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Summary ATIR Exam, 2aUniversity of Groningen
Week 1 – What is advanced theory of International Relations and
what role does knowledge-formation play within it?
ATIR – Lecutre 1 – 10 Februari 2022 –Prof. Dr. Luis Lobo-Guerrero
IR started by the question → how to prevent the world for the next war. Is this the basis of IR? Is IR a
discipline or a problem solving? IR is the discipline and ir is the problem, the phenomenon. When we do
international relations, we are engaging with politics in the world. We engage with global politics. But
where is the global? The global is everywhere, but mostly in our mentality. It is a mental construction
which influences the way we are approaching things.
What does it mean to do research? Especially in international relations? It starts with curiosity.
Knowledge, epistemology, and power
- What is theory?
- What is advanced theory?
- What is epistemology?
o Knowledge formations
- How is theory made, by whom, for what?
- What are the power relations involved in producing/making/using/imposing theory?
- What is the role of universities and research institutions in this process?
- What responsibility do we have in creating and using theory?
Compromise plays an important role.
Being critical
- Not just giving an opinion
- Not saying something is wrong, that is being judgemental
- It depends more on your perspective
o Helps us define the world
Buegger: From epistemology to practice
- Standards of reflexivity
- Reconnecting theory with practice
- Buegger paraphrasing Latour: ‘Science is a form of politics pursued by other means’ (p. 101)
- The fallacy of the ‘scientific method: hypothesis formulation, testing, re-testing…
- Need to be reflexive on the performative capacity of IR
Lake: why ‘isms’ are evil?
- The threat of ‘intellectual monocultures’ – possible hegemony of rationalism and certain modes
of reasoning
- Pathologies of research traditions
- The risk of ‘compartmentalisation’ of knowledge
o The alternative: inter-disciplinarité, trans-disciplinarity, post-disciplinarity…
- The narrowing down of our problems of study… seeing what our lenses allow us to see…
- Nomological (laws and causation) vs narrative (descriptive and reconstructive) forms of
explanation… or of understanding?
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,To explain is setting a correlation between. Things happen because of things.
Epistemology/ methodology
- Not a matter of hierarchy or weight within a scale of orders
- Methodology is about how we go investigate our problem matter
- Epistemology is about understanding the conditions of possibility for us thinking about that
problem matter
- Both matter, and both affect theory formation
- This course focuses mostly on epistemology, on taking a critical distance to the epistemological
formations of IR theory and practice
Bueger, Christian. From epistemology to practice: a sociology of science for international relations.
Journal of International Relations and Development (2012) 15, 97–109
· This reading should lead us to reconsider the connection between the abstract, theoretical,
conceptual and the practical of every day (p97)
· Reflexivity: connection of theory and practice looking into epistemology without falling into
relativism. The challenge to go beyond epistemology reviewing the past, present and future to
constitute “the international”
· Social reflexivity: how the structure, mechanisms and practices of IR have shaped the
international is thought of.
· Early research was shaped by eclecticism and lack of analysis- now- there is a more pluralistic
and colorful picture of IR across disciplinary boundaries.
Sociology of science
· Kuhn’s- father of contemporary sociology- importance of basing reflexivity in practice:
o 1. The position of social scientist in society
o 2. Quality of research
o 3. Education of future scientists and the evolution and scientific achievements.
· IR scholars have cottoned on the fact of IR capabilities to influence policy formulation
through their direct participation in policy formulation, as experts and advisors, through
their participation in collective and through their representations of the world.
· Research agenda that sees IR as an element of world politics and investigations.
· A sociological approach investigates the dynamic between organizations, practice of
knowledge, political agendas, political practices and IR practice.
· Disciplines (such as IR) reflect on the goals of research of universities- determine the scope
and importance of problems, phenomenon’s and articulate the intellectual community.
· Scientific practices are in a constant struggle of being significand or incoherent, this are
successfully once they become fields of knowledge and change the narrative-
Reconfiguration of Disciplines-
· Power Relationships between knowing a subject and giving authority to one or the other.
Sociology of science is a powerful tool to reconfigure the discipline of IR.
· Objective of sociology science in IR:
o Studying IR as a constitutive element of world politics
o Function as emancipatory reconfiguration
o Strengthen self evaluation and education
· Standards for evaluation of academic performance have become defined by consultants
and bureaucrats.
· Disciplines are communities of practices and norms, for IR norms are abstract and difficult
to apply in concrete situations.
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, · Managerialism: private sector management practices, focuses on markets and non-
governmental funding and evaluates the academic performance and implementation.
· The norms of Managerialism regulate behaviours, number of articles published, and
impact factors
o The critique is: it makes no sense to judge an author for the number of publications
rather than the ideas developed and how they help to solve problems.
· Sociology of science norms come from concert, historical and observable scientific
practices.
· IR has used manuals as a positive epistemology- some authors reject these- no one actually
follows the stylized steps of hypothesis formulation, testing and so on…
· Sociology of science- through IR- provides knowledge generation from a broader and
practical perspective.
· Cultural studies of science: social formation constituted by practices and in constant
relation to other formations. Understands science as a constant formation,
reconfigurations, new practices and concepts- IR should be considered as living, evolving
structure.
· Pele proposes Categorizing in a triangle: 1) state/politics, 2) culture/science and
economy/market.
· Organizational practices are consider the logistics of science; through this practices
knowledge circulates and content is made-Organizations as hosts of practices and
communities-
· New epistemic objects change and create new communities and disciplines and their
relations with others.
· Discussion of concepts- concepts worth studying are found in the gray zones between IR
and other actors.
Lake, David, Why ‘‘isms’’ Are Evil: Theory, Epistemology, and Academic Sects as Impediments to
Understanding and Progress, International Studies Quarterly (2011) 55, 465–480
The article presents a critique of the way theorists of international relations produce academic output:
they organize themselves in ‘sects’ that engage in self-affirming research and then argue amongst
themselves. The author is instead claiming that we should create mid-level theories of specific
phenomena.
The field of IR has been divided into paradigms: realism, liberalism, Marxism, neorealism, neoliberal
institutionalism, constructivism, postmodernism, and feminism (and more). Each has a set of
assumptions about the nature of world politics, thus presents different visions of world politics = we
still don’t have a general, universal, and empirically power inful theory of IR.
According to the author, the problem lies in the way we respond to these different traditions: we have
adopted a set of professional practices that produces 5 pathologies. These transform the traditions into
‘sects’ that don’t focus on explanation, rather on creating dogmas. The 5 pathologies are:
1. We reify research traditions: we organize (school) courses in terms of “great debates” and give
students readings to understand what the core assumption of each of these are + handbooks
are organized by research traditions. However, in doing this, we force research into artificial
traditions that we believe have real standing and meaning, which they don’t.
2. Having reified research traditions, we then reward extremism: everybody cites the same
canonical resources, which embody the assumptions of a research tradition. Their purpose is to
communicate meaning and info to other scholars + orient debates in the field of IR. These
canonical works shape the discipline, and their authors receive disproportionate professional
rewards. The rewards create incentives for younger scholars to compete for recognition by
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, adhering to one of these ‘sects’ and by taking even more extreme positions. This makes them
even more single-minded.
Because of the strive for professional recognition, we also create incentives for adherents of
new approaches to create new ‘isms’. This is because creating a new section provides legitimacy
and status to the adherent and gives credibility to the approach.
The first 2 pathologies bring to a proliferation of research traditions in IR.
3. We mistake research traditions for actual theories: the assumptions found in the different
traditions are actually often incomplete and other assumptions must be added for traditions to produce
hypotheses and explanations = the assumptions help scholars that are working using a specific research
tradition, but they are far from being complete enough to explain specific events.
Since these assumptions are incomplete, research traditions can’t be assessed directly. This is
because traditions are often underspecified and don’t generate valid hypotheses.
4. We narrow the permitted subject matter of our studies to those topics, periods, and observations
that tend to confirm the particular strengths of our tradition. (Realists focus on security policies of great
powers; liberals on economic policy) = researchers apply their theory where it’s more likely to fit.
Therefore, every tradition affirms itself by studying what it does best and ignoring everything that can’t
be explained using that tradition. Here, the traditions transform from objective social science to dogma
(theology). Experiments are only done to support the theories developed even before doing empirical
tests.
5. Scholars within each research tradition aspire for their approach to be the scientific paradigm =
we claim that our approach is general and should be treated as universal or near universal.
Because of these pathologies we focus on the superiority of one set of assumptions over the other. We
don’t seek to understand the world, we debate assumptions without end.
Alternative: reorganizing our research and professional association around problems, not approaches.
To do this we should:
• Stop teaching ‘isms’ to students
• Embrace partiality = acknowledge that all theories are partial and explicitly state they
boundaries and scope. Basically, if authors state the boundaries and scope of their theory, we
would know if the theory in question was meant to apply to a specific event and avoid criticism
such as “yes, you can explain this but you can’t explain that.”
In addition: we need to be able to communicate across theoretical traditions. The idea would be to have
partial theories that connect to other theories to carry out larger explanatory tasks. To do that we need
to have a common lexicon that allows translation across theories.
One possible lexicon is to think of politics as made up of actors pursuing interests while engaged in
interactions with other actors within institutions. Every theory should specify every component:
• units of analysis (individuals, organizations, states)
• interests (power, wealth)
• nature of interactions (zero-sum bargaining, multisum cooperation)
• how thickly institutionalized is the world
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