Sociology of International Relations

ABSTRACT (does not appear in published version):

Much has been written in the past two decades about the sociological and geographic dimensions of knowledge and power in the IR discipline — research funding patterns, social networks, national academic communities, institutions, academe-policy connections, leading journals and patterns of publication and citation. Such elements have been the dominant focus of efforts to describe and explain the “hegemony” of American/Western scholarship within the global IR discipline. While recognising the great value of this work, this essay argues that its success in identifying, characterising and explaining the phenomenon of disciplinary “hegemony” in academic IR has been partial at best.

Geographical and social-structural accounts have largely ignored the epistemic aspects of disciplinary hegemony; as a result, we lack precise, rigorous, in-depth and up-to-date analyses of the type, content and style of scholarship that constitutes hegemonic IR theory. Moreover, the powerful allure of measurable and seemingly comparable data about large-scale, structural features of the discipline has led to a lack of detailed and discriminating attention to its practices — to the variety of specific, concrete things that hegemonic scholars actually, and regularly, do.

The result is that we still lack a very precise idea of what the hegemony in IR theory actually is, who it involves, where it extends and, particularly, how it functions. This essay briefly suggests an alternative way of characterising disciplinary hegemony and of identifying and analysing the socio-epistemic (and other) practices which compose it, and outlines certain benefits we might be able to expect from such an approach.

Ориентализм Послесловие к изданию 1995 года I «Ориентализм» был завершен в конце 1977-го и опубликован годом позже. Эта книга являлась и до сих пор является единственной, которую я написал на одном дыхании,начиная с предварительного исследования через несколько набросков к окончательнойверсии без какихлибо перерывов или серьезных помех. Если не брать в расчет то, что я,будучи в 1976-77 гг.

This essay offers an overview of Behavioralism in Political Science and International Relations, first by situating Behavioralism within its academic and socio-political context as an American school of thought, then by exploring Behavioralism's central assumptions and methodologies, the diverse range of studies that were produced during the "Behavioral Revolution," as well as the key debates they triggered in the discipline. The essay finally concludes with some reflections on the contemporary status and value of Behavioralism in a post-Behavioralist era.

La lutte contre le terrorisme est une préoccupation contemporaine des diplomaties, alors que sa définition internationale demeure introuvable. Dans une approche organisationnelle, les hauts fonctionnaires du ministère français des Affaires étrangères partageraient une vision commune sur la violence terroriste et un « savoir-faire » qui leur permettraient de prendre des décisions efficaces pour la prévenir et la combattre. Or, dans une approche constructiviste, la lutte contre le terrorisme relève de relations intersubjectives comprenant l’activation de systèmes de croyances ou Operational Codes (OPCODES) différents, selon que les diplomates français viennent de l’ENA ou du Concours d’Orient. Ces croyances jouent un rôle dans la façon que les hauts fonctionnaires voient le monde, l’ennemi, mais aussi se perçoivent dans leurs fonctions. Ce sont aussi des croyances préexistantes, forgées à partir des expériences et des engagements personnels, qui font que les décisions en matière d’antiterrorisme ne relèvent pas seulement de considérations sécuritaires, mais aussi de motivations matérielles, émotionnelles, cognitives et morales pour un Etat comme la France.

Thèse disponible sur Theses.fr : http://www.theses.fr/2014LIL20009

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The fight against terrorism is a contemporary concern shared in state diplomacy, though no such common definition exists in international affairs. From an organizational approach, senior civil servants of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs are thought to share a global vision on terrorist violence and a savoir-faire that should allow them to make effective decisions in their efforts to prevent and fight against it. However, in a constructivist approach, the war on terrorism draws its inspiration from inter-subjective relations that activate a set of belief systems or different Operational Codes (OPCODES). These beliefs systems, though dependent French diplomats’ background (Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) or the Concours d’Orient), contribute to their decision making process. Thus, these beliefs play a role in the way decision makers see the world, the enemy, but also as to how they perceive themselves in their duties. These pre-existing beliefs which have been forged through personal experiences and commitments are responsible for shaping a decision making process that is not solely based on security concerns. They are in fact, also determined by material, emotional, cognitive and moral motivations for a state such as that of France.

Thesis avaible on Theses.fr : http://www.theses.fr/2014LIL20009

Concepts are a key feature of academic research and international politics. Despite the fact that interpreting, classifying and communicating the world through concepts has far-reaching social and political consequences, their various roles and complex dynamics remain poorly understood in International Relations (IR). Instead of disregarding concepts, conflating them with other cognitive terms such as norms, or obsessing about their ability to scientifically capture reality, this dissertation builds on the emerging field of critical concept studies (CCS), which understands concepts as open and contestable interpretive devices that observers use to make sense of the world, often to steer political thought and action. In line with CSS, this dissertation refers to these political struggles as “conceptual politics”—the ways in which actors coin, use, promote, revisit and fight over concepts in anticipation of performative effects—and argues that it constitutes a key facet of politics.

The field of CCS is mainly theoretically oriented, and few empirical studies address conceptual politics in practice. The purpose of this study is to further the field of CCS by expanding the notion of conceptual politics. It does so first by developing three issues that previous research presumes are important but does not investigate empirically: the dynamics of feedback loops, or interaction effects between interpretations of the world and the world; reification, the treatment of concepts as if they were real rather than human-made interpretive devices; and travel, the movement of concepts across time, levels and space. Next, the dissertation develops an analytical framework capable of tracing conceptual politics empirically. The dissertation seeks to answer the following key questions: How can we study conceptual politics? How do feedback loops, reification and travel shape conceptual politics? What are the consequences of conceptual politics for world politics?

Taking an abductive approach, an analytical framework is developed as a “thinking tool” to trace conceptual politics in practice. Based on a case study design and interpretivist process-tracing, the soft power concept—the ability to affect others through attraction—is subjected to a critical concept analysis of its travel from the US to Japan and China and back to the US again. Although soft power has emerged as a key concern in IR and international politics, the concept and its consequences remain poorly understood. This dissertation finds that the soft power concept has become part and parcel of various political struggles over the “correct” interpretation of reality and the way to act on it. The findings reveal the importance of: continuous efforts to ensure soft power’s position in IR; the concept’s common treatment as if it was real; the interaction effects between its various roles (e.g. social fact and interpretive, foreign policy and socialising tool), which have shaped how “power” and “power shifts” are understood and acted on in international politics; and the emergence of new translations and discrete sites of conceptual politics that rely on, exploit, challenge or even ignore the original concept.

From the analysis, a more complete picture of conceptual politics emerges that underscores many dynamics and effects that would otherwise be missed, and advances our understanding of the role of concepts and the consequences of conceptual politics in IR.

The idea that there are biases, blind spots or exclusionary if not oppressive forces in the very way scientific endeavour is organised still appears to be a rather strange idea. It runs counter to the ingrained idea that science is reflective. Science is still predominantly associated with the idea of a separation between values and facts and a clear separation between subject and object, that is, the normative ideal that researchers are detached from their 'object of study'. With it comes the idea that knowledge and power need to be separated before the scientific enterprise can enjoy the fruits of objectivity and neutrality. True knowledge can only be produced where power is absent. Yet, regardless of whether one subscribes to, for instance, the Kuhnian notion of paradigm shifts, Wittgenstein's idea of therapy, or Foucault's arche´, 1 as soon as the welltrodden paths of positivist philosophy of science are re-situated within a series of relations, practices, institutions, and persons, questions regarding scientific endeavour stop being solely confined to objectively instituted rules of evaluation.

In his presidential address to the International Studies Association, Amitav Acharya (2014, 1) observed that despite the fact that " IR schools, departments, institutes, and conventions have mushroomed around the world.. .the discipline still needs to overcome a central challenge related to its British and North American roots. " Interestingly, Acharya's observation about the continued dominance of IR perspectives rooted in particular Western nations comes during a time of unprecedented structural internationalization of the very higher education institutions that house those dominant IR programs (Rust and Kim 2012). Thus, we find that the IR programs rooted in the United Kingdom and the United States are not only extending their dominance over the intellectual components of IR, they are also now replicating the very institutional structures designed to protect and extend that intellectual dominance. Engaging the institutional layer of the sociology of IR set forth by Waever (1998), this contribution problematizes how the expansion of universities into foreign countries, and the associated replication of institutional structures, affects the development of IR.

This article provides a state-of-the-art of ‘Reflexive studies on IR’, namely the research literature that has recently questioned the identity, traditional narratives, and conditions of knowledge production in the academic field of International Relations. Empirical accounts of International Relations’ existence make explicit the social and political relations that order the academic field as well as the biases and the myths that are perpetuated in associated scholarly practices and literature. To further our understanding of Reflexive studies on IR, this article delineates a typology of the main perspectives recently developed in this research agenda, namely the geo-epistemic, the historiographical, and the sociological. This typology is a valuable tool for analysis, synthesis, and further engagement. Reviewing these three perspectives also illustrates how Reflexive studies on IR can help scholars and students to extend their critical awareness towards the historical and current conditions of knowledge production, which reflects the understanding of science as a product of complex social interactions.

Reflexive investigations into the International Relations (IR) discipline proliferate, and empower scholars to ever more critically engage the analytical, geo-cultural, and political lenses through which world politics is explained. Yet, publishing in flagship journals continues to serve as the most popular indicator of the field’s trajectory and configuration in the emergent literature. This chapter challenges this focus. It argues that the preferred metric normalises implicit understanding of IR’s stakes and structures, and that an alternative cartography of IR can help directs attention to further scholarly goals and practices. To make this point, the chapter looks at the ‘instructed discipline’. Based on a comprehensive review of mandatory readings in core IR courses, it maps the paradigmatic, geo-cultural, gendered, and historical perspectives taught in American and European graduate programs. The chapter shows what kind of intellectual parochialism prevails at which of the selected 23 Western IR departments, and concludes with a call for a more critical pedagogy of international affairs.

Artykuł odsłania wielowymiarowe i nieoczywiste związki między nauką o stosunkach międzynarodowych a socjologią. Celem jest udowodnienie, że nauka ta twórczo przyswoiła wiele pomysłów teoretycznych, metodologicznych i empirycznych z obszaru socjologii. Wymiana nie była symetryczna, gdyż socjologowie byli znacznie mniej skłonni inspirować się koncepcjami wypracowanymi przez badaczy stosunków międzynarodowych.
Istniały jednak projekty połączenia specyfiki obu dziedzin pod
postacią socjologii stosunków międzynarodowych, a od pewnego czasu, wraz z intensyfikacją globalnych procesów społecznych, socjologowie coraz śmielej eksplorują obszar stosunków międzynarodowych. Tekst składa się z trzech części. W części pierwszej przedstawiono wpływ teorii i w mniejszym stopniu metodologii socjologicznej na kształtowanie się teorii stosunków międzynarodowych, przy czym szczególną
uwagę zwrócono na tzw. socjologiczny przełom w internacjologii. W drugiej części opisano próby konceptualizacji socjologii stosunków międzynarodowych jako nowatorskiego podejścia do analizy zjawisk międzynarodowych.
Część trzecią poświęcono wkładowi socjologów do analizy interakcji międzynarodowych. Analiza ma charakter przyczynkowy, a przykłady dobrano ze względu na ich walor ilustracyjny.

Іванов Олег, кандидат соціологічних наук, доктор філософії (PhD) у галузі масових комунікацій, незалежний дослідник. Чинники геополітичних орієнтацій населення України як складові національної ідентичності Серед українських соціологів та політологів інтерес до теми геополітичних орієнтацій населення України загострився після виборів 1994 року. Тоді за президентське крісло змагались два Леонід Кравчук та Леонід Кучма. І саме тоді, вперше в новітній історії України, її населення політично, орієнтаційно і електорально розділилось на 2 частини: Кучма не отримав більшості голосів виборців в жодній з 12 областей на Захід від Чернігівщини, Полтавщини та Кіровоградщини, де на той час проживало близько 40% населення, Кравчук -у жодній з решти областей Півдня і Сходу України, де на той час проживало близько 60% населення. На перших президентських виборах 1991 року такого поділу не було: тоді в деяких областях на Заході проти Кравчука проголосувало більше виборців, ніж на Сході (див. рис. 1). Рисунок 1 -Електоральний поділ України на президентських виборах 1991 та 1994 років. Для пошуку причин такого поділу, того ж 1994 року, Київський міжнародний інститут соціології (далі -КМІС) під керівництвом В. Є. Хмелька провів серію репрезентативних для населення України опитувань. В результаті було виявлено низку відмінностей в орієнтаціях населення Західно-Центральних і Східно-Південних областей 1 . Більша важливість відносин з Росією постулювалась саме у Східно-Ми стверджуємо, що первинними є саме відмінності ідентичності і дані відмінності є водночас складовими ідентифікації особи як представника української нації.

Since the 1980s, International Relations (IR) scholars have emphasised the ‘geoepistemological’ dynamics underpinning the global structuration of discipline diversity. By focusing mainly on the study of ‘American’ and ‘non-Western’ IR, this debate has given little attention to the voices, perspectives, and practices of those scholars who study IR in Europe. This article aims reflexively to question the identity dynamics of the marginalisation of European cases in the debate about diversity and hegemony in International Relations. Using anthropological and sociological tools, such as the idea of ‘misery of position’ developed by Pierre Bourdieu, it explores the postcolonial and eurocentric narratives that can explain this situation, while also putting forward why assuming a balanced ethnocentric stance would provide a more appropriate relational model to promote pluralism.

This paper offers a side view on the question of knowledge production and expertise on conflict. What we intend to do here is to focus on the construction of a particular rule concerning an agent operating in conflict situations (i.e. private military and security companies). The norm production process studied reveals indeed the enmeshment of private actors, States representatives, civil society organizations as well as academics − especially jurists −, whose discussions and interplays lead to the definition of an agent and impose a specific representation of conflict. Academics and experts help develop a legalistic understanding of conflict, where accountability and standard operating procedures dominate. Their inputs are yet confronted to multiple agents and we can notice how their  respective positions affect the authority of their saying and writings.
The study of the Swiss Initiative (from the name of the norm enterprise in question) therefore exemplifies how agents speak about conflict, through their way of regulating one of its actors. This is actually a point of entry to inform about who is authorized and legitimate to produce knowledge on such a subject. This is also a practical study on the way this
knowledge is produced, between public, private and academic expertise.

El debate contemporáneo de las relaciones internacionales propone que los Estados nacionales pierden en el siglo XXI su capacidad de mantener la vigencia del monopolio de la violencia legítima y de la guerra. Sin embargo, el uso de la fuerza en incursiones punitivas y disuasivas sigue siendo un elemento que manifiesta la continuidad del poder estatal en el sistema internacional. Desde la perspectiva de la Sociología Histórica de las Relaciones Internacionales, el artículo analiza los cambios en el moderno sistema internacional para detectar los elementos que persisten y que dan cuenta de la capacidad de los Estados nacionales por mantener bajo su control los medios para ejercer el uso de la fuerza de manera efectiva.

State-building under the aegis of international administrations has faced various hurdles and obstacles in Kosovo and Timor-Leste—fail- ures that came to full light in March 2004 in Kosovo and in May 2006 in Timor-Leste. However, the international conception buttressing the set up of international administrations—I dub it the ‘‘empty-shell’’ approach—is still present in certain policy circles. This article aims to analyze this international conception by clarifying how the UN came to impose its authority over the two territories in a very similar process. While the literature on each state-building experiment is vast and com- pelling, few authors have attempted to contrast the two case studies, especially regarding the mental conception informing the governance process of these territories since 1999. This article links the empty-shell approach with the delegitimization process that came to be experi- enced by the UN in both cases. The article describes the international policies put in place by the UN to expand its control over the two terri- tories, a mix of co-option of local elites and the marginalization of the local population. Finally, the article reveals some possible solutions in order to avoid the more blatant difficulties pertaining to state-building conducted from the outside-in.

The aim of this contribution consists in analyzing the “terrorism” through the academic and political struggles about the paradigm of the “new terrorism” since the events of 9/11. Thanks to the exploration of the real difference between “old” and “new” forms of terrorism, this article argues the interest of a specific research design which implies multiplying levels and focus of analysis from the terrorism groups to counterterrorism actors, society and media. This approach in terms of “scène terroriste” asks in a new point of view the question of continuity of political violence since the bombing attacks of 9/11.

Concepts are a key feature of academic research and international politics. Despite the fact that interpreting, classifying and communicating the world through concepts has far-reaching social and political consequences, their various roles and complex dynamics remain poorly understood in International Relations (IR). Instead of disregarding concepts, conflating them with other cognitive terms such as norms, or obsessing about their ability to scientifically capture reality, this dissertation builds on the emerging field of critical concept studies (CCS), which understands concepts as open and contestable interpretive devices that observers use to make sense of the world, often to steer political thought and action. In line with CSS, this dissertation refers to these political struggles as “conceptual politics”—the ways in which actors coin, use, promote, revisit and fight over concepts in anticipation of performative effects—and argues that it constitutes a key facet of politics. The field of CCS is mainly theoretically oriented, and few empirical studies address conceptual politics in practice. The purpose of this study is to further the field of CCS by expanding the notion of conceptual politics. It does so first by developing three issues that previous research presumes are important but does not investigate empirically: the dynamics of feedback loops, or interaction effects between interpretations of the world and the world; reification, the treatment of concepts as if they were real rather than human-made interpretive devices; and travel, the movement of concepts across time, levels and space. Next, the dissertation develops an analytical framework capable of tracing conceptual politics empirically. The dissertation seeks to answer the following key questions: How can we study conceptual politics? How do feedback loops, reification and travel shape conceptual politics? What are the consequences of conceptual politics for world politics? Taking an abductive approach, an analytical framework is developed as a “thinking tool” to trace conceptual politics in practice. Based on a case study design and interpretivist process-tracing, the soft power concept—the ability to affect others through attraction—is subjected to a critical concept analysis of its travel from the US to Japan and China and back to the US again. Although soft power has emerged as a key concern in IR and international politics, the concept and its consequences remain poorly understood. This dissertation finds that the soft power concept has become part and parcel of various political struggles over the “correct” interpretation of reality and the way to act on it. The findings reveal the importance of: continuous efforts to ensure soft power’s position in IR; the concept’s common treatment as if it was real; the interaction effects between its various roles (e.g. social fact and interpretive, foreign policy and socialising tool), which have shaped how “power” and “power shifts” are understood and acted on in international politics; and the emergence of new translations and discrete sites of conceptual politics that rely on, exploit, challenge or even ignore the original concept. From the analysis, a more complete picture of conceptual politics emerges that underscores many dynamics and effects that would otherwise be missed, and advances our understanding of the role of concepts and the consequences of conceptual politics in IR.

The instrumentalization of religion-especially Islam by Azerbaijan in foreign relations-in the nonreligious Nagorno Karabakh conflict could further deepen the differences among the parties in the conflict and in the region, and make a final resolution and reconciliation even more difficult.

The political crisis and subsequent civil conflict within Ukraine has raised a number of important questions in Europe. The idea that security is a problem dealt with in and around the EU has had to be rethinked. Also the growing power of Russia and the leadership characteristics that stem from that power has created opportunity for significant geopolitical changes at the EU's external borders. The paper addresses the issue of political leadership from a multidimensional perspective in an effort to understand what each side really wants. With a conflict that has not stopped growing we find ourselves determined to understand the power struggle in and around Ukraine.

"The voice of the Third World,” Jean-Paul Sartre famously rejoiced in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, “has finally been articulated and can no longer be ignored.” Back in the 1960s and 1970s, progressive North American and European universities had indeed started to address international affairs from more diverse vantage points. This process was not uniform across academia. But at least some scholars made efforts to understand the politics and societal dynamics of other nations from the inside out, as opposed to assessing and explaining them through projections from afar. Fifty years after the works of Sartre and Fanon, one might expect academic diagnoses of international affairs to have become ever more differentiated and comprehensive. After all, scholars such as Edward Saïd or Dipesh Chakrabarty popularised the call for perspectivist approaches. Considerable time has passed since these thinkers’ statements, giving their arguments ample opportunity to sink in. Yet, the discipline of International Relations (IR) shows surprisingly little signs of such a globalist development.

IR has become increasingly reflexive recently. Not only have interpretative epistemologies been introduced into the field. The discipline’s own foundational myths, its intellectual premises and purposes, its transnational scholarly structuring and its national and regional manifestations have now also become central objects of inquiry. This volume marks the latest contribution to this research agenda.

In his 1998 article The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline, Ole Wæver suggested to assess the development and organization of the International Relations (IR) discipline through a three-tier comparative sociological research framework. It is by looking at the intellectual, institutional and political layer of IR, so he argued, that one can fully understand the specificities of IR as a complex social field of work, as well as the particular forms of knowledge that are developed in this field. In the years following its publication, Wæver’s article was joined and followed-up by a growing and increasingly sophisticated body of literature studying IR scholarship. Yet, a thorough reading of this literature shows that the emerging sociology of IR has come to focus strongly on only two of Wæver’s three analytical layers: It is the intellectual and political layers of IR that garnered significant attention thus far, whereas work about the field’s institutional layer remains surprisingly scarce. This forum addresses this gap by means of promoting a dedicated engagement with the field’s institutional determinants: How is the institutional layer of IR organised in different places? How is the discipline embedded in distinct sites? And how is it governed by material and immaterial institutional constraints? To answer these questions, the forum’s six individual contributions focus on conventional university departments and hybrid sites of international relations alike. In doing so, the forum’s ambitions are both to highlight the empirical diversity of sites and settings where specialised knowledge about international relations is produced, shaped and re-instantiated, and to illustrate how a focus on the institutional layer of IR can become an important vector

Major international events contribute to guiding IR scholarship's interests, yet it remains surprisingly unexplored how transformative political events affect international relations as an academic field. This article focuses on the linkage between key global moments and the institutional factors that condition IR scholarship, focusing on the important yet under-explored intervening elements in the interrelation between political events and academic practice. The article defines the utility of such focus and illustrates it with case studies of three central parties to the Cold War conflict: Russia as representative of the Eastern bloc, Canada of the Western alliance, and Switzerland as a neutral polity. This article shows how institutional factors such as funding schemes, the marketization of education, and the creation of new IR departments operate as effective “hinges” exerting significant influence over the ways scholars develop ideas about international relations.

Los principales eventos internacionales contribuyen a guiar los intereses de los académicos de las relaciones internacionales; aún así, la manera en que los eventos políticos transformativos afectan las relaciones internacionales como campo académico sigue siendo un terreno sorprendentemente inexplorado. Este artículo se centra en la conexión entre momentos mundiales clave y los factores institucionales que condicionan a los académicos de las relaciones internacionales, y hace hincapié en los importantes, si bien insuficientemente explorados, elementos intervinientes en la interrelación entre los eventos políticos y la práctica académica. En el artículo se define la utilidad de un enfoque de estas características y se la ilustra por medio de estudios de casos de tres partes centrales del conflicto de la Guerra Fría: Rusia, como representante del bloque oriental; Canadá, de la alianza occidental; y Suiza, como sistema gubernamental neutral. En este artículo se muestra cómo los factores institucionales como los esquemas de financiamiento, la marketización de la educación y la creación de nuevos departamentos de relaciones internacionales operan como «bisagras» eficaces que ejercen una influencia considerable sobre la forma en que los académicos desarrollan ideas sobre las relaciones internacionales.

Les événements internationaux majeurs contribuent à guider les intérêts du domaine des RI, mais il est étonnant de constater comme les événements politiques transformateurs affectant les relations internationales, en tant que domaine universitaire, sont restés un territoire inconnu. Cet article se concentre sur le lien entre les événements mondiaux clés et les facteurs institutionnels qui conditionnent le domaine d’étude des RI, en axant les recherches sur les éléments d'intervention importants mais largement inconnus dans l'interrelation entre les événements politiques et la pratique universitaire. L'article définit l'utilité de cet axe de recherche et l'illustre avec des études de cas de trois parties centrales ayant pris part au conflit de la Guerre froide: la Russie comme représentante du bloc de l'est, le Canada comme représentant de l'alliance occidentale et la Suisse comme entité politique neutre. Cet article montre comment les facteurs institutionnels comme les systèmes de financement, la commercialisation de l'enseignement et la création de nouveaux départements RI agissent comme des «charnières» efficaces exerçant une influence importante sur la manière dont les spécialistes développent leurs idées sur les relations internationales.

En Amérique latine comme dans le reste du monde, les organisations régionales et sous-régionales se sont récemment multipliées. Les chercheurs s’intéressent principalement à la variété des régionalismes ou à
leur nature changeante (post-libérale, post-hégémonique...). Pour aller au-delà de ces questionnements, il faut travailler sur les régions latino-américaines et leurs acteurs à la lumière d’une approche de sociologie
politique du régionalisme. L’observation des secrétaires généraux régionaux du sous-continent est précieuse si l’on veut comprendre l’émergence de pouvoirs régionaux. Cette réflexion, qui s’intéresse
particulièrement ici à l’Union des nations sud-américaines (Unasur), à la Communauté andine des nations (CAN), au Marché commun du Sud (Mercosur) et au Système d’intégration centraméricaine
(Sica) permet d’apporter une réponse plus précise à la question de la configuration du pouvoir dans les régionalismes latino-américains

Diplomatic schools are instructive cases of how the production and dissemination of ‘international knowledge’ is conditioned by institutional factors. With their vocational focus, diplomatic academies are first and foremost sites for educating the praxis of state-behaviour. This orientation notwithstanding, the academies should not be dissociated from disciplinary IR. Already, diplomatic academies are closer to practical world politics, and thus to the central research object of IR – a point that itself warrants close(r) engagement with the diplomatic field and its professional reproduction. What is more, the barriers between diplomatic and academic training have become more porous recently, and both fields are marked by similar processes at their overarching institutional level, i.e., elements such as evolving mandates, the internationalisation of contents and design, and a general commercialisation of activities. With a view to exposing a different site of international education and to generating further insights on the institutional sociology of IR, this contribution considers diplomatic schools as interesting hybrid sites of international education.

One of the most well-known articles published on how representative international relations (IR) is in including global perspectives was written by Ole Waever. His argument in a 1998 article entitled "The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline" is that there is a clear American and European hegemony in IR scholarship. While there are many critiques of Waever, most of the scholarly debate on this argument is usually neo-positivist in their methodology. The focus is usually on comparing quantitative data from different countries and scholarly journals in order to evaluate how international IR is in terms of scholarship. That is, even the scholarly discourse through which the actual internationality of IR is discussed is highly restricted in its use of methodology. Ironically, in doing so, Waever reinforces the very dominance that he seeks to critique. The need to decolonise and democratise the discipline is stressed by many authors but few provide insights on how we can make way for the redress of the status quo present in IR between dominant and peripheral IR scholars.

Cet article traite de l’évolution contemporaine des discours sur la guerre et de leur poids dans la construction d’une réalité acceptable et acceptée. A travers le cas des compagnies de sécurité privée, il analyse les transformations des représentations de la guerre et de ses agents, et les conditions de leur acceptabilité, par le biais d’une analyse des pratiques discursives via la lexicométrie. Les compagnies de sécurité privée sont ainsi utilisées et acceptées parce qu’elles sont reconnues comme des entreprises, privées et régulées, de sécurité. Elles apparaissent comme des acteurs légitimes des situations de « conflit » et « post-conflit » grâce à une identité qu’elles ont récemment redéfinie. Les contraintes et conditions à l’autorité du discours imposent toutefois de prendre la mesure des limites de la construction discursive d’une réalité qui ne saurait se réduire à un processus d’auto-définition.

Just a Matter of Words? The Construction of a Self-Legitimation Discourse by Private Security Companies.

Focusing on the case of internationally active private security companies, the present article examines the role of discourse in processes of legitimation. Long decried as mercenaries, these companies are today widely used and recognized as specialized, private and regulated businesses. Endowed with this newly acquired identity, they now seem to be legitimate actors. It is therefore worth considering the forms that this process of legitimation has taken by comparing the discourse produced by the security companies themselves with the manner in which they are discussed in other arenas. This side-by-side comparison reveals the constraints that operate on the production of a discourse in the area of private security and, above all, allows one to assess the conditions of its authority. For imposing a discourse – and an identity – in a domain considered as falling under the competence of the state cannot be reduced to a process of self-definition.

This paper offers a renewed viewpoint on the study of private security. Indeed, if the topic has been widely researched these last ten years, the client’s perspective in this constitution of a market for private security has been neglected. Therefore our demonstration will be articulated around three main questions in order to go beyond the analysis of providers’ effects in the renewal of the security field: What is consumed? How it is consumed? And what are the implications of such a consumption? The paper will here defend the idea that if the question “what are we consuming when we consume private security?” appears today almost rhetorical, this results from the construction of “security” itself as a product, and the reduction of a condition to a commodity available on a market. Along but also explaining this move, new practices of consumption have been developed, whether regarding their volumes -as the consumption of private security is still expanding-, or their forms -various clients contracting corporate and recognized companies. Nonetheless, due to the nature of the services involved, their controversies, and the past uses of operators of private violence (especially in the case of France and the United Kingdom), such a consumption induces clients to structure and regulate the market, in order to legitimize this practice of contracting security in international operations.

This book provides an alternative approach to regionalism in neglected parts of the world. Taking stock of several decades of conceptualization, the author provides a political sociology approach of regionalisms fed by recent contributions from the sociology of international relations and public policy analysis. It uses a methodological rather than theoretical framework to bring a new perspective on an emerging field of comparative regionalism. The relational dimensions, the social contexts and characteristics of actors and their practices are key to shed a new light on what is considered in this book as a ‘social international phenomenon’.

The growing sociology of IR literature systematically investigates the discipline’s organization and inner structuring. Making the academic field cognizant of its own institutional and intellectual configurations, the literature today empowers scholars to engage critically with the analytical, geocultural, and political lenses through which IR explains world politics. This contribution notwithstanding, there is a continuing focus in the literature on leading (flagship) publications as indicators of intellectual proclivities, and on IR scholars as their only relevant audiences. This article challenges this focus and expands the sociology of IR literature’s scope of analysis. Making the case for an inquiry into classroom socialization practices, it maps the paradigmatic, geocultural, gendered, and historical perspectives taught to students in the case of 23 American and European IR graduate programs. Pointing to differences between the instructed and the published discipline, the article shows how the instructed discipline is governed and constrained by different kinds of intellectual parochialisms. Problematizing the educative functions of these, it advocates a more self-reflexive understanding of IR teaching (a domain in which scholars have greater agency), and the enactment of a critical pedagogy of international studies.

ORGANISER LE MERCENARIAT PAR LE MARCHÉ ?
Traditionnellement pensé comme étant du ressort des États et du droit,  le contrôle de la violence privée s’avère depuis 2010 prendre  les  formes  d’un mécanisme de soft law dans la mesure où les compagnies
de sécurité privée s’adaptent aujourd’hui à une  certification  commerciale plutôt qu’à une convention internationale de caractère obligatoire. Là où d’autres options de régulation étaient avancées, c’est en effet le principe d’une standardisation technique qui a prévalu.  Au  moyen d’une sociologie des normes et des relations internationales,
l’article montre que c’est dans la lutte entre champs nationaux mais  aussi entre secteurs sociaux que ce mécanisme s’impose.
C’est en s’intéressant plus particulièrement aux agents impliqués, à leur partage d’un certain habitus juridique et à leur possession  d’un  capital  culturel  et  social  important, que l’on peut comprendre comment
un  consensus se forge entre experts du secteur privé et public, représentants des États, des compagnies de sécurité privée
et des ONG. Dans la configuration de cet espace trans-sectoriel des experts du droit, émerge une politique de régulation commerciale  des  compagnies de sécurité privée entre concurrences et alliances qui ne
sauraient se réduire à une simple lutte entre puissances étatiques.

MANAGING MERCENARY ACTIVITIES THROUGH THE MARKET?
Control over private violence is traditionally conceived as falling under the remit of the state and law. Yet, since the 2010s, the regulation of private violence is characterized by a soft law mechanism which enables private security companies to adhere to a business certification rather than a legally binding international treaty. While other regulating options were considered, it is indeed the principle of a technical standardization that prevailed. Based on a sociological approach to norms and international relations, this article underscores that this resulted from struggles between national fields as well as social sectors. It channels attention towards the experts involved in the process : their common juridical habitus and strong cultural and social capital help explain the emergence of a consensus among private and public sectors experts, representing states, private security companies and NGOs. This transnational space structured around competing and allied legal experts accounts for the prominence taken by the option of a market regulation of private security companies – an outcome which cannot be explained solely by a focus on power struggles between states.

Celem artykułu jest opisanie wybranych skutków rewolucji informacyjnej w obszarze rozwoju społecznego i bezpieczeństwa ludzkiego. Są to pojęcia rozłączne, choć blisko ze sobą powiązane, co będzie uwypuklane w niniejszym artykule: pojęcie bezpieczeństwa ludzkiego wyrosło bowiem z logiki myślenia przyjętej w środowisku ekspertów związanych z oenzetowskim Programem ds. Rozwoju (UNDP) (Gomez, Gasper 2013). Chęć przybliżenia istoty zjawiska rewolucji informacyjnej, zwłaszcza w powiązaniu z zastosowaniem tzw. Big Data, zdeterminowała zasadniczo opisowy charakter artykułu, jak również przyświecała  decyzji o przytoczeniu stosunkowo dużej liczby przykładów empirycznych.

Багато дослідників нових демократій, що з'явилися упродовж останніх п'ятнадцяти років, наголошували на важливості сильного і активного громадянського суспільства для консолідації демократії. Зокрема, коли йдеться про посткомуністичні країни, і вчені, і демократичні діячі нарікали на відсутність або відмирання традицій незалежної громадської активности та на поширену тенденцію до пасивного сприйняття держави. Ті, кого хвилювала слабкість громадянських суспільств у посткомуністичному світі чи у країнах, що розвиваються, зазвичай сприймали передові західні демократії, передусім США, як альтернативну модель. Однак існують вражаючі свідчення того, що упродовж останніх кількох десятиліть резонанс американського громадянського суспільства помітно послабшав.

What are the drivers of disciplinary change and intellectual innovation? How can they be described? Frameworks from the philosophy of science tend to dominate the discussion in IR and other social sciences. Neither Kuhnian paradigm shifts, nor Laktaosian research programmes provide however a sufficient heuristic to capture the micro-shifts in disciplinary developments or to understand drivers of change. In this paper we develop and test an alternative approach to understand the mechanisms and drivers of scientific progress in IR. More specifically, we examine one core mechanism of progress in social science, which has not been thoroughly understood neither in science studies in general, nor in the study of IR in specific, that is, the role of fashions in driving disciplinary developments. We develop an approach that understands the progress of scientific disciplines as driven by sequences of theoretical fashions. A discipline driven by theoretical fashions exhibits substantial variance in the popularity of theories and concepts. Ideas rise to prominence, are incorporated into the mainstream of scholarly research and fade away when alternative approaches gain momentum. We test the appropriateness of the fashion approach for a subfield of IR publications related to international organizations (IOs). We use burst detection analysis to identify bursts of cited references in a sample of articles that deal with IOs as a topic. Our results largely support our theoretical expectations about fashions in IO-research. Over time, IO-studies experienced multiple reference bursts of particularly influential publications, which can be linked to specific ideas representing theoretical fashions.

The article discusses how the Russian Federation, in the context of ‘anti-Western’ approach and the multipolar world order’ seeking, wants to position Turkey. Looking from the Russian Federation to Turkey, Turkey’s relations with primarily USA, the West, and especially NATO are one of the most influential variables in the relations between Turkey and the Russian Federation. ‘Eurasianist ideocracy’, which had significantly marked the foreign policy of the Russian Federation, has evaluated Turkey, due to its NATO membership, as a ‘Rimland’ or ‘coastol zone’ country which affiliated to rival Atlanticist bloc. In the article is sought the answer to the question of what are Russia’s possible strategies in the scope of the multipolar world order project and in an effort to become a global player, to make Turkey own ally and to mitigate threats can come through Turkey.

At the ISA Annual Convention in New Orleans I heard numerous scholars draw on the sociology of IR literature's insights in order to call for the creation of 'national IR schools', i.e. new and exclusively locally defined approaches to international analysis. An Indian school of IR ranked prominently among the candidates, but so did a Chinese school of IR, an Anatolian and a Brazilian one, and further propositions made at the panels and roundtables I attended centred on Eastern Europe. Hearing these calls, I wondered: Is the institutionalisation of national IR disciplines really what the sociology of IR research agenda seeks to achieve?

The article discusses how the Russian Federation, in the context of ‘anti-Western’ approach and the multipolar world order’ seeking, wants to position Turkey. Looking from the Russian Federation to Turkey, Turkey’s relations with primarily USA, the West, and especially NATO are one of the most influential variables in the relations between Turkey and the Russian Federation. ‘Eurasianist ideocracy’, which had significantly marked the foreign policy of the Russian Federation, has evaluated Turkey, due to its NATO membership, as a ‘Rimland’ or ‘coastol zone’ country which affiliated to rival Atlanticist bloc. In the article is sought the answer to the question of what are Russia’s possible strategies in the scope of the multipolar world order project and in an effort to become a global player, to make Turkey own ally and to mitigate threats can come through Turkey.

This paper is analysing one of the most dynamic fields of EU studies, the Economic Studies, which is, in the same time, a classic and a permanently new and changeable domain, offering a comprehensive coverage of European economic integration. This assertion is also confirmed by the fact that the EU Economic Studies come in second position in point of projects funded by Jean Monnet Action.
The study takes into consideration three subfields of EU Economic Studies: European Economy, European Management, and Europe and Global Economy, tracing their evolution in twelve European countries.
The curricular database of these subfields has been the support needed to seize the development of curricula in EU Economic Studies through internal elements contributing to its development - the dynamics of specializations, the role of mobility in various ways for crossing the disciplinary/transdisciplinary and national /transnational borders, or the role of NTIC in developing the curricula. Finally, it is the same curricular database that has helped us follow the EU Economic Studies curricula development depending on external stimuli: evolution of curricula according to the European agenda and its level of knowledge, and the impact of Jean Monnet Programme in developing the European Studies curricula in the field.