Symposium: Scholarly Influence and the Shaping of International Relations Debates

[This is a post-publication review symposium] Back in 2011, I characterized the field as having moved from the “paradigm wars” to the “war on paradigms.” (Nexon 2011). That same year, David Lake proclaimed that “isms” are “evil” in the pages of International Studies Quarterly. (Lake 2011). Indeed, by 2015 the European Journal of International Relations was debating the “End of IR Theory.” (Nexon, 2015). But while international-relations scholars variously celebrated, rent their garments, or yawned, the fact is that we don’t know all that much about the actual state of theory and theorizing in the field. In his recent ISQ piece, “Where is International Relations Going? Evidence from Graduate Training,” (2016) Jeff Colgan seeks to shed more light on the present and future of the field. In doing so, he takes on many trends, including the increasing reliance on journal-oriented metrics to allocate status and prestige. (Hendrix 2015, Mugge 2015, Nexon and Jackson 2015). And in this symposium, four scholars respond to his claims in three pieces. Katie Paulson-Smith and Michael J. Tierney focus on Colgan’s “Teaching Influence Score (TIS)” and how it compares to other metrics of influence. Cullen Hendrix offers a critical assessment of TIS. Jelena Subotic finds TIS problematic as well, but for reasons that implicate all metric-based assessments of scholarly importance. Finally, Colgan responds to his interlocutors.[...