In “International Relations in the US Academy” Daniel Maliniak, Amy Oakes, Susan Peterson and Michael Tierney attempt to categorize trends and the extent of theoretical, methodological, and epistemological diversity amongst IR scholars at American universities and its relationship to policy making. While the conclusions of this article are widespread across both the length of trends analyzed as well as the amount of theories taken into consideration, the general trends of this paper illustrate the pervasiveness of often overlooked ‘American school’ of IR. In particular, this paper serves to illustrate the dominance of positivism as an epistemology, quantitative methods as evidence and the conflicting theoretical approaches to global politics analysis.
This article makes a particularly intriguing claim by illustrating that the four core theoretical traditions of IR (realism, liberalism, constructivism. and Marxism) are apparently far less dominating than expected with the majority of scholarly literature taking positions based on different ontologies, some even taken from disciplines outside of traditional political science and reapplied to suit IR. At first glance this seems like a healthy route for IR to take, one that encompasses a wide range of theoretical viewpoints to provide a holistic perception of what is happening in world politics at multiple levels of analysis. However, this utopian idea at viewpoints does not seem to represent the true reality of American IR scholarship. Despite this prevalence of viewpoints, and realism oriented articles peaking at only 15% in the highest point of this study, realism can still seen to be the norm in international relations thought. While new articles championing realism appear to be rare, it nethertheless remains the paradigm taken the most seriously by both opposing and supporting scholars and papers adhering to realism receive a disproportionately large amount of citations. I would maintain that this indirectly illustrates the concept of American erasure in IR we have examined in the classroom concerning how American values of realism and positivism can often remain unexamined and unchallenged. As realism has long been the dominant theory of IR, it is often not reflected on but accepted as a hegemonic fact. Its role in american IR remains somewhat unchallenged, but scholars from other theoretical standpoints still appear to be interacting with its ideas more so than those of other paradigms.
While the theory side of IR implies a hidden dominance of traditional theories influencing intermingling with fresh theoretical standpoints, American IR appears to be more overtly dominated by positivist epistemologies and quantitative methods. This prevalence of “hard science” trends can even be seen in this survey itself which, while making room to share normative arguments from non-positivist writers such as Steven Smith, the vast majority of the data of this paper uses quantitative methods to replicate hard data, demonstrating how nationalistic trends may continue even amongst self-reflective IR scholars . This leaves the paper with some lacking nuance, such as finer details on the relationship between the “core” IR theories and new approaches to global politics that gets lost in the vast amount of data collected for this piece.
Ultimately, this reading serves to illustrate the pervasiveness of American IR as an unrecognized school of thought. There are observable distinctions of the ‘American School’ that relies heavily on traditional theories, positivism and quantitative data. However, many scholars fail to critically engage with this aspect of the field and can in turn be limited by hegemonic nationalistic driven perceptions of what constitutes the science of IR. This is dangerous as, while values and biases are inherent in any writing, a lack of perception to these inclinations can only serve to omit valuable voices perceptions from the field.