Catherine Weaver

Between the Covers: International Relations in Books

Efforts to systematize our knowledge of international relations (IR) have tended to focus on journal articles while ignoring books. In contrast, we argue that to know IR we must know IR books. To this end, this article presents the first systematic analysis of such books based on coding 500 IR texts published by leading presses against variables covering methodology, theoretical paradigm, and policy application. We compare the results with those of the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) projects coding of 2,800 journal articles against the same variables, and the 2008 and 2011 TRIP surveys of more than 3,000 IR scholars. The main findings are that books are much less quantitative than articles published in leading journals, are somewhat more representative of the field according to paradigm, and are more engaged with policy concerns.

Reflections on the American school: An IPE of our making

In 1984, Susan Strange famously likened the field of international political economy (IPE) to the wild American west, a ‘vast, open range… still unfenced, still open to all comers’ (Strange, 1984: ...

IPE's Split Brain

I became aware of my scholarly schizophrenia nearly three years at the 2006 inaugural meeting of the International Political Economy Society. Benjamin J. Cohen provided the keynote address, in which he previewed his forthcoming intellectual history of the American and British schools of IPE. I remember sitting in the audience, one of the very few constructivist and qualitative-leaning scholars amidst a sea of quantitative rationalists. As Professor Cohen unveiled his vision of the discipline, I suddenly thought, ‘I’m British?!’. A year later, in a smaller forum of mainly European, Canadian and Australian scholars in Copenhagen, I found myself describing my work in the very positivist terms of hypotheses and empirical testing, and had second thoughts. Similar to Mark Blyth’s experiences, related in his essay here, my identity as either an Americanor British-school IPE scholar depended not on the substance of my work as much the audience to whom I was presenting it. For an early-career American-born and trained scholar of the ‘third generation’ (as Eric Helleiner argues), this kind of identity crisis could be paralysing. But I instead find being stranded mid-Atlantic to be an enviable position, compelling me to be receptive to the insights and challenges of both schools of thought. As Oscar Levant once said, schizophrenia beats dining alone. I have further reason to be encouraged by the current reflections on our discipline. At the beginning of this year, I started a new job at a policy school, which can best be described as uninterested in metatheoretical debates. I was told upon my hire that my task as a public intellectual would not be to change the way I conducted my work, but rather to make that work relevant beyond the ivory tower. This is not easy for the American side of my psyche. American IPE scholars of my generation, in our quest for the best testable model to prove the causal effect of X on Y, are not widely encouraged to ask the ‘so what?’ questions (Keohane 2009; Palan, this issue). The professional incentive structures we face New Political Economy, Vol. 14, No. 3, September 2009

RIPE, the American School and diversity in global IPE

ABSTRACT On the occasion of the Review of International Political Economys 20th anniversary, this paper systematically assesses RIPEs claim to represent an alternative to the ‘mainstream’ study of international political economy (IPE) with several new sources of evidence. The first is the IPE component of a 20-country survey of international relations (IR) faculty, the second a database of books in the field. The third, and most important, is derived from coding 326 RIPE articles published 2000–10 to discover key cleavages and trends. These results are compared with those from prior studies of the 12 IR journals identified as the ‘leading’ journals by the Teaching, Research and International Politics (TRIP) project. The article concentrates on five key issues: paradigmatic orientation, epistemology, methodology, policy orientation, and demography. The results provide ground for scepticism that the ‘American School’ of IPE does or will define the mainstream. The findings further tend to confirm that RIPE has stayed relatively true to its founders’ intentions in representing diversity in the global study of IPE.