Description
Nowadays, it is impossible to impress anyone with another study on a local (national/regional) IR discipline. Similarly, studies preoccupied with the disciplinary dynamics on the global level steadily made their way into the disciplinary mainstream. Methodologically, those range from eclectic qualitative case studies to large-scale bibliometric analyses of publication patterns, teaching practices, and scholarly preferences. Substantially, all of them are united by a single underlying issue: disciplinary dominance. The latter takes various forms, such as Core, Western, Eurocentric, US, positivist, and masculine dominance theses. Conventionally, the issue of disciplinary dominance is operationalized through the notion of diversity. In this sense, it becomes associated with patterns of disciplinary homogeneity. The latter range from the methodological preferences of IR scholars to those of geo-institutional affiliations of cited/publishing authors.
This paper, in turn, aims to destabilize the current debates within the sociology of IR by applying the latter’s methodological and substantial orientations to the subfield itself. In particular, this implies a two-fold research strategy. First, in methodological terms, it generates data concerning author-level indicators, citation patterns and brings the two together within a spatial (geo-epistemic) perspective. Second, substantially, it asks a question of how diverse the published dimension of disciplinary sociology is. Following the subfield’s convention, the latter question applies to various issues ranging from the authors’ gender to the institutional affiliation of the most frequently cited scholars.
In such a way, the paper’s primary research purpose is to demonstrate that the patterns of homogeneity characterizing the subfield are similar to those associated with its primary research/critique object, namely the discipline of IR.
