New Book on French IR by Henrik Breitenbauch

Senior Researcher Henrik Breitenbauch has published International Relations in France: Writing between Discipline and State, a Routledge monograph that is part of the series Worlding Beyond the West. The book examines how and why the French IR tradition is different from the transnational-American discipline. By analyzing argument structures in French and transnational-American journal articles over time, Breitenbauch demonstrates how the disciplines differ, and how they evolve over time.

The book is a major contribution to the meta-IR literature on global, regional and national traditions of IR. The challenge to the French discipline of whether and how to position itself in relation to the evolving American discipline is in many ways exemplary for other non-American national IR disciplines, and the choices as well as the structural conditions underlying the French case are relevant to all non-Western cases.

As the analysis is comparative, moreover, it reveals that the modern American discipline – what is considered as recognisable social science – takes shape only during the 1970s. The book thus offers new knowledge about the discipline’s international development as such. Both the case and the methodology are interesting to larger audiences outside IR, in the history and sociology of social science, contrastive rhetoric, as well as French and cultural studies.

Discover more about the book here on Routledge’s homepage.