2011 Venture Workshop:
The International Relations Discipline; Description, Explanation, and Evaluation

Workshop Chair: Michael J. Tierney, College of William and Mary
Location: Salon A, Sheraton
Time: 8 AM - 6 PM, Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Workshop Summary

Despite the fact that IR scholars use social scientific methods to study war, trade, monetary policy, decision-making processes, environmental cooperation, and a variety of other issues, they rarely use those same methods of data collection and analysis in order to study research and teaching practices or the links between IR scholarship and policy practice. Over the past few years researchers at the College of William and Mary’s Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project have been conducting surveys of IR scholars (in ten different countries) and have been coding journal articles in terms of 29 distinct variables. Such data collection provides a necessary first step if IR scholars want to describe, explain, or evaluate their own discipline using systematic criteria that they often use to explain features of the international system and foreign policy outcomes. However, very little of this data has been vetted or analyzed by scholars within the IR community. This workshop will provide an opportunity for scholars from a variety of countries and at different stages of their academic careers to use these data to write papers on the links between research, teaching, and policy in the field of IR. The assembled group includes realists, liberals, constructivists, and feminists. It includes scholars who use quantitative, qualitative, formal, and interpretive methods. And it includes both world-renowned scholars and graduate students. This group will use the next 18 months in order to analyze the existing TRIP data, re-code TRIP data in order to answer new questions specified by participants, and to combine TRIP data with existing and new data sets in order answer questions about the links between research, teaching and policy in the field of IR.

The March 15th workshop in Montreal will provide the first opportunity for a face-to-face meeting of this diverse group. We will use this opportunity to present draft papers that use the TRIP data and/or critically evaluate its utility. After the workshop participants will revise their papers based on feedback from the group. These papers will be collected and sent to a journal in the form of a special issue or to a university press to be published as an edited volume. While there is no shortage of books or articles on the state of the IR discipline, the changes in research practices over time, or the links between scholarly research and policy practice, there are very few examples of this research relying on data that is systematically collected and analyzed. Hence, the resulting book or special issue should be of great interest to students of international relations who are interested in the history of the discipline, a snapshot of the current state of the discipline, those interested in the links between teaching and research, or those interested in the links between scholarly research and policy practice. The organizers of this project have already been in touch with two leading university press publishers that are interested in publishing this collaborative project as a book.

Workshop Participants (tentative)

  • Bill Bernhard, University of Illinois
  • Charli Carpenter, UMASS Amherst
  • TJ Cheng, William and Mary
  • Anne-Marie D'Aoust, U.Penn
  • Mike Desch, Notre Dame
  • Dan Drezner, Tufts University
  • Mike Horrowitz, U. Penn
  • Patrick Jackson, American University
  • Patrick James, Univ. of Southern California
  • David Leblang, University of Virginia
  • Quan Li, Penn State University
  • James Long, UC San Diego
  • Dan Maliniak, UC San Diego
  • Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton
  • Rich Nielsen, Harvard
  • Sue Peterson, William and Mary
  • Jon Pevehouse, Wisconsin
  • Ryan Powers, Wisconsin
  • Paul Racine-Sibulka, University of Ottawa
  • Brian Rathbun, Univ. of Southern California
  • Stephanie Rickard, LSE
  • Jason Sharman, Griffith University
  • Alan Stam, University of Michigan
  • Brandon Stewart, Harvard
  • Arlene Tickner, Universidad de los Andes
  • Mike Tierney, William and Mary
  • Jacqui True, Auckland University
  • Ole Waever, University of Oslo
  • Catherine Weaver, University of Texas
  • Korhan Yazgan, University of Exeter