Description
As an early career researcher from the Global South, currently in the Turtle Island (Canada), I experienced friction between the expansiveness of the IR discipline regarding its purpose, audiences, and issue areas and the specificity required in doctoral research. IR addresses a range of audiences: state officials, NGOs, local populations, the IR community, other academics, think tanks, and students. Yet, doctoral work must be positioned within an identified ‘gap’ within a niche in IR literature and its audience (coloniality). Simultaneously, the growing use of AI in research has raised questions about the nature of research, originality, and research integrity.
Given this mismatch between research training, the colonial/decolonial discipline’s breadth, the advent of AI for research, and appreciating its expansiveness and multidisciplinary/supradisciplinary tone, IR should reposition itself as a pluriversal knowledge ecosystem that trains research translators and connectors, rather than portraying itself as a confined discipline. This direction requires rethinking IR research, pedagogy, employment metrics, and discipline’s coloniality.
It’s a considerable undertaking not without obstacles; however, a step would be reimagining doctoral dissertations as not filling a gap, but as expressing an authentic voice on IR, labelling IR scholars not as traditional or critical, but as research translators who speak multiple disciplinary languages.
Keywords: International Relations, Coloniality/Decoloniality, Theory, Research, Pedagogy, AI
