Pluralism, plurality and interdisciplinary relations in IR: shifting theoretical directions

Abstract

Despite concerns over the discipline’s state of ‘fragmentation’, there is no systematic empirical analysis of how this theoretical proliferation is driven by ‘importing’ from other fields. This paper attempts to fill this gap by analysing data collected from American, European, British and Japanese journals during 2011–2015. It argues that interdisciplinary relations are not only fuelling theoretical proliferation in the field but are also creating distinct directions for IR scholarship: a new ‘transatlantic divide’ between sub-disciplinary specialisation and broadening of the disciplinary contours in the English-speaking ‘core’, continued compliance with theoretical and methodological unity of the field in the non-English-speaking ‘semi-periphery’ and parts of the ‘periphery’, and a full embrace of interdisciplinarity in other parts of the ‘periphery’. These images each symbolise the direction that IR as a discipline is (or should be) heading, which will also imply a shift in what gets accepted as ‘IR’ in the coming decades.