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Introduction
What is the subject matter of the discipline of International Relations (IR), particularly if seen in relation to its closest neighbouring disciplines: in IR's case Sociology, Politics/Political Science, and History? This seems to be a straightforward, if quite basic, question to ask of any academic discipline. Yet in IR, this question is rarely addressed (let alone answered) in a direct fashion. We argue in this contribution that systematically engaging with it is a worthwhile exercise required to focus on central research questions for IR as a discipline. The argument is based on the conviction that any discipline functions and innovates by always asking basic questions about itself anew, and that doing so also serves as a boundary-drawing exercise in the demarcation practice of forming (fleeting and always contested) 'disciplinary identities'. The purpose of this article is to inquire whether it is possible, particularly with a view to neighbouring disciplines, to legitimately delineate one or many realms as the discipline's prime subject.1The purpose of this article is not to provide an agenda for what IR should do (either collectively or as individual scholars). It is a process piece, something a discipline needs to do as part of reproducing itself and keeping up to date (see more below on the practice of boundary drawing).2
In order to address the issue of delineating the discipline's subject, the next section first raises a number of problems associated with both identifying the subject matter of IR and 'labelling' the discipline in relation to competing terms and disciplines. The following section approaches the issue by first of all dealing with the questions of whether, and to what degree, IR takes its identity from a confluence of disciplinary traditions or from a distinct methodology.3The section after that then turns to the two possibilities we see that would lead to identifying IR as a discipline defined by a specific realm in distinction to other disciplines. The first possibility refers to the identification of the 'international' as a specific realm of the social world, differentiated from other such realms in functional terms. The second possibility refers to IR being about everything in the social world above a particular scale, that is, IR in effect being similar...