A common complaint among international-relations scholars is that our journals don’t sufficiently engage with big, new, and pressing issues of world politics. Those that do, on the other hand, often get criticized for a lack of rigor. I’ve made this complaint before, in the context of the financial crisis, and Kate Weaver offered some thoughts about “what’s wrong” with IPE. But the problem extends far beyond the financial crisis and IPE.
Standard explanations for this state of affairs include:
- the length of the publication cycle: it can take years to get from paper, to submission, to making it through peer review, to showing up in a journal;
- disciplinary incentives to tackle narrow topics and to squeeze incremental findings out of those topics; and
- the general parochialism of academic international relations.
On the other hand, not a few people argue that the whole point of academic international-relations work is to avoid faddishness and overly speculative claims about unfolding events. Anyone who has ever head “journalism” used as an insult knows one version of this line of argument. Still, the fact that international-relations articles usually genuflect in the direction of policy relevance suggests that even those in this camp think journals should have contemporary salience.
I’m not visiting this well-trod terrain to provoke a meta-argument about scholarship. Rather, I’m curious what “big” questions deserve more attention in our journals. The nature and dynamics of contemporary economic order strikes me as an obvious candidate, but what else is out there? And how ought such questions be addressed in a way that maintains a commitment to scholarly rigor–in its myriad forms?
I suspect that I’ve asked these questions in way unlikely to spark much conversation. If so, I’ll try to come at them again in a subsequent post. But still, I’d love some serious engagement from Duck readers.
“A common complaint among international-relations scholars is that our journals don’t sufficiently engage with big, new, and pressing issues of world politics.”
Is this because scholars are bored and want more interesting journals to advance the scholarly field of IR, or that they’re hoping for a wider audience (policymakers, citizens, etc)?
The first issue should be a scholarship debate on “Where is IR going”, the second issue is about “Why IR Matters (And why Coburn deserves Coal for Christmas)”.
The present and future of academic journals help to define those debates, and I hope whatever answers are discussed here can complement those questions as well.
A “big” question that IR should surely be paying more attention to (unless I’m missing a significant corpus of work out there somewhere) is how climate change is affecting and will affect international politics. I’m mainly Middle East/North Africa focused, so I’m interested in water and food security, desertification and climate refugees: when I teach on these issues in an IR class I tend to assign articles from outside the subdiscipline, usually outside political science altogether, which is not very satisfying. But it’s not just a MENA issue, of course. Sub-saharan Africa and South Asia, among others, face the same issues. Arctic melt and the scramble for resources is also going to be huge, I would have thought.
I agree. I focus on human rights issues, specifically the international legislation (or lack thereof) on sex trafficking. Most all of the journal articles on the matter are located in sociology or criminal justice, barely making an appearance in IR/Poy Sci journals. I think it speaks volumes to how important the field views environmental and human rights issues, which I believe will be an unavoidable topic of discussion in the coming years. I suppose, however, that the editors would rather keep discussing such sexy topics as world systems theory and voter turnout.
The big classic question is: why war? And I do believe we have heaps and heaps of work on this question. Sure, now some of it has moved to “why civil war?” which includes duration, onset, effects, etc. In IPE there is heaps of work on the big questions of why trade/don’t trade, so I am not sure there is a shortage of big question stuff. Just some people whine about the lack of big questions and other whine about the lack of smaller questions and few whine about the absence of medium range work. The reality is that it is damn big tent, that it keeps getting bigger, but we are not kicking anybody out of it either, so the big question folks are still present at the circus. We just happen not to notice them as much as we used to.
I haven’t gone through all the major journals in 6 months or so to double-check, but at that point there had not been a single article directly related to the Global Financial Crisis in IO, ISQ, World Politics, or any of the Big Three. (It’s possible I missed something but I don’t think so.) We’re six years on from the start of the crisis now.
We’re starting to see a few “effects of the crisis for issue X” articles trickle out now — there’s one in Early View at ISQ — but not much at all on macro causes or macro consequences of it. I think this is a big issue, because I think we’re in the middle of a major structural shift in the global economy. The financial crisis was one effect of this, and there will most likely be others.
What about Benjamin J. Cohen on the “Future of the Euro”? https://www.polsci.ucsb.edu/faculty/cohen/recent/pdfs/RIPE.pdf
I should have clarified: no research articles. There have been tons of speculative articles, reviews of literature, and sociologies of the discipline. (Also, RIPE isn’t one of the journals I listed. RIPE has, in general and along with NPE, been one of the journals most concerned with the crisis. But those do not represent the mainstream of American IPE.)
I’d like to emphasize the point about the disciplinary nature of academic publishing. That is, the journals are the gatekeepers of disciplinary understandings of knowledge production. So in the social sciences this now translates into methodological techniques in search of problems to explore. The less mainstream outlets resort instead to more or less esoteric jargon to underpin their knowledge claims. Both these approaches are pretty much incompatible with contributing to navigating a crisis situation where decisions need to be taken urgently.
Structural violence is rarely discussed. Also, wrt the causes of war, there is an unfortunate tendency to write off cases of non-great power interstate war as unimportant if the findings do not generalize to great power conflicts. So, few papers explaining the causes of interstate fighting in the DRC for example in the major journals (separate from civil war literatures).
Great questions Dan. Couple of thoughts, and some of them violate Dan’s wish to avoid the meta-argument about scholarship, but here goes.
1. It is worth distinguishing between “big questions” and “relevant to current policy issues.” These strike me as two different things. Current policy issues may be directly related to big questions, but they need not be.
2. Dan says, “Still, the fact that international-relations articles usually genuflect
in the direction of policy relevance suggests that even those in this
camp think journals should have contemporary salience.” I think Dan is incorrect about that fact. If you look at the 12 journals that publish the most cited IR scholarship over the past 30 years, what you find is that less than 15% of articles actually include a policy recommendation. Further, if you drop International Security from that list, the number plummets. Finally, if you look at the past 10 years you have even lower numbers of policy recommendations in these articles.
3. For list of big issues that folks could address more, I guess I agree with Steve. There is a big tent and nobody is getting kicked out. Some questions/approaches gain/lose attention over time, but based on the stuff I am sent to review, there is no shortage of big and little questions and some people are still committed to re-fighting the battles of the 1980s. Go for it. That said, you asked for lists, so here are some big issues that few folks are addressing now, and likely more will/should address in the future:
A. How will the rise of China and other BRICS shape the international order (or the international regime for X).
B. Why have we seen a decline in the rate and severity of interstate war and will this continue? (No need to leave this to social psychologists).
C. How will the revolution in social media and information technology shape politics and foreign policy outcomes? Heck, how will said revolution shape individual and group identity, which will shape policy choices and outcomes.
D. What is the relationship between economic development and foreign policy choices/international outcomes?
E. How does variation in politics and policy at the sub-national level shape international outcomes?
4. On the case/cases of the current financial crisis, I recommend a new book by my colleague, Scott Nelson, entitled A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters. It is much more readable than anything in our journals, perhaps because it is written by an historian. But I used it in an intermediate IR course. Great complement to traditional IPE literature. https://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0307474321
Time for me now to go work on some of these big research questions….or something a bit smaller.
Actually there’s quite a lot of writing on questions A through E, though maybe not in the ‘top’ journals.
W/r/t yr question B, worth noting that there has been a decline in armed conflict in general, of which the decline in interstate war is simply the most visible and talked-about aspect.