Embrace IR Anxieties (or, Morgenthau's Approach to Power, and the Challenge of Combining the Three Domains of IR Theorizing)

Abstract

Abstract This article addresses the call made by the ISA Sapphire panel to focus on “the opportunities and the challenges of theory-building in interdisciplinary scholarship.” The article focuses on the multiple anxieties that exist in the discipline of IR, its departmental subalternity, its fragmentation of content, its methodological diversity, and its hybrid constitution of practical and observational knowledge. However, rather than arguing for any restriction, the article pleads for these anxieties to be embraced and for IR to be treated as a privileged space in which to integrate that knowledge. It invites scholars to link three distinct yet important domains of IR theorizing: the philosophical, the explanatory, and the practical. It invites the discipline to see the three domains as equally fundamental for its identity. Using Morgenthau's theory of power as a foil, the article shows the need to think about these three domains of theorizing concomitantly, despite the difficulties involved in providing a coherent link between them, something Morgenthau did not achieve.