International Relations Conference

Background
International Relations (IR) is, in the words of Harvard scholar Stanley Hoffmann, an American social Science.¹ One important aspect of the American-ness of IR is the often-cozy relationship between the discipline and the U.S. government. Harold Lasswell, one of the discipline's founding figures, worked extensively with various national security agencies during World War II and the Cold War. Lasswell's student, Gabriel Almond, maintained close ties to the U.S. government in the 1940s and 1950s, and his research was oriented to the national security concerns and policies of the time. Yale University's Institute of International Studies, home of some of the discipline's leading scholars in the early postwar years (including Almond, Arnold Wolfers, Frederick Dunn and Klaus Knorr), served as an auxiliary research and consulting arm of the State Department. Other international studies centers also enjoyed close relations with government agencies. MIT's Center for International Studies, for example, was largely funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).² Deterrence theory, one of the discipline's most vibrant sub-fields during the Cold War, was developed primarily at the RAND Corporation under the auspices of the U.S. Air Force.³

A recent investigation by Lingua Franca magazine found that the relationship between IR and the U.S. government continues to flourish. Although the Vietnam war drove a wedge between the government and social scientists, "Since the Cold War's end ... the nation's universities and intelligence services have experienced a kind of detente." According to Yale political scientist Bradford Westerfield, cooperation between IR professors and U.S. intelligence agencies "is now very much to the fore ... There's a great deal of actually open consultation, and there's a lot more semi-open, broadly-acknowledged consultation."⁴

Paradoxically, at the same time that IR has become attached to national interests, it has increasingly come to understand itself as a detached, disinterested science. As Alexander Wendt observed, the majority of contemporary IR scholars "think science is an epistemically privileged discourse," and are committed to a, broadly speaking, "positivist" epistemology.⁵ Positivism, as Friedrich Kratochwil and John Ruggie put it, "Before it does anything else, ... posits a radical separation of subject and object. It then focuses on the 'objective' forces that move actors in their social interactions."⁶

There is a seeming incongruity, then, between the presupposition of a subject-object distinction, which prevails in the discipline, and the actual history of IR's implication with the objects which it studies. The aim of the conference is to address the theoretical and epistemological ramification of this apparent contradiction; participants will explore, among other things, how future IR theorizing might be made more reflexive, i.e., be made to take into account its own embeddedness in its historical and political context. More specifically, conference papers will pose on or more of the following questions:

How (in)appropriate is a positivistic epistemology for a discipline implicated with the politics which it studies?
How has IR, qua science, attempted to come to terms with its implication with political interests? What epistemological strategies, if any, has it developed to control for this implication? Is such control in principle possible and/or desirable?
What might a reflexive IR theory look like?
What are the possibilities for developing an IR theory that grasps international political processes in ways that illuminate the relations of these processes to the theory itself?

Conference Participants
Four outside scholars, including three Europeans, have agreed in principle to take part in the conference. The invited scholars are:

Friedrich Kratochwil holds the chair of International Politics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. Kratochwil received his PhD from Princeton University and taught at the University of Maryland, Princeton, Columbia, and Penn before returning to Germany in 1995. He has published widely on international law, political theory, and problems of epistemology in the social sciences. He is the editor of the European Journal of International Relations, and member of the editorial board of several leading IR journals.
R.B.J. Walker, Professor of International Relations at Keele University, UK. Walker's research and teaching interests include philosophy of social science and the implications of contemporary global transformations for sovereignty and subjectivity. He is the editor of the journal Alternatives: Global, Local, Political. He has published numerous articles and several books, including Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
David Campbell, Professor of International Politics and Director of the Centre for Transnational Studies, Newcastle University, UK. Campbell's Research interests include IR theory, foreign policy, and continental political philosophy. He is co-editor of the Borderlines series of books published by the University of Minnesota Press. He authored several books, including Writing Security (University of Minnesota Press, 1992), and many articles.
Daniel Monk teaches in the department of Art History, SUNY at Stony Brook, and is also affiliated with the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Monk received his PhD from Princeton University's School of Architecture. His research interests include colonial architecture, the architecture of international conflict, and critical cultural theory. He has become acquainted with IR as a postdoctoral fellow of the SSRC-MacArthur Foundation program in international peace and security. His book, An Aesthetic Occupation: the Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestine Conflict, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

In addition to the invited scholars, several members of the UF department of political sciences will take part in the conference, including Sammy Barkin, Leslie Anderson, Larry Dodd, Aida Hozic, Peggy Kohn and Les Thiele.

Format and Logistics
The conference will meet in the conference room of the political science department, 216 Anderson Hall. It will be held in March or April, 2002 (exact date TBA).