The Sociological Turn: Bringing the Domestic Analogy Back In

Maximilian Terhalle

International Studies, 2011, vol. 48, issue 2, 165-175

Abstract: In an exemplary article, Buzan and Albert (2010), two leading scholars of International Relations (IR), employ insights from sociology in order to present their new theory of differentiation. However, they fail to properly theorize the domestic-international analogy in their new theory. In contrast, this essay argues that the supposed dichotomy between the two realms, the domestic and the international, can be collapsed into a synthesis. Essentially, two analytical steps are taken. First, the norms that are to be transposed from the domestic to the international plane are not fixed but reflect a spectrum instead. The second move is to recognize that the first step critically depends on the international political context. If the latter is, as is argued here, strongly influenced by rising powers that have fervently disagreed with Western notions of global governance and thereby, of world society, functional differentiation, advocated by the above authors as the predominant paradigm in today’s international politics, does not seem convincing.

Keywords: Differentiation; domestic analogy; sociological turn; world society; rising powers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0020881712469459 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:intstu:v:48:y:2011:i:2:p:165-175

DOI: 10.1177/0020881712469459

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().