Ten Years of IPS: Fracturing IR

Abstract

In the past few years the relative success of international political sociology as an intellectual project has stimulated debates about its contribution to international studies. With this issue we celebrate ten years of International Political Sociology. The journal was created in 2006, with the first issue published in 2007. It has been an intellectually fascinating ride. Since its beginnings, IPS sought to engage the “problem of the international” by questioning practices that delimit a realm with clear boundaries as grounds for making claims about world politics (Bigo and Walker 2007a,b). As such, it tried to articulate a strategy of openness and transversality that would circulate through, and connect, various intellectual terrains and could be filled in multiple ways (Lisle in this volume; Basaran et al. 2016; de Goede forthcoming; Guillaume and Bilgin forthcoming; Guzzini forthcoming; Leander 2016; Villumsen Berling 2015). In fact, IPS is not really an approach, let alone a school of thought, but more a signifier that connects people sharing a disposition toward traversing familiar, institutionalized repertoires of analysis; toward re-conceptualizing and displacing the questions that can be asked, the methods that can be used, the styles of arguing that are acceptable. The particular forms this disposition takes depend on the lineages one draws on to do such transversal research. While this disposition has produced a rich and diverse conversation around innovative themes and strategies, we try to resist the tendency, not uncommon in intellectual movements such as IPS, to a certain normalization around empirically grounded research inspired by the shift to sociological, analytical, and methodological practices (see Lisle in this volume). We therefore decided to use our introduction as a singular interference into the field rather than a state of the art of ten years of International Political Sociology. In this introduction our aim is thus not to evaluate how far IPS has come in creating a new and “less restrictive topology” of international relations and their boundaries. Rather, we seek to offer some insights into how this project can retain its openness, its exploration of in-betweenness, as well as its potential as a site of contestation and critique of contemporary world politics. We try to foreground the contingencies and ambivalences that characterized the critical ambition of IPS at its inception.

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