Critical methods in international relations: the politics of techniques, devices and acts

Aradau, Claudia and Huysmans, Jef (2014). Critical methods in international relations: the politics of techniques, devices and acts. European Journal of International Relations, 20(3) pp. 596–619.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066112474479

Abstract

Methods have increasingly been placed at the heart of theoretical and empirical research in IR and social sciences more generally. This article explores the role of methods in International Relations and argues that methods can be part of a critical project if reconceptualised away from neutral techniques of organising empirical material and research design. It proposes a two-pronged reconceptualisation of critical methods as devices which enact worlds and acts which disrupt particular worlds. Developing this conceptualisation allows us to foreground questions of knowledge and politics as stakes of method and methodology rather than exclusively of ontology, epistemology or theory. It also allows us to move away from the dominance of scientificity (and its weaker versions of systematicity and rigour) to understand methods as less pure, less formal, messier and more experimental, carrying substantive political visions.

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