Handbook of International Relations

Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, Beth A Simmons

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781473971196
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The original Handbook of International Relations was the first authoritative and comprehensive survey of the field of international relations. In this eagerly-awaited new edition, the Editors have once again drawn together a team of the world?s leading scholars of international relations to provide a state-of-the-art review and indispensable guide to the field, ensuring its position as the pre-eminent volume of its kind.

The Second Edition has been expanded to 33 chapters and fully revised, with new chapters on the following contemporary topics:

- Normative Theory in IR

- Critical Theories and Poststructuralism

- Efforts at Theoretical Synthesis in IR: Possibilities and Limits

- International Law and International Relations

- Transnational Diffusion: Norms, Ideas and Policies

- Comparative Regionalism

- Nationalism and Ethnicity

- Geopolitics in the 21st Century

- Terrorism and International Relations

- Religion and International Politics

- International Migration

A truly international undertaking, this Handbook reviews the many historical, philosophical, analytical and normative roots to the discipline and covers the key contemporary topics of research and debate today.

The Handbook of International Relations remains an essential benchmark publication for all advanced undergraduates, graduate students and academics in politics and international relations.

PART ONE

Historical, Philosophical, and Theoretical Issues in International Relations

1

On the History and Historiography of International Relations

Brian C. Schmidt

The historiography of international relations (IR), that is, both the scholarship on the history of the field and the methodological principles involved in that research and writing, is more advanced today than at any time in the past. During the last ten years, a wealth of new literature has appeared that greatly challenges much of the conventional wisdom regarding the development of IR. In light of the new and sophisticated research on the historiography of IR, it is even possible to suggest that progress is being made in understanding the complex and multifaceted story of the emergence and maturation of IR as an academic field of study. Scholars have also discovered that researching the history of the field can lead to new insights that have critical purchase in the present. Today, disciplinary history has achieved a level of recognition and legitimacy that it formerly lacked. This is a dramatic improvement on the previously existing attitudes that many expressed about disciplinary history. Despite the growing pluralization of the field and the ever-expanding range of topics being investigated, an element of suspicion was cast on the task of examining its history. One possible explanation for the reluctance to grant legitimacy to this research task is the common notion that we already know the history. Another possibility is that those in the mainstream are satisfied with the dominant story that is told about the development of the field. In any event, there is no shortage of brief synoptic accounts of this history in introductory textbooks, state-of-the-field articles, and International Studies Association presidential addresses.

These renditions frequently retell a conventional story of how the field has progressed through a series of phases: idealist, realist, behavioralist, post-behavioralist, pluralist, neorealist, rationalist, post-positivist, and constructivist. The image of the first three phases has been so deeply ingrained in the minds of students and scholars that there almost seems to be no alternative way of understanding the early history of the field. Hedley Bull, for example, claimed that it is “possible to recognize three successive waves of theoretical activity”: the “idealist” or “progressivist” doctrines that were dominant in the 1920s and early 1930s, the “realist” or conservative theories that developed in the late 1930s and 1940s, and lastly the “social scientific” theories that arose in the late 1950s and 1960s “whose origin lay in dissatisfaction with the methodologies on which both earlier kinds of theory were based” (Bull, 1972: 33). This story of the field’s evolution is, in turn, often buttressed by the closely related account of the field evolving through a series of “great debates,” beginning with the discipline-defining “great debate” between “idealists” and “realists” and extending perhaps to the latest debate today between “rationalists” and “reflectivists” (Banks, 1986; Katzenstein et al., 1999; Keohane, 1988; Lijphart, 1974a; Maghroori, 1982; Mitchell, 1980). This particular construction of the field’s history tends to have the effect of making the present debate a matter that all serious students of IR must focus on while relegating previous debates to obscurity.

Finally, the field’s history is commonly chronicled by reference to the external events that have taken place in the realm that has been conventionally designated as international politics. There is a strong conviction that significant developments in international politics such as wars or abrupt changes in American foreign policy have, more fundamentally than any other set of factors, shaped the development of IR. The birth of the field, for example, often associated with the founding of the world’s first chair for the study of international politics, in 1919 at the Department of International Politics at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, is characteristically viewed as a reaction to the horror of the First World War (Porter, 1972).

My main intention in this chapter is to problematize these prevalent interpretations of how the field has developed and to indicate that the history of the field is both more complicated and less well known than typically portrayed in the mainstream literature. While it is quite evident that we do not possess an adequate understanding of how the field has developed, there are a number of reasons why it is crucially important for contemporary students of IR to have an adequate familiarity with this history. First, numerous theoretical insights, of largely forgotten scholars, have been simply erased from memory. Yet, once recalled, these insights can have critical purchase in the present. Second, the field has created its own powerful myths regarding the evolution of the field that have obscured the actual history (Booth, 1996; Kahler, 1997; Wilson, 1998). Third, an adequate understanding of the history of the field is essential for explaining the character of many of our present assumptions and ideas about the study of international politics. While current intellectual practices and theoretical positions are often evoked as novel answers to the latest dilemmas confronting international politics, a more discriminating historical sense reminds us that contemporary approaches are often reincarnations of past discourses. Without a sufficient understanding of how the field has evolved, there is the constant danger of continually reinventing the wheel. There is, in fact, much evidence to support the proposition that much of what is taken to be new is actually deeply embedded in the discursive past of the field. Finally, a perspicacious history of the field offers a fruitful basis for critical reflection on the present. Knowledge of the actual, as opposed to the mythical, history may force us to reassess some of our dominant images of the field and result in opening up some much-needed space in which to think about international politics in the new millennium.

My purpose in this chapter is not to provide a comprehensive history of the broadly defined field or discipline of IR. Not only would such an endeavor be impossible in this context, but, as I will indicate below, there is sufficient ambiguity concerning the proper identity of the field, with respect to its origins, institutional home, and geographical boundaries, that simply writing a generic history of IR without addressing these kinds of issues in detail would be counterproductive. Moreover, while much of the previous work on the history of the field has not exhibited sufficient theoretical and methodological sophistication in approaching the task of providing an adequate historical account, recent work in this area is forcing scholars to confront a number of historiographical issues. This latest wave of scholarship clearly recognizes the necessary link that exists between establishing the identity of the discipline and presenting an image of its history (Bell, 2009; Thies, 2002). Furthermore, the manner in which the history of IR is reconstructed has become almost as significant as the substantive account itself, and therefore it becomes crucially important to address the basic research question of how one should approach the task of writing a history of the field.

I will begin by briefly discussing a number of lingering and contentious issues concerning the extent to which there is a well-defined field of IR that has a distinct identity, as well as the equally controversial question of whether the history of the field should be written from a cosmopolitan frame of reference that does not pay significant attention to distinct national and institutional differences, or whether it is necessary to approach this task from within clearly demarcated national contexts. Although it should be evident that IR is a discrete academic field after more than fifty to a hundred years of evolution, depending on how one dates the genesis of the field, ambiguities have continually arisen regarding both the character of the subject matter and the institutional boundaries of the field. Adding to the confusion surrounding the identity of the field is the overwhelming and continuing dominance of the American IR scholarly community, which sometimes leads to the erroneous conclusion that the history of IR is synonymous with its development in the United States. While there is much merit in Stanley Hoffmann’s (1977) assertion that IR is an American social science despite the influence of a great many European-born scholars, it is also the case that notwithstanding the global impact of the American model, there are many indigenous scholarly communities that have their own unique disciplinary history. This is, for example, clearly the case with the English School, whose contributions have only recently begun to be properly documented and assessed (Dunne, 1998; Little, 2000). These communities have certainly been deeply impacted by theoretical and methodological developments in the United States, but there are nevertheless differences in how the subject is studied in different parts of the world (Jorgensen, 2000; Tickner and Waever, 2009; Waever, 1998). The interdisciplinary character of the field and differences in national settings sometimes lead to the conclusion that a distinct discipline or field of IR does not really exist, but despite ambiguities about disciplinary boundaries and an institutional home, IR, as an academic field of study, has a distinct professional identity and discourse.

I next focus on two historiographical issues: first, presentism, which involves the practice of writing a history of the field for the purpose of making a point about its present character; and second, contextualism, which assumes that exogenous events in the realm of international politics have fundamentally structured the historical development of IR as an academic field of study. I will illustrate these issues by reviewing the existing literature. The most recent literature has cast increasing doubt on the conventional images of the development of IR. My critical purpose in this chapter is to challenge the dominant understanding of how the field has progressed and to encourage more sophisticated work on the disciplinary history of IR.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AS AN ACADEMIC FIELD OF STUDY

The task of demarcating the disciplinary boundaries of the field is an important prerequisite to establishing authority over its object of inquiry. Yet the question of whether a distinct field or discipline of IR exists has been a matter of consistent controversy (Gurian, 1946; Kaplan, 1961; Neal and Hamlett, 1969; Olson, 1972; Olson and Groom, 1991; Palmer, 1980; Thompson, 1952; Wright, 1955). While the controversy is, in some ways, related to the contentious issue of the origins and geographical boundaries of the field, it more fundamentally involves the question of the identity of IR as a second-order discourse and the status of its subject matter. Although it is apparent that this question has never been answered satisfactorily, disciplinary history does provide an insightful vantage point for viewing the manner in which the field has attempted to establish its own identity. Recent work has focused on the dynamics of “discipline formation“ and uncovered a number of previously neglected factors that contributed to the emergence of IR (Bell, 2009; Guilhot, 2008; Long, 2006; Vitalis, 2005).

The period that precedes the point at which we can discern the identity of the field as a distinct academic practice can be termed its “prehistory”; when there was a gradual change “from discourse to discipline” (Farr, 1990). This period is important for identifying the themes and issues that would later constitute the field as it took form during the early decades of the twentieth century (Long and Schmidt, 2005; Schmidt, 1998b). The field’s antecedents included international law, diplomatic history, the peace movement, moral philosophy, geography, and anthropology (Olson and Groom, 1991). In The Study of International Relations (1955), Quincy Wright identified eight “root disciplines” and six disciplines with a “world point of view” that had contributed to the development of IR. Wright, along with many others, argued that the task of synthesizing these largely autonomous fields of inquiry hampered the effort to create a unified coherent discipline of IR. Moreover, Kenneth Thompson observed that “there was nothing peculiar to the subject matter of international relations which did not fall under other separate fields” (Thompson, 1952: 433). The interdisciplinary character of the field and the fact that other disciplines studied various dimensions of its subject matter has sometimes led to the question of whether “international relations is a distinctive discipline” (Kaplan, 1961). This is an interesting and important question that has often been answered by pointing to the field’s unique subject matter, typically defined in terms of politics in the absence of central authority as well as by adducing various epistemological and methodological grounds. Yet while the question of whether IR is a distinct discipline is intriguing, it is important not to let this become an obstacle to reconstructing the history of the study of international politics.

These issues do, however, highlight the importance of clearly identifying and focusing on the institutional context of the field. The variability in institutional context is, in part, responsible for the wide range of dates that have been used to mark the birth of the field. It makes a large difference, for example, whether IR was institutionalized as a separate discipline, as was largely the case after the First World War in the United Kingdom, where a number of independent chairs were created, or as a subfield of political science, as was the case in the United States, Germany, and France. Yet orthodox histories have been more inclined to emphasize the impact of significant political events on the development of the field than the character of the institutional setting of the field. In the case of the United States, for example, it is impossible to write the history of IR without locating it within the disciplinary matrix of American political science (Schmidt, 1998a, 1998b, 2008). In addition to these institutional variations, there are numerous differences with respect to intellectual climate, access to information, research support, links between government and academia, and the general structure and character of the university system (Simpson, 1998).

The significance of institutional context is closely related to the issue of the national context of the field. Variations in institutional structure are intimately related to the national setting in which IR is situated. The issue of whether the boundaries of IR should be demarcated in terms of one particular country or whether it should be viewed as a more cosmopolitan endeavor without regard to national differences complicates the task of writing a history of the field. Although the creation of a truly global discipline may, perhaps, be an aspiration, studies continue to indicate that the academic study of international politics is marked by British, and especially American, parochialism (Crawford and Jarvis, 2001; Peterson, Tierney, and Maliniak, 2005; Waever, 1998). Ever since Stanley Hoffmann (1977) declared that IR was an “American Social Science,” a lively discussion has ensued about the extent to which the American academic community dominates the “global discipline” of IR, and about the profound consequences that this dominance has for the discipline as a whole (Alker and Bierstek...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Preface First Edition
• Preface Second Edition
• PART 1: HISTORICAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND THEORETICAL ISSUES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
• PART 2: STRUCTURES AND PROCESSES OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
• PART 3: SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
• Index