How to follow and Study Through the Sites and Situations of Expert Knowledge Diffusion in International Politics: Research Challenges and Methodological Responses

Abstract

Abstract The central aim of this article is to consider tools and methods for studying expert knowledge (EK) diffusion in international politics. What we need are methodological devices to enable research of the object in motion and to study small or multiple sites, and even global scales in time, as well as the object of inquiry at different levels of analysis. Based on the marriage of network analysis and mobility research this article discusses the research potential of several methodological tools: bibliometrics, QHA, SNA techniques, topology, topography and biography. I conclude that despite these methods being imperfect, they 1) make possible the bridging of traditional IR dilemmas, such as the level­of­analysis problem, the micro­macro gap, and the agent-structure debate, 2) enable to collect and evaluate a much richer class of evidence and contextualization than methods usually used in IR offer, and 3) make possible to be much more ethnographically sensitive than IR research traditionally is.