Through Dialogue to Engaged Pluralism:. The Unfinished Business of the Third Debate

In what has frequently been referred to as the “third debate,” postmodern, postpositivist, critical, feminist, and constructivist scholars who have alternative assumptions about social inquiry and knowledge construction have vigorously challenged conventional scholarship in international studies. Issues of theoretical pluralism, cross-paradigmatic communication, incommensurability, reflexivity, and theory choice have been raised in this discussion but until recently dialogue, as such, has received only indirect and sporadic attention. Presently, however, the rising tide of interest in dialogue concerning social theory seems to have reached the shores of the international relations discipline. Therefore, the present is as good a moment as any to ask the inevitable question: Is this new preoccupation with dialogue yet another metatheoretical diversion (see Moravcsik in this forum)—whereby international relations scholars divert precious and scarce scholarly resources from productive “first order” (for example, empirical) investigations to sterile “second order” navel gazing—or are we witnessing here a potentially important development that may eventually help us leave the isolated intellectual realms into which we have drifted over time?