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This article makes an argument about chiasmatic knowledge production that seeks to cut across the entrenched division between the subject and object of inquiry, on the one hand, and the narrative and normative authority of the scholar, on the other, that is inherent in most writing in international relations. We revisit our own research encounter in the field of European security to explore the premises and implications of fieldwork relationships between researchers and practitioners and show their potentially transformative effects. Classifying such engagements as acts of professional transgression by both sets of parties overlooks their promise to facilitate the understanding of security practice ‘from within’ and to provide for tangible scholarly and political criticality. It is argued that, in the restricted realm of security, extensive interaction with practitioners could be a proxy for participant observation. Yet, we look further than that. We develop a concept of ‘chiasmatic crossings’ that reflects and helps theorize the ideational give-and-take and conceptual ruptures in the process of co-authorship that are indicative of distinct trajectories in European security research. This challenges the knowledge claims and static positions of both ‘problem-solving’ and ‘critical’ scholars in the field.

Politics was long overlooked in analyses of architecture. International politics still is. Yet one of the sub-fields of International Relations seemingly best equipped to address this oversight, 'International Political Sociology' (IPS), is at a crossroads with leading scholars bemoaning the dominance of Sociology over the political and the international. They concur on the need revive the political, but some advocate abandoning the international. Instead, I argue that IPS scholars should embrace the international and suggest a particular way to do so via Rosenberg's concept of Multiplicity. This transforms the international from the object of analysis into an analytical and heuristic lens through which to examine the constitutive effects on, (e.g.) architecture, of (international) societal coexistence , interaction, combination, difference, and dialectical change. Using examples from the late Habsburg period to the present, I sketch an international politics of 'Czech' architecture and show the value of 'the international' in and beyond IPS.

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