What is a minor international theory? On the limits of ‘Critical International Relations’
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088220956680 |
| Published date | 01 October 2021 |
| Date | 01 October 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088220956680
Journal of International Political Theory
2021, Vol. 17(3) 488 –511
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088220956680
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What is a minor international
theory? On the limits of
‘Critical International
Relations’
Nicholas Michelsen
King’s College London, UK
Abstract
This article argues that ‘Critical International Relations’, often counterpoised to
‘mainstream IR’, has come to function as a major theoretical category in its own right.
It argues that critique involves ‘minor theorising’, defined as the practice of disturbing
settled theoretical assumptions in the discipline. The article examines the role and
significance of ‘minor theories’ in the context of ongoing debates about Critical IR. It
argues that critique is defined by context, and is politically and ethically ambiguous. The
article concludes that the scope for critique could be advanced if the terms ‘Critical IR’
and ‘Critical IR Scholar’ are dropped from scholarly parlance.
Keywords
Critical IR, critique, International Relations, minor theory
Introduction
In the 1980s ‘Critical International Relations Theory’ began to be rhetorically counter-
posed to ‘Mainstream IR Theory’ (Cox, 1981; Linklater, 1990; Neufeld, 1993; Price and
Reus-Smit, 1998; Smith et al., 1996; Steans, 2003). ‘Critical IR’ is not a marginal subfield
or theoretical subculture of disciplinary IR. Academic departments, particularly in the
UK, self-define as leaders in Critical IR, and sections at leading International Conventions
self-define using the nomenclature of Critical IR. The label ‘Critical’ is used in IR job
descriptions, as an identifier carrying symbolic capital. The rise of ‘Critical IR’ as a rec-
ognised category during the last three decades has been accompanied by the
Corresponding author:
Nicholas Michelsen, Department of War Studies, School of Security, King’s College London, Strand, London
WC2R 2LS, UK.
Email: nicholas.michelsen@kcl.ac.uk
956680IPT0010.1177/1755088220956680Journal of International Political TheoryMichelsen
research-article2020
Article
Michelsen 489
institutionalisation of various Critical sub-disciplines in book series with major publishers
and Journals explicitly devoted to giving space to ‘Critical’ forms and styles of IR knowl-
edge production – with titles like Critical Security Studies, Critical Military Studies, or
Critical Terrorism Studies. These journals determine their object of study as a field of
scholarship around an issue (like Terrorism, Militarism or Security), which ‘Critical IR
Scholars’ argued they can address with greater nuance or under a guiding ethos of eman-
cipation (Booth, 1991; Jackson, 2016; Toros and Gunning, 2009). Major international
studies journals now expressly seek ‘submissions from allied critical traditions’, which
means that adopting the title of ‘Critical IR Scholar’ may be viewed as a professional
obligation in these settings, especially by younger academics (Lisle et al., 2017).
Should scholars committed to the vocation of academic critique be celebrating the rise
to power of ‘Critical IR’ as an identifying label? After all, it appears to have aided theo-
retical pluralisation within disciplinary IR, and opened space for novel, often ethically
and politically engaged, scholarship. This article contributes to an emerging body of
work in the discipline asking whether scholarship in IR needs to ‘bring the sword of criti-
cism to criticism itself’ (Latour, 2004: 227). The article argues that the identifier ‘Critical
IR Scholar’ has become a problematic label by which to describe academics, giving rise
to significant downsides for scholarship in the field. To some extent this is a permutation
of the problem of categorisation and labelling that all academic disciplines face. All theo-
retical categories commonly used in IR, such as Realism, Idealism, Liberalism, are all
known to hide diversity, and Critical IR is no different (Wæver, 1996). In this article, I
argue that ‘Critical IR’, as a category of scholarship, creates specific sociological and
methodological issues that are distinct from the problem of categorisation in general,
because it can undermine the practice of critique itself.
The article begins by examining the difference between the practice of critique within
the academic field of IR and the critiques people conduct in their everyday lives.
Following Deleuze and Guattari (1986), and Katz (1996, 2017), I argue that what distin-
guishes the practice of critique is a ‘minor’ relationship to established theoretical litera-
tures about IR, which have distinct historical and sociological conditions. Scholarly
critique involves ‘minor theorising’ because it disturbs settled theoretical assumptions
that structure debates within any academic setting. This is not the same as ‘criticism’ in
an everyday sense, or speaking in the name of marginalised groups in society.
The second section explores the rise of ‘Critical IR’ as a sociological category within
the discipline, distinct from the practice of critique. This section observes that ‘synoptic’
understandings of the role of critique in IR, as developed by Hoffman (1987) amongst
others, and updated by Levine (2012), make the case that Critical IR theoretical projects
all cohere around the pursuit of reflexivity (Hoffman, 1987; Levine, 2012). I argue that
this synoptic framing of ‘Critical IR’ inhibits the practice of critique inasmuch as it oper-
ates as an injunction to nuance. The article then examines ‘anti-synoptic’ accounts
Critical IR, and of the role of critique in IR, which can also be traced back to the late
1980s (for example, Sjoberg, 2017: 163). Examining the contemporary disciplinary sub-
fields of Decolonial and Queer IR, this section outlines the problems that can follow
from the presumption that engaging in critique signifies possession of a virtuous Critical
identity, and that ‘to be Critical’ scholars have to go ‘beyond’ disciplinary IR.
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