Accounting for the politics of language in the sociology of IR

In: Journal of international relations and development, Band 15, Heft 1, S. 120-131

Abstract

With its 2009 report on the state of the discipline of International Relations (IR), the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project of the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations aimed to tackle directly Ole Waever's claim that IR 'is and has been an American social science'. The TRIP project engaged in an ambitious ten-country survey about the 'state of the discipline.' The choice of the ten countries reflects an obvious yet unmentioned selection criteria: the countries use English as the main language of scientific communication. I suggest that the impacts on knowledge production of this imperative to write in English in order to be acknowledged as 'doing IR' have been understudies in their theoretical, material, and emotional implications. A turn to postcolonial theory, I suggest, would prove a useful place to start in seeking to account for the political and emotional components tied to a politics of language in the discipline, politics which goes beyond the mere acknowledgement of English as a practical lingua franca that enables communications beyond frontiers or as an imperialist language that simply threatens intellectual diversity. Adapted from the source document.