Dividing Discipline: Structures of Communication in International Relations

Abstract

International Relations (IR) has cultivated an image as a discipline with strong divisions along paradigmatic, methodological, metatheoretical, geographical, and other lines. This article questions that image analyzing the latent structures of communication in IR. It uses citation data from more than 20,000 articles published in 59 IR journals to construct a network among IR journals and finds a discipline with a center consisting of pedigreed IR journals, albeit closely related to political science. Divisions are identifiable as specialty areas that form clusters of specialized journals along the periphery of the network—security studies and international political economy in particular—but communication is also divided along the lines of geography and policy/theory. The article concludes that divisions notwithstanding, IR communication remains centered around American, general, and theoretical IR journals and that to practice this particular kind of communication is an important dimension of being an IR scholar.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 66 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.