Interdisciplinarity and the Study of International Relations

Interdisciplinary International Relations in practice

“…Interdisciplinary approaches in their various forms can for their part overcome the limitations of individual disciplines by combining, crossing, bridging and transforming the highly specialized knowledge individual disciplines offer. 18 Of course, picking empirical findings from various disciplines to write on topical problems has always occurred within the contours of applied IR. Although such an impressionistic method may be a good start, it offers no systematic basis for new discoveries.…”

Introduction: Interdisciplinarity and the International Relations event horizon

“…David Long’s chapter in that volume (Long, 2011) offered a particularly helpful way of differentiating between these different types of interdisciplinarity. He asked us to distinguish between multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and neo-disciplinarity.…”

“…Multidisciplinarity assumes the existence and relative permanence of the established disciplines and their relatively unique capacity to address a specific range of questions about a defined subject matter. For this type of scholarship, interdisciplinarity is needed because subjects often overlap: ‘more than one discipline is needed to understand some topics, research problems or subject matter’ (Long, 2011, p.38). Herding ourselves into professionally defined silos has important costs, whatever the advertised benefits of specialization.…”

“…Trans disciplinarity rejects the idea that disciplines have a unique hold on any core subject. Indeed, for ‘some advocates of transdisciplinarity, disciplines reflect congealed practices of specialization generating knowledge that is uselessly narrow and baroque’ (Long, 2011, p. 40). Hence, this type of scholarship ‘calls instead for an alternative or novel approach at odds with one or more of the established disciplines’ (Long, 2011, p. 44).…”

“…Indeed, for ‘some advocates of transdisciplinarity, disciplines reflect congealed practices of specialization generating knowledge that is uselessly narrow and baroque’ (Long, 2011, p. 40). Hence, this type of scholarship ‘calls instead for an alternative or novel approach at odds with one or more of the established disciplines’ (Long, 2011, p. 44). Neo -disciplinarity shares with transdisciplinarity the scepticism of established disciplinary subject boundaries, paradigms and methods but adopts a more conventional approach to disciplinarity as a necessary but problematic feature of how scholarly knowledge is generated.…”