PODCAST: How to Become a Hegemon
Dizzying Developments in International Relations
Multiplicity: Take Two
What is the idea of ‘Multiplicity’? And how convincing are the claims that it can be used to overcome longstanding problems in social and international theory?
Re-Engaging with Neighbours in a State of War and Geopolitical Tensions (RE-ENGAGE)
RE-ENGAGE’s overarching ambition is to assist the EU in refining its foreign policy toolbox, including its enlargement and neighbourhood policies. This will enhance the Union’s geopolitical leverage a...
Reflex to turn: the rise of turn-talk in International Relations
The field of International Relations (IR) is being spun around by a seemingly endless number of ‘turns’. Existing analyses of turning are few in number and predominantly concerned with the most prominent recent turns. By excavating the forgotten history of IR’s earliest turns from the 1980s and tracing the evolution of turn-talk over time, this article reveals a crucial yet overlooked internalist driver behind the phenomenon: the rise of reflexivity. Rather than emerging in the 21st century, turn-talk began at the end of the 1980s as a series of turns away from positivism and towards reflexivity. Cumulatively, this first wave of turns would denaturalise IR’s state-centric ontology while enshrining reflexivity as a canonical good among critical scholars. By the mid-1990s, however, these metatheoretical critiques of positivism had produced a substantial backlash. Charged with fostering an esoteric deconstructivism, a new generation of reflexivists set out to demonstrate the feasibility of post-positivist empirical research. As a result, IR’s turning also took on a different form from the 2000s: whereas the first wave of turns had mounted an epistemological and methodological attack against the positivist mainstream, the second wave set about bringing new ontological objects under the scrutiny of reflexivist scholars. This shift from anti-positivist to mostly intra-reflexivist turning was facilitated by the institutionalisation of critical IR as a major subfield of the discipline. It is the privileged position of reflexivity among critical IR scholars that is the condition of possibility for endless turning, accentuated by mounting pressures to demonstrate novelty in an increasingly competitive environment.
Leonard Seabrooke
Leonard Seabrooke is Professor of International Political Economy and Economic Sociology in the Department of Organization at the Copenhagen Busin...
Thor Olav Iversen
Thor Olav Iversen is a development economist with rich experience in working with international affairs as both a practitioner and an academic. At...
Book presentation: The Counterinsurgent Imagination
How and why counterinsurgent ideas persist, despite recurring failures?
NUPI team to take over as editors of the prestigious journal Cooperation and Conflict
“Thinking about Unthinkability in World Politics” with Jennifer Mitzen
The NUPI Center for Historical International Politics (CHIP) invites you to a seminar where Prof. Jennifer Mitzen (Ohio State University) will present work in progress for her next book, “Thinking about Unthinkability in World Politics”.