The World at the Door: Problematizing the Local/International Dichotomy

• In Event: Positionality and Reflexivity in Political Science II: The International Context

Abstract

In this paper, we show the need to be reflexive about the categories we use to understand and analyse our research. This need to be reflexive and practice reflexivity takes place across the research process—from selecting an object of analysis, research design, field work and analysis of data and right up—because the process of denaturalising the categories is continuous and iterative.

In this paper, we use a particular example of denaturalising categories of analysis, showing how the “local” and “international” cannot be understood as a binary performance. Ontologically, we know that the “international”, “national” and “local” are connected, now and in the past. Refugees, soldiers, and diplomats experience this intersection every day. It has been a challenge for scholars of International Relations and Comparative Politics to study this intersection, empirically, theoretically and methodologically. IR literature, for example, has traditionally emphasized how “international” actors intervene in “local” contexts. The “local turn” emerged in response to the lack of agency traditionally given to local settings. However, these works neither question the relevance of the categories of “local” or “international” nor deconstruct this opposition, as we aim to do in this article. IR has yet to denaturalize and examine these categories as social objects which affect how we perceive, understand, analyze and construct the world through these categories.

This article provides an analytical and practical framework by assessing critically the categories of analysis through which they apprehend their object of research, by focusing on the binary pair of the "local" vs. "international". After presenting how other disciplines have tackled the challenges raised by implicit categories of analysis, we examine four diverse cases from the Caribbean, West Africa and post-Soviet space. We show how the iterative process of denaturalising categories, and how this need for reflexivity needs to take place across the category, by signalling how insights from fieldwork in these four cases shapes our understanding of the need to go beyond seeing the “local” and “international” as a binary performance.

Authors

• Eleanor Knott, London School of Economics

• Audrey Alejandro, London School of Economics