Overlapping Scientific Communities: Internal Structuration and Knowledge Diffusion in International Relations (IR)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Risse
• Subject Area: Political Science ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 287195050

• Final Report Year: 2021

Final Report Abstract

A lively debate is going on about "global IR," sometimes also referred to as International Relations "beyond the West." Many scholars have raised conceptual, normative, and/or empirical points regarding the structure and practices of International Relations research around the world. What this debate in the discipline lacked, however, were data appropriate to actually study global IR, the role of "periphery" scholars and journals, and the flow of knowledge across its (sub)communities around the globe. We have filled this void by generating several unique datasets of IR author biographies, published research content, and global networks of references across journals and authors. In particular, we have investigated the geographic diversity of 2.362 IR articles and their authors published in 17 IR journals from Africa, East Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, and the United Kingdom between 2011 and 2015. We applied these data to answer two interrelated research questions: 1. How are scientific communities within a particular field of the social sciences (IR) structured and how is this structuration maintained? 2. How does the structuration of scientific communities affect the diffusion of knowledge within this field of the social sciences? What are the mechanisms, and what are the effects? For the structuration, we found that the overall structure of the IR community resembles a core-periphery structure as a hub and spoke system with a transatlantic core and peripheral nodes in Latin America, Asia, and Africa (note: for the latter we had only one journal in our analysis). The peripheral nodes connect to the transatlantic hub but are not connected among themselves. This hub-and-spoke system is visible in our CV, reference, and survey data but also reflected in the discipline's published content: the set of publications which we analyzed showed that what scholars located in the core publish is theoretically pluralistic and heterogenous, while the periphery journals connect to the core through adopting the theory cannon produced in the core. We did not find evidence in our sample for genuine non-Western IR theory - neither in the transatlantic journals nor in periphery journals. For the second research question, we observed diffusion within the core through dense interactions among scholars, irrespective of where they are located. The most plausible diffusion mechanism seems to be scholarly socialization, especially through education. Scholars received their PhD in one country - bringing some of their intellectual baggage with them to the location of their education and taking with them an even larger baggage when returning to their home community and moving on to another. We have observed few signs for periphery-periphery mobility. The diffusion from core to periphery happens through the hub and spoke system with academic socialization as its main mechanism. The effect of all of this is the perpetuation of the core-periphery structure: the more depends on the connection to the core for periphery scholars, the more they will connect through the core.

Publications

• (2018) “Diversity and Dominance in International Relations Scholarship”, Refubium – Freie Universität Repository
  Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Wiebke
  
• (2016) Globalizing International Relations: Scholarship Amidst Divides and Diversity. London: Palgrave Macmillan
  Peters, Ingo; Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Wiebke (eds.)
  
• (2016) “The IR of the Beholder. Examining Global IR Using the 2014 TRIP Survey”, International Studies Review 18 (1): 16–32
  Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Wiebke; Bell, Nicholas; Navarrete Morales, Mariana; Tierney, Michael J.
  
• (2016) „IB in Deutschland: jung, internationalisiert und eklektisch. Ergebnisse der TRIP-Umfrage 2014“, Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen 23 (2): 144–172
  Risse, Thomas; Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Wiebke
  
• (2017) “Journals as Communication Channels between National Sub-Communities”, Conference publication from 16th International Conference on Scientometrics & Informetrics. Wuhan, China, 16 - 20 October
  Gläser, Jochen; Aman, Valeria
  
• (2018) “International Relations Scholars in Germany: Young, Internationalised, and Non-Paradigmatic”, German Politics 27 (1): 89–112
  Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Wiebke; Risse, Thomas
  
• (2020) “The global IR debate in the classroom”, In: Arlene B. Tickner und Karen Smith (eds.): International relations from the global South. Worlds of difference. Abingdon Oxon, New York NY: Routledge (Wording beyond the West): 17–37
  Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Wiebke; Peters, Ingo; Kemmer, Laura; Kleinn, Alina; Linke-Behrens, Luisa; Mokry, Sabine
  
• (2020) “Theory Makes Global IR Hang Together”, Refubium – Freie Universität Repository (pre-print)
  Risse, Thomas; Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Wiebke; Havemann, Frank
  
• (2020) “Who Publishes Where? Exploring the Geographic Diversity of Global IR Journals”, International Studies Review (online first)
  Lohaus, Mathis; Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Wiebke
  
• (2021) “Topics as Clusters of Citation Links to Highly Cited Sources, The Case of Research on International Relations”, Quantitative Science Studies. Advance Publication
  Havemann, Frank