Fragmenting and connecting? The diverging geometries and extents of IR’s interdisciplinary knowledge-relations
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066120922605 |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
Fragmenting and connecting?
The diverging geometries and
extents of IR’s interdisciplinary
knowledge-relations
Stephen Aris
Department of Geography and Environment, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Abstract
IR has long been concerned about its claim on disciplinary status. This includes concerns
about its differentiation from Political Science and a divide between scholars who
advocate a narrow disciplinar y approach and others who conceive of IR as a pluri-
disciplinary concept. Although these dilemmas revolve around its position vis-`
a-vis
other disciplines, the vast majority of the recent disciplinary-sociology debates have
focused on the extent of IR scholarship’s intradisciplinary fragmentation, along episte-
mological, topical, national, status and other lines. However, the sociology of science
literature stresses that disciplines are the product of not only internal practice but also
their knowledge relations to and differentiation from other disciplines. In short, intra-
disciplinary fragmentation cannot be considered as detached from a discipline’s relations
to other disciplines – and, by extension, the differentiated knowledge relationships held
by distinct intradisciplinary fragments to other disciplines. Taking this into account, this
article uses bibliometric analysis of journals as a proxy for analysing the relationship
between IR’s intradisciplinary make-up and its interdisciplinary relations to eight cognate
disciplines between 2013 and 2017. Three distinct modes of bibliometric analysis are
operationalised to map three different aspects of interdisciplinary knowledge practice:
(inter)disciplinary debates (direct citation), multidisciplinary knowledge bases (biblio-
graphic coupling) and interdisciplinary knowledge production (co-citation). On this basis,
the article asks, one, whether and how differences in the interdisciplinary knowledge
relations practised by IR scholarship correlate with intra-IR lines of fragmentation. And
two, what are the implications for how IR’s socio-intellectual composition is understood
and its disciplinary status evaluated?
Corresponding author:
Stephen Aris, Department of Geography and Environment, University of Geneva, Switzerland.
Email: stephen_aris@hotmail.com
European Journal of
International Relations
2021, Vol. 27(1) 175–203
ªThe Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066120922605
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JR
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Keywords
Interdisciplinarity, disciplinarity, International Relations, sociology of knowledge,
bibliometrics, science
International Relations (IR) scholarship frequently expresses concern about its dis-
ciplinary identity and health.
1
It has been suggested that this is due to IR’s ‘inferiority
complex’ about its status as a standalone discipline (Turton, 2015b: 248; see also
Rosenberg, 2016; Lawson and Shilliam, 2010; Albert and Buzan, 2017). Such dis-
ciplinary handwringing is often seen as taking place against the seemingly perennial
dilemma of how to interpret the grey area of IR’s independent status vis-`a-vis Political
Science (Reiter, 2015; Rosenberg, 2016). While, in parallel, a growing number of voices
are advocating that IR be understood as a multi-, pluri- or inter-disciplinary object of
study, around which all production of knowledge on the ‘international’ can coalesce
(Aalto, 2015; Grenier, 2015; Jackson, 2017). In this way, questions about its relation-
ships to other disciplines are commonly regarded as integral to IR’s disciplinary
disposition.
Yet, IR’s disciplinary composition, status and health have predominantly been
studied from an exclusively intradisciplinary perspective, most often mapping out its
internal intellectual and institutional organisation. As noted by Kristensen (2015: 244),
most such studies and commentaries have concluded that IR is a ‘more fragmented
discipline today’. Indeed, several scholars have, drawing on Whitley’s (2000) typology,
suggested that the contemporary socio-intellectual organisation of IR is best described as
a ‘fragmented adhocracy’ (Oren, 2016; Waever, 2016; Wight, 2019) – fragmentation that
is frequently attributed to intradisciplinary differentiation along epistemological,
2
the-
oretical,
3
methodological,
4
topical
5
and national/regional
6
dividing lines. The upshot is
that IR often characterises itself as a ‘dividing discipline’ (Holsti, 1985; Kristensen,
2012), splintered into different ‘sects’ (Lake, 2011), ‘campfires’ (Sylvester, 2007) or
‘paradigms’ (Lapid, 1989). This perception often encompasses the implicit, and some-
times explicit, assumption that IR is more fragmented than other disciplines, and that this
constitutes a threat to IR’s disciplinary status (Holsti, 1985; Lake, 2011).
The sociology of science literature, however, stresses that disciplines are a product
not only of internal coherence but also of the external differentiation of this internal
practice to that of other disciplines (Abbott, 2001; Frodeman, 2014; Klein, 1996;
Weingart, 2010). This is not to say that academic disciplines are closed knowledge
systems (Leydesdorff, 2015; Luhmann, 1995). To the contrary, the knowledge produced
by one discipline is openly available and able to flow to all others. In this context,
disciplinary knowledge production centres on the continual practice of engaging with
knowledge derived from other disciplines, but reinscribing it according to intradisci-
plinary codes, debates and positions, thereby constituting the boundary that differentiates
its disciplinary knowledge to all others (Barry et al., 2008; Bu
¨ger and Gadinger, 2007;
Gieryn, 1983; Klein, 1996). From this vantage point, healthy disciplinary practice
involves more than internal unity; it is based on balancing internal enclosure with
external exchange with other disciplines. Put differently, scholarly practice that both
generates distinctive disciplinary debates, problematiques and objects of study, and
176
European Journal of International Relations
27(1)
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