ABSTRACT
International Relations (IR) was notoriously awarded the “dubious honour of being among the least self-reflexive of the Western social sciences” (Frost in Lapid 1989: 249–250). Since, a rich literature on the notion of reflexivity in IR has emerged, most notably in connection with the Third Debate and the ethnographic turn in IR (Ackerly and True 2008, Guillaume 2002, Neufeld 1993). Broadly defined, reflexivity means that “serious attention is paid to the way different kinds of linguistic, social, political, and theoretical elements are woven together in the process of knowledge development, during which empirical material is constructed, interpreted and written” (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000: 9). This means that the research process influences the research object or situation, challenging established distinctions between object and subject, theory and reality, and author and text. Reflexivity makes us think about the (power) relations between the researcher and the researched, and the political nature of research (Aull Davies 1999, Marcus 1994).
