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This process note explicates the methodological intervention of maintaining fieldnotes on government documents and its significance for historically situated international relations (IR) research. For the most part, IR scholarship treats archival documents as the neutral preserve of the state, representing its coherent national interests. Building on discussions around critical methods within IR, I argue that there is a need to reflexively engage with the writing and curating practices of the state. This process note deploys the ethnographic hallmark of thick description within IR research through critical annotations on archival documents and other government publications on India's eastern Himalayan borderlands between 1880 and 1965. These annotations encourage a granular reading of government documents and situate them within a larger context of their production, reception, archival memorialisation and subsequent access. I propose that critical annotations help us move beyond post-hoc analyses of foreign policy in terms of success and failure. Instead, in viewing IR theorising as 'unfinished dictionaries of the international', I argue that critical annotations challenge a unitary view of the state and facilitate a more nuanced analysis of foreign policymaking emphasising historical contingencies within which policies are articulated and enacted.

A SURVEY OF 545 STUDIES BY STATE DEPARTMENT INTELLIGENCE ANALYSTS INDICATED THAT THE MAJOR TOPICS STUDIED, THE FORM OF ANALYSIS EMPLOYED AND CONSIDERED WHETHER QUANTITATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE TECHNIQUES COULD BE USED IN THE POLICY ANALYSIS PROCESS. MAJOR TOPICS COVERED WERE TRADE, DOMESTIC POLITICAL AFFAIRS, AND MILITARY MOVEMENTS. LITTLE USE WAS MADE OF SYSTEMATIC SOCIAL SCIENCE TECHNIQUES.

AbstractThis article moves from deconstruction to reconstruction in research methodology. It proposes pragmatism as a way to escape from epistemological deadlock. We first show that social scientists are mistaken in their hope to obtain warranted knowledge through traditional scientific methods. We then show that pragmatism has grown from tacit commonsense to an explicit item on the agenda of the international relations discipline. We suggest that a coherent pragmatic approach consists of two elements: the recognition of knowledge generation as a social and discursive activity, and the orientation of research toward the generation of useful knowledge. To offer a concrete example of what pragmatic methodology can look like, we propose the research strategy of abduction. We assess various forms of research design to further elucidate how pragmatic research works in practice.

Discourse analysis has become a mantra for many young international relations scholars that would like to place their research within the camps of postmodern theorizing, increasingly fashionable yet still marginal enough to be attractive to those that do not set for the usual mainstream topics or methods. However, their work has been frequently put under much methodological pressure by positivist social scientists that sometimes reject the discourse analysis framework as too fluid to be a "proper" social research tool. Premising that discourse is a social practice, this paper proposes a non-Marxist argument for pushing forward this debate and for helping especially social constructivists in advancing their methodological concerns beyond the positivist-interpretativist dichotomy.