of Theory to Practice’, in The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, eds. Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 648–60.
3.
James D. Long, Daniel Maliniak, Susan Peterson and Michael J. Tierney, TRIP around the World: Teaching, Research, and Policy Views of International Relations Faculty in 20 Countries (Williamsburg: Teaching, Research, and International Policy [TRIP] Project, January 2012). Note that at the time of publication, TRIP had only released data from US respondents.
4.
William Wallace, ‘Truth and Power, Monks and Technocrats: Theory and Practice in International Relations’, Review of International Studies 22, no. 3 (1996): 301–21. For an interesting application of Wallace’s argument to the Australian case, see Michael Wesley, ‘Australia’s International Relations and the (IR)relevance of Theory’, Australian Journal of International Relations 55, no. 3 (2001): 455–67.
5.
Ibid., 314.
6.
Ibid., 316.
7.
Ibid., 304.
8.
See, for example, Rudra Sil and Peter J. Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms: Analytical Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics (London: Palgrave, 2010); Rudra Sil and Peter J. Katzenstein, ‘Analytical Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics: Reconfiguring Problems and Mechanisms across Research Traditions’, Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 2 (2010): 411–31; and Peter Katzenstein and Rudra Sil, ‘Eclectic Theorizing in the Study and Practice of International Relations’, in The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, eds Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 109–30.
9.
Sil and Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms, 3.
10.
The classic work in this area is Irving Janis’s Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascos, 2nd edn (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1982). Also see Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). For a powerful illustration of bureaucratic culture and decision making, see Michael N. Barnett, ‘The UN Security Council, Indifference, and Genocide in Rwanda’, Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 4 (1997): 551–78.
11.
A good example of this can be found in the opening essay by Peter Katzenstein, Robert Keohane and Stephen Krasner on the 50th anniversary issue of International Organization. In explaining why International Organization had not published much postmodernist work, they argued that this was because the journal ‘has been committed to an enterprise that postmodernism denies: the use of evidence to adjudicate between truth claims’. Whatever one concludes about this, it is an example of epistemological criteria being used to delimit what constitutes admissible social-scientific inquiry. See Peter J. Katzenstein, Robert O. Keohane and Stephen D. Krasner, eds, Exploration and Contestation in the Study of World Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 38.
12.
On this question, see Colin Jerolmack and Douglas Porpora, ‘Religion, Rationality, and Experience: A Response to the New Rational Choice Theory of Religion’, Sociological Theory 22, no. 1 (2004): 140–60.
13.
Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, rev. edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Peter J. Singer, ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972): 229–43.
14.
Christian Reus-Smit, ‘Constructivism and the Structure of Ethical Reasoning’, in Moral Limit and Possibility in World Politics, ed. Richard Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 53–82; and Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, ‘Between Utopia and Reality: The Practical Discourses of International Relations’, in The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, eds Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3–40.
15.
The all-too-common claim that human rights are worthless normative principles because everywhere human rights are violated is an example of the former tendency, and Kenneth Waltz’s distinction between ‘theoretical explanation’ and ‘philosophical interpretation’ (the second being outside the proper scope of IR) is indicative of the latter. See Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979), 6.
16.
Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article’, New German Critique 3 (1974): 49–50. Translated by Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox.
17.
E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1964), 95.
18.
Bernard de Jouvenel, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 15.
19.
Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 6th edn (New York: McGraw Hill, 1985), 31–51.
20.
Martin Wight, ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’, in Diplomatic Investigations, eds Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), 17–34.
21.
J.D.B. Miller, The Nature of Politics (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1962), 13.
22.
Andrew Moravcsik, ‘Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics’, International Organization 51, no. 4 (1997): 517.
23.
For the development of such a conception of politics, see Christian Reus-Smit, ed., The Politics of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24–9.
24.
In locating the origins of the field in the early 20th century, I am not suggesting that scholars had not thought systematically about the international prior to this. Indeed, philosophers, historians and lawyers had written much on the subject for centuries before. My point is simply that IR, as a self-conscious social-scientific project, emerges only after 1900.
25.
Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 8.
26.
Ibid., 21.
27.
Ibid., 10.
28.
Ibid., 92.
29.
See, for example, two otherwise excellent text books: John Baylis, Steve Smith and Patricia Owen, eds, Globalization in World Politics, 5th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Henry Nau, Perspectives on International Relations: Power, Institutions, and Ideas, 3rd edn (Washington: CQ Press, 2012).
30.
See Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, eds, The Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Chapters 7–24.
31.
Chris Brown has, of course, been making this point for some time. For his various cuts at the issue, see Chris Brown, Practical Judgement in International Political Theory (London: Routledge, 2010).
32.
Allen Buchanan and Robert O. Keohane, ‘The Preventive Use of Force: A Cosmopolitan Institutional Proposal’, Ethics and International Affairs 18, no. 1 (2004): 1–22.
33.
Richard M. Price, ed., Moral Limit and Possibility in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Richard M. Price, ‘Moral Limit and Possibility in World Politics’, International Organization 62, no. 2 (2008): 191–220.