ABSTRACT
While R. B. J. Walker's Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Inside/outside) is in many ways a classic, there are several difficulties — and indeed ironies — in referring to it as a classic of International Relations (IR). 2 Here, we are not dealing with a work that seeks to improve on contemporary theories of IR, either by providing better and more accurate explanations of ‘international relations’, or by offering new visions of ‘world politics’. Such criteria might usually be employed to judge whether a particular contribution to IR is worthy of the accolade of being a ‘classic’, but they do not apply in Walker's case. Rather, his is a collection of essays that engage critically with some of the underlying assumptions upon which the very notion of IR as a separate ‘discipline’ relies. Perhaps most of all, it is a text that questions the constitutive limits of IR — understood as a discipline that concerns itself with what is said to happen ‘outside’ rather than ‘inside’ the sovereign territorial state, in the realm of ‘international’ as opposed to ‘domestic’ politics. Through the establishment and maintenance of these limits Walker argues that IR is (re)produced as a separate field of study and is distinct from Political Theory.
