Reclaiming the social: relationalism in anglophone international studies

Abstract

Even in the North American and European context, relationalism comes in many flavours. We identify the common features of relational approaches, including varieties of practice theory, pragmatism and network analysis. We also identify key disagreements within relationalism, such as the relative explanatory importance of positional and process-oriented analysis. Our discussion reveals the problems that come from associating relationalism solely with other clusters of international-relations theory, such as constructivism. It also allows us to construct a typology of major relational frameworks in the field, and provides a better foundation for comparing and contrasting Chinese and Western relationalisms.

Acknowledgements

We thank Astrid Nordin for inviting us to participate in this project. She and the other workshop participants provided invaluable feedback and widened our perspective on the global dimensions of relational thought. We are especially grateful to LHM (Lily) Ling, whose untimely passing is a great loss to the field. We also appreciate the careful feedback provided by the editors and anonymous referees. We apologize to those we have inadvertently left out of these acknowledgements.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Our understanding of theoretical aggregates thus differs significantly from the odd blend of Lakatos and Kuhn that animates so many other field-mapping discussions. See below.

2 But see, in particular, Krebs and Chowdhury (2009).

3 Suggested to several members of the Columbia School by Yosef Lapid.

Additional information

Funding

Funding in support of this article was provided by the Norwegian Research Council under the project ‘Evaluating Power Political Repertoires (EPOS)’, project no. 250419.