Description
International Relations as a science is a fiction. This fiction of science (which we render as ‘science-fiction’) guides the discipline’s reproduction through the exclusion and marginalisation of research deemed uncompliant with its orthodoxies. Specifically, we argue: (i) these disciplining efforts are rooted in stories about IR’s historical development as a social science; (ii) such exclusionary science-fiction narratives limit the discipline’s ability to apprehend significant dimensions of world politics; and (iii) learning from research that acknowledges the fiction of science in IR is a way to open up, and narrate other possibilities for, the discipline. These arguments are developed from an original bibliometric analysis of co-citation practices. We use this to map the evolution of IR’s intellectual ‘camps’, visually demonstrating the discipline’s increasing division and continued marginalisation or exclusion of ‘heretical’ research, including within ‘critical’ scholarly communities. Analysing IR in this way enables us to make a significant contribution to the advancement of IR’s sociology of knowledge, including longstanding interrogations of IR’s origins and development, as well as more recent debates on IR’s growing gap between theory and methods, and its implications. Exploring what is at stake in debates around the proper pursuits of IR scholarship, we provide a unique assessment of the anthropology of group membership within IR and their political dynamics. More specifically, we interrogate the study of popular culture in IR, arguing for the imperative inclusion of research on popular artefacts, even where these approaches unavoidably challenge and subvert the notion of disciplinary International Relations.
