Overlapping Scientific Communities: Internal Structuration and Knowledge Diffusion in International Relations (IR)

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This project examines how the social structuration of multiple and overlapping communities in the field of International Relations (IR) affects the diffusion of knowledge within and among these communities. We contribute to the Sociology of Science by mapping and explaining the global diffusion of knowledge in a particular field of the social sciences for the first time. We also add much-needed empirical evidence to self-reflexive debates in International Relations on how the various geographically as well as substantively defined communities relate to each other and to the alleged Western core. The project takes its theoretical departures from Social Identity Theories (SIT), on the one hand, and diffusion approaches, on the other. In cooperation with American, Brazilian, and Japanese partners, we will conduct studies of various national, regional as well as substantive (theory, epistemology, methods, issue areas) IR communities and their role in the global production of knowledge. The project uses a multi-method design integrating data from multinational surveys of IR scholars, journal content and citation analyses, as well as from CV analyses and semi-structured interviews. The systematic incorporation of scholarship and data from the Global South allows us to go beyond Western-based IR and beyond data from the Web of Science and, thus, to investigate the extent to which there is indeed a global scholarly community.