Concepts at work: on the linguistic infrastructure of world politics

Despite the linguistic turn in social sciences and the epistemic discussions within the so-called third debate in International Relations (IR) theory, the problematique of concepts, their epistemic construction and social function has (still) not been sufficiently addressed in IR. The volume edited by Piki Ish-Shalom responds to this challenge by providing both an extensive analytical framework for researching concepts and a set of case-studies which demonstrate how concepts emerge, how they are employed by political actors in specific contexts, and how they can be investigated in different social settings with the help of different methodologies (qualitative, quantitative and mixed) and diverse empirical material (e.g. documents, news outlets, transcripts of speeches). The book shows also how the study of concepts contributes to the reflexivity of IR and to the project of a global IR in theory and practice. The book consists of ten chapters, including the introduction and conclusions. Interested readers...