Academic Freedom and the Discipline of International Relations
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: This short entry makes the case for academic freedom not just as a core value but as an opportunity and a lens indispensable to the study of international politics. Despite its widely recognized importance, academic freedom has never been among the key research concerns for international relations (IR). Institutionally, the discipline is prepared to take a stance and voice its worries through, for instance, the ISA Academic Freedom Committee.1 And yet academic freedom remains at the margins of our research, publishing, and teaching. This is despite the fact that the discipline has invested considerable effort into the study of its own knowledge production practices. This text explains why academic freedom matters for IR, in which areas it should have already made a greater mark, and how it could be approached more broadly as a precious resource for learning and teaching about key aspects of world politics. There is no doubt that academic freedom represents a fundamental value, a right, and a crucial working condition for all scholars. As a cross-disciplinary research subject, it has attracted attention in philosophy (Butler 2017; Lackey 2018; Simpson 2020), political theory and political science (Ignatieff and Roch 2018; Bárd 2020; Berggren and Bjørnskov 2022), higher education and university studies (Gibbs 2016; Matei and Iwinska 2018), international legal studies (Beiter et al. 2016), sociology (Lynch and Ivancheva 2015; Orr 2019), geography (Bartel 2019), and area studies (Golunov 2014; Meyer 2017). Given such wide treatment, it is useful to start with a few basic definitional approaches.
Source: International Studies Review
Author: Katarzyna Kaczmarska
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4402679306