Interdisciplinarity and the Emerged Shift in the Study of International Relations

Introduction

Traditionally, international problems were associated with nation-states, regarded as the building blocks of the International Relations (IR) universe. Since the end of the Cold War and the related security shift, problems have multiplied, incorporating local, regional and global issues, such as global warming, arms races, unemployment and accelerating population growth. These problems are complex, and to understand and explain them so that adequate, concrete solutions can be envisaged, the relationships between them must be discovered. Given that they exist on various levels and are highly complex, several disciplines must be systematically combined to study them. On that basis, Aalto et al.’s books (2011 and 2012), among other current studies, bring to light a better understanding both of the problems themselves and of the need for an interdisciplinary approach. In the 1930s, IR scholars were making good use of interdisciplinarity, and today’s scholars would do well to learn from their works. ¹ Aalto et al. deal with both theoretical and conceptual interdisciplinarity, defining it in the following way:

[interdisciplinarity] concerns exchanging theories, models and concepts from various disciplines in order to study international issues; examination of various synthesizing schools, or theoretical aggregates such as realism, Marxism or the English School from an interdisciplinary approach, and disaggregation and rebuilding of key concepts in international studies. ²

I start by discussing the shifts in the study of international relations over the last century, before proposing new interdisciplinary directions for IR scholars that are wider and more inclusive of other disciplines than those proposed by Aalto et al. I next consider the application of multidisciplinarity, neodisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity ³ as a tool to examine complex issues ranging from energy security and feminist and gender parodies to political linguistics. The last part of the article offers some comments and criticisms as well as some concluding remarks.

Changes within International Relations: The Necessity for Interdisciplinary Studies

To understand the desirability of incorporating IR into the wider approach of International Studies (IS), it is necessary to gain a good understanding of disciplinarity. The literature, written from several different perspectives, shows that scholars acknowledge three separate eras of IR scholarship. ⁴ The discipline was born when a chair of International Politics was founded in 1919 at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, but it was very unlike IR as we know it today, ⁵ although there were several joint interdisciplinary interests, some of which used the term IR. Interdisciplinarity was most visible in overt institutions – educational institutions and a variety of research centres. Some offered thousands of interdisciplinary courses, while others maintained a single interdisciplinary organisation. Yet, there is a wealth of writings that are sceptical of the Aberystwyth-centred argument. For example, Casper Sylvest suggests scrutinising the identity and history of the discipline of IR by revisiting its tradition. The border between disciplines and conventional narratives is challenged in the process of the intra-disciplinary move to history, law and political theories. ⁶ Brian Schmidt explains the problems of the Aberystwyth-centred argument even more precisely than Sylvest does. Schmidt argues that although the birth of the field of IR is associated with the first chair of IR Studies in the Department of International Politics at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1919, the history of IR is complicated and somewhat obscure.

He states that the historical identity of IR is still a matter of considerable confusion and that there are three main reasons why the history of IR has not adequately developed over time. Firstly, numerous theoretical insights, which could have added critiques to IR, have been erased. Secondly, studying the field of IR offers a fruitful basis for critical reflections on the present situation of the field but, because of the ambiguity concerning the proper identity of the field with respect to its origin, institutionalised home and geographical boundaries, the discipline does not address those factors and is therefore counter productive. Thirdly, an adequate understanding of the history of the field, which would have helped explain the character of many present assumptions in IR, is lacking.

IR’s prehistory, as Schmidt calls it, was the period during which IR changed gradually from discourse to discipline, crystallising as an academic practice. This period of the early 20th century allows us to identify many of the themes and issues involved. New disciplines were synthesised from root disciplines and this process hampered the rapid formation of a unified, coherent discipline of IR. ⁷ The question therefore arises as to whether the process is complete – if IR can be regarded as a distinct discipline in its own right, as suggested by the Aberystwyth-centred argument.

Prior to the 1940s, Stanford University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Studies incorporated a variety of areas but did not run them through a central office, and, besides, IR was not the centre of attention. The University of Southern California maintained interdisciplinary studies in nine areas. Since then, dozens of centres and institutions have considered interdisciplinarity as fundamental to both teaching and scholarship. ⁸ Looking at the interdisciplinary nature of IR, Quincy Wright’s The Study of International Relations contributed to interdisciplinarity and IR. His first classification divides the subject into four approaches: history, arts, philosophy and science. ⁹ To maintain coherence in disciplinary approaches, Wright synthesised the contribution of different disciplines in IR. ¹⁰ During this first phase, which inspired the true appearance of IR studies, IR was not an autonomous entity but was invisible, studied within disciplinary studies.

The second era started in the 1950s, when IR became visible as a sub-discipline of political science, gaining its autonomy at a high price. Only limited efforts were made to carve out a new territory for IR, separate from other disciplines. The late 1940s saw a new, vast pattern of distant commitments and a very new world order; instinctual and institutional developments led scholars to rely on political science to gain knowledge of the world in the wake of military victory, focusing on security and strategic studies. IR became an American discipline concentrated on nation-states and power. ¹¹

Nevertheless, change came again in the 1980s, when many scholars, dissatisfied with IR studies’ isolation, caused by the focus on states, considered the addition of new and different disciplines. Kalevi Holsti’s The Dividing Discipline examined the state of IR studies at the time, pointing out the difficulties of generating a coherent research agenda as IR fragmented and new problems arose, such as climate change, ethnic conflicts and a decrease in the number of wars between states alongside a dramatic increase in the number of wars within states. The position is easier to understand if we recall that many new issues arose in the 1980s that affected the relations between states and the relations between societies. It was natural that the political and social climate of the day would lead IR to turn to sociology and anthropology among other disciplines, and that a single IR theory would be seen to be incapable of depicting the entire set of complex, interdependent issues. ¹²

Changes in IR studies over time are, of course, inevitable, but this particular shift was sharpened by the complex nature of the threats arising since the beginning of the post-Cold War era, which can be more easily examined using interdisciplinary studies, as the analyses below demonstrate.

Interdisciplinarity and International Relations

The book International Studies covers a wider field than pure IR studies do, so we have an opportunity to use interdisciplinarity to aid research on contemporary theoretical debates in IR. By adopting the interdisciplinary concept of IS, we can develop IR’s understanding of global phenomena by choosing a suitable set of disciplines on which to base IR research, general debates and the level of analysis. Although the theoretical and methodological approaches of most of the analyses in the book deal with non-human subjects, Aalto argues in his chapter that the connections between IR and human subjects – human nature, actors and decisions – are discoverable through interdisciplinary cooperation ¹³ . A path to humanity can be traced from realism through liberalism to the English School Theory and reflectivism. In contrast to other suggested theories, the English School Theory reflects an evident open-ended character and, within the triad of the international system, international society and world society, the human subject appears among transnational actors. ¹⁴ The application of English School Theory is reviewed in the 2012 volume as well in the case of energy security, which will be discussed in the next section.

IR researches on war have focused on the causes of war, distribution of power, leaders’ misperceptions and domestic political regimes. Petr Drulák uses disciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to examine war, treating it as an abstract concept to be understood in terms of metaphors such as physical combat, games or storms. As a particular understanding of war is embedded in specific metaphors, ¹⁵ Drulák benefits from metaphors to arrive at a transdisciplinary way to look at war. Drulák looks at metaphors used within IR, history and other disciplines such as political science, sociology, political economy, psychology and anthropology. In this analysis, focusing on psychology, Drulák addresses war through causes and consequences at the level of the generalised individual, not necessarily an individual leader. Psychological studies show that although natural aggression is counterbalanced by a human reluctance to kill other humans, ¹⁶ reasonable thought ceases in combat situations as the midbrain, no different from animals, becomes active. The psychological effects of war are therefore valuable study material because the psychology of war is a promising area for research. Drulák concludes that the identification of conceptual metaphors makes it possible to overcome disciplinarity by allowing various interpretations. Note that a transdisciplinary approach to war is different from a transdisciplinary approach to political psychology, as that is discipline-centric and does not attempt to merge different parts of several disciplines into a new one. ¹⁷

Many authors have examined different cases of interdisciplinarity, but Iver B. Neumann goes further than most, discussing an anthropological voice in addition to the international one. The core of his idea is to insert social theories, which are at the heart of interdisciplinary work, into IR. When taking this approach, it is crucial to acknowledge social theories rather than a social theory. Neumann exemplifies the work of Patrick Jackson ¹⁸ by celebrating the plurality of ways of studying social theory and extends it by saying that political anthropology helps keep the classical study of politics alive. The focus of classical politics, and of IR scientists, is the concentration between power and order, and recently both have focused on the existence of certain institutions or the need to create them. In Neumann’s terms, anthropologists define politics as a question of who we are, while political scientists define politics as who gets what, when and how. He reminds us that interdisciplinarity between political science and IR with anthropology is still rare, and suggests a stronger focus on disciplinarity within social theorising.

All these contributors emphasise that interdisciplinarity in IR will help to re-establish the links between IR and other fields. This claim is apparent in the Global and Regional Problems volume too, which will be discussed below. The contributors in International Studies have focused on foreign, global and transnational facets, interdisciplinary theories, and methods, but their analyses of inter-human and social aspects (apart from Aalto’s) tend towards the abstract rather than the practical. Taking one example, the traditional IR focus on inter-state politics, such as the power concept, means that there is a need for expert interpretation in terms of the linkage of IR with other disciplines, particularly in the interdisciplinary taxonomies of power that have hitherto been locked in the realms of IR.

Global and Regional Interactions and the Complex Problems

If the International Studies volume provides the groundwork for theoretical and methodological interdisciplinary studies and a basic abstract knowledge of interdisciplinarity, the Global and Regional Problems volume can be considered as an empirical practice of interdisciplinary studies. It is dedicated to demonstrating the social world and its related problems in regional and global contexts, all of which are too complex for any single IR theory to capture comprehensively. Therefore in the introduction, the editors propose an interdisciplinary agenda by starting from the wide tradition of IS. Benefiting from the work of David Long, ¹⁹ the editors use the taxonomies of multi-, trans- and neo disciplinarity to rearrange the scope of interdisciplinarity, seeking to depict regional and global problems. They agree that the adopted taxonomy is one of many possible ways to advance research, but have some reservations. Multidisciplinarity involves ‘the simple act of juxtaposing parts of several conventional disciplines in an effort to get a broader understanding of some common theme or problem’. ²⁰ In other words, we have multidisciplinarity if the subject matter is what holds the enterprise together. ²¹ Transdisciplinarity, however, draws upon ‘articulated conceptual frameworks which seek to transcend the more limited world-views of the specialized conventional disciplines’. ²² With a slight difference, neodisciplinarity represents radicalisation and institutional consolidation of some transdisciplinary strategies. ²³ Simply put, the book attempts to sketch out a way in which several types of interdisciplinarity could be developed within analytic capacities.

What are the regional and global problems? The contributors put no limitations on regional and global problems; for example, energy security, as discussed by Aalto and a colleague, is observed as a regional problem in the context of the EU–Russia and the Caspian Sea region. By adopting the English School Theory, the multidisciplinary approach effectively melds the three literatures of economics, the environment and geopolitics to analyse energy security problems. Strong as that analysis is, the examination is at most confined to states and transnational actors. The concept of the energy security society is defined in this way:

the interaction between multiple sectors and levels (international, regional and national) by a group of states and transnational actors and broader public has resulted in the establishment of common institutions for the conduct of their natural energy relations with a firm interest of maintaining these arrangements. ²⁴

This definition implies the need to believe that society consists of individuals, and that there is good reason to expect individuals, as well as nations, to affect energy security in both regional and global contexts.

Recalling the English School structural revision, world society includes individuals, nations and non-state organisations in a broad sense, all co existing with international society, but that concept has received relatively little attention and has undergone almost no conceptual development; ²⁵ it is obscure even in Aalto’s energy security society model. One could perhaps even claim that this inadequacy affects other parts of the work in the volume, where, in the post-Cold War era, problems are not confined only to regional and global contexts, but also exist, and to the same degree, at the local level. If, in the introduction, the editors remind us that problems are confined to global and regional contexts, ambiguity arises in the concept of the energy security society, as we cannot tell if the national level is included or omitted in the analysis. The top-half-down focus in Global and Regional Problems brings to mind the same point in International Studies, by arguing that social discipline and social problems at the local level have been taken only slightly into account.

Aalto’s other scholarly works do not refer to multidisciplinarity per se, but we observe an embedded trend towards a multidisciplinary approach. One example is Aalto’s volume on The EU–Russia Energy Dialogue: Europe’s Future Energy Security; it contributes to IR, political science, international political economy and political sociology literatures. One instance of multidisciplinarity in the book is Aalto’s consultation of economic and political literatures to illuminate his discussion of the wider ramifications of the EU–Russia energy dialogue and the future of European integration. ²⁶ The most important principle of his analysis includes the beginning of European integration with the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), as it was in the interest of its six members to cooperate economically in the aftermath of the Second World War. European economic cooperation was a collective response to settle problems and recover lost economic power. ²⁷

At the economic cooperation level, the predecessors of the EU’s economic integration were forged through intergovernmental conferences and started to spill over into new policy sectors through technical and incremental processes. ²⁸ This core claim of functionalism leads us to politico-normative literature. At this point, Aalto turns his discussion from economic to political literature by offering evidence that the treaties of European integration are important for peace and reminding us that the ECSC (1952/1 Paris Treaty) was a peace settlement that resolved economic problems while its purpose was political. ²⁹ Aalto points out that, despite the dominance of the economic approach, the functionalist logic suggests that the wider political cooperation certainly increased economic energy cooperation.

A second example of Aalto’s multidisciplinary approach is his European Union and the Making of a Wider Northern Europe, ³⁰ which refers to international relations and psychology in terms of human subjectivity. He analyses ‘the subjective roots of geopolitical discourses’ ³¹ of the EU and the addition of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Northern Europe to the Union. Aalto acknowledges that, for example, Estonia’s viewpoint vis-à-vis the Union evolved from statements made in the 1990s; the EU’s role was to guard democracy, free speech and the rule of law. Estonia’s joining the EU helped it to acquire an idea of the desirability of the EU gaining subjectivity in the north. Aalto also notes that the Estonian view might help the EU to strengthen the Union’s subjective relations with the strategic partner Russia. ³² On the other hand, the EU’s subjective relations with Latvia offer the Union a transit prospect for EU–Russian energy and trade, although, crucially, Latvia–Russia relations have been problematic. Even so, Aalto points out that Latvia is making an integrative input to the enlargement of the EU by deepening its geo strategic goals. ³³

A further contribution in Global and Regional Problems is made by Pekka Korhonen, who builds on political linguistics to examine transdisciplinarity, a radical form of interdisciplinarity. In doing so, he refers to the conceptual history of Asia. In the first part of the discussion, Korhonen’s view is that when the term international came to be used in the phrase international politics, it denoted the interaction of nation-states through their high representatives. For Korhonen, world politics does not refer to the area of human interaction in terms of size, but in terms of the various types of actors that interact in state and non-state organisations. Observing the totality from the point of view of the linguistic action, world politics can be seen as a field of human argumentation, linguistic interactions that create world politics. ³⁴ The actors themselves, of course, may be big or small in terms of the effect and power they bring to bear.

Korhonen proposes the taxonomy of concept, commonplace, name and term as tools to impose sufficient order on a situation. To take one example, commonplace refers to a well-known concept, phrase or slogan that can be used to study the rhetoric of the situation in reference to the conceptual aspect of the object rather than narratives. In this spirit, Korhonen tries to sharpen our awareness that ‘Asia’ as a commonplace is used globally, but its meaning is specific to the geographical area where it is used in public rhetoric. ³⁵ Whereas a European or American would envisage an entire continent, a Singaporean might see ‘Asia’ as synonymous with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); that is enough for her to formulate her feeling of the world, but her usage is not a universal definition of ‘Asia’. Korhonen interconnects his discussion to relevant transdisciplinarity international studies in terms of theoretically informed social and political criticism to which the analysis of names, concepts and commonplaces leads. He concludes that ‘a theoretically well-informed politological linguist, who understands symbols, historical meanings, and the emotions connected to them, is certainly able to formulate visionary and normative policy objectives’. ³⁶

Saara Särmä suggests a neodisciplinary approach by connecting gender studies to international studies as a means of examining Iran’s nuclear objectives. Her discussion of Iranian nuclear energy reflects bilateral analyses in terms of either a threat or a peaceful programme, but the basic claim in the chapter – that Iran’s aspiration to nuclear capability is more of a global than a regional issue when considered from the perspective of the spread of nuclear weapons – is not surprising, as horizontal proliferation of nuclear weapons threatens the stability of global politics. The first part of Särmä’s discussion relates to feminist interdisciplinarity in the field of international studies. She states that feminist interdisciplinarity in IR draws its theories and methodologies from multiple sources within and beyond traditional disciplines, while remaining closely connected to them. ³⁷ Feminist research and knowledge production could be institutionalised in neodisciplinarity by exploring more conventional IR issues and questions in the international, security, war, conflict and militarisation fields. In other words, IR feminism aims to further our understanding of both international relations and gender by examining various questions related to these categories. The feminist approach, therefore, cannot be limited to a single traditional discipline. ³⁸ In the second part, Särmä applies the IR feminist approach to the case of a report of 8 July 2008 alleging that Iran had tested nine missiles – an image of four of them was released to the global media. She states that ‘one of the missiles in the image had failed to take off but was photoshopped’ and that numerous parody images emerged in the ‘blogosphere’ soon afterwards. ³⁹ Despite that, Särmä’s main thesis is that Iran was attempting to show its might and military muscle. Muscle-flexing is coded as masculine by feminist critics of gendered security discourses. Those four missiles also, in Särmä’s terms, reveal Iran’s desire for its manliness and potency to be taken seriously in the global arena. By the application of the sexualised image, she attempts to explain gender and sexuality in relation to nuclear weapons. In this sense, she states that, metaphorically, nuclear weapons are associated with male sexuality. ⁴⁰ For Särmä, weapons technology is not just material, but a cultural and symbolic tool used by countries to find a power position in the global hierarchy, underpinned by gender.

Särmä uses a combination of gender and international studies in an attempt to argue that reliance on nuclear weapons is seen as a significant part of militarism, a culture of readiness and enthusiasm for war. ⁴¹ In contrast to this viewpoint, evidence from other sources ⁴² exists to support Iran’s right to pursue a peaceful nuclear energy programme and make it fit for the new millennium. ⁴³

Perhaps the book’s most substantial argument appears in the concluding remark, calling for a future in which scholars move away from grand theories centred in one discipline as they obstruct knowledge. Nevertheless, one of the editors’ findings is that people would like to see interdisciplinary study employed to achieve better solutions to policy problems. ⁴⁴ The contributors demonstrate the problems well enough but do not offer plausible, proportionate suggestions for particular policy solutions to the proposed regional and global problems.

Conclusion

Both of these works on interdisciplinary studies reflect the effects of the 1980s, shift in IR studies, and discuss the requirement for scholars not to confine their studies to major theories and trends in IR, because problems arise from different spheres – global, regional and even national and local contexts. The central themes of interdisciplinarity in IR and openness to diverse disciplines imply diverse solutions to complex problems that may be able to provide an adequate arena in which to grasp the multifaceted nature of regional and global problems. The position of IR, in the interdisciplinary approach within IS, connects directly with the ‘disciplinary heritage of IR’ and that position stands at the core of both works.

All the contributors are committed to interdisciplinarity and identify opportunities to widen IR. They also take a concrete stance to direct their choice of cases that represent the analyses in the best possible way. Nevertheless, is mere multi-, trans- and neo-disciplinarity enough to explore global and regional problems thoroughly? Without a doubt, other forms of interdisciplinarity could be extended and used to reinterpret the widespread, complex problems identified. In this sense, the books concentrate on general problems at the regional and global level, and there is a need for more capacity to analyse social contexts and for more belief in the efficacy of such analysis. Overall, these two innovative volumes, with their strong message that international relations research demands interdisciplinarity, will remind the field’s opinion-formers of the importance of the third period of IR studies. Both books will interest IR scholars and students and all who work on interdisciplinary studies of international, global and regional issues.