Published in European Journal of International Relations
Discipline Admonished: OnIR Fragmentationand the Disciplinary Politics of Stocktaking
Peter Marcus Kristensen
University of Copenhagen
Abstract
The International Relations discipline (IR) has recently witnessed a wave of stocktakings and they surprisingly often follow the narrative that the discipline once revolved around all-encompassing great debates, which, either neatly or claustrophobically depending on who sees, organized the discipline. Today, most stocktakers argue, IR has moved beyond great debate—the very symbol of the discipline—and is undergoing fragmentation. For some scholars fragmentation is caused by the lack of any great structuring debate and a proliferation of less-than-great theories. To others fragmentation is a result of the divisive great debates themselves. When stocktakers portray fragmentation as novelty, however, they neglect the prominent historical record of this fragmentation narrative. By rereading stocktaking exercises from the 1940s to today, this paper argues that the stocktaking genre—past and present—is conducive to seeing the past as more simple, coherent and ordered while the present is marked by fragmentation and cacophony. Neat summaries of the academic scene in one’s own time are quite rare. Few stocktakers ever identified one conversation/debate driving the discipline, not during the first, second, third or fourth debate—and those who did disagreed on what the main trenches and its warriors were. The paper concludes by arguing IR’s recurrent anxieties about its fragmentation begs questions, not about whether this time is real, but about the disciplinary politics of this stocktaking narrative. Stocktaking exercises are never only objective descriptions of a current state of disarray; they are political moves in the discipline. Dissatisfied scholars employ this narrative to lead the discipline in certain directions, often quite idiosyncratic ones that reflect and serve their own position in IR.
Biographical Note
Peter Marcus Kristensen is a PhD fellow at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on the sociology of the International Relations discipline, bibliometric studies of IR, non-Western perspectives and theories on international relations. His PhD project explores non-Western perspectives on security, power shifts and future world order in the cases of China, India and Brazil. It involves fieldwork in China, India and Brazil and more than 100 interviews with leading academics and think tank scholars.His articles on the sociology of IR have appeared in peer-reviewed journals like International Political Sociology, International Studies Review, International Studies Perspectives, Journal of European Public Policy, Pacific Review and Third World Quarterly.
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 discipline (IR).[1]These stocktakingsare 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 who sees, organized the discipline. Regardless of whether one liked the great debates ‘era’ or not, IR isseen as a morefragmented 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 great debates era, some are celebratingand 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”wereacrimonious trench wars that resulted in a proliferation of isolated sects speaking differenttongues:“the current cacophony is not what we should aspire to” (Lake, 2011: 478). Theoretical unity is perhaps out of the question, butIR shouldstrive for a unified, eclectic framework: a Rosetta stone through which ‘real world’ problemscan be analyzed. 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 latteralso see a discipline fragmented into subfields, islands and camps with a minimum of engagement.But heredisintegration 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 debatesgave 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,alsocalled 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 debatesignalsthe end of IR (debate) as we know it(Sylvester, 2007, 2013), while others advocatea return to grand theoretical debaclesas 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 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—exhibitsconsiderable disagreementover whether the great debates were (un)productive, (un)necessary and (dis)integrating for the discipline.Both sidesnonetheless agree thatIR was once characterized by all-encompassing great debates among a few grand theoretical positionsand 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 IR today, more than ever, 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 questionsabout 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 scholarsdiscuss, andsometimesdeclare, the end of great theoreticaldebates, leaving nothing but the debris of their epic battles tocoming generations. This paper will argue that it is not seniority butthe 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 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 paper reviews earlier stocktakingsto 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 paper 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 orderedgreat 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 debate. Even when they did identify a debate, there was rarely consensus about what the main trench and its warriors were, nor 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 hodge-podge 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 whether it was a product of debate or behaviorist 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 isthat the present looks more cacophonic before the history and textbooks are written. There is the clarity of hindsight: it is easier to identifygreat debates and organizing principles in retrospect. Furthermore, as revisionist scholarship onthe 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 amidst 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 and other works of the contributors). The narrative that IR had a series of relatively simple and great theoreticaldebates 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 arelatively 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 paperstudies the question of fragmentation in IRby looking at how scholars have historically represented the state of the discipline to peers instocktaking exercises published injournal articles,review essays,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 amore 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.).But there are also important continuities, such as a strikingly familiar rhetorical figure about fragmentation and 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 thatstocktaking essays aimed at peersare particularly prone to the fragmentation narrative (the discipline is fragmented and chaotic, 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 paper proceeds chronologically corresponding to the ‘great debates’and looks at stocktaking essays published in those periods.The final section concludes by arguing that IR’srecurrent anxieties about its fragmentation begs questions about the disciplinary politics of the fragmentation narrative, not about whether this time is real. 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 onesserving their own positionin IR.
The ‘First Great Debate’ years: Existential Crisis in the Hodge-Podge
The obvious point of departure is the period later remembered forthe first genuine disciplinarydebate, namelythe foundational great debate between realist and idealists/utopianists in 1940s and 1950s.As mentioned above, disciplinary historiographers laterarguedthat 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 subdiscipline to political science) and proponents of IR as interdiscipline: “the precision-eclecticism debate”(Olson, 1972: 23). Postwar IR experienced a profound existential crisis concerning its status as an independent (sub)discipline (Schmidt, 2012b: 95). Stocktaking exercisesfrom 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 questioned whether IR was a loose interdisciplinary “hodgepodge”, “a kind of mixture, concocted from various subjects [and thus] an unsystematic putting-together” (Gurian, 1946: 276–278).There was a widespread sense that IR was neither integrated from having a long history as a separate discipline nor from commanding a unique methodology, as Klaus Knorr argued, but “only from its topical unity” and even then had to rely on a “multiplicity of scattered sources”(Knorr, 1947: 552, 568).According to W.T.R. Fox it was still debated whether IR had yet arrived as a separate social science (Fox 1949, 79).
At the time, the sense of fragmentation concerned primarily the teaching of IR andwhether it was a separate branch of higher learning or, as Frederick Dunn described it, a “miscellany of materials and methods drawn from existing subjects.” (Dunn, 1948: 142).Dunn later identified a “gradualbut persistent shift” from “reform to realism” but did not call it a great debate(Dunn, 1949: 80). 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, who identified a similarmove from idealism towards realism in American IR, also stated that “today, after a quarter-century of activity, the study of international relations is still in a condition of considerable confusion.”(Kirk, 1947: 7).It was a common critique that only “a modern Leonardo da Vinci” could teach the IR “hodge-podge” of economics, political science, history, geography, military strategy, law and psychology (Kirk, 1947: 31–32). Kirk later summarized the “frustrations” of trying to comprehend the vast multidisciplinary field of IR as starvation amidst plenty (Kirk, 1949: 426). 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 1950sdid see the field as organized by debate, but there was little consensus about what that debate was. Herbert Butterfield identified two approaches “the scientific and the moralistic” (Butterfield, 1951) but did not specify who the warring parties were and his discussion concerned primarily foreign policy debates. Similarly, the “Great Debate” which was “just beginning” according to Frank Tannenbaum concerned whether American foreign policy should abandon its pacific tradition and embrace power politics, the coordinate state versus the balance of power (Tannenbaum, 1952: 173–175; see also the ‘Another Great Debate’ on U.S. national interest of Morgenthau, 1952).Others, like Kenneth W. Thompson, argued that while IR was still far from an independent discipline, there were promising trends towards disciplinarity centered around ‘international politics’ with “political idealism and political realism [as] the major competitors for recognition as the theory of international behavior.” (Thompson, 1952: 443).Another observer of mid-century IR, Piotr Wandycz, 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 (Wandycz, 1955: 193, 202). At the same time, however, Dwight Waldo retrospectively identified a movement from idealism toward realism in the interwar period, but saw contemporary IR as marked by the growing reception of behavioralism, growing interest in theory and held that “the eclecticism and expansionism of current international relations must be emphasized”(Waldo, 1956: 59).Although “methodological problems have been at the fore”, he also argued that it had been intermingled with a ‘great debate’ (his scare quotes) between ‘realists’ and “Those who stand under attack by the realists [and] are not as readily designated by a single world.”(Waldo, 1956: 60). Illustrating the point that the academic scene rarely looks neatly organizedto contemporaries, Waldo argued that “The realist-idealist debate has been highly complex, and confusing if not confused.”(Waldo, 1956: 61).