Blackwell Reference Online

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Comment on this article   The historiography of international relations (IR), that is, both the scholarship on the history of the field and the methodological principles involved in that research and writing, is more advanced today than in any time in the past. During the past 10 years (1998–2008) a wealth of new literature has appeared that greatly challenges much of the conventional wisdom regarding the development of IR. The fundamental aim of this essay is to survey the growing body of literature on the disciplinary history of IR. My focus is primarily on IR as a subfield of political science, although I am sensitive to the fact this is a narrow view and that there are multiple ways in which to conceptualize “international studies.” In the process of reviewing the literature, the core issues, debates, and controversies that have been associated with explaining the development of IR will be highlighted. Some of these issues involve disagreements about the substantive history of the field, while others involve debates about the most appropriate method to chronicle the history of IR. These two kinds of issues are actually closely related, because there has been an increasing recognition that the manner in which the history of the field is reconstructed is almost as important as the substantive account itself. Disciplinary history is rarely a neutral or impartial undertaking and, ... log in or subscribe to read full text