Two Stories to Tell about International Political Sociology

This article identifies what International Political Sociology (IPS) is and is not, as 'IPS' debates enter their third decade in this journal. The first story presents IPS as an attempt to reconstruct the conditions of international thought: it asks how distinctions between the international, the political, and the social became possible in the first place. In this sense, IPS is associated with an inquiry into the social c onditions of thought, including the emergence of scientific disciplines, concepts, and ways of knowing. The second story is closely related to the first but differs in orientation. Rather than primarily reconstructing the conditions and presuppositions of international thought, it applies established approaches from social theory to trace silences, exclusions, and invisibilities within world politics. In doing so, it resonates with existing critical networks and uses IPS as a platform for advancing a broader critical agenda in IR. While we are sympathetic to both understandings, this article identifies a shift toward the second. We trace this shift through an analysis of citation networks and a close reading of IPS editorials. The article therefore suggests that revisiting some of IPS’s founding questions may offer a fruitful route for renewing debates about its intellectual profile, its critical agenda, and possible futures.