A pragmatist vocation for International Relations: The (global) public and its problems

Outward-looking

The first category of works that incorporate practice theory and pragmatism use the new conceptual language of habits, habitus, and practices to revive the field’s commitment to real-world problem-solving. We label this tendency as “outward-looking” because such research often slips into an ontological position that maintains a separation between scholarly work and real-world empirical reality, or, in Jackson’s (2011: 31) terms, “mind–world dualism.” ² According to this literature, Bourdieu’s practice theory or Deweyan pragmatism is useful in solving empirical puzzles like political change and adaptation (Adler-Nissen, 2008, 2014; Mérand, 2010; Pouliot, 2008; Schmidt, 2014), or structural continuity (Hopf, 2010) — that is, pragmatic and practice-based insights inform theories of political action. Instead of debating about this or that paradigm, structure or agency, and material or ideational factors, focusing on what people actually do provides us with more accurate knowledge to make sense of the real world and, as Adler and Pouliot (2011a: 10–11) argue, a “glue” or a “conceptual focal point” to unite a fragmented field.

Summarily, when read in light of vocational commitments, the “outward-looking” literature tends to frame the politics of metaphysical debate as inhibiting the problem-solving task of IR. From this vantage point, IR cannot provide solutions to pressing political problems if it remains entrenched in the relative importance of agents and structures, or material resources and ideational discourses. However, we argue that this vocational promise remains unrealized. Although the language of practices and habits has been helpful in explaining certain empirical puzzles, it has not settled these debates; rather, these categories are often situated within or mapped onto the same ontological framework. The works discussed in the following, by treating practices as “raw data” (Andersen and Neumann, 2012) and problems as objects “out there” to be solved — that is, by bracketing the politics embedded in ontological choices — tend to reactivate rather than resolve these debates.

Inward-looking

A second tendency in the practice and pragmatic IR scholarship collapses the distinction between real-world and scholarly practices by treating theory, itself, as a practice. We label this kind of scholarship “inward-looking” because of its reflexive focus on the role of science and expertise (i.e. theoretical practice) in constituting the world. As opposed to “outward-looking” theories of practices, this literature reflexively grapples with the constitution of political problems. It analyzes practices of knowledge production and dissemination in order to expose the knowledge–power nexus, unpack social hierarchies, and reveal modes of domination. Given these reflexive and analytical drives, the “inward-looking” scholarship is explicit regarding its vocational goals: emancipatory politics is dependent on reflexively produced knowledge. However, even as this literature brings us closer to a deep and serious discussion of IR as a vocation, even as its conception of theory as practice resonates with pragmatist commitments, we nevertheless depart from it in an important way. “Inward-looking” research under-specifies the political content of its emancipatory vocation, leaving its politics ambiguously framed in terms of anti-domination. Without theorizing the political values to which it attends, it remains in a narrowly critical mode of “uncovering” practices of domination such that the task of IR becomes purely informative; through reflexively produced knowledge, through knowledge that is “better” or more appropriate, academic theoretical practice reveals the quality of domination to others. The problem, however, is that it advances a solution that only reinscribes a particular mode of domination: a top-down and an elitist approach to knowledge production. In the following, we outline the critique of the “inward-looking” literature, but a fuller engagement is offered in our affirmative argument, wherein we distinguish our pragmatic reading of Dewey.

The problem of expertise, or figuring democracy as social inquiry

While there is certainly a debate as to whether “pragmatism” embodies a specific political position (cf. Myers, 1986: 414–415; Posner, 2003: 44), our reading of Dewey places the question of democracy at the center of his pragmatist social theory. The starting point of The Public and its Problems (Dewey, 1927), which counts among Dewey’s most read works, concerns the question of democratic participation in an era of industrialization, complex interdependence, and increasing individualism. In the context of a fragmented society, how is it possible to render the processes of political democracy accountable to the needs of the community? This was not a problem for Dewey, but the problem; it was the problematique, the broad socio-political context, in which his pragmatist commitments arose.

According to Dewey, the substantive value of modern democracy was threatened by the control of governmental decisions by expert managers. Dewey observed that the rise of expertise was transforming the site of political governance into a business that proceeds according to technocratic logic rather than to the needs of a community. Expertise, in other words, conditioned a general problem of democratic participation. In his review of Walter Lippmann’s (1965 [1922]) Public Opinion, for instance, Dewey (1922a) confronts this issue directly. While Lippmann outlines the flaws of US democracy, disparages the fickle quality of the masses, and argues that democracy could be “brought under human control” by the use of experts who make reality intelligible to the rest (Lippmann, 1965 [1922]: 233), Dewey rejects such a stance and suggests a more optimistic vision for the prospects of non-elitist democracy:

Democracy demands a more thoroughgoing education than the education of officials, administrators and directors of industry. Because this fundamental general education is at once so necessary and so difficult of achievement, the enterprise of democracy is so challenging. To sidetrack it to the task of enlightenment of administrators and executives is to miss something of its range and its challenge. (Dewey, 1922a: 288)

Dewey’s rejection of a limited democracy, of a pluralism enjoyed by a “class of experts” (Dewey, 1927: 207), is the basis for distinguishing between political democracy, or the set of institutional procedures generally associated with democratic polities, and democracy as social inquiry, or a publicly inclusive mode of generating knowledge and policy decisions. For Dewey, the question of knowledge or expertise had to be at the same time the question of democracy: if practical knowledge can only be achieved by experience and intelligent inquiry, then the production of knowledge should be open to include the intelligent capacities of the public, to “those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (Dewey, 1927: 15–16). In many ways, Dewey’s notion of democracy as social inquiry is a call for participatory democracy, which would mean “the maximum use of the capacities of citizens for proposing courses of action, for testing them, and for evaluating the results” (Putnam, 1990: 1682). The procedures of political democracy, such as popular voting and majority rule, are in fact predicated upon prior practices such as public consultation, debate, education, and discussion (Dewey, 1927: 207–208).

Summarily, then, Dewey’s politics put the question of knowledge at the center of the problem of democracy. More precisely, as opposed to Lippmann and other elitist views of democracy, Dewey’s project was to make the quality of political democracy dependent upon the quality of knowledge production: if the latter is oligarchic, held by a few, the former tends to follow suit. Certainly, political democracy in terms of institutionalized procedures for majority rule may persist, but left in the hands of a few experts, this governance structure becomes detached from the needs and interests of the public. Without an inclusive, democratic mode of producing knowledge, political democracy becomes merely an empty shell.

Yet, this problem of democracy in Dewey’s corpus is not a superfluous political project, only relevant in the context of his writings on pedagogy and public education, but one that clarifies the stakes of his social philosophy. Indeed, within the pages of The Public and its Problems, a pointedly “partisan” and “political” text, the language of habits and practices is figured into basic categories of human action, and philosophical debates about fact-value distinctions, anti-dualism, and the limits of causation are introduced as premises for a reconfiguration of democracy as social inquiry. That is, the familiar ontological and epistemological categories that typify strands of pragmatic IR are deployed as a premise for his clarification of the problem of democracy. In the following, we concretely unpack and connect these now familiar categories to the political project of democracy.

Against dualism, or the philosophical bases of political domination

If there is some principle upon which a number of classical pragmatists cohere, it may be a skepticism of the philosophical dualisms endemic to Western philosophy: thought and action, reason and experience, mind and body. However, for Dewey, an anti-dualist posture was not merely an academic exercise, but a practice deeply embedded within his political commitments. In fact, contrary to those who do not locate power in pragmatist theorization, Dewey is, in our reading, first concerned with how domination manifested itself in modern liberal democracies — namely, the rise of expertise in the context of a fragmented public (Dewey, 1927: 138). The category of knowledge, frequently invoked in his ontological and epistemological interventions, is central to understanding his political commitments.

This is no more evident than when we turn our attention to the concept of habit. Whether explicitly drawing on Dewey or not, the concept of habit in IR is often employed conventionally as an iterative pre- or non-reflective practice. Yet, for Dewey, while habits can be routinized as unreflective modes of thinking and acting in the world, they are also deliberative and creative experiments (Dewey, 1929: 67–70). Typical of the Deweyan impulse to collapse dualisms, habits are defined broadly and inclusively: they are an “ability, an art, formed through past experience” (Dewey, 1922b: 66), “an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response” (Dewey, 1922b: 42); however — and this is critical — whether the particular habit is mimetic or experimental and intelligent depends on the specificity of that habit in context. As a consequence, something like scientific theoretical practice — that is, rational reflection — is only a specific kind of habit. While thought and habit (like thought and action) are usually separated out, Dewey’s reconceptualization of habit brings it into an imbricated space with reflective thinking, allowing for both the routinized reproduction and creative transformation of experiences (Dewey, 1922b: 67). Certainly, when geared towards long-standing academic debates on the nature of human action (instrumental, normative, pre-reflexive) or the quality of social life (structure or agency, stasis or change), the pragmatic category of habit can productively intervene, can direct us to the creativity that unfolds in the contingency of experience. That being said, we argue that Dewey’s dense reconceptualization of this term is not, for him, merely a matter of better representation of human action. Rather, he understands the language of habit to be a means through which political domination persists and, as such, the means through which the problem of modern democracy can be clarified. According to Dewey, historical distinctions between rational thought and unthinking habit — between rational, reflective deliberation and iterative, automatic response — constitute a dualism through which subjection recurs, an ordering of socio-political life that specifies those who think and are capable of rule and those who are automatons only capable of following (Dewey, 1922b: 72). In the context of modern liberal democracies, the elevation of experts from the public — or those entrusted to govern from those expected to defer — is precisely the contemporary instantiation of this old form of subjugation. Habit, as such, becomes a key category for his reconfiguration of democracy as social inquiry, for what marks out the expert scientist and the average citizen is not capacity for intelligent and rational thought, but socialization into different habits (Dewey, 1927: 160). Critical inquiry, then, is only a specialized kind of habit that should be publicly generalized (Dewey, 1927: 167). By theoretically working on this concept, Dewey rethinks habit as a social practice rather than a biological inheritance, thereby setting the stage to subvert this particular form of political domination.

This politics of knowledge production, integral to Dewey’s reconceptualization of habit, appear even more strongly as we begin to unpack other interventions against dualism in Western thought. Take, for example, the concept of practice regularly considered to be a central tenet of classical pragmatism (Hellmann, 2009b: 639). Practice, within the theoretical space of pragmatism, pushes us away from thinking about thought and action as two distinct modes of experience and brings us to an understanding of how each are simply “two sides of the same coin” (Hellmann, 2009b: 641). Even as Dewey lauds science, the pragmatist notion of theory is not an “empiricist” one in the sense that it is not a detached concept meant to correspond to a reality out there; rather, “theories” are simply tools to cope with the world, and thinking or “theorizing” is itself a practice, an action of the empirical world (Dewey, 1929: 67). To move theory onto an abstract plane outside the empirical, outside of experience, is to remove theoretical practice from its social context, the specific problematique in which it emerges and (re)acts upon.

In other words, while classical pragmatists begin from the empiricist notion that all knowledge is derived from experience, they stake this claim from a mind–world monist position, claiming that experience cannot be known or evaluated outside of experience itself and that knowing is only one mode of experience. As opposed to the “outward-looking” literature discussed earlier, in our reading of pragmatists, there is no separation between knowledge claims and real experience out there, no transcendental space of theorization that hangs apart from the world. Rather, knowledge is produced from experience within the world, and, as such, there are only different types of experiences: for instance, experiencing something as a “known thing” is different from experiencing something aesthetically or morally as an “immediate experience” (Dewey, 1905: 394–395).

Further, such mind–world monism, like other anti-dualist moves, is an integral part of pragmatist theories of truth. For pragmatists, the question of truth is not a matter of what is a correct or an accurate representation of reality (Rorty, 1979: 12), but of what works, what is useful to cope with the endless disruptions and problems of social life (James, 1907: 80). While most accept that a pragmatist notion of truth escapes the confines of having to correspond with a reality out there and the dark abyss of interminable relativism, too often this is understood as a pragmatic desire to eschew metaphysics writ large. Yet, acknowledging the imbrication of mind and world, theory and practice, means that determining what works, what is useful and therefore “true,” must entail a prior political delineation of the problem and circumscription of the relevant subjects. What constitutes a political problem? For which actors, interests, and political positions does our research provide solutions? What concepts, terms, and patterns are under contestation? What are our biases in asking specific questions and advancing specific arguments? As much as we would like to analyze the world out there, a pragmatic conception of truth reminds us that we are implicated in the problems we investigate.

If this discussion on “theory as practice” and “reflexivity” were to end here, we would only be left with an identical set of claims made by constructivists, who note that “science is just another form of human action” (Guzzini, 2000: 162), or critical theorists, who ask us to pay attention to our “ideological baggage” (Levine, 2012: 11), or Bourdieusian scholars, who similarly understand theory as practice (Hamati-Ataya, 2012b: 630) and demand “reflex reflexivity” (Leander, 2011: 307). That is to say, when we think of these pragmatic insights as theoretical tools detached from the socio-political context in which they were fashioned, we can certainly make good and varied use of them, but we often arrive at familiar places. However, when we foreground Dewey’s normative project, when we locate the political problem of democracy as central rather than auxiliary, we begin to see how the implications of “theory being of this world” or “reflexivity” can take on new contours for the practice of IR. Like the discussion of habit earlier, we begin to see how questions of knowledge production are at the same time questions of democratic engagement. We arrive at a pragmatist understanding of reflexivity that specifies not only how knowledge production and the world are co-constitutive, but also how the quality of knowledge production, itself, is at stake in the perpetuation of domination in liberal polities. A pragmatic understanding of reflexivity shares a concern for how knowledge produces the world but also takes the further explicit political position to democratize the process of producing knowledge by making it part of a broader community of inquiry (see also Bueger and Gadinger, 2015: 458).

It is at this juncture that our Deweyan take on pragmatism departs from “inward-looking” practice theorists, who are similarly concerned with expertise, theoretical practice, and reflexivity. As encountered earlier, Bourdieu-inspired practice theorists certainly treat theorization as a practice, demonstrating how knowledge constitutes social reality; further, much of this scholarship focuses on the role of experts in different sectors, including academia, in legitimating and defining certain categories such as security, democracy, and human rights (Berling, 2012; Bigo, 2000; Guilhot, 2005; Leander, 2005). Preoccupied with the way in which hegemonic discourses are historically produced through power struggles among experts and policymakers within and across “fields,” they certainly demonstrate how expertise helps to perpetuate domination and political inequality. Nonetheless, the consequences of this mode of scholarship is twofold: first, it advances a notion of reflexivity that is primarily about understanding the conditions of knowledge production, the biases and exclusions that accompany theoretical practice such that we may take measures to limit them; and, second, while it embodies an emancipatory ethic (Hamati-Ataya, 2011, 2012b), it is committed to a politics of exposure, to “revealing” domination in all its insidious forms. Reflexivity, then, becomes a tool to reflect on scholarly habits, to make academic knowledge production better, more appropriate, and more attuned to relations of power. In other words, it is meant to reinforce academic knowledge production as a distinct field tasked with exposing domination to those who are dominated. The vocation of IR is emancipatory in intent, but given a thin conception of background political values (ostensibly, anti-domination), it employs a strategy of fighting expertise with expertise. In short, for practice theorists, the public (the dominated) remains non-theorized, the object of emancipatory efforts but not conceptualized as an agent of these efforts themselves.

On the other hand, our pragmatic reading of Dewey pursues alternative emancipatory politics. By foregrounding the values of democratic politics, by locating expertise as the fundamental problem of democracy, pragmatic reflexivity actively works to dismantle the academic “field” in order to make the process of social inquiry publicly inclusive. Rather than working to secure academia as a privileged site of knowledge production, the ends-in-view of pragmatic theoretical practice must be to undermine the boundaries of this field by democratizing knowledge production, by actively undermining the inequality of experts and the public. Therefore, in many ways, pragmatism has a more robust “activist ethos” that derives from an explicit conceptualization of the public and a more radical solution to the problem of expertise.

Planetary democracy, or a pragmatist vocation for IR

In our reading of Deweyan pragmatism, we do not so much arrive at a distinct social theory or methodological parachute than a specific problematique constituted by the relationship between knowledge production and democracy. A “pragmatic turn,” in our estimation, requires an honest discussion in unambiguous terms of the political commitments we hold. There may be shared background values that underlie a number of traditions in IR — whether liberal, practice-based, constructivist, critical, or classical realist — but these values are rarely theorized as more than a resistance to forms of violence on individual bodies. The pragmatist vision articulated earlier, however, gives political content to this normative stance against domination, rendering the logic of domination in specific terms as embodied in the politics of producing knowledge. In other words, it not only comes clean with its political positions, but also foregrounds them as the basis of social theorizing.

What specifically are the vocational contributions made possible by this pragmatist vision? If the complex problematique in which Dewey was entangled asked how a public could be constituted at a historical moment when expertise and administrative specialists were managing the processes of government, then the pragmatist-inflected problem for IR is how a global public can be constituted in the historical moment of deepened global governance. Dewey was thinking with and within a social formation in which the practices of administration, of governing a modern mass of citizens, were disconnected from the needs of a domestic public. In Dewey’s (1927: 137, 142) estimation, the pace of technological transformations in the early to mid-20th century was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it enabled an unprecedented level of communication that acted as the material basis for potential integration. On the other hand, such transformations also produced forces that dispersed the public through higher levels of mobility and individuation. Ours is no longer the machine age, but the digital age. We are situated in the radical transformation of communication technologies that has produced a pace of socio-political life hardly imaginable by classical pragmatists. While we may argue that the interconnections of people at the dawn of the 21st century are not different in kind than at the beginning of the 20th, technological changes have undoubtedly refigured the speed and intensity of these relationships (Deudney, 1998). Not only are there nascent and enduring forms of trans-state community, but there exists an ordering of the globe that directly bears upon people regardless of territorial borders. International organizations (IOs), non-governmental organizations, activist networks, scientists, and lawyers are among the diverse actors constituting the hypermodern plane of global politics (Ruggie, 2004).

In parallel with Dewey’s historical circumstances, we are seeing processes of global governance on a range of political issues — from cyberspace management to global public health, from climate change to migration flows — evaluated and enacted by a class of experts rather than a democratic public. Decisions of consequence to people across the globe occur without any clear mechanism of accountability, let alone any clear path of delegated authority. To be sure, the disjuncture between the decisions made by a class of global experts and the needs of people outside of those epistemic communities, commonly referred to as a democratic deficit, has been taken up by those situated in the global democracy literature (Dryzek, 2000; Dryzek et al., 2011; Held, 2010; Walzer, 1999) and touched upon in various ways by the global governance literature (Moravcsik, 2004; Scholte, 2002; Slaughter, 2004). Barnett and Finnemore’s (2004) empirically dense volume on the role of IOs in explaining global political outcomes, for instance, primarily focused on how the rules and bureaucratic procedures of IOs lead to pathological outcomes, but it ended with the discomforting claim that the current liberal order is increasingly produced apart from democratic procedures, what they call “undemocratic liberalism” (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004: 172–173). Dewey’s problem, then, is scaled up: if expertise was the specter of oligarchy at the national level, then it has similarly begun to haunt global politics.

What our pragmatist argument brings to IR is a political project that demands attunement to the problematique in which we are all entangled. The promise of a pragmatic IR is working out a politically informed vocation, one that is radically important in an era of nuclear weapons, climate change, mass migration, global epidemics, and worldwide economic integration. Such a pragmatist-inflected IR is tasked with the project of constituting, of helping to “find,” the global public of which we are a part. Generally, publics, for Dewey (1927: 27), are associations of individuals around a common interest of which the consequences extend “beyond those directly engaged in them.” However, The Public emerges around processes of government, around state officials that regulate and take care of public interests (Dewey, 1927: 35). From our perspective, The Public, as opposed to publics, takes on a particular valence in the context of an institutionalized order that regulates and attends to it: the state and The Public become the modern, liberal manifestation of the rulers and the ruled, those capable of thought and those capable of following. To be sure, at the global level, there is no world state constituted on the basis of an attendant public, but there are certainly processes of governance that unfold in the context of common vulnerabilities of a planetary scale. Practicing IR according to our pragmatic reading of Dewey, we argue, would entail a vocational commitment to organizing a global public, to take part in practices that democratize the process of inquiry and produce institutional sites around these already acknowledged common vulnerabilities. Of course, it is not only through pragmatic theoretical practice that we come to terms with the problem of democracy at the global level, that we encounter the yet-defined contours of a global public. Many within the literature on trans-state democracy, including Habermas (1998, 2003), Benhabib (2002), Bäckstrand (2006), Steffek (2010), and Dryzek (2000), have worked through notions of a global public sphere or outlined supplementary sites of deliberation and association. However, a pragmatist-inflected IR not only centers theoretical practice toward the problem of democracy globally, but also provides a vocational urgency to make our own field of knowledge production publicly inclusive. In this sense, IR’s pragmatist vocation cannot be limited to the clarification and dissemination of the stakes of scientific knowledge and “expert” decisions, cannot follow a politics of exposure, but must actively organize the public through a shared method of critical inquiry.

To clarify, we are not arguing that this must be the vocation of IR, that a discipline as diverse and dispersed as ours has to be constituted on the problem of democratic social inquiry. We acknowledge that there are other viable ways of thinking IR as a vocation, including an endorsement of elitist conceptions of democracy and knowledge production or a complete rejection of liberal democracy from the start. In fact, there are strong reasons to believe that in the context of planetary crisis, the pace of democratic processes may be too slow. Nonetheless, however the task of the discipline is conceptualized, scholars must begin with thorough reflection on the political values that inform the substance of a vocation and, therefore, the substance of theoretical practice.

Even if we accept a pragmatist vocation, a glaring question remains: what processes allow the democratic public to emerge? What does it actually mean to help constitute a global public? Dewey, in many respects, is ambiguous in articulating actual practices that work toward these ends-in-view. We know that knowledge production must be democratic, that it must be plural not only among a cadre of experts, but also among the community as a whole. What implications derive from such a formulation? Addams provides us with clearer ways forward. The anti-dualism that pervades pragmatist thought and collapses conventional oppositions of habit and thinking, theory and practice, is in every way practiced by Addams, whose own thinking on health care, poverty, war, and democracy was theorized within the context of her social work (Elshtain, 2002a, 2002b). Her settlement project in an impoverished neighborhood of Chicago, Hull House, was the basis for a pragmatist articulation of how social fragmentation could be overcome in the pursuit of a democratic community. Dewey’s proposals for more face-to-face interaction, local community-building, and education were not just anticipated by Addams, but institutionally organized and theoretically deepened.

From Addams, then, we get a sense of where a pragmatist IR should take us. It cannot only be, as many have taken Dewey, a matter of pedagogy, of making education a central feature of the discipline (though Dewey’s co-founding of the New School as a site of adult education testifies to the importance of pedagogy). Rather, inquiry, itself, must be democratically understood as well. While there are certainly issues of scale, moving toward a global public must begin with local initiatives to include others outside the academy in the process of knowledge production. Corollary examples in participatory governance can be found in the institutional literature in comparative politics (Ansell, 2011; Dorf and Sabel, 2000; Sabel and Zeitlin, 2008), wherein democratic experiments are theorized in local and trans-state policy settings. Though nascent and uneven, this inclusive logic also exists in specific sites of global governance. Though not articulated in terms of “pragmatism,” multi-stakeholder governance of the Internet, which is organized around deliberative fora, seeks solutions to techno-political problems via discussion among all parties said to hold stakes in the issue at hand, regardless of expertise (Mathiason, 2008; Mueller, 2010). Like other institutional sites, the process of Internet governance involves pragmatic experimentation in which inclusivity and deliberation are the basis for policy production.

A pragmatist vocation for IR would similarly entail carving out spaces for the democratic production of knowledge, a difficult but not impossible task. Initial steps in this direction would entail broadening panels at the International Studies Association meeting to include members of the public in a deliberative space that actively dismantles distinctions between knowledge producer and knowledge consumer. A roundtable on critique in global political economy would not be limited, for example, to neo-Gramscian and Foucauldian academics, but would actively identify and include non-academic workers in the discussion; a conference on the aesthetics of global politics may include performers and street artists as well as those versed in Kantian aesthetics. In both cases, a common language would have to be worked out, one that avoids misunderstanding, mistrust, and, above all, stultification. This language, of course, cannot be decided in advance as an ultimate or ideal end, cannot be the object of a priori theorization, but can only be worked out and negotiated in the messy process of democratically produced knowledge. As such, these immediate surface-level engagements would be the wellspring of deeper collaborative projects and professional incentives for public engagement, the latter of which would have to include a re-evaluation of what counts as success in the academy. This may involve favoring popular presses over esoteric ones, co-authorship over individually penned manuscripts, and multimedia presentations in community settings over powerpoints in a seminar room. More radically, the long-term process of research would have to be opened up, which may include establishing links between one’s university and the community around it and/or with communities around the world. Cases would subsequently have to be made for institutional support from universities, foundations, and governments for non-academic researchers. These kinds of vocational reorientations configure a mode of producing scholarship not just about people and their politics, but with them.

Further, such engagements would have to move out from local contexts toward spanning continents, involving others in the process of knowing and doing IR. Yet, of course, we should not pretend that this understanding of a pragmatist vocation for IR operates on an ideologically universal register, that it is able to offer much outside of a specific political position: making the organization of knowledge in relatively liberal political contexts attuned to core values of openness, pluralism, and exchange. Nor should we pretend this sketch of pragmatic IR to be a panacea, a disciplinary reorganization that seamlessly engenders a global public or the inscription of democracy globally. Nor, for that matter, should we be comfortable with the Western-centric dimensions of this project (all of which we consider more deeply in the concluding section). ³ Nevertheless, if we are to locate something novel and productive within the diverse space of pragmatist thinking, then we argue that much work is needed, and these lofty political ends-in-view are its theoretical consequence.