Multiple Paths to Knowledge

Abstract

Provides an intellectual Overview of the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) project: its Origin in 1975; the Principal Colleagues of the founder, Michael Brecher; the Coders from universities in Canada, the U.S., and Israel, and Advisers from many universities in diverse countries during its first four decades (1975–2015); the ICB project’s Rationale and Methods; its Objectives; its Formative Publications (1977–1980); the Qualitative Analysis of Case Studies; and the creation of state level and international levels of Datasets and their Aggregate Analysis. It also reports on an ambitious Millennial Reflections Project in 2000–2002, in which 44 scholars of International Studies–International Relations–World Politics (IS–IR–WP) presented papers on diverse Paradigms, Methodologies, and Topics. The Paradigms assessed were as follows: Realism, Institutionalism, and a half dozen Alternative and Critical Perspectives: Critical Theory, Radical Theory, Constructivism, Feminist-Gender Perspectives, Post-Modernism, and System Change. Three Methodologies were addressed: Formal Modeling, Quantitative Methods, and Qualitative Case-Studies. The state of knowledge on three general topics in IS–IR–WP was the focus of a dozen papers: Foreign Policy Analysis; International Security, Peace, War; and International Political Economy. An overall assessment of the state of IS–IR–WP was provided by the Co-Editors of this project, Michael Brecher and Frank Harvey. Finally presents reflections on the author’s intellectual odyssey during the past seven decades, in terms of three categories: phases, themes, and concepts.