From hegemonic decline to the end of history: the transformation of International Relations, c.1970-2000

Dixon, Samuel (2023) From hegemonic decline to the end of history: the transformation of International Relations, c.1970-2000. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis provides a disciplinary history of International Relations (IR) during the late twentieth century. Covering a period that began with fears of the decline of United States hegemony following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, and climaxed with celebrations of the ‘end of history’ after the Cold War, it argues that IR transformed in tandem with a changing global order. The nature and significance of this transformation has been largely overlooked by a booming disciplinary history literature focused predominantly on the discipline’s formative years in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. Disciplinary sociologies, meanwhile, though more alert to IR’s evolution than disciplinary histories, are methodologically limited as a means of narrating the story of such transformation. Combining substantive insights from sociologists of IR with the methods of disciplinary historians, this thesis contends that IR’s transformation consisted in entwined processes of intellectual diversification, institutional expansion, and disciplinary self-reflection. With primary focus on the United States and Britain, the thesis documents how a generation of scholars clashed and collaborated across the Atlantic to construct an array of new theories, subfields, institutions, and second-order modes of looking at IR which remade the discipline between 1970 and 2000. Responding to developments within and outside the academy, these scholars sought – with much, if not total, success – to redirect IR from its earlier origins, helping forge the expansive and increasingly global discipline we know today. The thesis offers three main contributions to IR. First, it advances methodological debate in the disciplinary history literature by moving beyond the internalist/externalist controversy and engaging with disciplinary sociologies, highlighting and addressing a temporal imbalance within the literature that has naturalised an ‘originalist’ approach to writing the history of IR. Second, it problematises historical self-images popularised in and about late-twentieth century IR, specifically ideas that the discipline had developed as ‘an American social science’ or had opened into a pluralistic paradigm war following a sequence of ‘Great Debates’. The thesis shows that IR has undergone more intellectual and institutional evolution internationally than the former suggests, but that the vaunted theoretical pluralism of the late twentieth century did not completely escape the discipline’s deeper past – particularly the legacy of Eurocentrism. Third, however, by highlighting a transformation that did occur, space is opened to consider how IR could change again in the present and future.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2023 Samuel Dixon
Library of Congress subject classification:	J Political Science > JZ International relations
Sets:	Departments > International Relations
Supervisor:	Wilson, Peter
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4701

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