Theory Makes Global IR Hang Together: Lessons from Citation Analysis

Abstract

This paper asked two interrelated questions through citation analyses of both WoS- and – for the first time – seven non-WoS publications from Latin America, Africa, and Asia: 1) What is the state of IR theory in various journals? 2) To what extent is IR theory global rather than con-fined to transatlantic IR? We find that IR theory is alive and kicking everywhere. There is little evidence for continued paradigmatic warfare as experienced during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The two main clusters of the 300 top-cited sources represented in our WoS dataset are both engaged in theory-building, one with regard to one substantive issue-area in world poli-tics, namely international security, the other more generally devoted to theorizing from a variety of substantive perspectives. As to the non-WoS journals in our sample, a similar picture of non-paradigmatic theory use emerges. However, while IR theory is referred to everywhere, it is definitely not global. Our top-300 WoS cited sources have been exclusively published in the U.S., the UK, and (Western) Europe. Highly cited theory sources in our dataset of non-WoS journals do not contain references to non-Western IR scholarship either. There are few theory citations in non-WoS journals referring to scholars of the particular region or country, but these cites do not travel beyond the individual journal. In sum, we can observe a core-periphery structure of global IR whereby a strongly interconnected transatlantic core community faces a periphery that only connects through common references to the core.