International Relations in France: Writing Between Discipline and State

ISBN-13: 9780415630047 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 234 str.

Henrik Breitenbauch

Opis

Why is the French International Relations (IR) discipline so different from the transnational-American discipline?

By analysing argument structures in research articles across time and from both sides of the Atlantic, it shows how the discipline in France is in a limbo between the American character of the discipline and the French state as regulator of legitimate forms of expression. Concretely, French research arguments are less explicit about what their propositions are and what academic discussions they draw on and add to than their transnational-American counterparts.

Based on a comparative case study of French and American IR research from 1950-2011, the book is a major contribution to the meta-IR literature on global, regional and national traditions of IR. The French discipline s challenge of whether and how to position itself in relation to the evolving American discipline is in many ways exemplary for other non-American national IR disciplines, and the choices as well as the structural conditions underlying the French case are relevant to all non-Western disciplines.

The comparative analysis moreover reveals that the modern American discipline what is considered as recognisably social science takes shape only during the 1970s. The book thus offers new knowledge about the discipline s international development as such. Both case and methodology are interesting to larger audiences outside IR, in the history and sociology of social science, contrastive rhetoric as well as French and cultural studies.

Spis treści

1. Introduction  2. Theory: Legitimate Forms of Expression in French IR  3. Origins, Arguments and Less Lego: What French IR Looks Like  4. Shun the Blunt: Dissertational Patterns in French IR  5. Cartesian State Practice: Why the French Write like They Do  6. Conclusion: What the French Case Can Teach IR – Inside and Beyond the West

O autorze

Henrik Breitenbauch is Senior Researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.