International Political Sociology and its contribution to critical thought in International Relations

Abstract

For some time, the theoretical debate in international relations has occupied an ambiguous place in the discipline. For some, the remarkable diversity of theoretical production expresses the dynamism of a field that has grown thanks to its capacity for dialogue with a wide range of disciplines from the humanities and social sciences, and even the exact sciences. Others, however, see this process as a symptom of the decline of the discipline, reflected in its fragmentation and inability to produce a more or less coherent (or consensual) set of research problems. We could also mention a current of opinion that sees the supposed exhaustion of International Relations as a process that we should not regret, since the evolution of the field would be irremediably associated with a colonial power project that produced unequal and discriminatory world orders. For the latter, the theories of International Relations offer few possibilities for the construction of a critique of world politics and, therefore, would not deserve significant intellectual investment. This view echoes the controversial debate about the 'end of IR theory' waged in the pages of the European Journal of International Relations in 2013 (Dunne, Hansen, and Wight 2013). This declaration of death seems premature, yet the current state of the debate may suggest a fund of truth for pessimistic assessments. Had the 'critical turn' project fallen victim to its own success? Has the drive towards greater theoretical pluralism produced a fragmentation that impedes the evolution of the discipline? Has the critique of the limits of international studies - in particular its supposed universality - compromised our ability to think of the international as a planetary political space? This diffuse dissatisfaction with international theoretical work has a very broad scope, reaching both Anglo-American and continental European academic cultures and the many other continents where research in International Relations is conducted today, testifying to the increasingly global breadth of the discipline. The paradox that stimulates the reflection developed here - proposed in this issue of Relaciones Internacionales journal - expresses, precisely, this tension between a pluralism, transdisciplinarity and diversification that are indispensable for the relevance and expansion of the area, and its survival as an academic discipline whose research paradigms and programmes give it coherence and legitimacy.
The answers to the problem in question are, as we suggest, very varied, ranging from the colonisation of international studies by the humanities to the return to geopolitics, to mention only two of them. It would not be pertinent, in this context, to evaluate all the attempts to give direction to a drifting discipline. The aim of this article is more modest. It is to situate the subfield of international political sociology (IPS) in the process indicated above, that is, in the intellectual pluralization of the field in the last twenty years; as well as to indicate its contribution to the restructuring of the lineage of critical thinking in International Relations. To this end, we unfold the argument in two propositions: international political sociology emerges from the collective intellectual project known as the 'critical turn' in International Relations; and secondly, IPS seeks to articulate critical thinking at the borders of the international and the discipline, problematizing the ontological status of both. Based on these two points of departure, the article is organised in three steps. The first section discusses how IPS emerges as the expression of an intellectual lineage dedicated to rethinking the 'modern international' through a new topology; that is, through an alternative conception of the place of politics and the problematisation of its spatio-temporal assumptions. We will see how IPS proposes to imagine the international from the problematization of the practices of border production. The second section discusses some of the main concepts from which IPS rethinks the international or, in other words, how and where social and political relations are structured in what we may call transversal spaces. To this end, we analyse how networks, fields and assemblages contribute to the task of proposing a less restrictive topology of the international. Finally, in the third section we address how SPI conceives its research project from a processual and relational logic that privileges the production of the new, practices and flows in order to open spaces for a politics that affirms difference, divergence and the continuous transformation of what exists.