From exotic seduction to utter normality: discourse research and International Relations

摘要

'Studies involving discourse as a central theoretical concept have been in recent years one of the most active and interesting areas of International Relations' (Milliken 1999, 225). Written in hindsight against the background of the 1980s and 1990s, Milliken's observation would turn out to have unforeseen prognostic quality. More than 15 years after her contribution, discursive perspectives keep proliferating in International Relations (IR), and today the concept of discourse no longer denotes solely a 'commitment to some exotic (presumably Parisian) social theory' (Jepperson et al. 1996, 34) - as some of the more polemic critics had warned - but has developed into a widely used and accepted concept in IR. From questions of international governance, legalization and institutionali-zation, to European integration and identity, all major aspects of international life are being scrutinized from a discursive perspective. Hence it is fair to say that discourse research has remained the active area in IR that Milliken considered it already back in 1999, highly dynamic and diverse with a plethora of different understandings of the concept of discourse and scholars pondering the implications of the latter for the analysis of international political and societal life.