ISR forum on sites of IR knowledge (re-)production (out now)

How does the organization of social scientific fields, education policies, and related institutional transformations condition the production and diffusion of scholarly knowledge about world politics? In the latest International Studies Review forum, Félix Grenier and I promote a more dedicated engagement with the disciplines’ institutional sociology. The ambition of the forum, which brings together contributions from Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Tom Biersteker, Thierry Balzacq, Marina Lebedeva, Jason Lane and Martin Müller, is to highlight the diversity of sites and settings where specialized knowledge about international relations is produced, shaped and re-instantiated.

Hagmann, Jonas; Lebedeva, Marina (2016). Teaching (as) statist practice: Diplomatic schools as sites of international education. International Studies Review 18(2): 349-353. PDF

Grenier, Félix; Hagmann, Jonas (2016). Sites of knowledge (re-)production: Towards an institutional sociology of International Relations scholarship. International Studies Review 18(2): 333-336. PDF

BISA @40 Blogpost: Does everyone need a national IR school?

At the ISA Annual Convention in New Orleans numerous scholars drew on the sociology of IR literature to call for the creation of ‘national IR schools’, i.e., new and exclusively locally defined approaches to world politics and international analysis. An Indian school of IR ranked prominently among the candidates, but so did a Chinese school of IR, an Anatolian and a Brazilian one, and further propositions made at the panels and roundtables I attended centred on Eastern Europe. Hearing these calls, I wondered: Is the institutionalization of national IR disciplines really what the sociology of IR research agenda seeks to achieve?

Hagmann, Jonas (2016). Does everyone need a national IR school? Engaging the sociology of IR’s most recent appropriation. British International Studies Association BISA @40 Posts. 12 February. PDF

ISR forum on the ‘institutional sociology’ of International Relations

How does the organization of social scientific fields, education policies, and related institutional transformations condition the production and diffusion of scholarly knowledge about world politics? In an upcoming International Studies Review forum, Félix Grenier and I seek to promote a more dedicated engagement with the disciplines’ institutional sociology. The ambition of the forum, which brings together contributions from Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Tom Biersteker, Thierry Balzacq, Marina Lebedeva, Jason Lane and Martin Müller, is to highlight the diversity of sites and settings where specialized knowledge about international relations is produced, shaped and re-instantiated.

Hagmann, Jonas; Lebedeva, Marina (forthcoming). Teaching (as) statist practice: Diplomatic schools as sites of international education. International Studies ReviewPDF

Grenier, Félix; Hagmann, Jonas (forthcoming). Sites of knowledge (re-)production: Towards an institutional sociology of International Relations scholarship. International Studies ReviewPDF

Routledge book: (In)security and the production of international relations

What happens to foreign politics when actors, things or processes are presented as threats? My first book explains state’s international behavior based on a reflexive framework of insecurity politics. It argues that governments act on knowledge of international danger available in their societies, and that such knowledge is organized by varying ideas of who threatens whom and how. The book develops this argument and illustrates it by means of various European case studies (Germany, France, and Switzerland in particular). Moving across European history and space, these show how securitization projected abroad evolving – and often contested – local ideas of the organization of international insecurity, and how such knowledges of world politics conditioned foreign policymaking on their own terms. By moving the discipline from systemic theorizing to a theory of international systematization, the book seeks to show how world politics is, in practice, often conceived in a different way than that assumed by grand IR theory. Depicting national insecurity as a matter of political construction, the book also raises the challenging question of whether certain projections of insecurity may be considered more warranted than others.

Hagmann, Jonas (2015). (In-)security and the production of international relations: The politics of securitisation in Europe. London/New York: Routledge, 244p. URL

JIRD article on securitization theory and foreign policy-making

Securitization theory conceptualizes the construction of threats. In its original variant, however, the theory focuses strongly on the deontic (norm-breaking) powers of ‘security talk’ – and not on the threat sceneries that the latter substantively describes. My forthcoming article in the Journal of International Relations and Development addresses this link, reworking securitization into a positional/relational argument. Seen this way, the framing of something as threatening comes with larger – often implicit – claims about threatening and threatened actors in world politics. The empirical cases on post-war France and West Germany show how securitization equals an epistemological systematization of international affairs, thus becoming an ordering process that conditions foreign policy strategizing.

Hagmann, Jonas (forthcoming). Securitisation and the production of international order(s). Journal of International Relations and DevelopmentPDF