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British Journal of Politics and International Relations,
Vol. 2, No. 3, October 2000, pp. 374–402

The discipline of international relations: still an American social science?

STEVE SMITH

Abstract
This article reviews the state of the discipline of international relations. It starts from statements made by the editors in their editorial published in the first issue of this journal. The editors noted that there seemed to have been less adherence to positivism in international relations than in other areas of political science and that there was both more opposition to positivism and more methodological and epistemological openness in international relations than in political science generally. The article outlines the current state of the field, focusing on the rationalist mainstream and then on the reflectivist alternatives, before looking at social constructivism, seeing it as the likely acceptable alternative to rationalism in the mainstream literature of the next decade. It then turns to examine whether international relations is still an American social science, before looking at the situation in the United Kingdom. It concludes that the editors’ comments were indeed accurate, but that the fact that there is both more opposition to positivism in international relations and more openness in the UK academic community does not mean that the mainstream US literature is anything like as open or pluralist. The UK community is indeed more able to develop theory relevant to the globalised world at the new millennium, but the US academic community still dominates the discipline.

In their editorial in the first issue of the British Journal of Politics and
International Relations, the editors made some provocative remarks about the state of the discipline of international relations (IR) in the United
Kingdom. In this article I address these comments by examining the state of the discipline at the turn of the millennium. I will focus

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