The United States and the Discipline of International Relations: "Hegemonic Country, Hegemonic Discipline"

This paper focuses on the relationship between the way the discipline of International Relations (IR) is studied in the U.S. and U.S. foreign policy itself. Referring to the events of September 11 the paper argues that mainstream U.S. IR defines the appropriate methods of how to study international relations in such a narrow way as to restrict understanding of other cultures and rationalities. By relying on culturally and historically specific distinctions between politics and economics, between private and public, and between domestic and foreign policies, U.S. IR explains a narrow range of world political events and does so from a U.S. perspective. This makes it difficult to account for many of the most pressing inequalities in the world, and thus raises the question of the linkage between academia, the civil society in which it is located, and the role that it should serve in encouraging a wide debate on the motivations and views of those outside the U.S.