Toward a Fourth Generation in Civilizational Scholarship

Abstract

One of the areas of research most underdeveloped in IR concerns the production of knowledge. Although the intellectual history of the field is a booming specialization, and the sociology of the field has been the subject of a few significant studies, Naeem Inayatullah’s and David Blaney’s International Relations and the Problem of Difference (2003) is one of few critical studies of how IR was made. In this chapter I will briefly suggest that civilizational analysis can clear new pathways in the critical study of the history and— significantly—prehistory of IR. Concomitantly, a focus on the production of knowledge will implicitly, or explicitly, contribute to civilizational analysis.