Theorizing the Political Relevance of International Relations Theory

Abstract

Article (Accepted Version)http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Jahn, Beate (2017) Theorizing the political relevance of international relations theory. International Studies Quarterly, 61 (1). pp. 64-77. AbstractTwo broad positions -the 'gap-bridgers' and the 'gap-minders' -dominate the current debate on the (lack of) political relevance of International Relations (IR) theory.Missing from this debate, however, is a broader theoretical framework that allows us to move beyond their disagreements. Hence, this article provides a theoretical account of the relationship between politics and knowledge. It shows that in the modern context scientific knowledge achieves political relevance by distancing itself, through theorizing, from the particularities of politics. This paradoxical relationship gives rise to three different dimensions of political relevance at different levels of abstraction.Metatheory plays a crucial role in constituting the modern conception of politics; theories establish concrete political spaces; and empirical studies can influence specific policies. Taking this context into account, moreover, calls for a reassessment of core features of the discipline: its poverty, fragmentation, and immaturity are common to all modern sciences; they function as a driver of scientific progress; and metatheoretical debates address the political dimension of the modern sciences.Hence, the source of IR's political relevance lies in its theoretical foundations.Abandoning theory in favor of policy oriented studies would simultaneously undermine the discipline's policy relevance and its standing as a modern science.

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Critical international relations and the impact agenda

“…Within IR, debates have generally pitched calls for IR as a field and IR theory in particular to become more 'policy relevant' (e.g. Lepgold and Ninsic 2001), against counter-arguments, such as those from Johan Eriksson (2014) and Beate Jahn (2017), to the effect that theoretical work is politically relevant anyway. When critical IR has entered these debates in any explicit way, it has either been to support arguments for the value of theory (as in Jahn 2017) -with at least the sub-text that calls for greater 'relevance' and 'impact' overlook or undervalue the actual impact of IR theory -or to insist that critical IR illustrates IR's relevance problem at its worst (Wallace 1996).…”