IR has not, is not and will not take place

Abstract

Baron, Ilan Zvi (2015) 'IR has not, is not and will not take place.', International relations., 29 (2). pp. 259-263. Further information on publisher's website:http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0047117815585888dPublisher's copyright statement: Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.

The “UFO Taboo” Is What IR Theorists Make of It: “Sovereignty and the UFO” in Citational Perspective

“…As the median article during this period, it is difficult to conclude that the citational impact is deflated due to the taboo. In the case of Raymond Duvall's work in the period displayed in Table 2, "Sovereignty and the UFO" in fact ranks second behind only Barnett & Duvall, (2005). Therefore, the evidence of a taboo depressing impact is even less than in the case of Wendt.…”

“…The article was not widely cited and was seen by some as pushing the boundaries of acceptable thinking in security studies...” (Carpenter, 2016, 94). • “If the simulation is to function logically, the logic of levels and in regularly asserting IR’s stature at the highest level implies that future IR work would need to move up yet another level, to interstellar relations. This logic of moving up the levels is evident in Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall’s examination of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) and the anthropocentricity of sovereignty, although they are not the first social scientists to think about this final frontier” (Baron, 2015, 262).…”

What’s the point of being a discipline? Four disciplinary strategies and the future of International Relations

“…For Christine Sylvester (2007), the days of agreement about the focus of IR are over and as such ‘IR is at an end’ (p. 551). For others, it never really was a thing: ‘the subject matter that IR is concerned with is not distinct to IR’ and ‘the more IR tries to be a discipline, the greater its failure’ (Baron, 2015: 260–261). As George Lawson and Robbie Shilliam (2010) note, ‘IR appears as a kind of disciplinary Polo mint – an enterprise without a centre’ (p. 70).…”

“…The need to widen the subject area beyond state interaction is part of the case against considering IR ‘a discipline’: ‘a lot of what now counts for IR is not about [interaction between states] but about ideas, peoples, norms, aboriginal rights, culture, multinational corporations and the environment’ (Baron, 2015: 261). Caroline Kennedy-Pipe’s suggestion ‘for the future of the discipline is that, first, we forget about it as a discipline.…”

“…At one extreme, disciplinarity is simply considered a sociological phenomenon, consisting of institutions, journals and professional practices. In this view, IR’s disciplinarity is more akin to a ‘simulation’ (Baron, 2015: 261): it need not involve a settled or unique subject matter, agreed upon theories or methods. Demanding that would in any case disqualify most academic fields from being disciplines, and moreover, ‘it is almost impossible for any discipline to be truly autonomous from other realms of academic pursuit’ (Turton, 2015: 4).…”