TY - JOUR
T1 - Sociology and international relations: legacies and prospects
AU - Lawson, George
AU - Shilliam, Robbie
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - While sociological concepts have often been implicitly used in International Relations (IR), recent years have seen a more explicit engagement between IR and Sociology. As with any such interdisciplinary assignation, there are both possibilities and challenges contained within this move: possibilities in terms of reducing IR's intellectual autism and opening the discipline towards potentially fertile terrain that was never, actually, that distant; challenges in that interdisciplinary raiding parties can often serve as pseudonyms for cannibalism, shallowness and dilettantism. This forum reviews the sociological turn in IR and interrogates it from a novel vantage point - how sociologists themselves approach IR concepts, debates and issues. Three sociological approaches - classical social theory, historical sociology and Foucauldian analysis - are critically deployed to illuminate IR concerns. In this way, the forum offers the possibility of (re)establishing exchanges between the two disciplines premised on a firmer grasp of social theory itself. The result is a potentially more fruitful sociological turn, one with significant benefits for IR as a whole.
AB - While sociological concepts have often been implicitly used in International Relations (IR), recent years have seen a more explicit engagement between IR and Sociology. As with any such interdisciplinary assignation, there are both possibilities and challenges contained within this move: possibilities in terms of reducing IR's intellectual autism and opening the discipline towards potentially fertile terrain that was never, actually, that distant; challenges in that interdisciplinary raiding parties can often serve as pseudonyms for cannibalism, shallowness and dilettantism. This forum reviews the sociological turn in IR and interrogates it from a novel vantage point - how sociologists themselves approach IR concepts, debates and issues. Three sociological approaches - classical social theory, historical sociology and Foucauldian analysis - are critically deployed to illuminate IR concerns. In this way, the forum offers the possibility of (re)establishing exchanges between the two disciplines premised on a firmer grasp of social theory itself. The result is a potentially more fruitful sociological turn, one with significant benefits for IR as a whole.
U2 - 10.1080/09557570903433647
DO - 10.1080/09557570903433647
M3 - Article
SN - 0955-7571
VL - 23
SP - 69
EP - 86
JO - Cambridge Review of International Affairs
JF - Cambridge Review of International Affairs
IS - 1
ER -