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Where Does IR Stand in Terms of Diversity?

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Pluralism and Engagement in the Discipline of International Relations

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Abstract

This chapter first looks into “the rise of pluralism” in IR literature while questioning whether it has any substance in terms of range and especially practice. Here, I examine and analyze the extent of epistemological, theoretical, and methodological diversity through a close reading of the key texts in the field. This literature review is followed by a detailed empirical investigation of publishing and teaching practices in IR communities, with a focus on American IR and the newly emerging Asian (e.g., Chinese) IR communities. The results show that the dominant influence of positivism remains largely intact in IR, and that post-positivist research is neither fully “practiced” as a serious alternative to positivism nor is it actively accepted as a key axis of the study of world politics not only in American IR but also in the rapidly emerging Chinese IR community, which is commonly expected to take a different path of development with a critical edge.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a general review of methodological pluralism in contemporary political science research and curricula, see Yanow and Schwartz-Shea’s (2010) article on “Perestroika Ten Years After: Reflections on Methodological Diversity” and Mead’s 2010 study of “Scholasticism in Political Science” both of which draw a similar conclusion that the discipline has not gone far enough in terms of diversity. Their studies show that qualitative methods and interpretive research are currently marginalized in the discipline, at best suggesting that the “Perestroika” movement for promoting a more pluralist methodology is still needed.

  2. 2.

    They include: International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, World Politics, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Politics, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and European Journal of International Relations.

  3. 3.

    Maliniak et al. identified 4126 individuals who research and/or teach IR; 1719 scholars responded to their surveys.

  4. 4.

    Maliniak et al. (2011: 455) code “positivist” works as those “that implicitly or explicitly assume that theoretical or empirical propositions are testable, make causal claims, seek to explain and predict phenomena.”

  5. 5.

    Since 2004, TRIP has surveyed faculty members at colleges and universities who teach or conduct research on international relations in more than 20 countries, including the USA, Canada, and the UK. The surveyed countries do not, however, include China. For further details, see http://www.wm.edu/offices/itpir/_documents/trip/trip_around_the_world_2011.pdf

  6. 6.

    The rest are Nanjing University; Zhejiang University; Shanghai Jiao Tong University; University of Science and Technology of China; Wuhan University of Technology; Sun. Yat-Sen University; Tianjin University; Wuhan University; East China Normal University; Harbin Institute of Technology; and Dalian University of Technology. These universities were selected according to the “Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings 2014,” which analyzes 13 performance indicators to provide comprehensive and balanced comparisons. See http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2013-14/regional-ranking/region/asia/ (Accessed June 11, 2015).

  7. 7.

    In addition, when our keyword-based search was carried out in Chinese, both Mandarin and Cantonese were used for a more accurate representation.

  8. 8.

    See, for example, the following statement by Wendt: “the epistemological issue is whether we can have objective knowledge of these [socially constructed] structures” (Wendt 1995: 75).

  9. 9.

    See http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/cjip/about.html (Accessed March 11, 2015).

  10. 10.

    The investigation is based on the data gathered from the website of CJIP (http://cjip.oxfordjournals.org/ Accessed May 7, 2015). The texts and abstracts are accessible on the website. As before, a keyword-based search was undertaken, using the 38 post-positivism related terms.

  11. 11.

    This is consistent with what Peter M. Kristensen found in his study of the geography of IR which concludes that US-based journals and institutions continue to dominate IR (see Kristensen 2015: 249–257).

  12. 12.

    The institutions surveyed include: University of Science and Technology of China; Nanjing University; Zhejiang University; Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Wuhan University of Technology; Sun. Yat-Sen University; Tianjin University; Wuhan University; East China Normal University; Harbin Institute of Technology; and Dalian University of Technology.

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  1. Department of Political Science, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Yong-Soo Eun

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Eun, YS. (2016). Where Does IR Stand in Terms of Diversity?. In: Pluralism and Engagement in the Discipline of International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1121-4_2

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