The state of the art in German IR

Extract

Gunther Hellmann, Klaus Dieter Wolf, and Michael Zürn (eds.), Die neuen Internationalen Beziehungen. Forschungsstand und Perspektiven in Deutschland (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2003), pp. 614.

The intensification in recent years of interest in the history and sociology of IR (as a discipline) has been manifested in a growing number of publications dealing with aspects of different IR communities. The appearance of a weighty and semi-official volume summarising the state of the art in German IR is therefore a noteworthy development, and one that merits attention beyond the German-speaking world where it will find its main audience. I refer to this volume as ‘semi-official’ because it has been published under the auspices of the Section for International Politics of the German Political Science Association (Deutsche Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft, DVPW). The book does not attempt to speak for IR scholars in Austria or Switzerland and so represents a national rather than a linguistic community, though not all the contributors teach at universities in Germany.