Description
The renewed interest in international relations (IR) as a coherent discipline has raised important questions about creative research methods and their application to enduring puzzles in global politics. This article deals with discovery, asking how it can be integrated into IR through a reconsideration of case-based research. The first part of the paper addresses the aims and assumptions of social research methods, and methodology, within IR. The argument then turns to discovery as an essential component of applied interpretivism. A central theoretical and methodological problem stems from the disregard of discovery for research and inquiry in IR. A corollary of this neglect is the marginalisation both of case study research and case-based methods. The article concludes by setting out the features of case study research as a central feature of global politics.
