ABSTRACT
In 2007, Christine Sylvester argued that the discipline of International Relations had lost the common ground that would enable all its practitioners to participate in a shared conversation. International Relations (IR) had moved irreversibly from an earlier common ground that had proved unsustainably narrow, and into a new diversity that, however, lacked any common ground at all. Unlike Sociology, History, Anthropology, Geography, Comparative Literature, and so on, IR has arguably not contributed a ‘big idea’ of its own to the interchange among the human disciplines. In order to unpack the methodological implications of this claim, the author identified five ‘consequences of multiplicity’ which, he argued, could be applied in the study of social phenomena both within IR and beyond. These consequences are: co-existence; difference; interaction; combination; and a necessarily dialectical quality to historical change. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
