The Generality and Exclusivity of International Political Sociology: A Response to Jan Daniel and Dagmar Rychnovská

Abstract

The paper responds to Jan Daniel and Dagmar Rychnovská’s article from
Mezinárodní vztahy 1/2015, whose aim was to establish International
Political Sociology (IPS) as a specific strand within critical security studies.
This project is criticised in the paper for three reasons. First, the definition
of IPS through common features is so general that most critical research
could fit in the IPS category. Second, the attempt to define IPS by negation
is grounded in a distorted image of discursive approaches to international
politics. Third, the label is deployed in a way that excludes a range of related
authors not only from IPS, but even from the ‘main currents’ of critical
security studies. Rather than being an analytical category, IPS is thus more
like a political tool through which a distorted and exclusionary image of the
discipline is being constructed.