I
International Political
Sociology
Sarah Earnshaw
University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley,
USA
Keywords
International Political Sociology · (In)
securitization · Social Theory · Political
Theory · Transversal · Critical Security
Introduction
Contributing an encyclopedic entry on the subject
of “International Political Sociology” is a perhaps
unenviable task: this is a lively, flourishing, and
expansive field of study that, in the words of
Bilgin and Guillaume, “needs to be read in the
plural” (Bilgin and Guillaume 2017). In fact, the
approaches encompassed under this banner defy
easy categorization. They are fed by diverse
research flows which explicitly reject the con-
struction of a canon, resist the presentation of
(yet another) meta-narrative, and respond to a
need to de-discipline the problematization of soci-
ety, polity, and the international as distinct and
knowable phenomena. There is no prescribed
pathway to an International Political Sociology
(IPS), and the presentation of a checklist would
be anathema. There can be no specifiable meth-
odology or dominant epistemology. This defiance
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
S. Romaniuk et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_75-1
of disciplined knowledge is exactly part of the
appeal and the power of the research within this
field. The three eponymous terms have largely
been conceptualized as unified, static, and self-
contained concepts that have developed in rela-
tion to distinct disciplinary boundaries as well as
to specific historically and geographically contin-
gent epistemologies: polity as researched through
political science; society analyzed through sociol-
ogy; and the international as a sphere defined
through international relations, itself initially con-
sidered a subfield of political science. Each of
these three concepts has attained a status of com-
mon sense, as almost naturally occurring, within a
Western imaginary of progress and modernization
(Walker 2017). While this entry will discuss IPS
in the study – and critique – of security, it is
important to first address the wider implications
as a challenge to academic convention. The reflex-
ivity inherent in IPS enables an interrogation of
the distinctions in knowledge production which
reify notions such as security, sovereignty, and
an international, as well as the examination of a
multiplicitous and diverse field of security agents.
Such scholarship aims to unearth the conditions of
possibility of authoritative knowledge on who
must be secured, from what, by what means, and
at what cost. The separation of these disciplined
knowledge streams has reinforced the dichoto-
mous assumptions which order, stratify, and
limit thinking on the international, namely,
inside/outside, national/international, local/
global, everyday/exceptional, state/society,
2 International Political Sociology
police/military, social/political, and security/inse-
curity. The field has been conceptualized as
exposing, analyzing, and interrogating the “trans-
versal lines” that cut across conventional planes of
scholarship. Entrenched, dichotomous fragmenta-
tions, perpetuated as natural and immutable
truths, sustain and mask policy and practice that
is founded upon exclusion and insecurity. IPS is
an attempt to unearth the changes, flows, circula-
tions, and conflicts by rejecting the tripartite
ordering of the essentialized categories of an inter-
national, a polity, and a society. As a brief, wan-
dering foray into the field, the piece begins with
the project of de-disciplining, before moving on to
an interrogation of the “international,” and finally
presenting some of the key tenets of an interna-
tional political sociology of security.
De-disciplining: The Stakes of
Knowledge
Scholarship within IPS problematizes the reifica-
tion running rampant in disciplined academic
scholarship: the reiteration of a subjective idea to
the point that it becomes considered an objective
fact obscures any sign of a definitional struggle,
thereby structuring the knowledge production of
that field. Disciplinary boundaries are often sites
of silencing, excluding outsider perspectives.
Tackling this problem began with posing interna-
tional relations (IR) as both the subject and object
of critique, where scholars not only engage in
multi- and non-disciplinary dialogue but also
strive toward a self-reflexivity which enables the
discovery of “transversal lines” that cut across
borders, agents, and knowledge claims (Basaran
et al. 2017). This is a horizontal mode of thinking
that does not operate on the assumption of a
separation of the local from the global. To navi-
gate the cultivated, treacherous gulfs across disci-
plines, one must be conscious of the power
relations and hierarchies that are (re)produced
in the distinction of legitimate knowledge.
Reflexivity is a core tenet of IPS, as a recognition
that “doing” social science is a practice, where
meanings are contested by various actors.
Targeting the formation of disciplinary regimes
of truth unsettles truth claims which present
particular perspectives as natural and universal.
Recognizing and exposing the political stakes of
knowledge formation, particularly with regard to
the ordering of the international as a distinct real-
ity, have formed a central thrust of enquiry (Huys-
mans and Nogueira 2012). Interdisciplinarity is an
oft-referenced desire in academia but one that is
difficult in practice. Even when attempted, criti-
cisms that (re)produce categorized knowledge
production abound: such work is dismissed as
“thin” as it is spread across too many knowledge
planes; publishing practices adhere to disciplinary
models; and the qualitative/quantitative methodo-
logical divide presents obstacles to collaboration.
Exploring the multidisciplinary horizons avail-
able through IPS, Bleiker suggests the embrace
of a “broad set of approaches” in the study of the
“sociopolitical dimensions of the international.”
The possibilities in IR have been restricted, he
argues, as the disciplinary boundaries are con-
stantly negotiated in debates between competing
gatekeepers – for example, between realism and
liberalism – therefore constantly reinforcing the
need for such borders around what is, and what is
not, the international (Bleiker 2017). Speaking to
this expansion of insights and burgeoning interest
in IPS as an inclusive space of dissent, two vol-
umes were published in 2017: the Routledge
Handbook of International Political Sociology
and International Political Sociology: Transver-
sal Lines (Basaran et al. 2017; Bilgin and Guil-
laume 2017). IPS as an open space has gone
beyond international relations, political science,
and sociology, to include perspectives from
diverse disciplines including law, geography, eth-
nography, history, criminology, and economics
and theoretical approaches such as feminism,
postcolonialism, international political economy,
environmental humanities, and historical sociol-
ogy as well as adopting diverse methodologies
tailored to equally plural sites of intervention.
This is a space of engagement with diverse prob-
lematics, where collective and collaborative
research is one strategy pursued under the
umbrella of IPS: scholars from a multitude of
backgrounds have contributed to often very
lengthy articles, in a fashion defying conventional
International Political Sociology
academic standards (C.A.S.E Collective 2006).
De-disciplining goes beyond two disciplines
exchanging respective expertise upon a shared
topic, toward the collation of a collective toolkit
for inquiry and the imagining of a non-discipline.
The titular amalgamation of international,
political, and sociology is in no way intended
as a straightforward application of political
sociology to the international (as an
unproblematized realm) or indeed as a reference
to internationalizing the political and sociological.
IPS recognizes each of the three terms as prob-
lematic and demands that scholars question the
historically contingent meaning that is evoked in
the attribution of international, political, or social.
The field of IPS is conceived as facilitating
encounters, of exploring tensions in meaning,
and analyzing historical ruptures. For example,
Aradau, Huysmans, and Squire explore notions
of mobility and integration through the tensions
inherent in European citizenship which is simul-
taneously territorially bound while characterized
by freedom of movement (2010). Critiquing the
ahistorical and essentialist nature of much work
within IR, the field has largely been associated
with the genealogical work of Foucault and the
Bourdieusian sociology of power dynamics
(although many other social and political
theorists have been called upon, including Latour,
Veyne, Derrida, and Deleuze, to name but a few).
Taking this specific group of theorists as intellec-
tual grounding is revelatory of a commitment
to a particular understanding of social relations –
of the social as constituted through practices – that
is, viewing the world as a complex of (heteroge-
neous) processes where phenomena/actors/things
gain particular meanings, where identities are
(dis)assembled. The ahistoricism that has tradi-
tionally characterized IR fails to problematize
the conditions of possibility of the present world
order, depoliticizing the entrenched inequalities of
global capitalism directed by international institu-
tions across sovereign borders and effacing the
violent histories of colonialism, slavery, genocide,
and forced dependency. IPS strives to overcome
the division between theory and praxis: targeting
the gaps, problems, and contradictions that have
been papered over in respective disciplines, this
3
scholarship performs empirical work upon spe-
cific relations and then builds theoretical work
upon these empirics. An array of empirical
methods have been used thus far within the field,
discourse analysis, archival research, interviews,
and ethnography, where empirics are tailored to fit
the study (Vrasti 2012; Neal 2012). The imagining
of power is not only relational but also processual:
that is, it is always becoming, always in move-
ment and flux. Questioning the supposed factual
certainty of “academic rigor” arrived at by way of
tried-and-tested methodologies, IPS is informed
by theoretical and methodological bricolage
(Aradau et al. 2015; Squire 2012). A messy and
experimental methodological practice is proposed
as exposing the plural, coexisting realities and
rationalities, as well as recognizing the contingent
power relations which differ across spaces, thus
defying a one-size-fits-all practice. It is in drawing
attention to this mess that we can unsettle sup-
posed global and social orders and work toward
an alternative reading and reordering.
This application of Continental (mainly
French) lines of thought to the study of the inter-
national also reveals a geographical expansion,
along with the disciplinary. The critique of the
geographical, and related linguistic, dominance
of Anglo-American scholarship in international
relations has also contributed to the development
of IPS as a dissenting space. The journals Cultures
and Conflicts and Conflitti Globali, in French and
Italian, respectively, provided breeding grounds
for dissent, separately and in collaboration, tack-
ling themes including the practices of security and
surveillance within and outwith borders, as well as
theoretical interventions into the constitutive role
of war in the inside/outside and norm/exception
divide. However, these projects have remained
staunchly within a European perspective. While
the relation of IPS to postcolonial perspectives,
in blurring the perceived dichotomy between
domestic and international which has upheld
contemporary practices of accumulation and
intervention in postcolonial spaces, has begun to
be recognized and explored, the contributions
of IPS scholars have remained largely tied to
European pastures (Jabri 2013; Krishna 2017).
4 International Political Sociology
The Limits of “An International”
This fluidity and contestation in relation to disci-
plinary boundaries are used in IPS to interrogate
what has traditionally been conceived of as “the
problem of the international.” It is argued that this
framing of “a problem” is inherently limiting in
itself, as it presupposes a singular problem: the
international is then conceived as a realm to be
examined and solved, where actors are analyzed
and their actions predicted, in an investigation
which ultimately groups heterogeneous practices
with an identifiable “international,” excluding
those that are considered as domestic, internal,
or social (Bigo and Walker 2007). Working in
the gaps, margins, and fissures, IPS recognizes
the need to conceive of the complex of relations
that display global or international dynamics, as
well as taking account of plural temporalities and
spatialities. The study and theorizing of IR have
traditionally been organized through the contra-
distinction of the anarchic international – the
Hobbesian state of nature – to the rational, polit-
ical space of the nation-state, bound by the social
contract. With sovereign states conceived of as
equal actors upon this stage, such a conceptuali-
zation results in the peculiarities of balancing
power, enforcing customary norms, and dissuad-
ing irrational, destructive behavior. The concep-
tualization of these two distinct spheres, as the
inside/outside divide, was foundational in the
establishment of IR as a separate field of enquiry.
The policing of this perceived boundary of a
knowable “international” continues to pervade
the discipline’s claims to legitimate knowledge
production. Indeed, a series of fragmentations
sustains this bounded arena: the internal and
external, realists and idealists, and theory and
practice. Particularly in the post-Cold War con-
text, attention has been drawn to the challenge
posed to the bifurcation of political agency from
multiple sites: supra-, trans-, and sub-national
sites of governance and influence complicate
authority and legitimacy; the increasing mobility
of people, capital, goods, and information, each
posing different problems of security and control;
and the continual debate over the strenghts and
vulnerabilites of globalization, are but a few
examples. However, the decoding of such digres-
sions in the separation of governmental/interna-
tional politics has borne witness to many
rehashings of the whole-parts theory within the
imaginary of a “just,” “whole” global society,
which ultimately dismisses contestation as mere
disorder (Kessler 2009; Bigo 2017). The “order-
ing” that has characterized the international,
whether in terms of taming disruptive states or of
categorizing dysfunction, is predicated upon a
particular meaning of order legitimized through
an Anglo-American-dominated IR, where interna-
tional behavior can be problematized against stan-
dards of free movement of capital and limited
movement of people. The politics of ordering
entails a management of disorder, of blocking or
enabling flows.
From the standpoint of political geography,
Agnew has applied an IPS approach to question
the monopolizing notion of “territoriality” that has
been affixed to state: the territorial bordering
supposed as the paramount spatial logic cham-
pions a Eurocentric and transhistorical notion
of statehood. Drawing our attention to the “col-
lective fiction” of equal sovereignty upon which
major international institutions and related norms
of political mappings are founded – we are all
aware that not all states are equal in their capabil-
ity to sustain borders, in their international stand-
ing, or in domestic legitimacy – Agnew proposes
a geo-sociology that priorities both historical and
geographical contingency (Agnew 2017). IPS
arose from a recognition of the limits of IR in
the interrogation of the constitution of the inter-
national, which sustains an idealized worldview
and presents the international as neutral, stable,
and natural. Through conceptual genealogical his-
tory, one can unearth the long history of forma-
tions: IR affirms a particular idea of what history
looks like and how space and time must have then
been. Guzzino has pinpointed both the emergence
of International Political Economy and the rise of
a plethora of critical lenses in IR – namely, post-
structuralism, feminism, critical constructivism,
and postcolonialism – as opening avenues for
critique, welcoming differing theoretical tradi-
tions, and introducing alternative perspectives on
the political in the international. Both within and
International Political Sociology
without traditional IR, these research agendas
have rescued histories and struggles that have
been elided in mainstream discourse (Guzzino
2017). A flurry of texts published in the 1980s
and 1990s make up what has been described as the
“poststructural turn” in IR, which introduced
social and political theoretical developments in
order to destabilize the (re)production of the status
quo (Ashley 1988; Walker 1993). The subdivision
of work, and thus the separation and specializa-
tion of knowledge production, within IR itself was
also problematized: work that explored notions of
disorder, threat, and danger as constitutive of
notions of the international and related foreign
policy-making unsettled the subdisciplining of
security studies – also known as strategic studies
– that had arisen in the post-Second World War
context (Campbell 1992; Dillon 1996). It is to this
problematic of security, to which we now turn.
IPS of Security
Security pervades our everyday; it seems that the
more security we pursue, the more insecure we
feel, and the more security we demand. Any
attempt to define security also involves questions
of life, sovereignty, freedom, the nation-state,
community, and the individual, that are often
taken-for-granted, common sense notions: the
evocation of “security” must recognise the inter-
sections of race-class-gender and the challenges
posed by postcolonial perspectives in the con-
struction of the secure and the insecure. What
actually composes a secure state of being? How
would one (or should one) define security? How
much security is necessary for a “free” existence?
The popular conception of a “balance” of liberty
and security takes both as unchanging and eternal
values; how far can the scales then be tipped? In
the post-Cold War context, what is considered a
security issue is ever-expanding, much to the cha-
grin of many traditional security scholars as well
as some critical. Traditional security studies were
developed during the Cold War to study the phe-
nomenon of war between states, that is, in the
context of deterrence, mutually assured destruc-
tion, and the balance of powers. Discussions of
5
the burgeoning field of “Critical Security Studies”
often evoke the so-called “broadening” and
“deepening” of security: the former movement
refers to an expansion of threat beyond purely
military considerations to encompass environ-
mental, economic, political, and social issues;
and the greater depth is in the recognition of a
variety of referent objects, from the individual
level to those imagining a human or global secu-
rity. Such expansion supposes security as a fun-
damentally good thing, merely lamenting that it
must be humanized, sanitized, or democratized.
The IPS perspective of security has often been
characterized in surveys of the academic land-
scape as associated with the “Paris School,” in
relation to both the Copenhagen and Aberystwyth
schools (see Copenhagen School, Securitization
and Desecuritization, and Emancipation); how-
ever, the associated scholars do not consider IPS
as a facet of the capitalized “Critical Security
Studies.” An IPS approach to studying security
is concerned with analyzing discourses surround-
ing the construction of threat, danger, and insecu-
rity and the practices of a continually growing
array of security experts. The centrality on reflex-
ivity informs a focus upon the mundane, the
everyday, and the depoliticizing, bureaucratizing
inhumanity of (in)security. This proliferation of
security actors effaces the boundary between the
exceptional and the everyday – from airport
checks to university professors who must note
foreign student’s attendance, the practices of
policing and surveillance operate across multiple
borders.
Security has been traditionally understood as
encompassing an ordered internal space pacified
by police and a militarized external. Such a dis-
tinction has been challenged by the study of a
“transversal field of globalized (in)security”
through the application of a more sociological
approach. Exposing relations between and across
diverse actors – including the military, policing
apparatus, NGOs, private security companies, and
governments – unsettles the borders between the
realms of civil society, the state, and the interna-
tional. In revealing the interdependences which
emerge in spite of heterogeneity, IPS can then
reassemble other internationals (Bigo 2017). In
6 International Political Sociology
contrast to conceptions of security as survival in
the face of an existential threat, Bigo and Tsoukala
assert that “the knowledge of who needs to sur-
vive, be protected and from what, also supposes
knowing who is sacrificed in this operation . . .
Security is also, and mainly, about sacrifice”
(Bigo and Tsoukala 2008). The struggle over
what security means is analyzed through a reflex-
ive empiricism, which recognizes the power rela-
tions that define, legitimize, and carry out security
discourses, practices, and technologies. By posing
the question of who is sacrificed and who is made
insecure, at the forefront of considerations of
security, scholars interrogate whose security mat-
ters, and the measures that it entails, across geo-
graphical and temporal contingencies. The
problem of security is a particularly illuminating
snapshot for the fruitful transdisciplinary of IPS:
for example, the expansion of surveillance tech-
nologies, from biometrics to drones, directly con-
cerns perspectives from science and technology,
criminology, political science, sociology, and law,
to name but a few. The IPS approach to security
has largely developed in the context of the “War
on Terror” and has analyzed this contemporary
threat-scape through a focus upon the everyday
feeling of insecurity, or unease, as well as interro-
gating the exceptional within the everyday, par-
ticularly focusing upon the detrimental
consequences of security thinking in democracies
and analyzing the illiberal measures of liberal
regimes justified in the pursuit of the “common
good” of security (Bigo and Tsoukala 2008). Illus-
trative of this constitutive relationship between
security and insecurity, and of the relational and
processual approach of IPS, is the conceptualiza-
tion of the (in)securitization process, whereby
(successful) calls for security enable the deploy-
ment of coercive measures – with the conse-
quences of a proliferating insecurity – which
then further prescribes illiberal practices to pacify
this fear. The focus upon the illiberal liberalism
once again nods toward the Western and specifi-
cally Eurocentric gaze of IPS, which is particu-
larly stark in reference to the study of security.
Conclusions
As a plural field of research, IPS revels in the
negation of easily identifiable, categorizable,
exclusionary expertise. A recent collective essay
published in International Political Sociology
addressed the anxiety and myriad analytical
pitfalls that seem to litter the contemporary
global landscape – with particular reference to
the election of Trump and the Brexit vote – and
the associated consequences such as tightening
immigration, denial of climate change, and the
starving of the welfare state. This intervention by
four authors – with different disciplinary back-
grounds, perspectives, and angles of enquiry – is
a diagnostic endeavor, one that does not rely on
nostalgia, a presentist panic, or prediction but that
creates openings, across space and time to ima-
gine alternative ways of being, thinking, and
understanding (du Plessis et al. 2018). This encap-
sulates IPS as a dynamic, inclusive, and innova-
tive mode of critique which does not aim to
“solve” problems but to imagine the conditions
of possibility of the present and further to make
possible other articulations and practices.
Questioning the restrictive and limited view of
knowledge production within particular disci-
plines, which then claim autonomy and mastery
over particular phenomena, enables the unsettling
of the distinctions through which we structure the
world, such as the constitutive (b)ordering
between external and internal, the need for the
developing to become the developed, expertise
that are founded upon science, and rationale
opposed to indigenous knowledges. IPS scholars
have recognized increasing conversation between
social and political theory, sociology, and interna-
tional studies as indicative of a need for a more
interrelated engagement, to expose the violence of
disciplining knowledge and the related ordering
of the world. With reference to the subject of this
volume, the study of security through the produc-
tion of insecurity refuses to abide the distinction
between good security and bad insecurity, recog-
nizing the co-constitutive relationship. The adop-
tion of a more sociological approach broadens
beyond the state, exposing a transversal field of
actors. With every evocation of “security,” a series
International Political Sociology
of questions must be posed – who is being
secured, by whom, against what, and under what
conditions – to interrogate what life is considered
as (in)secure.
Cross-References
▶ Copenhagen School
▶ Critical Security Studies
▶ Emancipation
▶ Securitization and Desecuritization
References
Agnew, J. ‘Continuity, discontinuity and contingency:
Insights for international political sociology from
political geography’ in International political sociol-
ogy: Transversal lines, ed. Basaran et al. (London:
Routledge, 2017).
Aradau, C., Huysmans, J., & Squire, V. (2010). Acts of
European citizenship: A political sociology of mobility.
Journal of Common Market Studies, 48(4), 945–965.
Aradau, C., Huysmans, J., Neal, A., & Voelkner, N. (2015).
Introducing critical security methods. In Aradau et al.
(Eds.), Critical security methods: New frameworks for
analysis. Abingdon: Routledge.
Ashley, R. (1988). Untying the sovereign state: A double
reading of the anarchy problematique. Millennium, 17
(2), 227–262.
Basaran, T., Bigo, D., Guittet, E. P., & Walker, R. B. J.
(2017). Transversal lines: An introduction. In Basaran
et al. (Eds.), International political sociology: Trans-
versal lines. London: Routledge.
Bigo, D. (2017). International political sociology: Rethink-
ing the international through dynamics of power. In
Basaran et al. (Eds.), International political sociology:
Transversal lines. London: Routledge.
Bigo, D., & Tsoukala, A. (Eds.). (2008). Terror, insecurity
and liberty: Illiberal practices of liberal regimes after
9/11. London: Routledge.
Bigo, D., & Walker, R. B. J. (2007). Political sociology and
the problem of the international. Millennium: Journal
of International Studies, 35(3), 725–739.
Bilgin, P., & Guillaume, X. (2017). Introduction. In
Bilgin & Guillaume (Eds.), Routledge handbook of
international political sociology. Abingdon:
Routledge.
7
Bleiker, R. (2017). Multidisciplinarity. In Bilgin &
Guillaume (Eds.), Routledge handbook of international
political sociology. Abingdon: Routledge.
C.A.S.E Collective. (2006). Critical approaches to security
in Europe: A networked manifesto. Security Dialogue,
37(4), 443–487.
Campbell, D. (1992). Writing security: United States
foreign policy and the politics of identity. Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press.
Dillon, M. (1996). Politics of security: Towards a political
philosophy of continental thought. London: Routledge.
Du Plessis, G., Shilliam, R., Walker, R. B. J., & Weber, H.
(2018). Collective discussion: Diagnosing the present.
International political sociology, 12(1), 88–107.
Guzzino, S. (2017). Afterword: International political soci-
ology, or the social ontology and power politics of
process. In Bilgin & Guillaume (Eds.), Routledge
handbook of international political sociology.
Abingdon: Routledge.
Huysmans, J., & Nogueira, J. P. (2012). International polit-
ical sociology: Opening spaces, stretching lines. Inter-
national Political Sociology, 6(1), 1–3.
Jabri, V. (2013). The postcolonial subject: Claiming
politics/governing others in late modernity. London:
Routledge.
Kessler, O. (2009). Toward a sociology of the interna-
tional? International relations between anarchy and
world society. International Political Sociology, 3(1),
87–108.
Krishna, S. (2017). Postcolonialism and international polit-
ical sociology. In Bilgin & Guillaume (Eds.), Routledge
handbook of international political sociology.
Routledge: Abingdon.
Neal, A. (2012). Normalization and legislative exception-
alism: Counterterrorist lawmaking and the changing
times of security emergencies. International Political
Sociology, 6(3), 260–276.
Squire, V. (2012). Attuning to mess. In Salter & Matlu
(Eds.), Research methods in critical security studies:
An introduction. London: Routledge.
Vrasti, W. (2012). Travelling with ethnography. In Salter &
Matlu (Eds.), Research methods in critical security
studies: An introduction. London: Routledge.
Walker, R. B. J. (1993). Inside/outside: International
relations as political theory. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Walker, R. B. J. (2017). Only connect: International, polit-
ical, sociology. In Basaran et al. (Eds.), International
political sociology: Transversal lines. London:
Routledge.