Suchergebnisse

Sociologists have traditionally paid scant attention to International Relations (IR) as a social-scientific discipline. Conversely, sociology plays a very limited role in IR, particularly in the large, mostly US-based mainstream. Even when IR scholars take ideas and theories from sociology, they are neither particularly interested in this fact nor capable of recognizing the significance of sociology for the history of the discipline as a whole, being as they are generally uninterested in intellectual history, as discussed in the first section. Despite the difficulty that the scarcity of relevant literature represents, in section two we identify some occasionally important traces of social theory on the IR mainstream, which encompasses both a neorealist and a neoliberal paradigm. By contrast, sociology is intrinsic to most IR scholarship outside the mainstream, which is considered here to be part of a third " reflectivist " paradigm, examined in the third section. Here the focus is set on the sociological elements identifiable in IR constructivism, Marxism, and critical theory, as well as in some European national traditions of inquiry. The conclusion buttresses these arguments with some empirical evidence and makes suggestions for further research. Sociologists have traditionally paid scant attention to International Relations (IR) as a social-scientific discipline 1. A small, but telling piece of evidence on sociologists' lack of interest in IR is the absence of an article on this subject in the fifteen-volume International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (Sills 1968). The successor edition, extended to twenty-six volumes, included only two entries on IR and a few more on area studies (Smelser and Balter 2001); the most recent edition ignored IR altogether, containing not a single entry on the discipline, but included area studies (Wright 2015). This evidence suggests not only that sociologists' ignorance of IR is widespread but also that it has remained fairly constant across time. At least some IR scholars ...