ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the virtues of international relations (IR) as an undisciplined – suggesting that the comparative advantage of IR, or the potential comparative advantage of IR – is its lack of disciplinarily and the accompanying lack of foundation, which brings about a lack of clear rules for thought, knowledge production, and research. The disciplinary borrowing, or tool shopping, that has become characteristic of IR would be impossible were IR a proper "discipline". The chapter also explores that attraction – the draw of undisciplined IR – and discusses some of the potential advantages of IR-as-undiscipline for the intellectual community of IR scholars and their corresponding body of scholarship. It examines two potential draws of such work: putting exploration before coherence; and sampling diverse paths claiming contribution to IR. An undisciplined IR would be an IR that broke the boundaries of artificial pretense with imagination – imagined possibilities, imagined worlds, and imagined knowledge.
