Comparative Political Theory and International Relations: A Call for Partnership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last decades, critical scholarship in International Relations (IR) has grown, highlighting the Eurocentric, positivist, and hegemonic knowledge-making practices. These critiques have not only highlighted the shortcomings of IR practice but also established their own standpoints, frameworks, and approaches in the discipline, such as Global IR, pluriverse, relationality, and others. While central in imagining alternate IR and its practices, the critiques have ignored the methodological concerns and questions surrounding scholarship, particularly how to do non-Western research in IR and through what means? To address this, this study turns to Comparative Political Theory (CPT), a subfield of political theory, to reflect on questions of methodology and methods in IR. This research proposes espousing the comparative label from CPT and thinking about IR through CPT’s method of ‘dialogue’ and ‘three-step hermeneutics’. ‘Dialogue’ and ‘three-step hermeneutics’ offers critical tools for pursuing non-Western scholarship in IR, emphasising practices of empathetic listening and interpretation led by immersion within the field. By foregrounding methods and methodological discussions in IR, this research aims to reconcile the demands of intelligibility, policy, and practice of non-Western approaches within the discipline.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.055 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.076 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.046 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".