CONCEPTUAL ISSUES AND PERIPHERAL SCHOLARSHIP: HEGEMONY, DISCIPLINARY SOCIOLOGY AND IR IN BELARUS AND UKRAINE

This work questions the conventional conceptualization(s) of hegemony within the subfield of the sociology of IR. Despite the concept’s central position within the subfield, it is not immune to a series of misinterpretations and non-critical borrowings. Those had led the subfield into a conceptual dead-end, which, in turn, heavily affected the former’s empirical research orientations. In particular, disciplinary sociology was deprived of an ability to effectively locate the patterns of disciplinary dominance, instead being preoccupied with registering mere patterns of diversity and plurality. Thus, this work aims to investigate conceptual issues associated with hegemony. In particular, it concerns tracing the concept’s evolution of usage and semantic oscillations within and outside of IR. This, in turn, might allow a more nuanced and eclectic understanding of disciplinary hegemony. For this purpose, the work starts with the historical review of hegemony and its socio-political context of usage to prepare the ground for an overall assessment of the Gramscian conceptualization of hegemony and those which are conventionally labeled as the post-Gramscian. Subsequently, it moves on to investigate the existing theoretical traditions within IR to trace the channels of possible misinterpretation of the notion of hegemony by disciplinary sociology. Finally, it comes to the problem of disciplinary hegemony to critically assess the current conceptualizations of the latter with the backdrop of the abovementioned hegemonic traditions. As a result of this conceptual analysis, three outcomes are presented. The first locates the current misinterpretation of the disciplinary hegemony in misreading Kal Holsti’s thesis regarding the nexus of national-academic and national-intellectual hegemonies. The second formulates the double self-referentiality thesis. The latter concerns the sociology of IR’s treatment of its object of research, namely the discipline of IR, in the same manner as its parental discipline treats its object of study, namely the international. The third formulates several hegemonic analogies, i.e., alternative conceptualizations of disciplinary hegemony based on the results of the abovementioned analysis of various hegemonic traditions. In particular, it goes about the Gramscian, structural-realist, post-structuralist, and world system analogies and emulation of the English school and neo-liberal analogies. On par with its conceptual focus, this work has an evident empirical aspect. With the help of bibliometric analysis, it approaches two peripheral IR communities, Belarus and Ukraine. Its methodological framework consists of three crucial elements. A citation patterns analysis serves the purpose of tracing patterns of intellectual and disciplinary dependencies. A thematic content analysis, with its emphasis on research topics, paradigmatic and methodological position advanced, gives a more substantial picture of the local disciplines. Finally, the author profile analysis complements the latter two methods with author-level attributes and advances a scholar-level image of the participatory patterns of the local disciplines. Apart from the subfield’s convention of generating data about the peripheral national IR communities, the empirical part has a clear connection to the conceptual one. This connection unfolds as follows. First, the case selection is significantly based on the research logic brought in by the conceptual part. Second, its focus on specific aspects of the peripheral publishing patterns (reference time lag adjusted for the linguistic dimension, regional hegemon thesis, etc.) directly results from the empirical operationalization of the respective hegemonic analogies. Third, its attempt to bring methodological novelty, namely that of the thematic and citation analysis merge, comes from the issue-areas hegemonic analogy.