Beyond Boundaries?: Disciplines, Paradigms, and Theoretical Integration in International Studies

This book represents a critical yet constructive reappraisal of the role, and the limits, of the boundaries that define and separate disciplines and subfields in the social sciences, as well as the boundaries that divide distinct research traditions or paradigms in the analysis of international life. It provides an integrative and eclectic examination of the virtues of a more flexible division of labor, a division that facilitates more meaningful communication among scholars of different methodological persuasions investigating similar problems in international life.

Part One addresses concrete issues in international studies ranging from international bargaining and interdependence to conceptions of collective identity. The essays therein serve as creative models for integrating concepts and analytic logics from different theoretical frameworks rooted in different disciplines. Part Two shifts the focus to more wide-ranging questions in the philosophy of the social sciences and the organization of social science research in order to shed new light on the value and validity of boundaries currently drawn between different schools, sects, disciplines, and subfields.