International Relations as a Field of Study

The field of international relations (commonly abbreviated IR) focuses on a variety of subjects. The many connotations that are usually associated with the term relations (one of the most under-specified terms in the field itself) and the aesthetic quality that accompanies relating the name of the field (IR) to a broad set of subjects subsumed under the same term in lowercase letters, “international [Page 1298]relations,” help explain why both IR and international relations are still widely accepted. Of course, this is not to say that there is consensus. Both the name of the field and the description of its subject matter(s) have always been contested. Different observers have argued that international ought to be replaced by interstate, transnational, or global—to name just a few. Others would like to see relations replaced by studies or politics. A brief look at some of these alternative combinations—for example, “interstate relations,” “transnational politics,” or “global studies”—would give any reader a quick idea as far as different emphases are concerned, even if he or she is not familiar with the normative and theoretical underpinnings that inform these alternative descriptions of the field of study and its subject matter(s). For this reason, conceptual contestation is unsurprising; it is already an expression of the inevitable and recurring ascertainment of the borders of a field of study by the community of scholars belonging to it and claiming it as their own.

In the case of IR, contestation extends well beyond the question of how a rather loosely defined field of study—or “fragmented ‘nonfield”’ (James Rosenau, 1993)—is to be properly named. Especially in the English-speaking world, IR is sometimes defined in terms of an academic discipline of its own, separate from political science, or as a multidisciplinary field of study. On a global scale, however, this is not normally the case. Here, it is usually considered to be one of the major sub-fields (or subdisciplines) of political science. Even if the term discipline may sometimes be used interchangeably with field of study, it is meant in the sense of a more loosely defined field that keeps the outer borderlines both fairly fluid and permeable while, at the same time, emphasizing that its core is more clearly demarcated and in some ways also more stable. Of course, any such characterization of the field is in itself contestable. More specifically, two caveats need to be kept in mind with regard to any exercise in “mapping” a field of study. First, as Hilary Putnam put it, any such overview necessarily involves a particular “view from somewhere” that is shaped by specific individual and cultural formative experiences. Even if this view of IR is shaped by an environment that allows for pluralism with regard to normative commitments, theoretical orientations, and methodological preferences, it is inevitably limited by what IR scholarship is actually accessible via particular languages and academic infrastructures. The academic infrastructure of IR is lacking in crucial respects when measured against the ideal of a global discipline that is living up to the spread, reach, and interconnections of its subject matter. Second, there is also an inevitable temporal dimension of contestation. Any overview of IR as a field of study necessarily resembles a snapshot of the field at a particular point in time and will, almost inevitably, be the view of how the discipline used to operate in the past. This notion of IR as an evolving and historically situated field becomes strikingly clear when one compares similar overviews of the field in approximately 10-year intervals from the early 1920s onward. Not only do descriptions of the subject matter change. Rather, change is ubiquitous with regard to the borderlines drawn to other (sub)fields and the names used to denote and demarcate the field's most prominent theories. Therefore, this overview ought to be seen as a “disciplining” exercise in the dual sense of the word. It is supposed to provide a perspective on the structure of the discipline and familiarize the reader with some of the prominent conventions, theories, and practices of the field of IR as they are currently viewed in the field in terms of a history of the present. At the same time, it ought to be kept in mind that the very concept of scholarship points at moving beyond these conventions, theories, and practices. By de-emphasizing disciplinary stability in favor of an evolutionary perspective, this way of proceeding does not deny that a structural view of the discipline may be useful. As a matter of fact, it is—and such a structural perspective will be applied in the first section of this overview. However, looking at the discipline with a bird's-eye perspective necessarily emphasizes the big picture and will thus almost inevitably appear fairly static. The second, shorter section of this entry therefore applies a more historical and dynamic perspective depicting the field as an expanding one along many frontiers simultaneously.

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