When the Discipline is Not Enough: Scholarship, Communication and Power

What is responsible International Relations scholarship? This paper discusses this question through the prism of communication. This prism sheds important light on how scholarship is implicated in power relations beyond the supposed academic Ivory Tower. Scholars, qua their widely acknowledged authority as spokespersons on world politics as well as their training in crafting convincing arguments, have the potential to generate power in world politics. By the same token, focusing on communication also provides important insights for understanding responsible practices of scholarly power. This paper makes a case for communicative power. Drawing from Hannah Arendt’s work as well as related research on dialogue and reflexive scholarship, I argue that inclusive and critical dialogue makes the generation of communicative power possible. While I provide a number of specific suggestions for how such a dialogue ought to look like, the gist of my contention is that scholarship ought to be sceptical about what usually passes as taken-for-granted and develop communicative ties beyond narrow disciplinary confines in order to expose its arguments to careful and heterogeneous scrutiny. For such a scrutiny, the discipline – and even academia – is not enough.