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‘ythe writing of disciplinary histories in itself performs an ideological function reinforcing and legitimating dominant positions, which can be challenged through more critical reading’.
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the trajectories of the two disciplines. Moreover, what becomes apparent as this literature is compared, is that both sets of disciplinary histories and assessments of the discipline are Western-centric, arguably both reflecting and reinforcing Western dominance, not only in the actualities of politics as practice, but also as knowledge-based dominance through disciplinary analyses. Said’s (1978) classic text, Orientalism, draws attention to the importance of an awareness of culture in shaping the underlying assumptions that we make when carrying out political (and other forms of) analysis. He draws attention to the role of the Western construction of understandings of the Orient, and the logic of this argument is extended here to suggest that the way in which the disciplinary histories in Politics and IR have been constructed have served to legitimate and reinforce dominant Western conceptions of the way in which IR and Politics proceed. Indeed so embedded is this dominance that existing histories contain little reference to cultural variations in the histories of the discipline, which in turn serves to marginalise or exclude alternative viewpoints.3
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reinforcing and legitimating dominant positions, which can be challenged through more critical reading. For example, Bell identifies the existence of a progressive narrative in IR, as characteristic of much of the writing of IR history. It is this ‘progressive narrative’ that, he agues, ‘has served as a powerful legitimating device for certain substantive positions in post-war IR’ (Bell, 2009: 6). As noted below, the same can be said of disciplinary histories of Politics, and while there are exceptions the tendency is to reaffirm and reassert implied Western notions of progress and modernity. The writing of these histories also draws attention to the closed nature of the disciplinary boundaries. Histories tend to be either of Politics, or of IR, rather than integrating the two (despite their similarities). In Politics, histories and assessments of the discipline tend to be country specific: either in relation to the US (see Gunnell, 1993; Garand and Giles, 2003); the UK (Kenny, 2004) or comparative (Norris, 1997; Marsh and Savigny, 2004). King and Marian (2008) undertake a crossnational survey of the discipline of political science, including US, UK, Europe, Canada, Australasia, Asia and the Middle East; their analysis focuses on the concerns highlighted by Western histories of the disciplines – that is, debate over subject matter, method and future development – more fundamentally implying Western notions of progress and modernity. Disciplinary histories of IR also tend to focus attention on the American dominance in the discipline (which contribute to, and form part of, the larger notion of Western-centric approaches). While there are more critical accounts of the privileged positioning of US approaches within IR (Smith, 2000) and the origins and way in which the construction of histories have played a role in serving the interests of the dominant narratives (cf. Schmidt, 1998; Bell, 2009), there has been surprisingly little literature that compares
ORIGINS AND HISTORIES OF IR AND POLITICS Conventional narratives suggest that Politics as a discipline can be mapped heather savigny
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