Introduction: The international of everything
| Author | Justin Rosenberg,Benjamin Tallis |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00108367221098490 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00108367221098490
Cooperation and Conflict
2022, Vol. 57(3) 250 –267
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00108367221098490
journals.sagepub.com/home/cac
Introduction: The international
of everything
Justin Rosenberg and Benjamin Tallis
Abstract
This text introduces the Special Issue on Multiplicity. It sets out the broad research programme
of Multiplicity, considers some criticisms that have been made of this programme and then
summarises the contributions to the Special Issue.
Keywords
International Relations, international theory, introduction, multiplicity, special issue
Introduction
The international of everything
This Special Issue (SI) presents the latest wave of scholarship from an innovative
research programme in contemporary international theory: Multiplicity.1 First set out at
the EH Carr memorial lecture in 2015, the programme responds to the widespread view
that International Relations (IR) has failed to establish itself as an academic discipline
(Rosenberg, 2016). Its central claim is that, just like other human disciplines, IR can be
grounded in a distinctive feature of human existence. Yet this has not yet been done in a
way that delivers two fundamental requirements: a common ground for what is other-
wise often experienced as a dishearteningly fragmented field of IR theory, and a formula
for IR’s much needed, but thus far underdeveloped, contribution to the social sciences
and humanities at large. It is this curiously delayed aspect of IR’s disciplinary formation
– its ontological grounding – that the Multiplicity project seeks to address.
As a research programme, Multiplicity is beginning to come of age. The publication
of the 2015 Carr Lecture gave rise to a forum in International Relations (2017) and an
International Studies Association (ISA) round table event (Baltimore 2017). In 2018, the
potential for multiplicity to provide a new common ground within IR formed one of the
themes at the European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS) (Groningen 2018),
leading to a special issue of Globalizations (2020). The year 2019 also saw a 10-panel
Corresponding author:
Justin Rosenberg, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RH, UK.
Email: J.P.Rosenberg@sussex.ac.uk
1098490CAC0010.1177/00108367221098490Cooperation and ConflictRosenberg and Tallis
research-article2022
Article
Rosenberg and Tallis 251
section on Multiplicity at the European International Studies Association (EISA) confer-
ence in Sofia, as well as journal forums in the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen
(2019) and New Perspectives (2019). In 2020, a fresh group of scholars came together
(online) in a second EWIS workshop. The contents of the current Special Issue arose
from this workshop.
In line with the 2020 EWIS conference theme (‘Together We’re Stranger’), the
workshop initially focused on the question of ‘difference’ in IR – the second of the
originally identified five consequences of multiplicity. But in doing so, it also increas-
ingly explored the question of IR’s potential contribution to other disciplines such as
Cultural Studies (CS), Business Ethics and food in History. Finally, the contributions to
the workshop came from a variety of positions – Realist, Liberal, Constructivist, Post-
structuralist, Feminist, Historical Sociological and Historical Materialist – providing
further indications of Multiplicity’s potential for overcoming the internal divisions of
‘camp IR’ (Sylvester, 2007) – or ‘campfire IR’ as it is often referred to. As these discus-
sions progressed, they cohered around the notion of IR’s value per se – not just to other
disciplines, but to understanding the social world in ways those other disciplines do not.
The full potential of IR, we suggest, lies in its ability to identify and interpret ‘the inter-
national of everything’.
This Introduction describes the articles which compose the Special Issue. But first it
takes three steps in order to situate them in relation to the wider programme of
Multiplicity research and its contribution to IR. We begin with the question of IR’s dis-
ciplinary insecurity: Is this just the local version of debates over self-definition that go
on in all disciplines all the time? Or is there truly something peculiar and incomplete
about IR’s intellectual formation as a field of study? Next, we set out the problematic of
Multiplicity as an ontological foundation for IR, and we address the special liabilities –
and possibilities – associated with the idea of ‘societal multiplicity’. Finally, we ask
why Multiplicity might be able to define a common ground for IR theory when earlier
attempts have been rejected. Does that rejection mean that the search for a shared lan-
guage is misguided in principle? Or might Multiplicity differ from earlier attempts in
ways that alter the possibilities involved?
The problem of IR
The view of IR as a disciplinary failure is not, of course, based on the institutional met-
rics of disciplinarity – numbers of students, researchers, professional journals, annual
conferences and so on. For by all of these measures IR has long since arrived in the pano-
ply of Western social sciences and humanities. Rather, the claim has been that, unlike
other disciplines, IR brought with it no new viewpoint on the social world. Over the
years, it has imported numerous viewpoints from other disciplines – the spatial turn, the
historical turn, the linguistic turn, the practice turn and so on. But as Chris Brown (2013),
among many others, has pointed out, there has been no answering ‘international turn’, no
export of a big idea from IR which has been widely taken up elsewhere (p. 484). As a
result, even where other disciplines have sought to address the international dimension
of their own subject matter, there has been no stock of imported ideas from IR on which
they have drawn.
Get this document and AI-powered insights with a free trial of vLex and Vincent AI
Get Started for FreeStart Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting