IR research is inseparable from its interpersonal and sociopolitical impacts – EVEN IF policy-making is good, the K forces a critical re-evaluation of scholarship and research in the context of gender – rejecting hegemonic masculinism by highlighting the way that gendered hierarchies of power inform the international sphere spills into debate and forces reappraisal of interpersonal communication norms. Anything else recreates epistemic violence.

In practice, this theoretical approach lets us think of the constitutive other of the research subject as a social construction rather than as separable from the would-be researcher/scholar. Thinking of the constitutive other of the research subject as a social construction broadens the ways that we can think about the impact of research in four ways. First, the research has impact on the researcher: impact that is political, sociological, economic, and psychological (e.g., Kusic and Zahora 2020). Second, research has everyday impacts. Thinking back to Marysia Zalewski’s (1996) typology of theories, theory can be problem-solving (the traditional use in mainstream IR), critique (the modal use in critical IR), and action or lived. It is this last sort of theorizing that deconstructing the subject/object dichotomy sheds light on: theory as action. When would-be IR researchers do research, that itself is action “in the world” which has impacts in that world—that is, the everyday, around the researcher and the researched—in the community in which the research is produced, in the community in which the research is done, and in the community in which the research is disseminated. Third, research has political, social, and economic impacts in its citation, repetition, promotion, and publication. Each time research is shared, tweeted, and discussed, that is an act in itself with implications. Fourth, research has impacts on the ways that readers of research understand and see the people or institutions understood to be the subject of the research; such that research becomes a lens through which those othered in it are consumed by those who read it.

Across these four contexts, we make the argument that there is no such thing as non-violent or non-harmful research. We contend that reflection on the violences involved in one’s own participation both in the system of research production in which we live and work, and in particular research, is key to understanding the perverse effects and potential harms of research, in both substantive and methodological choice. Each research design choice includes and excludes some people; benefits and harms some people; supports some people distributing benefits and harms to others; has political, economic, social, and planetary footprints. The question becomes not whether harm is done, but what harm and to whom, and how it can be managed, understood, and minimized. Coming to terms with the violence in one’s own research, and one’s own (disciplinary and other) sociological and political choices, is a key part of understanding the links between (and distinctions among) ontology, epistemology, methodology, and methods, and the political content that crosses those concepts. Significant existing work on epistemic violence (Behl 2019; Brunner 2021), the violences of inclusion (Haritaworn et al. 2013; Haritaworn et al. 2014; Mbembe 2019), and the violences involved in IR research (Van Milders and Toros 2020; Zalewski and Runyan 2013), provide a strong foundation for having these conversations in a serious and useful way. Still, it is only when these texts and their ideas are brought into dialogue with the instructive content in a textbook like this that they could start being built into disciplinary discussions about how research is constituted and performed.

We argue that, at best, research can be done in a reflective or reflexive fashion that recognizes its (actual and potential) violences. IR research that claims to be “from nowhere” repeats and reifies this dehumanization of the researched. IR research is almost always about something or someone being done to someone somewhere. Moral commitments, whether acknowledged or not, play a role in the valuation of activities from war-fighting to development funding. There are no clean hands in this practice, only a consideration of worse or better results. While separation is performed for a clinical presentation of best practices or scientific knowledge, such separation is neither necessarily possible nor necessarily good. IR scholars repeat this fallacy at their peril. IR scholars are in the world they see and seek to understand, whether they like it or not, and the inability to come to terms with their fundamental situatedness is a barrier to optimal conceptions of the purpose of their scholarship.

CONCLUSION

The chapter concludes by providing a few ways to think about IR research performances in the world which might begin to come to terms with some of the issues laid out in its text. We make three suggestions: a more connected view of what research is; a stronger view of the researcher as situated in the research; and a more conscious discussion in the field of the significatory, sociological, and political aspects of method choice. A more connected view of research would be one which acknowledges its contestability, its problems, and its violences at the same time as it claims its contributions to the research. Perhaps Stephen White’s understanding of weak ontologies might serve as a model, as it:

involves the embodiment within them of some signaling of their own limits. Felicitous weak ontologies cannot simply declare their contestability, fallability, or partiality at the start then proceed pretty much as before … A weak ontology must possess resources for deflecting this propensity toward naturalization, folding of its dimensions. Its elaboration of fundamental meanings must in some sense fold back upon itself, disrupting its own smooth constitution of a unity. In a way, its contestability will be thus enacted rather than just announced. (White 2000, 8)

Such an enacted contestability could serve as a reminder of the perverse effects and pitfalls of all IR research. This could be combined with a stronger view of the researcher as situated in the research: as in/of “the international,” but also with a particular position therein; as not separated from but still a potential threat to the subject of the research. Adding to these two approaches, explicit understandings that research choices are social, sociological, political, and performative completes the situation of the researcher in the research, adding not only the positionality of the researcher in the research, but the interest and investment of the researcher in the research.

They cause serial policy failure – justifications and ideology determine policy formation and implementation – they can’t decouple the plan from their research – bracket the plan in favor of critical interrogation as a pre-requisite to IR prescriptions – That means you should bracket the plan in favor of critical interrogation as a pre-requisite to IR prescriptions – EVEN IF policy making is good, you should vote NEG to revise and resubmit the 1AC minus its gendered assumptions – voting AFF will never cause the federal government to create a [plan policy/JG/UBI] but NEG voting can and will encourage debaters to rethink their approach to research that doesn’t capitulate to masculine paradigms and academic norms.