Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction : Progress, Consensus and Cumulation in IR Scholarship?

[Ewan Harrison, Annette Freyberg-Inan, and Patrick James]

Part I: Judging Progress in the Study of International Relations

Chapter 1 - The Bias of ‘Science’: On the Intellectual Appeal of Neopositivism

[Patrick Thaddeus Jackson]

Chapter 2 - Maps, Models and Theories: A Scientific Realist Approach to Validity

[Colin Wight]

Chapter 3 - Substance, Form and Content: Scholarly Communities, Institutions and the Nature of IR

[Torbjørn L. Knutsen]

Chapter 4 - The Role of Theory for Knowledge Creation in IR: A Sociable Pluralist Discussion

[Annette Freyberg-Inan]

Part II: Evaluating Progress in Democratic Peace Research – An Illustrative Case Study

Chapter 5 - Bounded Pluralism and Explanatory Progress in International Relations: What We Can Learn from the Democratic Peace Debate?

[Fred Chernoff]

Chapter 6 - Systemism, Analytic Eclecticism and the Democratic Peace

[Jarrod Hayes and Patrick James]

Chapter 7 - Rethinking the Democratic Peace: Competing Accounts of ‘Scientific Progress’ in IR

[Ewan Harrison]

Chapter 8 - The Normative Within the Explanatory: A Critical Take at the Democratic Peace Literature

[Piki Ish-Shalom]

Chapter 9 - The Closer You Look, the Less You See: Knowledge Cumulation in IR

[Laura Sjoberg]

Conclusion - Different Standards for Discovery and Confirmation

[Annette Freyberg-Inan, Ewan Harrison, and Patrick James]

About the Author

Annette Freyberg-Inan is a lecturer and member of the research program "Political Economy and Transnational Governance" at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Among her many publications are the monograph What Moves Man: The Realist Theory of International Relations and Its Judgment of Human Nature (2004) and the edited volume Human Beings in IR Theory (2015). She is co-editor of the Journal of International Relations and Development, a former Vice President of the International Studies Association and the Vice Chair of its Theory Section.


Ewan Harrison is Assistant Professor in Political Science at Rutgers University, USA. He is author of The Post-Cold War International System: Strategies, Institutions and Reflexivity (2004), co-author of The Triumph of Democracy and the Eclipse of the West (2014). He has published in Journal of Peace Research, Review of International Studies, International Studies Review, International Affairs and International Politics.


Patrick James is Dornsife Dean’s Professor in the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California, USA. James is the author or editor of 23 books. He served previously as president of the International Council for Canadian Studies, Vice President of the International Studies Association and editor of International Studies Quarterly.