Introduction to the First Forum

One of the main purposes of the journal International Political Sociology is to function as a hub for circulating ideas about defining themes and arguments for international political sociology. In addition to the main articles, we have set up the Forum, which seeks to facilitate snappier discussion of key ideas. In the Forum, we will publish short letters (up to 900 words) that address particular issues, arguments, or events that relate to the published articles and previous forum contributions. The contributions below refer to the editorial and articles of the first issue. One of the vehicles for such a discussion are reflections and comments on and critique of key figures that give shape to the interdisciplinary project of IPS and which are central mediums for understanding key phenomena through which IPS seeks to theorize various conditions and transformations of modern and contemporary political lives. For example, in the first issue of IPS Michel Foucault figured largely, as he does in the forum contributions. The Foucault that emerges is no longer primarily the one that entered the meta-theoretical debates of the 1980s and 1990s about the ontological and epistemological implications of the linguistic turn and social constructivism for international studies. It is a more sociologically applied Foucault; one whose concepts are used to analyze specific practices and to generalize from them. But as both Barry Hindess and Simon Dalby rightly remark, Foucault's work also remains important for its long-term histories of fields of knowledge that define subjectivities, differential notions of time and space, modes of constituting objects and relations, etc. The concepts he introduces, however, mirror to a considerable extent the particular historical conjunctures—for many, the European classical age—in which they were formed as well as the specific intellectual debates in which he engaged—among others with the Sartreans and Marxists in France. This raises, as with all international sociological analysis, the question of what kind of political, social, and historical imaginary one imports by developing sociological analysis through Foucaultian concepts, and more generally, by working them from within the particular disciplinary knowledge of sociology and international relations, as all three letters point out

Epistemology · International relations · Linguistics · Michel foucault · Political science · Politics · Publication · Social science · Sociology · Computer Science · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · Philosophy · Political and Social Issues