Opportunities for systemism in learning and practicing IR

ABSTRACT

Systemism, a visual approach to mapping existing International Relations scholarship, aspires to distill complex and seemingly divergent research streams, across long-siloed areas of scholarship, into more digestible form. The goal of the systemist framework is to make the field’s vast sub-fields more accessible, in the hope of bridging the gap between approaches and research agendas, possibly promoting previously unconsidered collaborations. This essay considers the application of systemism to five studies, and identifies some possible strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) posed by the application of this approach. Ultimately, this review essay suggests that possibly the greatest opportunity that systemism offers to IR (and the more specialized study of Canadian foreign policy) may lie in making the field’s scholarship more accessible for practitioners and students.

RÉSUMÉ

Le systémisme, une approche visuelle de la cartographie de la recherche existante en relations internationales, aspire à distiller des flux de recherche complexes et apparemment divergents, dans des domaines de recherche longtemps silencieux, sous une forme plus digeste. L'objectif du cadre systémique est de rendre les vastes sous-domaines du domaine plus accessibles, dans l'espoir de combler les fossés entre les approches et les programmes de recherche, et possiblement, de promouvoir des collaborations qui n'avaient pas été envisagées auparavant. Cet essai examine l'application du systémisme à cinq études et identifie les forces, les faiblesses, les opportunités et les menaces (SWOT) que peut représenter l'application de cette approche. En fin de compte, cet essai suggère que la plus grande opportunité offerte par le systémisme aux RI (et à l'étude plus spécialisée de la politique étrangère canadienne) pourrait résider dans le fait de rendre la recherche dans ce domaine plus accessible aux praticiens et aux étudiants.

Introduction

For anyone who has ever attended the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA), or prepared for a doctoral candidacy exam in International Relations (IR), the tremendous diversity within the field of IR is indisputable. The multitude of approaches, assumptions, and objects of analysis is to be celebrated, but it can also be somewhat overwhelming for those looking for answers to policy problems or for students seeking to get a handle on the state of the field. A cursory scan of the ISA’s annual convention program reveals an abundance of scholarship, much of it divided into subfields, with surprisingly little cross-pollination among them. Systemism, a visual approach to mapping existing scholarship in the field, proposes discovery through bridging epistemological gaps to foster connections across long-siloed bodies of scholarship. Systemism aspires to distill complex scholarship into simpler, more accessible form, enabling the drawing (literally) of connections, the sharing of findings, and the promotion of collaborations. This essay reviews the application of systemism to five studies, and identifies some possible strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) posed by the application of this approach. Ultimately, this review essay concludes that the greatest opportunity that systemism offers to IR, and to studying Canadian foreign policy, may lie in making the field’s scholarship more accessible for practitioners and students.

Systemism’s strengths: bridging and abridging

How might scholars in the academic world, and actors in the policy world, benefit from reviewing the contents of this special issue? It is a worthy pursuit to endeavor to make our discipline more inclusive of new and different ideas and the approach of systemism, outlined by Sarah Gansen and Patrick James in the introduction of this special issue, is a good faith effort to find connections in a diverse field and to make its accumulated knowledge more accessible. To accomplish this, the authors essentially call for both bridging and abridging: the simultaneous construction of bridges and the deconstruction of barriers, achieved through data visualization as a means of simplifying complex ideas. Systemism achieves this through three possible applications: (1) visualization of a single argument or finding; (2) the compilation of a literature review of related works into a simplified visual; and, (3) the bringing together of approaches or studies that do not seem to have much in common at first, but through bridging, patterns and connections may emerge. Each of these applications is a form of bridge building and it is in this space that the strengths of systemism are most visible.

Bridges can be tangible crossings designed for overcoming gaps or enabling smooth passage over chasms or rough terrain, but bridges are also imagined as relational metaphors – they foster connectivity. Bridges reveal and enable an enduring connection between ideas. As Gansen and James point out, the revelation of connections is enabled when ideas are distilled and conclusions visually mapped. They note that, with respect to how Canadian foreign policy is often studied in Canada, systemism could help to visualize the main forces generally understood to influence foreign policy at the system, social, and governmental levels and show their interplay (Nossal, Roussel, & Paquin, 2015). Systemism does not replace the need for detail in their explanation of how these variables intersect, but it does provide an overall graphical explanation of their connection. Similarly, Susan J. Henders, in her contribution to this special issue entitled, “Border-Crossing Populations and Canadian Foreign Policy: A Systemist Analysis,” uses systemism to bring together scholarship that appears to be quite different, but when visualized, demonstrates various influences that migration, social standing, and the activities of immigrant communities can have on Canadian foreign policy. Henders reveals that there may be some important convergences in these works that could yield new collaborations and discoveries.

Systemism suggests that a key part of bridging diverse views, approaches, and research agendas is simplicity. And while simplicity can be a liability at times, it can also be an asset. The trick will be figuring out where the line should be drawn. Could the accumulated knowledge in IR be wielded more effectively if we could bridge gaps and visualize findings, thereby making them more accessible, and ultimately rendering our discipline more innovative and user friendly? Gansen and James think so. Systemism may not be a panacea, but it certainly presents opportunities for two worthy goals – simplification and accessibility – which will be discussed again later in the paper.

Systemism’s weaknesses – the TikTok-ization of IR?

Einstein famously cautioned that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. At first glance, systemism’s distillation of complex ideas into a more manageable size could be construed as oversimplification. At a time when the world is awash in technology that encourages the dissemination of brief 280-character pronouncements, or two-minute videos, the evidence seems to indicate that we crave simplicity – in memes, or GIFs, or Tweets. The trend toward scanning headlines rather than reading articles seems to have affected our attention spans, and relatedly, how we (and our students) learn and process information. Within IR, alternative pedagogies have students creating TikTok videos and memes to demonstrate content knowledge. It might be reasonable to wonder if the further simplification of our research design, methods, and findings is a conformational nod to an insatiable appetite for consuming info and ideas in rapid form.

That being said, Systemism’s goal is not to displace traditional forms of research design and inquiry, but rather to augment these approaches, design a lens through which these methods and findings can be understood and shared, and provide a spark for previously unconsidered collaborations. If systemism understands its space as a complement to existing approaches, rather than a wholesale replacement, this could help to meet the demands of an emerging kind of student and scholar. Systemism may be cleverly designed to meet people where they are. But this is beginning to sound more like an opportunity than a weakness.

Systemism’s opportunities: teaching and doing IR better

A relatively new approach, systemism has yet to fully realize its possibilities and it is expected that this special edition of CFPJ is just one step along this trajectory. This section identifies three general areas in which systemism may present opportunities, all of them enabled by simplifying complex ideas into visual form that enables the drawing of convergences and divergences in IR scholarship.

Opportunities for teaching and learning

The potential benefit to students is a worthwhile place to begin. Whether applied in an introductory IR survey course, or sophisticated graduate courses, systemism could assist students in understanding the nuances of divergent approaches in the field (for example sketching out, for newcomers, the positivist and postpositivist approaches), or in drawing connections between what we study and how and why we study it.

Systemism might help junior students avoid the (understandable) tendency to favor one level of analysis over others, for example. Visualizing IR theory (often a starting point in IR programs) could foster a more nuanced and complex understanding of the actors and issues at play, rather than taking narrow approaches that privilege one perspective over all others. Even more seasoned scholars spend precious time arguing about assumptions and biases, which are impossible to fully defend, rather than actually building an inclusive and comprehensive picture of the issues we are trying to explain or resolve. For first year students, systemism’s visual mapping could be a helpful lens through which students are introduced to these debates but not overwhelmed by their content. It could even serve as a visual translator of sorts to support international students in different languages of instruction; data visualization could potentially bridge language barriers for international students who may struggle with the nuances and complexities of the vernacular in IR. In fact, returning to the aforementioned demand for rapid, clear information, perhaps this mapping technique could even be used to support the development of alternative assessment tools that measure knowledge of content, perhaps even in the form of creating video maps that walk through individual books and articles, or bodies of scholarship, in a more visual medium. This could encourage the formation of innovative teaching tools.

For senior undergraduate and graduate students the visual mapping could help to discover patterns across the literature, and illustrate how assumptions, methodologies and research design can shape different outcomes. Edelgard Mahant’s contribution to this special issue entitled, “Foreign Policy of New Regimes and Their Leaders: A Systemist Exposition,” demonstrates the connections between research that identifies the role of leaders, ideas, and ideologies in foreign policy making. Through visualization, we connect the ways that new leaders and their ideas converge with institutional memory and bureaucratic inertia, or innovation, to shape foreign policy outcomes. This graphic visualization of the variables at play could help to make Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) more accessible for students.

Similarly, Geoffrey Hale, in his contribution to this special issue entitled, “Converging and Diverging Streams: Canadian Foreign Investment Policy Adapts to Globalizing and Fragmenting World Orders,” maps the influences on Foreign Direct Investment Policies with the aid of Kingdon’s policy streams (Kingdon, 2011). Hale argues that graphic visualization can be useful for illustrating cause and effect sequences which enable us a wider view of the evolution of policy and the political agendas and events that influence foreign investment. He observes that visualizing the intersecting policy windows helps to explain important continuities across governments. This could help students and scholars of Canadian foreign policy analysis to better understand the influences on policy outcomes.

For doctoral students, learning and practicing the mapping technique could help prepare for comprehensive candidacy exams. For example, Mahant and Hale’s contributions use visualization to map the role of individuals and institutions in foreign policy making and the influence of policy windows on the evolution of FDI policy respectively, which could help to reinforce content knowledge in a host of areas including in FPA, IR theory, and global public policy. These applications of systemism to those areas could also serve as a guide for students themselves to practice and apply the systemism technique to existing knowledge. Historically, graduate programs have trained emerging scholars to read academic material and make these mental maps for themselves as a way to better understand complex arguments. But systemism potentially offers students a more deliberate method of mapping ideas that may be more comprehensive. It could enable a visual overview of the arguments and methodologies of individual books or articles, the understanding of different findings and approaches in a comparative context, and also the finding of patterns across the literature, which could better position emergent graduate students to design and operationalize their research agendas, situate them within the existing literature, and identify potential collaborators. The benefits of this, of course, would not necessarily be exclusive to graduate students, but learning systemist mapping techniques as part of one’s graduate studies could be an asset to new scholars.

Opportunities for scholars

The discipline of IR is home to countless theoretical approaches and assumptions, as well as scholars from diverse backgrounds and experiences. Despite this diversity, a handful of traditional approaches continue to enjoy a prominent position in the field against which new and alternative approaches compete and are measured. This has implications for how we organize, and how we disseminate our findings. Academic conferences house sections or panels that rarely bring together the divergent approaches, thereby contributing to the siloed nature of the field. What systemism proposes is to bring together previously disconnected research programs to find possible ways to bridge these gaps. If done right, this could potentially help to make marginalized approaches and methodologies more accessible to the mainstream by helping to cut through what can at times be exclusive language – the disciplinary vernacular. By drawing connections between seemingly disparate approaches, it is also possible that traditional approaches that enjoy a privileged place within the field might find commonalities with other approaches, which could in turn prompt improvements in their own design, potentially making them more palatable to previously unattainable audiences. Here there may be a parallel to the wave of “liberal realism” that emerged as a response to critiques of classical realism and its limitations.

Bridging gaps through visualization may lend itself to better social science by helping us see the field’s subjects and methods more comprehensively, as well as to think through our own causal logic more rigorously. As mentioned above this could also enable the bridging of language gaps across a multi-cultural discipline as a sort of “visual translator,” potentially rendering scholarship in any language more accessible to the wider field. Finally, systemism’s visual mapping and the resulting ability to find connections between existing research programs may provide an opportunity to repurpose existing scholarship, which could reinvigorate and improve earlier works.

Opportunities for practitioners

Canadian foreign policy researchers have not enjoyed the same access to policy makers that their counterparts have enjoyed in the United States. South of the border, research centers and think tanks enjoy ease of access to the halls of power in ways that, for whatever reason, Canadian institutions do not seem to enjoy. It may be worth considering that the visual mapping process that systemism proposes could be a boon to both the academic and the policy making communities, in part though enabling stronger connectivity, and accessibility, between them. In their contribution to this special issue entitled, “Systemism, Foreign Policy Analysis: An Exercise in Systematic Synthesis,” Canbolat, Gansen, and James suggest that researchers could benefit tremendously from systemism’s ability to make their work more accessible by illustrating its inherent value a bit more clearly to practitioners, who generally have less time to review lengthy manuscripts and need high quality information in fairly short order. For example, the authors claim that mapping the reasons why and when some crises escalate to war (and others do not) can reveal important patterns that might go undetected in the absence of visual mapping. Their research asserts that, after mapping various studies of “non-routine foreign policy events,” a mesoscopic level of analysis begins to emerge that may have some predictive power that could prove invaluable to policy makers. While the authors acknowledge that graphic visualization may not be essential to seeing patters across existing explanations of the causes of war, it may allow for a nimbler tracking of existing connections that are waiting to be discovered.

Rosalind Warner, in her contribution to this special issue entitled, “A Graphic Depiction of Canadian Disaster Risk Reduction and Assistance 2011–2019,” uses systemism’s approach to bring together lessons about how “institutions, policies and values work to reduce disaster risk.” Data visualization illustrates how values-based and institutions-based governance might lead to inefficiencies in devising and implementing policy responses to disasters. This combined knowledge could assist policy makers in designing new institutional frameworks for disaster response (relief) and risk reduction (resilience). Again, if systemism can help to bridge the gap between academics and practitioners it can create cleaner pathways for efficient and effective policy development. These two examples – research on the causes of crisis escalation and disaster relief – illustrate the possibility that systemism could enable a more robust connection between ideas and practice.

Possible risks of systemism

Normally in a SWOT analysis, “threat” refers to potential threats to what is being assessed. Resistance to the graphic visualization of data may well emerge to challenge the systemist approach. Some of this resistance could oppose the reduction of complex ideas into digestible bites that might overlook and somehow underappreciate the contributions of some of the more discursive, complex approaches and methods within the discipline (after all, realism should be relatively easy to graph as its chief goal is parsimony itself). On the other hand, concerns may arise that challenge the notion that systemism actually simplifies anything at all, but instead draws complicated visual maps that could become confusing for those scholars socialized to favor complicated qualitative argumentation over linear flow charts and diagrams. The extent to which systemism simplifies or complicates our understanding may well depend upon the capacity of the scholar who applies it to existing work or the student who deploys it for the purposes of discipline mapping. This may be a caution worth reflecting on for systemism proponents James and Gansen, and for the contributors who have employed this approach in this special issue. We should be cautious about dismissing these potential concerns.

Moreover, in a push to draw visual connections across research programs and approaches, we may risk drowning out “other” voices when we strive for an all-encompassing approach that seeks connections and conformities. If we favor simplicity because it is easier to represent visually, we may be working against the calls to cultivate spaces for previously underrepresented voices or perspectives in favor of pushing toward one that is comprehensive. In other words, while the idea of graphic visualization itself is honest, could the desire for inclusivity actually do the opposite, to deny the newer, emerging voices the space they need to be heard and seen? One wonders if this could work against the cause of decolonizing our discipline. It may be too soon to say, but it is worth considering. In this way, systemism may face a threat from those seeking to be heard, but it could itself present a threat to the very voices seeking representation. These are tough questions but they are worthy of consideration as we contemplate the future of systemism.

Conclusion

The approach and method of systemism as a response to the proliferation of ideas, theories, and methods in IR is an intriguing one, and one that this writer approached with an open mind. It is not the role of scholars to set up road blocks to knowledge or to be gate keepers to a discipline resistant to change. Instead, I saw the invitation to participate in this special issue as an opportunity to consider new possibilities with an open mind. In this spirit, I believe that the efforts herein to bridge gaps between siloed researchers, to make the field more accessible to students, to bring truly international expertise – and researchers – together, is exciting. In fact, the task of reviewing five separate papers that apply graphic visualization to show the potential benefits of systemism has reinvigorated this scholar, much the way teaching “introduction to IR” often does. This process has brought me out of my own silo and asked me to consider innovative ways to bridge gaps in knowledge and approach, as well as how to make our field more accessible.

While I do not consider systemism a panacea, I do celebrate the effort to provide a new analytical tool for students and scholars to visualize the world, the field, and the expertise within it. Based upon some of the potential challenges of systemism, buy-in may not be universal; however, there are opportunities here that present themselves for the teaching and practice of IR. A challenge for readers of this special issue may be to consider whether and how your own work might be visualized graphically and what the benefits of such an exercise could be – from reinvigorating past scholarship, to discovering potential collaborations, or prompting innovative teaching methods. It seems as though the possibilities are endless.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kari Roberts

Kari Roberts is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Economics, Justice, and Policy Studies at Mount Royal University in Calgary. Dr. Roberts' research concerns Russian foreign policy toward the United States specifically and the West more broadly. She has also written about Russia's interests in the Arctic and how these affect relations with Canada and the USA.