ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the encounter between international political sociology and science and technology studies (STS), sometimes also labelled ‘new materialism’. D. MacKenzie’s understanding of the promise of STS for an analysis of the imbrications of big and small is relevant to international political sociology. The chapter focuses on the conceptual and methodological challenges of international political sociology, understood as an analytic focus on the complex assemblage of the big and the small in international politics. It also explores the potential of the so-called new materialist turn in international politics to advance this line of research. David Campbell’s suggestion to rebrand International Relations as the philosophical anthropology of everyday life on a global scale is interesting, not least because it raises the question of anthropology. Methodologically, there certainly is a tension between using inquests or court cases as sources for a practice-based or object-centred studies.
