Description
The paper intends to contribute to vibrant debates on knowledge production in IR from a methodological point of view, by reimagining the notion and use of comparisons. Studies of the ‘international’ and its disciplinary construction into International Relations have long relied on methodological frameworks derived from a positivist tradition interested in asserting ‘objective’ and ‘universal’ knowledge claims. While debates on the uses of methods, ethics and fieldwork have flourished over the past years especially thanks to the contributions of critical feminist and de-colonial scholars, this paper focuses on the less explored issue of use of the comparative method. We argue that established, conventional approaches to comparative research are not only epistemologically problematic for critical scholars who reject the logic of control, replicability and positivist conceptions of causality: they have also supported the Eurocentrism of IR by giving the illusion that comparisons lead to generalisable forms of knowledge, while at the same time fostering methodological nationalism, setting the limits of what constitutes a case, and what kind of cases can be productively compared in such a way as to produce this generalisable knowledge. The paper explores alternatives to the dominant comparative method based on the role of discourse, space and time, which can potentially disrupt the power relations and hierarchies reproduced in mainstream methodologies in IR.
