International Relations in the prison of Political Science

Abstract

In recent decades, the discipline of International Relations has experienced both dramatic institutional growth and unprecedented intellectual enrichment. And yet, unlike neighbouring disciplines such as Geography, Sociology, History and Comparative Literature, it has still not generated any big ideas that have impacted across the human sciences. Why is this? And what can be done about it? This article provides an answer in three steps. First, it traces the problem to )R s enduring definition as a subfield of Political Science. Second, it argues that IR should be re-grounded in its own disciplinary problematique: the consequences of (societal) multiplicity. And finally, it shows how this re-grounding unlocks the trans-disciplinary potential of IR. Specifically, uneven and combined development provides an example of an IR big idea that could travel to other disciplines: for by operationalizing the consequences of multiplicity, it reveals the causal and constitutive significance of the international for the social world as a whole.

An international politics of Czech architecture; or, reviving the international in international political sociology

“…Rosenberg argues that qualitative difference between societies is a necessary consequence of multiplicity stemming from geography and social development, which imply both differing distribution of resources (material and immaterial) and differing constellations of interaction and combination with other societies. He also notes that qualitative difference 'finds expression in a concrete configuration of societies that co-exist in space and time' (Rosenberg, 2016). Understanding the politics of constructing such spatio-temporal difference as well as the effects of its manifestations has long been a key concern for scholars of post-communist transitions (e.g.…”

“…Sociology, Geography, Anthropology, Law, and Science and Technology Studies. However, like other sub-fields of IR, it has been less successful in exporting ideas or analyses to those other disciplines (Brown, 2013;Rosenberg, 2016;Waever, 2007).…”

Cities and Water Security in the Anthropocene: Research Challenges and Opportunities for International Relations

“…Yet, IR scholars have largely disregarded the role of cities in the current international system (Acuto 2013;Curtis 2014;Chan 2016;Gordon 2016). Despite attempts at renewing and expanding IR -i.e., moving away from its mainstream framing and agenda -the field keeps returning to its conventional modes of thinking (Heng 2010): IR as a state-centric discipline that studies -through a positivist/rationalist point of a view, and stuck in its own reductionist disciplinary assumptions -an anarchic, competitive, and violent international system divided by territorial boundaries into sovereign states (Burke et al 2016;Rosenberg 2016). This means that, in IR scholarship, cities are considered as sub-national political entities (Curtis 2014) that are beyond the scope of the discipline's subject of study, namely interstate relations and the forms of international organisation allowed by them.…”

Theory, history, and the global transformation

“…These 'contradictory fusions' make clear that historical development is not linear or sequential, but jumbled and, as the experience of contemporary China aptly demonstrates, compressed. For more on this, see Rosenberg (2010Rosenberg ( , 2016. that the 19 th century global transformation is a macro-historical conjuncture of world historical proportions.…”