After the Interregnum - David Chandler

international sphere which has created a sense of the end of the ‘inside/outside’
dichotomy. When the academic community’s subjective hopes for change are
projected outside the formal political sphere of state-based politics there is little
inclination to look too closely, or critically, at whether the international sphere is, in
fact, open to these aspirations. International Relations practitioners are in this way
reflecting the broader political trends in Western society.
However, the challenge is not merely that of attempting to suggest an alternative
explanation for why the death of the political binaries of International Relations has
been so vociferously proclaimed. I would argue that the intellectual task of those
involved in the discipline is to reassert the importance of International Relations as a
specific political discipline. By this I do not mean defending ‘realism’, ‘rationalism’
or ‘positivism’ but changing the terms of debate and establishing a set of intellectual
tools and approaches which can establish International Relations as a vital and vibrant
political discipline. One which can challenge not only the attempts to import into the
international sphere, and in the process ‘hollow-out’, the ‘inside’ political concepts of
democracy, citizenship, and individual legal and political rights but also draw out the
flip-side of this process, the degrading of the political gains of the domestic political
sphere. Rebuilding International Relations as a political discipline is vital to inform
and to explain political engagement with both the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’.
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