Throughout the 20th century, a scientifically oriented social science has dominated as the means for looking at society. Methods and Nations examines and critiques one of the primary deployments of these methods: an explanatory comparative politics whose major focus has been on nation-building in the Third World, often attempting to universalize and render self-evident its own practices. Methods and Nations is essentially saying that IR Theorists, operating within our dominant state, have allowed themselves to become colonized, unable to resist the cognitive imperialism of a state-centric...

International Relations and the Problem of Difference has developed out of the sense that IR as a discipline does not assess the quality of cultural interactions that shape, and are shaped by, the changing structures and processes of the international system. In this work, the authors re-imagine IR as a uniquely placed site for the study of differences as organized explicitly around the exploration of the relation of wholes and parts and sameness and difference-and always the one in relation to the other.

International Relations and the Problem of Difference developed out of the growing sense that International Relations as a discipline does not assess the quality of cultural interactions that shape, and are shaped by, the changing structures and processes of the international system. IR has long had little to say about the motivations of individuals, about the interactions of communities, or about the role of identity. Inayatullah and Blaney re-imagine IR as a uniquely placed site for the study of differences. They suggest that IR might be organized explicitly around the exploration of the...