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Comment on this article   This contribution seeks to provide clarity to the idea and practice of interdisciplinarity by making definitional distinctions. The consequences of adapting one interdisciplinary approach over another for International Relations are also explored. The noun “interdisciplinarity” made its professional debut in a 1972 publication from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The report ( Apostel et al. 1972 ), entitled Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities , was sponsored by OECD's Parisian-based Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. The report had chapters written by scholars from six different European countries: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Though there were many differences between them, they all shared the thought that the scientific enterprise had become less effective due to disciplinary fragmentation, and that a countermovement for the unification of knowledge was the proper response. The problem was “how to unify knowledge and what the many implications of such unity are for teaching and research in the universities […]” Unification “means the integration of concepts and methods in these disciplines” (pp. 11–12). A number of unifying schemas were proposed, including mathematics, linguistic structuralism, Marxism, and general systems. Though ... log in or subscribe to read full text