IR Theory as International Practice/Agency: A Clinical-Cynical Bourdieusian Perspective

IR’s Field(s) of Forces

At the global level, IR is neither an international discipline, nor a symmetrical one in terms of cultural production. Since Stanley Hoffmann’s famous Daedalus article, ²³ its American ‘identity’ has been repeatedly confirmed, and the nature of its internal divisions empirically revealed – pointing to important differences that allow us to draw a nuanced map of how ‘peripheral’ IRs are positioned with respect to its American ‘core’ and to one another.

Based on indicators of global institutional visibility, such as journal publications, textbooks and course syllabi, studies conducted in the past three decades have shown that American scholars, methodologies and theories overwhelmingly dominate the discipline. ²⁴ Micro-analyses of local production in different parts of the world also corroborate the ‘hegemony’ of American IR, which has become ‘simultaneously a single local instance of the field and an integral component of everyone else’s universe’. ²⁵ On the other hand, however, Western peripheries, which enjoy some autonomy because of local disciplinary traditions and independent academic institutions, are clearly less subjected to this ‘hegemony’ than non-Western ones, which are especially dependent on the US for theoretical imports and institutional validation. ²⁶ In the other direction, American IR is more likely to be influenced, if at all, by its closer geo-epistemic periphery (the United Kingdom and Western and Northern Europe) than by farther sources of scholarship, ²⁷ and its academic system is largely independent from external influences.

The narrowness and asymmetry of this market of cultural exchange contribute to reinforcing the discipline’s Western-centric characteristics. Not only is IR predominantly informed by Western philosophical and epistemic traditions, the very themes that constitute its object of study are far from representing ‘global’ realities. Issues of relevance to ‘Third-World’ politics and scholarship – identity, development, poverty, health – remain marginal, and when they do appear in mainstream publications, it is usually from the perspective of Western interests. ²⁸ Even conventional subjects like war and security seem to often succumb to Western policy-informed taxonomies. ²⁹

Together, these elements suggest that while IR as a global discipline is undeniably shaped by the influence of its American centre of production, it cannot, however, be envisaged as a single ‘field of forces’, like a homogeneous set of concentric circles of ‘peripheries’ centred on its American ‘core’. Where national traditions exist and are supported by a relatively autonomous academic system of validation and promotion, as in the UK, Scandinavian countries and some Western European ones, the academic and intellectual parameters of American IR have weaker effects on local productions, which reduces their influence to the level of global recognition and debates. But in areas such as Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and parts of Asia, academic marginalisation is more problematic, as it results from a combined cultural and institutional dependence that is often the product of enduring colonial structures clashing with local concerns and aspirations. ³⁰ A comprehensive sociology of the discipline would have to analyse these different fields of forces in order to avoid any simplifications. Nonetheless, insofar as American IR is a common denominator to all of them, a clinical appraisal of global IR requires some understanding of its American specificities, as these contribute to shaping the whole field’s and its members’ ‘space of possibilities’.

American IR is currently divided between a ‘mainstream’ scholarship, represented by the consensus between leading neopositivist approaches – specifically Neorealism and Neoliberal institutionalism – and clusters of marginal ones informed by Critical Theory, critical Constructivism and other forms of ‘post-positivism’. ³¹ Despite the gradual diversification of ‘dissident’ scholarship, it is easy to recognise older patterns of disciplinary orthodoxy characteristic of American IR since at least the Behavioural Revolution. ³² The core’s mainstream has witnessed only three major transformations since the turn of the 20th century, namely, the rise of Realism, its Behavioural scienticisation and its unthreatening assimilation of neoliberalism. These trends are intimately related to the status of the US as an international power, and the strengthening of the relationship between the American academy, the American state and major American philanthropic agencies, the latter having a particularly important role in mediating, and bringing to fruition, the dependence of academic agendas on political ones. ³³ To this one should add the academic struggles that American IR and Political Science fought to delimit their turf against other social sciences.

This socio-intellectual history has an important bearing on the current structure of American IR’s field of forces. Firstly, it explains the importance of non-field-specific capital (political and economic) within it, and the weight exogenous social actors (government and funding agencies) have on the distribution of resources, the allocation of symbolic recognition and the framing of academic agendas. Secondly, it underlies the development of the field’s intersubjective system of academic and intellectual values, thereby shaping what counts as valuable and legitimate field-specific (scientific) capital. These doxic standards are typically embodied in a series of value-laden antinomies – science-vs-philosophy, practice-vs-theory, descriptive-vs-normative, facts-vs-values, objectivism-vs-subjectivism, objectivity-vs-ideology, value-freedom-vs-bias and so on. These define, in normative-binary terms, what the discipline favours or rejects, and hence establish and legitimate specific hierarchies by setting ontological, methodological and axiological orthodoxies. Central among these are the value allocated to empirical, quantitative studies (and hence to those who can understand and generate them), the centrality of state-centric, policy-relevant themes of inquiry, and the adherence to ‘ethical neutrality’ as the corollary of scientific ‘objectivity’. ³⁴

International Relations Theories as Position-takings in the Field of Struggles

These normative-binary terms imposed by the core’s mainstream are recurrent nodes of contention between those who have an interest in preserving the rules of the game by promoting their worldview as ‘natural’ and ‘objective’, and those who have an interest in changing them by undermining these assumptions. ³⁵ For the dissidents of IR’s ‘second debate’, the strategy was to interpret the extant version of objectivity as ‘unscientific’; for newer generations of dissidents since the ‘third debate’, it is about either denying the validity of ‘objectivism’, or portraying the core’s ‘objectivity’ as a hidden ‘parochialism’. Since the doxic antinomies that define disciplinary norms underlie and support IR’s internal hierarchies, these antinomies are typically the object of these symbolic struggles and ‘debates’. Informed by their positions in the discipline and the social world, by a complex set of dispositions shaped by these multiple positions, and by the (institutionally unacknowledged) forms of capital they have inherited and acquired through their social and academic trajectories, ‘dissident’ IR scholars promote themes, methodologies and ethical attitudes that either challenge these antinomies, or reverse the values associated with their constitutive positions. ³⁶ This process relies on a set of mutually legitimating narratives, and is accompanied by the production of new meta-classifications meant to create a legitimate space for these alternatives.

The meta-level is required for a redefinition of ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ (the field’s central values) that would allow the coexistence of different epistemologies alongside objectivism (constructivist, post-structuralist, critical realist, pragmatist) and simultaneously legitimate the introduction of new, qualitative methodologies that can better account for the ‘complexity’ of international politics (interpretative, historical, sociological, philosophical). IR’s object itself is characteristically redefined as encompassing ‘multiple’ realities – material and ideational, collective and individual, structural and agential, strategic and ideological, practical and normative. This, in turn, entails a redefinition of the ‘international’, either through the introduction of new objects that are of particular relevance to the dissidents’ own concerns and expertise – gender, development, culture, language, values – or through the reinterpretation of classical ones, such as war, security or diplomacy.

Typically, the narrative required to justify and legitimate anti-mainstream discourse is one of ‘crisis’ (or ‘malaise’, as in the Behavioural dissidence of David Easton): there is something fundamentally wrong with the discipline that needs to ‘urgently’ be addressed, something that undermines its very identity and vocation. ³⁷ The discipline is portrayed as fundamentally at odds with its object of study, which entails that its representations and social identity be problematised, politicised and even moralised. In contemporary IR, this is reflected in accusations of ‘political hegemony’, ‘parochialism’, ‘social irrelevance’ and ‘political collusion’, and the consequent calls for a ‘post-Western’, ‘plural’ and ‘responsible’ discipline. ³⁸

The efficacy of this narrative lies in presenting an alternative that is not merely ‘different’ from, but somehow ‘superior’ to, the dominant view, whose flaws are therefore portrayed as resulting from some sort of epistemic deception or ontological myopia. The symbolic efficacy of Critical Theory’s, Constructivism’s, Feminism’s and Postcolonial Theory’s strategies of ‘delegitimation’ rests on their ability to manipulate this meta-level to their advantage. And the culmination of this critical, superior meta-narrative is undoubtedly the promotion of ‘reflexivity’ itself, subtended by the symbolic power of a ‘know thyself’ that can strategically be targeted at the mainstream.

As IR itself cannot provide the tools of its own criticism, these are selectively borrowed from other disciplines – often from their own dissident production. The new ‘-isms’ and traditions are supported by a novel literature and a pantheon of ‘key figures’ – for example, Foucault, Bourdieu, Bhaskar, Said – that become the object of a new, exclusive expertise. The process of creating a disciplinary space for these alternatives therefore becomes mutually constitutive of the recognition of this new expertise as legitimate academic capital.

As the space of dissident scholarship develops from within the discipline’s many peripheries, its actors become increasingly interested and involved in one another’s research, giving the impression of a natural adequacy between their respective approaches and supporting literatures – typically and symbolically labelled today as ‘post-positivist’, ‘critical’ or ‘reflexive’. An example is the recent convergence of the sociology of IR, as the position-taking of pretenders within the core and its Western periphery, and postcolonial IR, as the position-taking of pretenders in non-Western peripheries. The homology between the positions of these marginals qua pretenders creates a space of intersubjective understanding that translates their aspirations into a common academic project, aimed at combining ‘critical, disciplinary self-reflection at the core and the periphery’s revolt against IRs [sic] concepts’. ³⁹

In this and other instances, dissidents are not unaware of what their academic endeavours owe to their structural positions and specific socio-intellectual concerns. What they often fail to appreciate, however, is what these endeavours owe to the relationality of their positions. Every time the status of a pretender changes in the field of forces, the remaining space of anti-mainstream criticism is restructured accordingly, leading to convergences (as mentioned above) or divergences and new ‘turns’. Yesterday’s pretenders – Critical Theory, Constructivism – have been partially assimilated intellectually and/or institutionally as legitimate contenders. As a result, new dissident strategies have formed, and new lines of attack have been drawn: Critical against Conventional Constructivism, ⁴⁰ and Postcolonial critiques of Critical Theory. ⁴¹ IR scholars’ space of possibilities in IR’s field of struggles is, then, constantly redefined according to changes in the structure of IR’s field of forces, which affect their relative position, and therefore constantly reshape their position-takings, beyond the subjective meaning these have for them.

The Meaning of International Relations (Theory) in a Non-Western Periphery: A Disjoined Sense of Practice

What is invested in these disciplinary struggles are IR scholars’ dispositions and sense of practice, which are shaped by their location and trajectory outside and inside of IR. Scholars located differently, and who come to IR through different trajectories, are differently disposed vis-a-vis its doxa, and the field itself is differently disposed vis-a-vis their dispositions and practice. ⁴² A Bourdieusian sociology of the discipline would therefore investigate the formation and nature of IR scholars’ social, intellectual and academic dispositions; how they affect their cognitive worldviews, career choices, ethical attitudes and overall academic ‘being’; and the extent to which, and ways wherein, academic structures undermine or promote the scholarly practices they inform. While IR scholars’ autobiographical/auto-ethnographic accounts make explicit the kind of existential conditions that shape academic trajectories and choices, ⁴³ these need to be understood sociologically by moving beyond their subjective meaning as lived experience, in order to understand how, and through what processes, they affect scholarship, and expand or limit scholars’ space of possibilities within the discipline.

Following Bourdieu’s analysis, a non-reflexive, subjective appraisal of practice is one that lacks an understanding of its objective conditions of possibility and operating principles, and therefore succumbs to the immediacy, or immediate ‘truth’, of lived experience. A non-objectivated practice explains itself on its own terms, according to the logic of the field within which it is constituted and performed. The practical (and reproductive) efficacy of a field’s doxa lies precisely in its ability to shape scholars’ sense of practice according to this ‘logic of logic’ that perpetuates ‘misrecognition’. This is gradually achieved through the training students undergo to become ‘IR scholars’, which requires them to acquire the field’s specific capital in the form of cognitive and technical competences – knowledge of IR’s history, debates, predominant theories and methodologies – along with the illusio or faith in its disinterested, ‘objective’ appraisal of the world.

Outside of the core, and especially in non-Western peripheries, the great diffusion of American/Western IR facilitates the peripheries’ assimilation of IR’s history, discourse and parameters, which are reproduced and spread through its textbooks and primary literature. One would assume that such an engagement with the scholarly problématiques of the core increases periphery scholars’ ability to master its language and participate in its discussions – that is, that it aligns their space of possibilities with that of their core counterparts by giving them access to IR’s specific capital. However, this assumption ignores the praxical meaning invested in IR’s past theoretical struggles. The socialisation core students undergo ‘to be in the game’ is meaningful because their perspectives and training are already shaped by the field’s past, which structures their present encounter with it: when IR’s literature and history are passed onto them, it situates their present, by reaffirming what they gained throughout its history through those debates and developments, within the history of their social setting; it therefore also justifies the extant state of IR, the value of its taxonomies and representations, and incoming students’ legitimate place and vocation within it.

But for scholars coming from, and doing IR in, a different location with a differently constituted habitus, the history of IR, its debates and its dominant theories appear awkward at best. ⁴⁴ This incongruity is most visible in those ‘core-like/core-bound’ non-Western peripheral academic institutions that uphold the standards of the core’s curriculum to keep students updated on the central discussions of the field, through the core’s textbooks, with the hope that they will assimilate the discipline. The problem, however, is that the habitus of the non-native is a non-native habitus. Faced with ‘the curriculum’, and subjected to the doxic principle that theoretical debates follow a ‘logic of logic’, a non-native invests a sense of practice that is disjoined from the meaning the history of the field has for those who have direct stakes in it and whose habitus it made. From outside this internalised history, the sense of practice invested into disciplinary debates remains invisible to an external participant, who will take them for what they claim to be – an intellectual competition for the understanding of reality. As long as the meaningfulness and validity of given theoretical positions is assessed on this logico-representational basis alone, the persistence of seemingly ‘weak’ or ‘invalid’ theories will appear unintelligible to an outsider who is so disposed that these can only be assessed qua theories.

IR scholars who have taught theory in non-Western contexts have probably experienced this disjunction, along with the pedagogical dilemmas it creates. How, for example, does one explain to students not only what Neorealism is, and where it comes from, but also its resilience to successful criticisms of its logical and cognitive-representational features? As they grapple with these issues, students are taught to manipulate IR’s meta-narratives as well. But unless they reflexively understand the objective conditions that underlie their own, and others’, sense of practice, meta-explanation only reinforces the doxic power of the ‘logic of logic’.

A quote from the Master’s thesis of a former student at the American University of Beirut (AUB) – one of these ‘core-like/core-bound’ institutions – helps illustrate the paradoxes of this peripheral (dis)position:

And hence a ‘puzzle’ worth solving. The meeting of a peripheral habitus with the field’s structure creates disjoined expectations. On the one hand, the assimilation of the core’s doxa gives periphery scholars the confidence that they have acquired the ‘competence’ to participate in the discussion. On the other, the distance that separates them from the core is deceiving, because the distanciation from the core’s ‘stakes’, without a simultaneous distanciation from the illusio the core creates, gives them the impression of possessing a superior, critical meta-viewpoint that reproduces the objectivist epistemic illusion, as if distance from the core permitted better understanding of the cognitively problematic aspects of constructs like Neorealism.

But Neorealism, like all IRT, does not solely operate on the basis of its intrinsic logic or correspondence with reality. It functions, for the members of the field, as a position-taking in a given moment of its history, connecting their habitus to the necessities of their position and the field’s past and extant stakes. For this reason, attempts to defeat Neorealism by pointing to its incoherence qua discourse or representation are not sufficient. They simply miss an important point: what is really at stake in the symbolic struggles that only those who have fought and inherited them from the inside can manipulate, because the sense of practice that underlies them continues to shape these scholars’ relation to their outcomes.

Some Facts Don’t Matter: Is Empirical Research Self-defeating?

A scholarly practice that operates according to the ‘logic of logic’ perpetuates the expectation that the value, and hence visibility, of scholarship is determined by exclusively cognitive standards of validation and ‘worth’. Non-Western scholars who adopt a utilitarian approach to theory might consider their chances of academic success greater if they invest their local capital (native knowledge, language, networks) in the production of empirical knowledge about their geopolitical region. Those who, on the other hand, think IRT ill-suited to understand and explain what goes on in their part of the world might also decide to mobilise this local capital to produce an empirical knowledge that would demonstrate the disjunction between ‘Western IRT’ and international reality. In an attempt to better understand the structural conditions that (de)limit peripheral scholars’ space of possibilities in the discipline, the following considerations highlight some of the constraints that undermine the disciplinary and political value of such empirically oriented strategies.

Firstly, the theory–practice antinomy is not just an epistemic assumption of most Western social science, but a practical principle of organisation of scholarly labour. A paradoxical characteristic of all social sciences is that their autonomy with respect to the field of power does not translate uniformly within them, and IR is no exception. On the one hand, they transpose, within their own doxa, the utilitarian value society allocates to ‘science’ as empirical knowledge. On the other hand, they tend to promote, for their internal audience, their identity as a field, that is, the sum product of their specific history – that of the (victorious) struggles that created the field’s specificity within the academy. And the privileged realm wherein these struggles take place is not empirical, but theoretical, scholarship, which retains its symbolic power (prestige) over the rest of the field. This explains why IR ‘classics’ are always works in/on theory, but also the predominance of theories/paradigms despite all successful empirical demonstrations of their disjunction with reality. As Bourdieu puts it:

Secondly, because scholars are not equally positioned in the field of forces, the lower prestige of empiry does not trickle down uniformly. In other words, the empirical scholarship of peripheral scholars is likely to be viewed as a peripheral empirical scholarship. This implicit principle of the division of academic labour is visible in the social sciences’ relational position in the academic field of forces, which constitutes the realm of their disciplinary symbolic struggles. A typical illustration is the ‘Area Studies (AS) Controversy’. What seems to be at stake in this ‘debate’ is the intellectual value of AS; what is really at stake is the preservation of the turf of ‘the Disciplines’, which are challenged by the interdisciplinarity AS specialists practise. In this opposition, AS is characteristically undermined because of its empirical, micro-studies, which allegedly lack any ambition or capacity to sustain a ‘systematic’ assessment of general social patterns, and hence the advancement of knowledge itself, which is achieved, according to this view’s proponents, through large-scale theorisations and generalisations. ⁴⁷

The most indicative discursive manifestation of the hierarchy of labour between core and periphery is the term ‘(native) informant’, often used to characterise AS scholars and their position in the field of forces dominated by the disciplines. Implied in this term is a series of significant oppositions: a subordination to a client; a lower professional status between those who produce information or merely collect data, and those who creatively produce knowledge and analysis; it also implies that the ‘informant’ has no autonomous agenda, and therefore cannot contribute to the central discussions that shape the disciplines’ identity and vocation. The informant, in other words, is not in the game.

This scholarly perception is not unrelated to the history of AS, often used by political agents as precisely that – a dispositif of native informants on the societies of the periphery. The history of IR, combined with the academy’s structural connection to the field of power, therefore shapes the core’s dispositions vis-a-vis empirical research produced in/by the periphery. ⁴⁸ In a non-Bourdieusian, postcolonial parlance, these perceptions support and reproduce the foundations of the ‘colonial house of IR’:

An additional point, which can only be briefly spelled out here, is that empirical scholarship is a politically problematic strategy. The ‘knowledge–power nexus’ refers to how knowledge-production facilitates and shapes power structures, but also to how power structures govern the production of knowledge and its uses. Societies located at the higher end of this nexus enjoy a virtuous circle of increased knowledge and power; those at its lower end, a vicious circle the periphery knows all too well. This begs the (political) question of what and whose interests periphery scholars serve when they produce – or, more specifically, publish – knowledge about the periphery that it cannot benefit from, because it lacks the objective structures necessary to turn that knowledge into power (at least a power over its own destiny). And if those who can benefit from it are already so developed and positioned as to efficiently transform that knowledge into power – relationally, a power over the periphery necessarily – then it is worth asking what political meaning such a research agenda practically has for periphery scholars, and whether/how it can be successfully pursued despite the structural and symbolic constraints imposed by the current global order.

Dispositions as Subversive Capital: IRT-as-Peripheral-Agency

Of all IR sub-fields, IR theory is the one that best manifests the marginal disciplinary position of non-Western periphery scholars. After a criticism of ‘American IR Theory’, postcolonial scholars now target the ‘Western’ foundations of all theorising done in the discipline, even the kind previously perceived as the most ‘critical’ or least ‘parochial’ within the core. ⁵⁰ IRT is now viewed as ‘almost exclusively Western’, ⁵¹ and the whole of ‘IR as we know it’ as ‘an effect of a specific [Western] mode of worlding’. ⁵²

IR’s ‘Westernness’ is amplified by non-Western periphery scholars’ disengagement from theory. Firstly, to borrow a Weberian formula, the core successfully claims its monopoly over the legitimate production and use of IRT. In the periphery, Western ‘hegemony’ is internalised by scholars and political elites, who ‘reproduce it by favoring core knowledge as more authoritative and scientific in comparison to local variants’. ⁵³ This preference itself results from the long-lasting effect of Western imperialism, namely, the destruction of the periphery’s relation to, and confidence in, its own cognitive traditions. ⁵⁴ Secondly, scholars point to the unattractiveness of theory in a ‘Third-World’ existential setting – problems facing the periphery are too ‘urgent’ to allow scholarship the ‘luxury’ of engaging in abstraction – and to the cultural and institutional barriers that undermine the attempts of those who might try, such as the investment in learning the language and style of the core’s scholarship and getting past its ‘gatekeepers’. ⁵⁵ To this, one should add the dilemmas imposed on periphery scholars by their own academic setting. ⁵⁶

However, many scholars consider that the periphery has a strategic interest in engaging IRT. ⁵⁷ This final section aims to show that IRT might in fact be a very reasonable strategy for non-Western periphery scholars, by offering a Bourdieusian argument that rests on the potentially subversive power of a peripheral, non-native habitus, if this habitus is understood reflexively and praxeologically.

This relationship between reflexivity and subversion appears in Bourdieu’s own work. As an ‘objectivation of the objectivating subject’, and of ‘objectivity’ as a viewpoint on the social world, reflexivity entails unmasking the ‘unthought categories of thought that delimit the thinkable and predetermine what is thought [le pensé]’. ⁵⁸ And this seems intimately related to Bourdieu’s view on socially subversive action:

One merely needs to apply this definition of ‘subversive action’ to scholarship in order to fall back on Bourdieu’s definition of ‘reflexivity’.

But to address reflexivity itself from a praxeological, reflexive perspective, is to consider it as a practice that results from the meeting of a given habitus with given objective structures. Reflexivity/subversion, then, can be objectivated as a position-taking that mobilises the dispositions of agents who are so placed in a given field of forces that reflexivity appears, in purely intellectual terms, as a natural, critical and superior viewpoint on the social world and on scholarship itself. This position is none other than that of the marginal pretender, whose perceptions of the ‘given order’ are shaped by the disjunctions between his/her (dis)position and the (dis)positions shaped and favoured by it.

The valuable aspect of this praxeological understanding is that it highlights what the periphery scholar’s potentially subversive habitus owes to the fact that it is precisely a peripheral, non-native one. From this perspective, the position from which marginals look at the world and at IR(T) is a potentially privileged position for the transformation of the game, just as that of core scholars is a privileged one for its reproduction. The privilege lies in the very disjunction affecting their (dis)positions, which makes them less prone to succumbing to IR’s doxa, and therefore more likely to be informed by, and promote, alternative ‘modes of worlding’. More than Western dissidents, who share the core’s epistemico-cultural assumptions and position within the international field of power, peripheral scholars are out of place in IR precisely because they are in another place. As long as the core’s epistemic, ontological and deontological assumptions remain IR’s standard doxa, this place is a nowhere that is not registered as equal or legitimate. But this nowhere has to be preserved, because it is from these peculiar positions that doxas are challenged, that is, properly subverted. ⁶⁰

This potentiality is implicitly referred to by scholars who promote a more inclusive IRT, stressing on what their different perspectives can bring to IR. What they can bring is a very different epistemic and praxical perspective they have not chosen, which cannot be willingly espoused by those who are differently (dis)positioned, and which defeats itself when it attempts to be recognised as such. One does not have to justify why one sees the world the way one does in order to make one’s view efficient. The core’s efficacy operates, on the contrary, through a collective misrecognition of its praxically particularism. One needs merely to draw on peripheral dispositions, and simply ‘do’ IRT.

However, the privileged position of peripheral scholars is a potentiality only. Firstly, the transformation of the rules of a game does not simply depend on the expression of new dispositions. Neither dissident/peripheral, nor mainstream/core scholars can, by their intellectual production alone, transform/preserve the structure of IR. Structural change is never the result of change(s) in one area of a social field, but the outcome of various, convergent changes occurring in different areas inside and outside of it. The point, then, is not if well-(dis)positioned, marginal scholars can effect change, but that their potential contribution to change is optimal in some circumstances and minimal/null in others. Their habitus will function differently, and therefore produce different outcomes, in different objective configurations of the field. The point is to preserve this potentiality and develop it until it becomes structurally efficient.

Consequently, the peripheral habitus has a greater potentiality of change inscribed in it if it is preserved as a differentiated habitus. This entails that periphery scholars should resist their assimilation into the core/mainstream of the discipline as is sometimes suggested by sociology-of-IR studies. On the contrary, and without the need to celebrate it as such, the peripheries’ subversive potential lies in their attachment to their own cultures, to what history has inscribed in their dispositions, and hence to their difference with ‘Western IRT’. It is therefore, indeed, in periphery scholars’ interest to engage IRT and understand its Western foundations, not to better assimilate themselves in it – another cynical, but self-defeating strategy – but rather to prevent such assimilation from depriving them of their structurally subversive potential. As the past and current states of the discipline(s) show, the periphery loses at least as much on the ground of theory as it does on those of empiry and real politics. It is therefore perhaps time to think of ‘the battle for IR theory’ as at least an equally ‘urgent’ one to join, for ignoring it is perhaps the ‘luxury’ that peripheral scholars cannot afford.

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In lieu of a conclusion, this article will end, as it should have started, with an apology to Pierre Bourdieu, for having pushed this reflexive endeavour beyond its ‘clinical’ limits. Bourdieu was keen on developing reflexivity as an epistemological instrument of self-understanding aimed at cognitive awareness and social emancipation. ‘Cynical’ uses, on the other hand, are dangerous insofar as they turn knowledge into an instrument of social manipulation. While I have used the term in order to make transparent its Bourdieusian origin, and its socio-analytical relation to ‘clinical’ self-inquiry, my purpose was neither manipulation, nor mere intellectual gymnastics. The ‘cynical’ – but not cynical – analysis proposed here should rather be construed – and hopefully understood – as a complementary, different exercise in self-understanding: an attempt to ‘own’ the space of our possibilities in the discipline, and conceptualise the means to best pursue our intellectual and moral commitments within the structural constraints IR imposes on us. Neither we, nor the students we advise, have ever found such knowledge in IR textbooks. And yet this is precisely the one we need to acquire in order to emancipate ourselves from the discipline’s own political order.