Discipline admonished: On International Relations fragmentation and the disciplinary politics of stocktaking

Debating the great debates

It has become customary to begin a discussion of the nature and present state of the discipline of international relations with a number of complaints. (Hoffmann, 1959: 346)

Recent years have seen a wave of self-reflection on the state of the International Relations (IR) discipline. These stocktakings are typically conducted by senior scholars, many of whom compare today’s state of affairs to the past. The narrative surprisingly often follows the formula that IR used to revolve around all-encompassing great debates, which, either neatly or claustrophobically depending on the stocktaker, organized the discipline. Regardless of whether one liked the great debates ‘era’ or not, IR is seen as a more fragmented discipline today. There has been a proliferation of theories. Scholars are now isolated on their respective islands of theory. There is little dialogue and mutual engagement. Although most observers see a fragmented discipline at the end of the great debates era, some are celebrating and others are mourning.

The former see IR as unproductively divided and fragmented, not into a clear hierarchy of subfields with one overarching theoretical framework, but into unfruitful debacles between dogmatic ‘isms’ that do not accumulate progressively. The ‘great debates’ were acrimonious trench wars that resulted in a proliferation of isolated sects speaking different tongues: ‘the current cacophony is not what we should aspire to’ (Lake, 2011: 478). Theoretical unity is perhaps out of the question, but IR should strive for a unified, eclectic framework: a Rosetta stone through which ‘real world’ problems can be analysed. The ‘end of the great debates’ between grand theories and the ‘Rise of Eclecticism’, ‘mid-level theory’, ‘causal mechanisms’ and ‘normal science’ is celebrated (Bennett, 2013; Lake, 2011, 2013; Sil and Katzenstein, 2011).

The latter also see a discipline fragmented into subfields, islands and camps with a minimum of engagement. Here, however, fragmentation is caused by the absence, not presence, of great debates. The great debates were socially integrative mechanisms that brought scholars together around discipline-wide conversations with relatively clear positions. The debates gave IR its social structure and a way of telling its history. Yet, the discipline never found a new debate after the last one — the so-called ‘third’ or ‘fourth’ great debate, depending on who counts, also called the rationalist–reflectivist or positivist–post-positivist debate. As a consequence of the end of debates, IR is now disintegrating: today’s ‘loosening grip of great debates [does] not mean more agreement, but less — we do not even agree on what to discuss any more’ (Wæver, 2013: 306). Some argue that fragmentation into specialized ‘camps’ after the last great debate signals the end of IR (debate) as we know it (Sylvester, 2007, 2013), while others advocate a return to grand theoretical debates as the only way of organizing the discipline (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2013; Nau, 2011).

The debate on debates, and the state of IR more broadly, recently received extensive treatment in a special issue of European Journal of International Relations (EJIR) asking whether we are now experiencing ‘The end of International Relations theory?’ Rather than asking whether theoretical work per se was ending, as the title seemed to indicate, most contributions focused on the end of the great debates among the grand theoretical isms. The debate on debates — in and beyond EJIR — exhibits considerable disagreement over whether the great debates were (un)productive, (un)necessary and (dis)integrating for the discipline. Both sides nonetheless agree that IR was once characterized by all-encompassing great debates among a few grand theoretical positions and that those great theoretical debates are now a relic of the past. Therefore, there is a widespread sense that the current level of fragmentation is novel. No matter whether scholars nostalgically lament or optimistically celebrate the state of IR after the great debates, the predominant view is that today, more than ever, IR is a fragmented and cacophonic field divided into insular ‘camps’ or ‘sects’ that rarely engage each other. Since the great debates define the history and identity of the discipline, it follows that we must be entering a qualitatively different, post-paradigmatic and post-debatist stage of disciplinary history. If not the ‘end of IR’, then at least the ‘end of IR as we know it’.

State-of-the-art exercises are usually conducted by senior scholars with decades of experience — often full professors and successful theorists. This led some younger scholars to ask how scholars in the start of their career would approach questions about the ‘end of IR’ (Berenskoetter, 2012; see also Jackson and Nexon, 2012: 8). Indeed, it can be somewhat confusing, disappointing and even provocative for theoretically inclined scholars in the beginning of a career, or even outside the mainstream Western discipline, to see a collective of accomplished scholars discuss, and sometimes declare, the end of great theoretical debates, leaving nothing but the debris of their epic battles to coming generations. This article will argue that it is not seniority, but the stocktaking genre per se, that is conducive to seeing fragmentation and cacophony in their own time while viewing the past as more simple, coherent and ordered. When today’s stocktakers identify fragmentation as a novelty, they neglect that the narrative about the fragmentation of IR has a prominent historical record and that academic disciplines look more chaotic to stocktakers in their own time than they do to posterity. Those who long for the neatly integrated great debates era forget that IR looked much less integrated at the time of great debates, and those who cannot wait to move beyond the trench war era overstate the impact that these debates ever had.

The art of stocktaking

Given that most scholars proclaim novelty concerning the state of fragmentation in IR today, there is room for historical and empirical engagement with this narrative. This article reviews earlier stocktakings to argue that the ‘endist’ narrative about a fragmented and cacophonic discipline has a long history. It is the prevalent narrative mode of stocktaking throughout the history of the discipline and part of its very identity. By rereading stocktaking exercises from the 1940s to today, the article demonstrates that scholars of the past also saw a chaotic and fragmented discipline. In fact, it is difficult to find stocktakings that do not contain some version of the fragmentation narrative. Even back in the era remembered for simple and ordered great debates, the 1940s to 1990s, stocktakers saw their own academic environment as fragmented, cacophonic and hard to make much coherent sense of.

Neat summaries of the academic scene in one’s own time are rare. Few stocktakers ever had a sense that one conversation or debate was driving the discipline, not during the first, second, third or fourth debates. Even when they did identify a debate, there was rarely consensus about what the main trench and its warriors were, or about the name and number of great debates. The great debates were never all-encompassing or uncontroversial; quite the contrary, the discipline looked a lot more chaotic to stocktakers in their own time. When the First Great Debate supposedly organized the discipline, IR was seen as a confusing ‘hodgepodge’ of imports from bordering disciplines and the proliferation of theories soon made the bewilderment complete. Stocktakers saw a discipline in fragmentation and decline — even before it had started — and longed for coherence, direction and dialogue. During the so-called Second Great Debate, scholars continued to see confusion, although they disagreed as to whether it was a product of debate or behaviouralist hegemony. During the Third and Fourth Great Debates, the picture was also much more blurry than remembered and scholars disagreed on whether and how there was a great debate.

Few state-of-the-art articles and books aimed at a peer audience ever argued that IR, at the time of writing, was actually quite simple, organized and ordered by one great debate with a few distinct positions that most scholars identified with. One explanation is that the present looks more cacophonic before the history and textbooks are written. There is the clarity of hindsight: it is easier to identify great debates and organizing principles in retrospect. Furthermore, as revisionist scholarship on the great debates has demonstrated, textbooks simplify and idealize a much more complex past to fit into disciplinary storytelling. The neatly dichotomized or trichotomized ‘great debates’, especially the first, are post hoc idealizations produced by self-proclaimed victors and textbook writers seeking simplicity amid theoretical cacophony, not an accurate picture of the actual historical state of affairs as it existed in articles and books published at the time (see Schmidt, 2012a; see also other works of the contributors). The narrative that IR had a series of relatively simple and great theoretical debates from the 1940s until the late 1990s, which then suddenly disintegrated and even ended, relies on flawed historiography.

Neat narratives can be found in textbooks, indeed, but textbooks have a specific audience and purpose. Textbooks are written to give students a relatively simple overview of the discipline and its history. The choice of source material touches upon methodological concerns in the sociology of the discipline. One line of scholarship uses textbooks and syllabi as an indicator of the discipline (Alker and Biersteker, 1984; Hagmann and Biersteker, 2014; Holsti, 1985); another looks at journal articles based on the argument that textbooks convey knowledge primarily to students while journals provide an indicator of the discipline as communicated to peers (Aydinli and Mathews, 2000; Kristensen, 2012; Wæver, 1998). Methodologically, this article studies the question of fragmentation in IR by looking at how scholars have historically represented the state of the discipline to peers in stocktaking exercises published in journal articles, review essays, International Studies Association (ISA) presidential addresses and chapters in edited stocktaking volumes.

The ambition is not to provide a comprehensive overview of the history of IR — or even to cover all stocktaking exercises ever written — but a more modest attempt to provide a historically founded counterweight to claims that fragmentation is novel by rereading some of the most influential stocktaking essays. Diagnoses on the state of IR differ from the 1940s through the 1960s to the 1990s, of course. Lines of division and fragmentation work at different levels (disciplinarity, theories, methodologies, paradigms, epistemologies, etc.). However, there are also important continuities, such as a strikingly familiar rhetorical figure about fragmentation and the lack of genuine dialogue. To counter the claim of novelty in today’s sense of fragmentation, my reading of stocktaking as a particular genre stresses these continuities, with attention to their embeddedness in different stages of disciplinary history. The argument is not that IR as a discipline has always been the same — a fragmented discipline — but that stocktaking essays aimed at peers are particularly prone to the fragmentation narrative (the discipline is fragmented and chaotic, and there is no genuine dialogue), a golden age narrative (this was not always the case, IR used to be more simple, integrated and in dialogue) and, finally, conclusions in the prescriptive vein (please follow my advice and IR can engage in proper dialogue again).

The article proceeds chronologically corresponding to the ‘great debates’ and looks at stocktaking essays published in those periods. The final section concludes by arguing that IR’s recurrent anxieties about its fragmentation beg questions about the disciplinary politics of the fragmentation narrative, not about whether it is real this time. Stocktaking exercises are never only objective descriptions of a current state of disarray, but political moves in the discipline. Stocktakers employ the fragmentation narrative to propose remedies, often quite idiosyncratic ones serving their own position in IR.

The ‘First Great Debate’ years: Existential crisis in the ‘hodgepodge’

The obvious point of departure is the period later remembered for the first genuine disciplinary debate, namely, the foundational great debate between realist and idealists/utopianists in the 1940s and 1950s. As mentioned earlier, disciplinary historiographers later argued that there were no idealists, no all-encompassing and coherent realist–idealist debate, certainly not a great one. Less well-remembered is that this period was also marked by a deep sense of fragmentation in another debate between proponents of IR as a separate discipline (or sub-discipline to political science) and proponents of IR as an interdiscipline: ‘the precision–eclecticism debate’ (Olson, 1972: 23). Post-war IR experienced a profound existential crisis concerning its status as an independent (sub-)discipline (Schmidt, 2012b: 95). Stocktaking exercises from the early post-war period did not see their time as the era of the First Great Debate — and certainly not as one of integration around a few coherent theoretical positions. Rather, they spent most of their efforts discussing whether IR was a coherent and unified discipline at all. Waldemar Gurian (1946: 276–278) questioned whether IR was a loose interdisciplinary ‘hodgepodge’: ‘a kind of mixture, concocted from various subjects [and thus] an unsystematic putting-together’. There was a widespread sense that IR was integrated neither from having a long history as a separate discipline nor from commanding a unique methodology, as Klaus Knorr (1947: 552, 568) argued, but ‘only from its topical unity’, and even then, it had to rely on a ‘multiplicity of scattered sources’. According to W.T.R. Fox (1949: 79), it was still debated whether IR had yet arrived as a separate social science.

At the time, the sense of fragmentation concerned primarily the teaching of IR and whether it was a separate branch of higher learning or, as Frederick Dunn (1948: 142) described it, a ‘miscellany of materials and methods drawn from existing subjects’. Dunn (1949: 80) later identified a ‘gradual but persistent shift’ from ‘reform to realism’ but did not call it a great debate. Instead, he saw IR’s (inter)disciplinary character as more contested and argued that there had been ‘great difficulty in deciding how the pie should be sliced’ (Dunn, 1949: 85). Grayson Kirk (1947: 7), who identified a similar move from idealism towards realism in US IR, also stated that ‘today, after a quarter-century of activity, the study of international relations is still in a condition of considerable confusion’. It was a common critique that only ‘a modern Leonardo da Vinci’ could teach the IR ‘hodgepodge’ of economics, political science, history, geography, military strategy, law and psychology (Kirk, 1947: 31–32). Kirk (1949: 426) later summarized the ‘frustrations’ of trying to comprehend the vast multidisciplinary field of IR as starvation amid plenty. In a period where the IR scholar, compared to today, was supposedly capable of consuming and being updated on most developments in a field organized by the realist–idealist debate, contemporary stocktakers saw a ‘dismaying stream which grows greater year by year, defying him to master it’ (Kirk, 1949: 426). Georg Schwarzenberger (1951: 8) maintained that without unity and coherence, IR would continue to be ‘nothing more than an ill-assorted conglomeration of disjointed pieces of knowledge’.

Some scholars in the 1950s did see the field as organized by debate, but there was little consensus about what that debate was. Herbert Butterfield (1951) identified two approaches, ‘the scientific and the moralistic’, but did not specify who the warring parties were and his discussion primarily concerned foreign policy debates. Similarly, the ‘great debate’ that was ‘just beginning’, according to Frank Tannenbaum, concerned whether US foreign policy should abandon its pacific tradition and embrace power politics: the coordinate state versus the balance of power (Tannenbaum, 1952: 173–175; on US national interest, see also Morgenthau, 1952). Others, like Kenneth W. Thompson (1952: 443), argued that while IR was still far from an independent discipline, there were promising trends towards disciplinarity centred around ‘international politics’ with ‘political idealism and political realism [as] the major competitors for recognition as the theory of international behavior’. Another observer of mid-century IR, Piotr Wandycz (1955: 193, 202), also argued that the realist–idealist dichotomy was currently ‘fashionable’ and that a ‘great debate’ was in ‘full swing’, but also that this dichotomy obscured rather than clarified the overall picture and ignored that few thinkers were consistently realist or idealist. At the same time, however, Dwight Waldo (1956: 59) retrospectively identified a movement from idealism towards realism in the interwar period, but saw contemporary IR as marked by the growing reception of behaviouralism and a growing interest in theory, and held that ‘the eclecticism and expansionism of current international relations must be emphasized’. Although ‘methodological problems have been at the fore’, he also argued that it had been intermingled with a ‘“great debate”’ between ‘realists’ and ‘Those who stand under attack by the realists [and] are not as readily designated by a single world’ (Waldo, 1956: 60, scare quotes in original). Illustrating the point that the academic scene rarely looks neatly organized to contemporaries, Waldo (1956: 61) argued that ‘The realist–idealist debate has been highly complex, and confusing if not confused’.

To summarize, even these early years of disciplinary IR were marked by a sense of disciplinary fragmentation. Stocktakings in the 1940s and 1950s differed from later exercises in that there was no golden age nostalgia yet. There was no imagined historical unity against which to benchmark the present sense of crisis. Fragmentation was thus not disintegration, but rather a sense that the discipline had not yet integrated — and a continued hope that it might eventually integrate around one unified theory. One commonly emphasized reason for IR’s fragmented, ‘scattered’ and ‘unsystematic’ nature at this early stage was, as Martin Wight (1960: 38) famously argued, that there was a ‘paucity’ of international theory. When Stanley Hoffmann took stock of IR in the late 1950s, he argued that IR’s stocktakers were right in having mostly complaints about the state of the discipline. IR and its theory in particular were ‘in poorer shape than practically any of the other social sciences’ (Hoffmann, 1959: 346). IR, with its ‘conglomeration of partial perspectives’, was a ‘smörgåsbord’ and ‘fleamarket’ that needed a theory to serve as its core (Hoffmann, 1959: 348). In a metaphor reminiscent of today’s admonition against fragmented islands and camps, Hoffmann (1959: 348) warned that ‘Theories of international relations are like planes flying at different altitudes and in different directions’. Indeed, it was ‘the Theory of International Relations’ that came to be seen as the raison d’etre of IR as a separate discipline or field of inquiry (Wandycz, 1955: 12; see also Guilhot, 2008). When IR was subsumed as one of four sub-disciplines under political science in the late 1950s, this shelved the disciplinarity and homelessness problem to some extent (but did not solve it as IR continues to have a strong sense of independent disciplinarity) (Wæver, 2013: 310). Another factor that contributed to the disciplinarization of IR was the notion that IR was insulating from external influences and was engaging in an internal scholarly ‘second debate’ (Wæver, 1997: 12).

The ‘Second Great Debate’ years: A proliferation of jargons

The late 1950s and 1960s are remembered as years when the discipline engaged in an overarching Second Great Debate between traditionalists using historical methods and behaviouralists using scientific methods (Lijphart, 1974: 11; Wæver, 1997: 11). Indeed, as Fox and Fox (1961: 343) noted in the early 1960s, US IR had been characterized not only by the ‘so-called “Great Debate” between the realists and the idealists (although they admitted that anti-realists were hard to find), but also by the rise of scientific, behavioural and quantitative research. It is particularly the Bull–Kaplan exchange in the pages of World Politics in 1966 that started employing the ‘Second Great Debate’ terminology. The academic scene looked simple and polarized when Hedley Bull (1966: 361) stated that ‘Two approaches to the theory of international relations at present compete for our attention’. The classical approach had been there all along, especially in Britain, but was challenged by ‘new men’ with scientific aspirations who had established a methodological orthodoxy in the US (Bull, 1966: 362–363). Judging from Bull’s essay, the ‘Second Great Debate’ was actually more a British anxiety about US scientific colonialism — a description of two worlds apart — than a debate. Even this was a simplified picture, Bull (1966: 363, 375–376) admitted, his ‘shotgun attack’ on US ‘scientific’ scholars lumped together scholars that were no uniform group, but had discrepancies and hostility among themselves, and were not scientific and devoid of self-criticism to the same degree. Not only did Bull homogenize US scientism in order to make his disciplinary move, but he also admitted that ‘there are many more approaches to the theory of international relations than two, and the dichotomy that has served my present purpose obscures many other distinctions that it is important to bear in mind’ (Bull, 1966: 376).

Needless to say, Bull’s article is not remembered for its caveats. Morton Kaplan (1966: 1) responded by calling the recent decade of attacks launched by ‘traditionalists’ on scientific approaches a ‘New Great Debate’. Although he nuanced the differences among scientific approaches and called the rival approach ‘traditionalist’ rather than classical, Kaplan effectively played along with Bull’s dichotomous characterization of the discipline. On the surface, it did indeed look like IR was structured around an all-encompassing conversation with two clear positions as Bull’s provocation was gradually taken on by other scholars (Knorr and Rosenau, 1969). Yet, later scholars argued that the Bull–Kaplan exchange was ‘misnamed’ a Second Great Debate and was rather a ‘phoney war’ about methodology within the realist paradigm (Smith, 1987: 190, 201). Misnomer or not, even if this was a period of great debate between traditionalists and behaviouralists, it is worth noting that several other stocktakers continued to see a mostly fragmented discipline with a proliferation of methodologies and theories.

To Stanley Hoffmann (1960: v, 6) — a traditionalist in Kaplan’s account — the discipline looked like an ‘overcrowded shopping center’ marked by a ‘confusion’ concerning methods and purpose combined with ‘a bewildering multitude of contributions from all kinds of disciplines’. W.T.R. Fox (1968 [1966]: 100) saw much variation, even fragmentation, within US IR when he stated that:

The methods of international relations are as varied as ever. There is no single frontier on which all the best minds or advanced students are working; and I cannot therefore make any straight-line projections of the next decade’s developments in our field.

This was in the midst of the Bull–Kaplan debate, when IR was allegedly as methodologically polarized as ever. In terms of theory, Abdul Said (1968: 18) did identify a general move from traditional moral political theory towards empiricist and value-free theorizing, but also saw a discipline where ‘there are as many theories as there are theorists’ and their attacks on each other meant that ‘the academic scene is littered with the debris of repudiated theoretical schemes’. Rather than an integrated ‘Second Great Debate’ between two opposing sides, Said (1968: 24) saw a movement towards ‘methodological formalism [that] has led also to a fragmentation of the discipline of international relations’. The description bears semblance to today’s lamentation over methodological fetishism and sectarianism when he argued that ‘Communication among methodological cults does not take place because there is no common ground [and scholars] speak in jargon that is unintelligible to all except the thoroughly initiated’ (Said, 1968: 24).

Charles McClelland (1969: 5), who used the ‘wisdom or science’ dichotomy to organize IR research but did not see the two as mutually exclusive, admitted that scientific IR had produced a more fragmented rather than unified body of knowledge: ‘The accomplishment to date amounts to little “islands” of research and these little islands float in a “sea” of wisdom’. Another observer in the same stocktaking volume identified ‘current diversity and occasional acrimony’ in IR and argued that ‘international relations today resembles a poorly marked-out arena in which a multiplicity of research programs and strategies compete, coexist, overlap, or retain splendid isolation’ (Platig, 1969: 11). Bruce Russett’s (1970: 103, 93) study found the all-encompassing dual-paradigm split between behaviouralism and anti-behaviouralism ‘very much over-simplified’ and instead identified a dozen competing schools cutting across behavioural–anti-behavioural divides, ‘occasionally warring, more often co-existing, sometimes in near ignorance of each other’. While Russett saw fragmentation among multiple competing schools and envied the theoretical unity given by a Keynes or a Freud in other disciplines, he admitted that ‘maybe even that is an illusion and other social sciences are really no more coherent than our own’ (Russett, 1970: 104). Already in the early 1970s, there was a movement away from the search for a unified framework that could overcome the fragmentation in IR. Arend Lijphart’s stocktaking saw ‘much disagreement and controversy’ but argued that the Second Great Debate was at least more of a proper debate than the first realist–idealist debate. Characteristic of such stocktaking exercises, Lijphart also admitted that current disagreements went beyond the simple and dichotomous Second Great Debate and that even Bull and Kaplan, the main protagonists in the debate, were ‘deviant cases’ that did not follow the traditionalist–behaviouralist dichotomy (Lijphart, 1974: 18–19).

Scholars reflecting specifically on British classical and US behavioural approaches also saw their own time as more fragmented and in disarray than it was remembered by posterity. When John Burton asked in 1973 whether this was ‘The end of International Relations?’, his answer was, unsurprisingly, affirmative. IR had moved into an ‘adisciplinary’ phase (Burton et al., 1973: 33). Stanley Hoffmann, in his classic essay on IR as ‘An American social science’, also regretted the increasing functional differentiation and fragmentation in the discipline. Not unlike today’s lament of academic camps, Hoffmann (1977: 54) argued that ‘Unfortunately, each cluster has tended to foster its own jargon; and this kind of fragmentation has had other effects’. Aware that ‘what was supposed to be a celebration of creativity seems to have degenerated into a series of complaints’, he put forward some proposals that would put the ‘fragments into which the discipline explodes, if not together, then at least in perspective’ (Hoffmann, 1977: 59; for his proposal, see below). There was a general sense that more IR research was now being done, but ‘Nothing seems to accumulate, not even criticism’, as Kenneth Waltz (1979: 18) deplored when advancing his attempt to unify the discipline a few years later.

The ‘inter-paradigm debate’ years: From profusion to confusion

To make matters more confusing, it was not only scholars writing in this period who had difficulties figuring out which overarching debate structured the discipline from the 1960s to the 1980s. Even later scholars who would seem to have the clarity of hindsight see very different, if any, great debates in this period. In some accounts, the ‘Second Great Debate’ was supplanted by another dichotomous debate: the ‘Third Great Debate’ between positivists and post-positivists (Lapid, 1989) or rationalists and reflectivists (Keohane, 1988). However, this historiography has largely forgotten the so-called ‘inter-paradigm debate’ between realism, liberalism (pluralism/interdependence) and radicalism (Marxism/structuralism) from the late 1960s to the 1970s (Wæver, 1996: 150). An alternative historiographical account thus sees the first three great debates as battles between realism, which had dominated IR until the 1970s, and its different contenders: first idealism, then behaviouralism and now the ‘third debate’ between realism and globalism (encompassing both transnationalism and interdependence) (Maghroori, 1982; Smith, 1987: 196).

Yet, all did not accept this representation of the discipline. Kalevi Holsti (1985: 1) argued that with the breakdown of realist consensus, ‘international theory is in a state of disarray’. He disagreed with the ‘neatly dichotomized’ image of a ‘third debate’ between globalists and realists (Maghoori and Ramberg’s third debate, not Lapid’s positivist–post-positivist third debate). Holsti (1985: 5) instead argued that the ‘considerable theoretical profusion that reigns today [makes] it difficult to organize a coherent debate, much less a dialogue leading to constructive synthesis or to the emergence of a “super-paradigm”’. In The Dividing Discipline, Holsti (1985: 5–7) provides an illustrative overview of the confusion surrounding the classification of current debates in IR, partly because ‘contemporary writers in international theory do not agree on the means of classifying the contending approaches’. Elsewhere, he celebrated the ‘outpouring of literature’ but complained that ‘contemporary work takes place within a context of serious theoretical fragmentation and competing paradigms’ (Holsti, 1984: 337–338). Contemporary students, Holsti (1984: 344) argued, face ‘a bewildering array of topics and approaches to international theory’.

To other observers, the third inter-paradigm debate was trichotomous: between the realist paradigm and its paradigmatic challengers, variously called liberalism/globalism/pluralism and Marxism/structuralism/dependency. Nevertheless, even Michael Banks, to whom the notion of an inter-paradigm debate is usually attributed, did not see a clear overarching debate between three coherent schools of thought organizing IR. Rather, Banks (1985: 217–218) identified a ‘downhill trend in the intellectual coherence of the discipline’ and asked ‘How did we scholars permit our discipline to reach this fragmented condition?’ Rather than three coherent paradigms, he argued that with the growth of the field, ‘specialization has increased, to the evident benefit of distinct subfields, but the overall structure of thought in the mainstream of the discipline has become increasingly complicated’ (Banks, 1985: 217–218). To Banks (1985: 220), the solution to fragmentation was a powerful new synthesis that could overcome the dual problem of a ‘superabundance of theories’ and the ‘lack of overall coherence’. Fred Halliday (1985: 407) further summed up the mood of the mid-1980s, arguing that ‘Within the discipline of International Relations, there appears to be a pervasive sense of entropy, and even of crisis’.

As Steve Smith (1987: 196–197) later noted, Banks’s tripartite inter-paradigm debate was but one attempt to ‘simplify the confusion over the state of the discipline since the decline of Realism’s dominance’, which risked underplaying the continued dominance of realism. Scholars were struggling to make sense of the post-realist chaos in IR theory. Even though few observers advocated a return to realist hegemony, a certain nostalgia seemed to colour accounts of the unity and simplicity of IR in the past. When Mark Hoffmann (1987: 231) took stock during the ‘inter-paradigm debate’, he celebrated the new diversity but also argued that:

The problem the discipline faces is that, unlike the 1950s and 1960s when Realism reigned supreme, there is no longer any clear sense of what the discipline is about, what its core concepts are, what its methodology should be, what issues and questions it should be addressing.

The confusion of the era of the inter-paradigm debate was complete when the foreword to a stocktaking volume argued that the ‘endless, and endlessly tiresome, paradigm debates seem to be pretty well over’ (Windsor, 1989: x) while one of its chapters argued that ‘the prospects for inter-paradigm debate are improving’ (Smith, 1987: 202 (later published in the same stocktaking volume)). The confusion and sense of fragmentation could be explained by the fact that this was in-between two periods of more structured interaction: the end of the inter-paradigm debate and the beginning of the reflectivist–rationalist debate. Soon came the late 1980s and a truly great third debate between positivists and post-positivists (Lapid, 1989) that ordered the discipline, right?

The ‘Third Great Debate’ years: islands in a sea of cacophony

In the late 1980s, when the third debate was allegedly raging, James Der Derian (1987: 11) (a protagonist in it) saw a discipline that was growing up, but had ‘little agreement’ on the question of theory, himself finding it ‘difficult to judge from the amount of debris on the battlefield of international relations theory … whether the theoretical side of the discipline is emerging from adolescence or passing into obsolescence’. Other main characters in the ‘third debate’ also saw their time as more fragmented than coherent. R.B.J. Walker (1987: 68) argued that it was misleading to see IR as more or less unified: IR is a ‘web of fragmented discourses, a mosaic of analyses and commentaries’ and this plurality is what gives the discipline strength. There was a sense of crisis in the discipline, which, Ashley and Walker (1990) argued, should not be used to resolve major theoretical disputes, but to explore the possibilities that emerge from the decline of realist hegemony and the deepening sense of crisis. There is — and has always been — a minority that celebrates crisis, fragmentation, cacophony, interdisciplinarity and the lack of unified frameworks, and that questions the need to build bridges or totalizing theories. These critical interventions nonetheless attest to a persistent sense of fragmentation in IR.

However, were the late 1980s and early 1990s not a period characterized by a relatively simple (dichotomized) great debate between reflectivists/post-positivists, on the one side, and rationalists/positivists, on the other? For those who remember it this way, it is perhaps worth rereading the article that popularized the term ‘The Third Debate’ because Yosef Lapid (1989: 238) actually described the state of the discipline as ‘excessive fragmentation’, ‘theoretical proliferation’, ‘sustained theoretical effervescence’ and ‘theoretical cacophony’, and noted that ‘there is conspicuously little agreement about who is debating whom, along what lines of contention, and with what prospects of success’. The discipline was not engaged in a simple and all-encompassing ‘Third Great Debate’ between two main epistemological camps and Lapid (1989: 238) actually introduced his essay with the caveat that he was looking for ‘a coherent and consequential pattern in the current intellectual cacophony in the international relations field’ and acknowledged ‘the difficulty some have in identifying a coherent “debate” in the emerging Babel of discordant theoretical voices in the international relations field’ (Lapid, 1989: 237). Several observers saw mostly fragmentation and anarchy, he admitted, and were ‘either reluctant or unable to detect a coherent pattern in the rampant theoretical speculation. Such observers deplore the dazing pace with which new ideas are superficially introduced into international relations theory’ (Lapid, 1989: 238). Lapid (1989: 250–251), like several other stocktakers, stressed the lack of consensus and the need for more ‘talking and listening’. All this in a manner that sounds surprisingly similar to today’s debate on the fragmentation of IR.

It could be argued that the unexpected and inexplicable end of the Cold War explains some of the confusion among stocktakers in the discipline. However, as Ferguson and Mansbach (1991: 363) argued in their essay ‘Between celebration and despair’, the discipline might actually be more chaotic than its subject matter:

theories of international relations are similarly in a condition of unprecedented disarray. Like the walls that kept peoples apart, those separating schools of thought are also tumbling down, but, as a result, there may today be less anarchy in world politics than in theories about it.

Nevertheless, the third debate between positivists and post-positivists or rationalists and reflectivists was supposedly still organizing the field. Alexander Wendt (1991: 383), one of the most prominent bridge-builders between those two positions, saw the state of the field as a ‘proliferation of explicit meta theoretic and foundational discourse in a period of theoretical fragmentation’, but saw this ‘as a sign of the field’s vitality and promise rather than of its degeneration’.

By now, a golden age mentality begins to take hold on stocktakers. The state of disarray in the early 1990s seemed unprecedented compared to the neat past, where IR unfolded within one paradigm until it was challenged in a great debate and overtaken by another paradigm. To take another example, William Olson and A.J.R. Groom (1991: 286) identified two periods of ‘consensus in the development of the study of international relations’: between the world wars and after the Second World War, respectively. In this light, they saw their own time as one of fragmentation, where most researchers go about doing Kuhnian ‘normal science’ in their respective ‘islands of theory’ with little attention to the greater whole (Olson and Groom, 1991: 286). In comparison to previous stages of the discipline, they argued that ‘no such consensus can be discerned today, the scholarship of the future will … grow out of three dominant paradigms in a sea of diverse assumptions and what have come to be known as “world views”’ (Olson and Groom, 1991: 315). It is worth noting that Olson and Groom tried to simplify the sea of confusion as three main paradigms (the inter-paradigm debate), unlike Lapid, who saw only two paradigms. Like Lapid, Olson and Groom (1991: 315–316) also recognized that ‘We are perhaps too close to events and trends in this second half to be able to be as objective “now” as in the more distant earlier period “then”’. In another example of golden age nostalgia, Holsti (1993: 408) argued that:

In the 1920s and 1930s, the chefs of international relations agreed on what to study and how to study it; they disagreed mainly on purpose. In the 1950s and 1960s, they agreed on subject matter and purpose but fought bitter wars over how to cook. Today, they seem to disagree on everything — purpose, substance, and methods.

The theoretical menu had expanded, a trend Holsti welcomed, but disagreements had become more acrimonious and even a trademark of IR theory: ‘Fragmentation and pluralism are the essential characteristics of the theoretical enterprise today’ (Holsti, 1993: 401). James Rosenau (1993: 456) saw IR as a multidisciplinary and complex array of activities that amounted to a ‘fragmented “nonfield”’ — albeit with a dominance of political scientists. Despite the state of ‘fragmentation of IR and its dominance by political scientists’ (Rosenau, 1993: 456), he did not see much debate among his contemporaries, especially not along the epistemological fault lines identified by Lapid:

Where the controversies once raged around methodological and epistemological issues, today analysts argue mostly about substance. … Notwithstanding the climate of tolerance that presently marks inquiry into IR, as of the 1990s, with competing perspectives continuing to anchor the work of analysts in different parts of the world, the study of the subject is as fragmented as world politics itself. (Rosenau, 1993: 459)

In the 1990s, IR was no longer as integrated as in a mythical time. Andrew Linklater (1994: 119) argued that the discipline suffered from ‘identity crisis’ because the ‘previous consensus’ — even ‘age of coherence’ — had been challenged by a ‘bewildering array of seemingly incommensurable modes of interpretation’, which had been productive but also resulted in ‘deep uncertainties’ about what IR is and ought to be. Roland Bleiker (1995, cited in Holsti, 2001: 75) stated that the field has been in a state of:

flux and turmoil. … Nothing has remained unchallenged. The railings and bridges of orthodox IR wisdom have fallen into the water and numerous attempts to replace them immediately met with the same fate. No consensus, no new and coherent paradigm is yet in sight.

With the decline of realist dominance, Fred Halliday (1996: 322) argued, the new fragmented situation was an almost natural development path for the discipline: ‘IR to some extent replicates the diversification and fragmentation that has marked other disciplines’. Resonating with today’s complaint that different research areas are isolated and disengaged, Ferguson and Mansbach (1991: 4) identified a ‘proliferation of tiny theoretical islands’. Although the discipline had not yet exploded into individualistic atoms, Neumann and Wæver’s (1997) Masters in the Making, which focused on persons rather than paradigms, was introduced as a ‘thought-provoking reflection on the fragmentation of the discipline’ (Buzan, 1997: xvii).

In this vast ‘supermarket for theorists’, where theoretical unity was long lost, some called for a unified framework for disciplinary dialogue and communication (Wight, 1996: 297). The notion of ‘incommensurability’ between these ‘ismic’ islands — whether one saw three (realism–liberalism–Marxism) or two (positivism–post-positivism) — was criticized as ‘legitimating devices for theoretical fragmentation’ (Wight, 1996: 292). IR, Colin Wight (1996: 292, 297) further argued, provided ‘perhaps a paradigmatic example of this “communicative redundancy”’, which resulted in theoretical cacophony, often in a hostile and competitive tone. There was no dialogue anymore, it seemed. Margaret Hermann (1998: 605–606), then ISA president, also argued in her state of the discipline that:

the field has proliferated into subfields and specializations built around groups of scholars who share similar interests and perspectives. … The field of international studies has become a little like the Tower of Babel, filled with a cacophony of different voices — or, as some have implied, a set of tribes that are very territorial, sniping at those who come too close and preferring to be with those like them.

Fragmentation and the end of IR (again)

The narrative of fragmentation among theoretical perspectives was common sense by now, and scholars started drawing attention to other divides, such as those between the core and periphery: ‘The fragmentation and cleavages of multiple perspectives and approaches constitute a first set of boundaries among disciplinary scholars of International Relations’ (Aydinli and Mathews, 2000: 289). The question of fragmentation was given special consideration by Barry Buzan and Richard Little (2001: 19) in an article aiming to ‘challenge the prevailing tendency to assume that theoretical fragmentation constitutes an inevitable state of affairs that we should either endure or embrace’. IR scholars, they argued, seem to prefer ‘fragmentation into the anarchy of self-governing and paradigm-warring islands of theory [and] have taken too much pleasure in the pursuit of competing programmes that fragment theories into rival camps, the prevailing ethos being in favour of promoting theoretical competition’ (Buzan and Little, 2001: 31).

While Buzan and Little saw fragmentation as one of the reasons why IR had ‘failed’, Holsti (2001: 74) identified it as a ‘crisis’: ‘The field of study no longer has any core questions or problems to investigate. Scholars go their own way, intellectually, meaning that the “community” of scholars organized around a common set of problems disintegrates’. In an interview, he argued that this situation was somewhat novel and had worsened since he wrote The Dividing Discipline (Holsti, 1985) (which used terms like ‘bewildering’, ‘theoretical fragmentation’ and ‘disarray’ to describe the field): ‘There has been a great deal more fragmentation of the field since 1985. There are now more specialisations, and small groups of people working in highly distinct areas.’ (Jones and Holsti, 2002: 621). The question of disciplinarity also seems novel in the argument that there is ‘not any longer a particular core to the field’, but so much controversy over the delimitation of IR that we ‘get into areas of sociology, anthropology, and social psychology that are best dealt with by people in those disciplines’ (Jones and Holsti, 2002: 621). It is worth recalling that scholars in the 1940s and 1950s also identified a fragmented discipline with a weak delimitation vis-a-vis other disciplines and no unified theoretical core. Golden age nostalgia imposes a simpler and more integrated vision onto the past. The point here is not to portray the golden age narrative as wrong, but simply that scholars use disciplinary history, loosely, to make their point in the present.

The stocktaking Visions of International Relations edited by Donald Puchala comprised a large number of contributions that saw a worsening of affairs: ‘scholarly discussion however enlightening, has in recent years also led to polarization of views, fragmentation of interests and attention, and bouts of intolerance within the field’ (Puchala, 2002: back cover). International relations, the subject matter, had become more complex than ever and it was problematized (again) as to whether IR was even a discipline and if it was capable of understanding an increasingly complex world. Puchala identified among his contributors a:

common concern about the fragmentation of scholarship in international relations — the ‘insularity of scholarship,’ the ‘incommensurability of discourses’, the ‘mutual inattentiveness’ of specialists, the growing intolerance of intellectual diversity, and even the degeneration of civility in the academy are all bemoaned. (Puchala, 2002: xiv)

Journals had become ‘intellectual subcultures’ that cite one another or themselves, career advancement depends upon ‘mobilizing subcultural clans-people’, and therefore almost all contributors called for bridge-building, dialogue and interaction across disciplinary divides and specializations (Puchala, 2002: xiv). Richard Mansbach (2002: 101), one of the contributors, joined the choir: ‘The international relations (IR) field is divided and subdivided into numerous coteries and cliques that rarely speak to one another and, when they do, may intentionally prevent communication by subverting the very language we use’. Reflecting the fear of islands and Towers of Babel, Charles Kegley Jr (2002: 65) argued that ‘Scholars have isolated themselves on separate islands, with few bridges between them in a sea of theoretical and methodological chaos’, and further that ‘A hundred flowers (and dozens of weeds) have blossomed, and the overgrown garden is not a pretty sight’. In a forum dedicated to ‘dialogue and synthesis’, Lapid (2003: 129–130) proposed that ‘dialogue must figure prominently on our agenda at the dawn of the twenty-first century’ if we are to overcome ‘the current field’s communicative stasis’. If arguments seem to repeat themselves at this point, this is exactly the point. Babel clichés abound in the stocktaking literature. Such lamentations are comme il faut in the stocktaking genre.

In one of the more provocative essays, Christine Sylvester (2007) saw the discipline fragmenting into different ‘camps’ dogmatically following particular persons, texts and theories, and unable to engage in dialogue with other ‘camps’. In a narrative conveying a sense that things were different in the past, she argues that ‘IR is at an end: there is little agreement today on what the field is about’ (Sylvester, 2007: 551). While IR was characterized by a few great paradigmatic debates between a few positions in the past, IR is now ‘past resolving differences through debates featuring a couple of positions, or through attempts at camp syntheses, pronouncements of a true way, or development of new typologies of IR. The field of lore and yore is over’ (Sylvester, 2007: 563). Phrases like ‘the era of the IR debates’ and ‘debates of yore’ convey a sense that this was actually how IR used to work (Sylvester, 2007: 555, 561). Even if Sylvester did not advocate a return to this — somewhat mythical — past of great debates, a certain sentimentality concerning the third debate runs through the argument that:

It is the third debate that we remember, the one that opened the floodgates of IR and saw newcomers entering and piling on the challenges, not least of which was to bring in the international and all its enlarging, moving, and demanding locations. (Sylvester, 2007: 553)

One wonders who ‘we’ are and exactly which one of the third debates ‘we’ remember. The confusion surrounding the third debate notwithstanding, things have only gotten more confusing since then, or so it seems. The floodgates have been opened and the vast numbers of newcomers today, struggling not to drown, are searching for islands of theory to hold on to, while their best hope is actually to suffice with an ‘afterlife’ or ‘epilogue’ of collages and ‘fragmented knowledges’ (Sylvester, 2007: 570, 551). Attracting as an ‘afterlife’ may sound, newcomers are today left with the impression that stocktakers like Sylvester seem to have enjoyed their formative years during the ‘era of debates’.

The concern about fragmentation has also been a persistent theme for ISA presidents, several of whom are cited earlier (Olson, Fox, Russett, Rosenau, Holsti, Kegley and Hermann). In the 2008 ISA convention call, Jack Levy, like several predecessors, warned that although ‘different viewpoints give great leverage for studying international relations, they often create artificial barriers between scholarly communities’ (cited in Sylvester, 2007: 554). In the most recent wave of frustration over fragmentation and sectarianism in IR, ISA President David Lake (2011: 465) admonished against the organization into self-affirming academic ‘sects’ that wage ‘theological debates’. IR is not unique, he argued, but has a ‘particularly acute form of the disease’, in part, because ‘the disproportionate rewards for intellectual extremism create a further centripetal force. Ironically, professional associations, often originally formed as a common ground for scholars, become a force for further fractionalization in the discipline’ (Lake, 2011: 467, 469). To Lake (2011: 466, 472), the only real alternative to the ‘current cacophony’ is mid-level theorizing, analytical eclecticism and, most importantly, a common lexicon that facilitates communication across research traditions and steers us safely away from the ‘intellectual Tower of Babel’.

Critics responded that there is no alternative to isms and that we need wider and more spirited debates, not narrower ones (Nau, 2011: 491). Furthermore, even those who agree that the era of great debates between ‘isms’ may already be over nonetheless believe that this has produced more fragmentation, not more consensus. In the Handbook of International Relations (Carlsnaes et al., 2012), Colin Wight (2012: 45–46) states that while the age of competing ‘isms’ seems to be over, the discipline remains divided and ‘theoretical fragmentation now seems deeply embedded within the field, and explicit attempts to build research programs across theoretical approaches are limited’. The shift away from great debates between a few ‘isms’ is seen as rather sudden: ‘A few years back, almost all articles in the USA fitted into a few main orientations and positioned themselves in relation to these’ (Wæver, 2013: 319). Fractal debates and large-N empiricism characterize the discipline and leading theorists are starting to complain about the ‘decline of theory/theorists’, Ole Wæver (2013: 323) argues, and the ‘image of “the end of theory” (accurate or not) might be the clarion call for a new move that reconfigures the disciplinary map’.

Most recently, a special issue of EJIR entitled ‘The end of International Relations theory?’ examined the question of whether theoretical ‘proliferation’ since the third/fourth debate has fragmented IR beyond the great debates among grand theoretical ‘isms’ (Dunne et al., 2013: 406). Aware that the great debates may have been more perception than reality, the editors nonetheless asked a number of prominent scholars to take stock of the discipline and whether it had moved away from the relatively structured great debates to a proliferation of less-than-great theories, as well as from theory development to theory testing. Most contributors agree with the editors that grand debates or ‘paradigm wars, if that is the correct term, are now over’ (Dunne et al., 2013: 406). A few contributors celebrate the end of fragmenting great debates and welcome the rise of mid-range theories (Bennett, 2013; Lake, 2013). Lake’s ambivalent intervention actually questions the history of great debates and is reluctant to even tell it, but eventually does and maintains that the debates, especially the ‘Final Debate’, resulted in ‘the fracturing of the field into multiple, overlapping identity groups’ (Lake, 2013: 570–571). Other contributors instead see fragmentation stemming from the rise of simplistic hypothesis testing and middle-range eclecticism and make the case for a return to grand theories like the ‘isms’ (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2013), ‘critical problem-solving’ grand theorizing (Brown, 2013) and the meta-theoretical reflections characteristic of the great debates (Reus-Smit, 2013), or at least to different modes of theorizing (Guzzini, 2013). However, even defenders of great debatism agree that the current trend is away from grand theoretical debates towards the proliferation of mid-range theorizing. The fear is that ‘In the absence of a “great debate”, let alone ways of organizing contemporary International Relations theory, this diversity descends into cacophony’ (Jackson and Nexon, 2013: 543). Sylvester (2013: 610) repeats the camp argument that IR has ‘fragmented and diversified’ and that ‘the smoke from proliferating IR campfires makes it increasingly difficult to see even friendly neighbouring camps’. Like in previous stocktakings, the proliferation of theories beyond the relatively simple great debates of the past is portrayed in the ‘End of IR?’ as a novel situation resulting from post-Cold War complexity and increasing engagement/import from other disciplines (Dunne et al., 2013: 413).

So what else is new? The latest bout of stocktaking concerned with the fragmentation of IR inscribes itself, somewhat unintentionally it seems, into a prominent lineage of pessimistic stocktaking exercises that identify fragmentation, confusion, a lack of dialogue and cacophony. When current stocktakers portray fragmentation as a post-Cold War novelty, they forget that Cold War IR also seemed complex and confusing to its contemporaries and that even post-Second World War IR scholars faced problems of disciplinarity and import of/engagement with other disciplines. It is truly an understatement that:

It is often discussed whether IR is a discipline or has been overtaken by fragmentation, multi-disciplinarity, hybridity [and] the proliferation of theories, approaches, and sub-fields that make it harder and harder for a research community to recognize itself and its members. (Wæver, 2013: 308)

As my reading of previous stocktaking essays demonstrates, the image of a dividing discipline in crisis and split into fragments is an intrinsic part of the identity of IR. The recent wave of stocktakings that complain over the fragmentation, cacophony and lack of genuine dialogue characterizing present IR while viewing past IR as more simple, coherent and ordered is an intrinsic part of IR practice, a ritual that reminds members that theirs is the ‘dividing discipline’ par excellence.

Conclusion: the disciplinary politics of stocktaking

If the ‘great debates’ narrative is the conventional mode of telling the history of IR, the fragmentation narrative is the conventional way of taking stock of the discipline. This article sought to demonstrate that the narrative of a fragmenting discipline in decline where no one engages in proper dialogue anymore has a long history in stocktaking exercises. Stocktakers today complain that IR is incapable of engaging in discipline-wide talking and listening because scholars find themselves in an overcrowded supermarket or around different campfires. Things must have been so much simpler in the 1940s and 1950s, when IR was a ‘hodgepodge’, smörgåsbord and confusing fleamarket of ill-assorted conglomerations of disjointed pieces of knowledge, back in the days when IR was as coherent as planes flying at different altitudes and in different directions. It can be frustrating to read yet another series of lamentations about disintegration and the end of the discipline, but if it is any consolation, the historical rereading of stocktakings offered in the preceding suggests that this is not the first time that stocktakers have seen a fragmenting discipline. Rest assured, even in the past, it looked like only the debris of past battles would be left for future generations, and yet the discipline proved somehow capable of exploding once again beyond recognition.

This article has consciously stressed the rhetorical continuities of stocktaking exercises to make its argument and to counter claims of novelty. However, this is not to argue that IR history is nothing but continuity and that the degree and kind of fragmentation remains constant throughout its history. Stocktakers make their rhetorical moves at different points in disciplinary history, of course, and, in that sense, it is not the same discipline that they see as exploding beyond recognition. It could be argued that the 1980s’ explosions of an already-fragmented field must, ceteris paribus, have made it even more fragmented in the 1990s. Similarly, in terms of theory proliferation, it is true, in fact, even a truism, that everyday there is ‘more out there than ever’ (Jackson and Nexon, 2013: 543). At least if we assume that theories accumulate — which is perhaps too much to ask — each additional theory ‘out there’ necessarily contributes to further theoretical proliferation. In that sense, too, IR is not the same discipline today as in 1940. The point is not to make an ahistorical argument that IR has never changed, but rather to make a historical argument that stocktakers have always identified theoretical fragmentation and proliferation as novel — compared to a simpler, more integrated past — although fragmentation arose from different sources throughout IR history (disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, paradigmatic, epistemological, etc.). ¹ There is a strange familiarity to the generic features of the fragmentation narrative one meets in past and present stocktakings: the frustrating sense of current theoretical fragmentation, cacophony and a lack of genuine dialogue, followed by prescriptions for a way forward. The major difference is perhaps that there was no integrated golden age to benchmark contemporary fragmentation against in the earliest years of stocktaking.

Given the recurrence of the fragmentation narrative in most stocktaking essays throughout the history of IR, the interesting question is not only whether theoretical fragmentation has finally led to the end of IR and its great theoretical debates, but also the disciplinary politics of this narrative: what the fragmentation narrative does in the discipline. As Hoffmann (1977: 59) — a quintessential stocktaker of IR — once admitted, ‘a state of dissatisfaction is a goad to research’. It is a way of herding the IR community in a certain direction. Not only are stocktaking exercises full of lamentations about the current state of disarray, but they also tend to be conducted in the prescriptive key: ‘compared to the past IR is in the worst state of fragmentation ever, but it is not too late to save the discipline, so if everyone would follow me now’ (Wæver, 2013: 309). While the diagnosis of fragmentation has shown a remarkable continuity over the past 70 years, the remedies proposed are very different and often somewhat idiosyncratic.

To mention a few examples: Thompson’s solution to fragmentation was a unified theory — ‘the theory’ — rooted in (international) politics and political science rather than other bordering disciplines; not a surprising solution coming from a disciple of Morgenthau. Hoffmann, a historical sociologist inspired by Raymond Aron, proposed Aronian historical sociology as a unifying approach to give the discipline a more systematic direction. To Linklater (1994: 130), further directions are suggested by critical social theory and emancipation. Barry Buzan and Richard Little, who had just published a macro-historical treatise on international systems (Buzan and Little, 2000), used their diagnosis to propose grand theorizing within an English School framework based on the concept of international systems as a way to save IR from failure (Buzan and Little, 2001: 38). To the editors of International Theory (IT), a new journal seemed the solution to the lack of dialogue when they argued that ‘IR is today, if anything, over-supplied with theories of every conceivable variety’ but the problem is that ‘different theoretical communities are not engaging each other in ways that could be mutually productive. IT aims to foster such a dialog’ (Snidal and Wendt, 2009: 4–5). It is also unsurprising that Katzenstein — who has called for eclecticism for more than a decade — uses the fragmentation narrative to call for greater eclecticism, or that Mearsheimer and Walt use it to call for grand theory. Sylvester, who has published on art in IR (Sylvester, 2009), calls for fragmented knowledges and artful collages, while Walker celebrated IR as a web of fragmented discourses.

The fact that stocktakers use their preferred IR theoretical frameworks to provide prescriptions for what should be the new common ground in IR lessens the probability that any one will ever be widely accepted. The question of what should be the common ground for dialogue in IR — the structuring meta-narrative — remains essentially contested. It is at the core of disciplinary politics and any proposal will meet opposition. After all, opposition is the lifeblood of intellectual life — ‘to deny it is to exemplify it’ (Collins, 1998: 1). Therefore, Lake’s proposal that mid-level theorizing based on ‘interests, interactions and institutions’ should be the Rosetta Stone for IR dialogue was immediately criticized for privileging some theories over others (Nau, 2011: 487). The same will be the case for proposals that causal mechanisms or artful collages should be the new communicative common ground. Generally, IR stocktakers have focused too much on how the discipline should be, should dialogue and should construct knowledge claims (philosophy of science) compared to how it actually is, how it actually practises dialogue and how it actually constructs knowledge claims (sociology of science).

There is no space for a full outline of the sociology of IR here (see Wæver, 1998); only for suggestions on how further sociological research could study the question of fragmentation and great debates. For example, the revisionist literature, which has re-examined and revealed the ungreatness of the First Great Debate (Schmidt, 2012a), should be extended to the second, third and fourth debates. Further research doing so could illuminate whether these were really the all-encompassing debates remembered by today’s stocktakers or if contemporaries of, say, the Second Great Debate also found themselves on planes flying at different altitudes and in different directions? My study of stocktakings indicates that this is the case, but further research could study a broader (perhaps even random) selection of journal articles to see whether the great debates constituted major lines of opposition in the published literature. In the more quantitative vein, bibliometric studies have found IR citation practice to be less intellectually fragmented than stocktakers think (Kristensen, 2012), but these studies also need to be extended to compare with IR’s past (e.g. is IR communication more fragmented now than in the 1980s?). The Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) project is coding journal articles from the 1980s onwards in terms of paradigmatic divides and also included questions on major dividing lines in IR in recent surveys, so this data could be used to study fragmentation over time. Sociological studies of IR could also compare its fragmentation to that of other disciplines (e.g. is IR more fragmented than sociology?) and to the stocktaking narratives of other disciplines (e.g. do relatively more unified fields like economics even have a conversation on fragmentation? Is stocktaking even possible in cultural studies?).

Further research along these lines offers more empirically founded, methodologically conscious and theoretically oriented ways to study the degree of theoretical fragmentation over time. However, to call for more sociological studies of IR fragmentation should not be seen as an attempt to circumvent the disciplinary politics of stocktaking identified earlier. A concluding note on reflexivity is in order here. This article provides a meta-analysis of stocktakings that reveal the typical rhetorical moves of the genre, such as complaints over fragmentation followed by somewhat self-serving prescriptions, but even a meta-stocktaking is still a stocktaking. As such, this article itself is not devoid of some of the usual jeremiad rhetorics (e.g. complaints about the state of the discipline) and even suggests a way forward that happens to be the author’s own favoured approach (less philosophy of science about how IR should be done; more sociology of science about how it is done). There is arguably a performative contradiction in critiquing stocktakings in what looks a lot like another stocktaking.

To clarify the argument, it is not that stocktaking per se is never useful. Stocktaking exercises can potentially contribute to disciplinary reflexivity, but the typical mode of stocktaking –the tour d’horizon essay that surveys the field based on personal experience, identifies fragmentation compared to the good old days and then prescribes idiosyncratic remedies for how IR should move forward–cannot stand alone. Further engagement with the historiography and sociology of IR is necessary if stocktakings are to increase reflexivity about where IR has been, is now and got there, and not just where it should go now. If stocktakings are to increase reflexivity in the discipline, they could start by being more reflexive (or just explicit) about how they arrive at their diagnoses about where the discipline is now and has been. IR meta-studies need not be jeremiads about a mythical past aiming mostly to police the future. Imagine if we did IR in the way we do meta-IR: with little to no theoretical or methodological reflections, no empirics except impressions from personal experience in the field, followed by policy prescriptions based on personal preferences. Stocktakings might even contribute to a reflexive debate about where the discipline should go from here if their authors were more open about their disciplinary politics, what they seek to obtain, why we should all follow their idiosyncratic solutions now and what alternatives might have been. The sociology of IR does not attempt to sidestep questions of disciplinary politics; quite the contrary, it aims for reflexivity by bringing them to the fore.