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Bridging the Gaps Between International Relations and Area Studies

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International Relations and Area Studies

Part of the book series: Contributions to International Relations ((CIR))

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Abstract

This chapter sets the scene for the volume International Relations and Area Studies: debates, methodologies and insights from different world regions by setting out the research questions and structure of this edited volume. Specifically, this chapter reviews the state of the art of the dialectics interweaving International Relations and Area Studies. In doing so, it focuses on tracing the genealogy of these debates, identifying the actors engaged with them, as well as, mapping those sites where such transdisciplinary knowledge is produced and circulated. Overall, this chapter provides a twofold contribution: first, we provide an account of the globalization of knowledge production and circulation that has also increasingly decentred, valuing local peculiarities and epistemological traditions beyond the Western academia. Second, we assess and discuss how Western and non-Western academics have contoured concepts which demand and entail site-intensive techniques of inquiry, exposure to complexities on the grounds, ethnographic sensitivity, and, at the same time, comparative endeavours going beyond area specialisms.

The contributions included in this chapter and Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 of this volume were partially published in the Special Issue of the Italian Political Science Review titled ‘Reaching for allies? The dialectics and overlaps between International Relations and Area Studies in the study of politics, security and conflicts’ (vol. 52 n. 2) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/italian-political-science-review-rivista-italiana-di-scienza-politica/issue/64D35748F0A69FFFF061772E7F731725.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Or, in the words of Thakur and Smith (2021), multiple “births” of International Relations, multiple disciplinary histories, and multiple voices and actors that have contributed to the development of “local” IRs and nonetheless have been subject to erasures and exclusions.

  2. 2.

    In doing this, our chapter seems to flow into a very current debate on how to empirically examine instances in which epistemic hierarchies and divides replicates or are instead overcome (Kaczmarska and Ortmann 2021).

  3. 3.

    Most recent developments of the English School largely overcome its initial Eurocentric biases and have produced a much more balanced account of the process of expansion of the international Society. See Keene (2002); for a synthesis, Buzan (2014).

  4. 4.

    A significant exception is the work of the Lenin and Hobson on the role of imperialism in the contemporary capitalist development and its role in the origin of World War 1.

  5. 5.

    The idea that colonialism generated forms of dependency that made the process of economic development more difficult is already present in neo-marxist approaches and in the dependencia theory of the 1970s and 1980s. See A dialogue between IR theory and area studies (Dietz, 1980; Smith, 1981; Wallerstein, 1979).

  6. 6.

    Area Studies were originally devoted to the study of “faraway places that needed to be better understood in the world centres of power” (van Schendel 2005, 290 cited in Köllner et al., 2018).

  7. 7.

    Bilgin (2016) in that respect clarifies that the task is “not additive but reconstructive” and that “what is being sought is not telling ‘multiple stories’, but ‘excavating’ […] multiple layers to already existing stories with an eye on power/knowledge dynamics” (138).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Global and Security Studies, University of Leiden, Leiden, Netherlands

    Silvia D’Amato

  2. Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Matteo Dian

  3. School of International Studies & Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Alessandra Russo

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  1. Silvia D’Amato
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  2. Matteo Dian
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  3. Alessandra Russo
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Correspondence to Silvia D’Amato .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Silvia D'Amato

  2. Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Matteo Dian

  3. School of International Studies & Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, Venezia, Italy

    Alessandra Russo

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D’Amato, S., Dian, M., Russo, A. (2023). Bridging the Gaps Between International Relations and Area Studies. In: D'Amato, S., Dian, M., Russo, A. (eds) International Relations and Area Studies. Contributions to International Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39655-7_1

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