Is There Still a German IR Discourse? Investigations in the Semi-Periphery of an Academic Discipline

Steffek, Jens; Lasshof, Yannick

doi:10.1093/isp/ekab008

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Finally, another question that came to my mind relates to how many IR scholars experience themselves as working in the periphery (see for example Cornut and Battistella (2013) and Steffek and Lasshof (2021) for the cases of IR in France and Germany and Alejandro (2018b) for the cases of Brazil and India). Or, to put it differently, who does not experience themselves working at IR's periphery?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do international relations scholars not care about Central and Eastern Europe or do they just take the region for granted? A conclusion to the special issue

Alejandro

2021

J Int Relat Dev

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I have very little knowledge of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). I have attended an academic conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2019, been on a romantic gateway to Zagreb in 2013, shared an office with a specialist of Moldova and Crimea for a year, and my partner is Turkish. As a non-expert outsider, sharing my reading experience about whether the provincialising ambition of the special issue 'worked' for me -that is, whether it successfully decentred my perception or not -makes me somewhat of a reflexive test subject. Another reason why I may have been invited to conclude this special issue relates to my interest in questions of knowledge production and my experience studying the discipline of International Relations (IR). I have researched different questions the special issue addresses. I investigated how to make IR a less parochial/Eurocentric field of study -by probing the conditions of production and internationalisation of the discipline in Brazil and India (Alejandro 2018b). I worked to show that 'European IR' goes beyond what is produced in the United Kingdom and Scandinavian countries (Alejandro 2017) -by co-editing a book series that aims to deuniversalise and historicise European transnational traditions in IR Theory (Jørgensen et al. 2017). I explored the conditions for formulating critiques that produce something other than the problems they seek to denounce (Alejandro 2021b). And so, I have tried to write this conclusive essay from this outsider/connoisseur position. 2In this contribution, I review the special issue in light of the broader debates it contributes to. I structure this conclusive article around the two goals set up in the special issue's introduction: 1) investigating how CEE has been used 'in the scholarship of politics and international relations in order to account for the relative silence about CEE in the debates on "worlding IR"', and how knowledge about and from CEE has been used in the discipline more generally; 2) exploring 'what provincializing the discipline from CEE might look like' (Mälksoo 2021b). How can we explain CEE's relative absence in the 'worlding IR' conversation and how has CEE been used in IR instead?This question emerges out of four decades of questioning IR's unequal institutionalisation around the world, which hinders its capacity to produce knowledge capable of explaining the diversity of sociopolitical phenomena in different contexts and potentially contributes to the (re)production of an unfair socio-political order. To engage such issues, IR scholarship started showcasing IR production in different countries/regions in an exercise sometimes referred to as 'mapping the discipline' (Holden 2002; Kristensen 2015). This special issue takes as a starting point the general lack of interest for CEE in this debate.Apart from a few initiatives (see Drulák 2009;Drulák et al. 2009 as well as Thümmler (2014 for the influence of emigres scholars on the global thinking about the international), CEE seemed to have fallen between the cracks of a conversation structured ...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do international relations scholars not care about Central and Eastern Europe or do they just take the region for granted? A conclusion to the special issue

Alejandro

2021

J Int Relat Dev

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“…'Semi-periphery' consists of 'IR communities from countries that have abundant material resources, modern university systems, and easy access to the English-speaking core, but for reasons of language and diverging academic cultures do not fully engage in its academic practices'. 59 As a disciplinary 'semi-periphery', the German IR community faces a dilemma with pressures to internationalise on the one hand, and to cater towards the national discourse in the local language on the other. They are heavily influenced by the English-speaking 'core', with theory also being imported from the centre.…”

Section: Discussion: From Fragmentation To Meaningful Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Compared to the English-speaking 'core', the Japanese IR community can be characterised as a disciplinary 'semi-periphery' that is strongly influenced by and imported from the 'core'. 5 Where does this leave the wider 'periphery'? While strictly beyond the scope of the data analysis here, the recent rise in alternative approaches emanating from the 'non-West' or the 'Global South' that question the ontological foundations of the discipline point towards a possibility of interdisciplinary relations radically upending the current disciplinary structure.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pluralism, plurality and interdisciplinary relations in IR: shifting theoretical directions

Ataka

2022

International Relations

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Despite concerns over the discipline’s state of ‘fragmentation’, there is no systematic empirical analysis of how this theoretical proliferation is driven by ‘importing’ from other fields. This paper attempts to fill this gap by analysing data collected from American, European, British and Japanese journals during 2011–2015. It argues that interdisciplinary relations are not only fuelling theoretical proliferation in the field but are also creating distinct directions for IR scholarship: a new ‘transatlantic divide’ between sub-disciplinary specialisation and broadening of the disciplinary contours in the English-speaking ‘core’, continued compliance with theoretical and methodological unity of the field in the non-English-speaking ‘semi-periphery’ and parts of the ‘periphery’, and a full embrace of interdisciplinarity in other parts of the ‘periphery’. These images each symbolise the direction that IR as a discipline is (or should be) heading, which will also imply a shift in what gets accepted as ‘IR’ in the coming decades.

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IR Theory and the Core–Periphery Structure of Global IR: Lessons from Citation Analysis

Risse‐Kappen

Wemheuer-Vogelaar

Havemann

2022

International Studies Review

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This article contributes to two debates about international relations (IR) as a discipline: first, how global is IR, and how is it structured? Second, what is the state of theory in IR? We conducted (co-) citation analyses of both Web of Science (WoS) and—for the first time— non-WoS publications from Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. With regard to the first question, we find that global IR resembles a core–periphery structure as a “hub and spoke” system whereby transatlantic core nodes are interconnected to each other and to some periphery nodes, while the periphery nodes are connected to the core but not to each other. IR scholarship in the periphery quotes the transatlantic theory cluster but is not linked to each other, not even in the same region. Knowledge produced in the periphery has to go through the transatlantic core in order to be recognized globally. As to the transatlantic core, we identify two major (co-) citation clusters: one committed to IR theory-building across issue areas from a variety of perspectives and the other focused on security studies with a strong emphasis on quantitative methods. With regard to the second question, global IR hangs together through references to the IR theory cluster consisting of North American and European authors who appear to define what IR theory is. Scholars in the periphery refer to this transatlantic IR theory cluster when engaging in theory-building. IR theories have become rather diverse and pluralistic, even in the core. While scholars still refer to the big “isms,” they use them around the globe in a synthesizing manner.

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Is There Still a German IR Discourse? Investigations in the Semi-Periphery of an Academic Discipline

Cited by 3 publications

References 45 publications

Do international relations scholars not care about Central and Eastern Europe or do they just take the region for granted? A conclusion to the special issue

Do international relations scholars not care about Central and Eastern Europe or do they just take the region for granted? A conclusion to the special issue

Pluralism, plurality and interdisciplinary relations in IR: shifting theoretical directions

IR Theory and the Core–Periphery Structure of Global IR: Lessons from Citation Analysis

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