Does international relations need area studies?

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Contributor Introduction: Does International

Relations Need Area Studies?

Louise Fawcett, Todd H. Hall, Andrew Hurrell, Kalypso

Nicolaïdis, and Kate Sullivan de Estrada

Thirty years ago, to study the international relations of an area was mainstream. Today, with the turn in International Relations (IR) and Political Science away from historicisation and contextualisation, scholars and students in the so-called ‘mainstream’ of the discipline confront a greater need to justify an area focus in their research. While much of the recent debate about the place of Area Studies within Political Science has focused on comparison and on comparative politics, only some of these concerns have carried over into IR. Conceptualisations of connectivity and the global; what counts as an area in IR, to whom, how, and why; and how we might reconstruct dominant modes of theorising in our discipline through a serious engagement with areas, all demand sustained attention. At a moment of ‘reconvening’ the discipline, embodied in the project of Global IR, this forum presents a set of distinctive yet interlinked answers to the question of how the localised study of ‘areas’ (understood as including North America and Europe) matters to IR.

As five contributors who share an institutional centre of gravity and a common commitment—the University of Oxford and the defence of pluralism in IR—we find ourselves not only at a moment of disciplinary reformation, but at a wider moment of reckoning. This forum’s publication against the backdrop of renewed student and faculty activism around our University’s past, particularly its legacies and memories of slavery and colonialism, serves as a potent reminder: the study of IR at Oxford, as in many other universities grown out of colonial and imperial centres, has distance to travel in the diversity of its faculty and, with some recent and encouraging exceptions, the coverage of its curriculum. Across sites of knowledge production and across the producers and reproducers of our discipline, the wider project of reconvening IR also demands a foundational shift in the frames through which we work, and it is here

i This forum emerges from a panel session at the 2019 ISA Annual Convention in Toronto. We would like to thank Neil MacFarlane for early inputs into our conversations, and Amitav Acharya for his generous and searching role as chair and discussant in Toronto. We are also grateful to the three reviewers of this forum whose detailed and excellent feedback we have sought to incorporate as far as space allows.

176 that we place our focus in this forum.ii

Situated in and reckoning with the history of Oxford as a flagship centre of IR and Area Studies in the UK, Europe, and the world, the pieces that follow debate the mutually dependent relationship between IR and Area Studies, a relationship forged in the shadow of empire and the Cold War. Drawing on what for most of us has been a long, prior engagement with Global IR, Area Studies, and a decentring agenda, we suggest new pathways forward. At the same time, we recognise at this pivotal moment that we are at a new beginning. There is much to learn, both as we aim to include others and as we hope for our own inclusion in rich debates taking place elsewhere—in other places and disciplines, some of which we draw upon below.

ii Our thanks to one of our reviewers for underscoring the importance of diver-sity in the producers of IR scholarship and to Nayanika Mathur for her insight that disciplinary self-examination must accompany such efforts. See: Nayanika Mathur and Liana Chua, ‘Introduction: Who are ‘we’?’, in: Nayanika Mathur and Liana Chua, eds., Who are 'We'?: Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology (New York: Berghahn books, 2018), 1-34.