Postgraduate course 2022/2023

Research Methods in International Relations

Type: Elective course

Area of studies: Political Science and Area Studies

Delivered by: School of Politics and Governance

Where: Faculty of Social Sciences

When: 2 year, 1 semester

Mode of studies: offline

Open to: students of one campus

Instructors: Iain Ferguson

Language: English

ECTS credits: 4

Contact hours: 36

Course Syllabus

Abstract

This is an intensive course on the methodologies that can be used to address research problems in world politics. It is designed specifically for advanced, postgraduate students. As such, it assumes a basic-to-intermediate knowledge of qualitative research design and the theories of international relations. It is a course about methodologies rather than methods. Methods are techniques for gathering and analysing bits of data, whereas methodology is “a concern with the logical structure and procedure of scientific enquiry” (Sartori 1970, 1,033). All research projects are to some extent multi-method. The question we must ask ourselves in our research projects is not about whether to mix methods, but how to do so in a manner that is coherent, or hangs together. The problems come when we try to mix methodologies. This is a much more fraught exercise, inasmuch as a methodology implies an epistemology and perhaps also an ontology – in short, a philosophy of science – in the way that a method does not. With that in mind, the course is divided into two parts. The first part The Problem of Explanation deals with two research traditions in the philosophy of social science, the extent to which these are in tension, and why this matters for doing research on world politics. We will cover the philosophical debates about rationality, causality, agency and structure that continue to shape the research agenda in the study of world politics, and the social sciences more broadly. The second part of the course, The Problem of Discourse Analysis, explores the main methodological approaches to analysing expressions of language (spoken and written) in world politics. This is a deliberately broad and inclusive conception of what discourse is. We shall cover hermeneutical (or interpretive) and critical approaches to discourse analysis and how they have been applied in celebrated works by leading researchers of world politics. The course closes with reflections on the problem of doing discourse analysis (and indeed any form of research in the social sciences) in ways that combine two different philosophies of science, one that is positivist/realist and the other that is hermeneutical/critical.