You should be skeptical of their evidence---their research model proscribes a violent model that privileges Western research practices.

We argue that knowledge cumulation in IR is a fantasy reified by paradigmatic clusters and the mimicry of research standards and practices in the natural sciences (e.g., Elman & Elman, 2001, 2003). The “evidence” of “knowledge cumulation” in IR comes as much from the ritualized practice of research behavior as it does from any “true” or genuine notion of knowledge cumulation. One has “succeeded” in the enterprise of IR by cumulating knowledge, and the work of “successful” scholars is by definition cumulated knowledge. Cumulation of knowledge as a standard of success is a condition of possibility for the desirability of success in the field. That ritualized practice at once is institutionalized as success and institutionalizes the need for research success, reified and reproduced by hiring, tenure, merit raise, and promotion standards.

This ritualization is a signifier that what counts as knowledge in the field, in particular research programs and more generally, is performative (Barad, 2007; Butler, 1990; Weber, 1998)—where standards are set by their utterance and repetition rather than by some external “objective” standards of (narrowly) good science or (more broadly) good research (Baudrillard, 1991; Shepherd, 2008; Williams, 2003). Scholars iterate and reify standards of measurement of knowledge in each piece of scholarship which “succeeds” in the field, and these iterations make it a paradox for scholars to both occupy the methodological, epistemological, and political space that falls outside of inherited standards and succeed. Outside -the -mainstream work’s underrepresentation in the places understood to be publishing “success” is overdetermined, and the correlation between mimicry of traditional scholarship and “success” of critical scholars a given.

We mean “performative” in the sense that Judith Butler uses it (Butler, 1990, 1993), particularly as she talks about it going hand in hand with a Foucauldian notion of disciplining,8 where “performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability—a regularized and constrained repetition of norms” which resonate as “ritualized production” (Butler, 1993, p. 60). This frames performativity as a “specific modality of power as discourse” (Butler, 1993, p. 139) where the politics of the signification and the politics of the sign meet, an act of territoralization, of production, of installation—which does not have to be alone, singular, or unidirectional. Since performatives are their own referent (Butler, 1993, p. 159), they proliferate as manifestations of the power underlying them and interact relatively on the basis of that relative power. In this context, “performances” are actions and events, iterations and reifications, and context-specific, which “bring a subject into being” relationally.9

To escape the recursive, performative loop of “disciplinary success,” we argue that it is important to see the possibility that knowledge cumulation is not, and should not be, a given in IR research. Instead, we argue that the idea itself is an inherited empty signifier with unspoken content which governs the production of what we understand as disciplinary IR. Traditionally, the idea of knowledge cumulation is firmly grounded in a neopositivist understanding of social science, in which the role of theory is to collate observed empirical regularities across cases or what Waltz calls laws (Waltz, 1979). While this interpretation is critiqued in most critical IR, “cumulation,” in that work, becomes a term without clear conceptual content. The paradigmatization of IR theorizing distracts from a particular theory’s internal conditions of possibility by introducing incompatible conditions of possibility drawn from an inherited disciplinary sociology of what knowledge is and how it works. As such, any acknowledgment of the idea of cumulativity from within specific exercises in reflexive IR creates the grounds for necessary failure within those exercises.

The simultaneous rejection of traditional “cumulation” and continued performance of acts of cumulation can be understood by seeing the ways that silence frames cumulation in critical IR. We learn from feminist theorists that the unspoken is as important as if not more important than what is spoken (Charlesworth, 1999; Kronsell, 2006), coming from attention to how IR’s others are omitted, excluded, kept out, and not mentioned (Agathangelou & Ling, 2004; Tickner, 1988). We argue that IR’s silences tell us more about the state of knowledge cumulation in the discipline than looking for standards that tell us what we do know. Accordingly, we ask on principle what any given research program does not take account of and how accounting for those omissions could changes analysis. We focus on both visible omissions (like the concepts that a research program fails to incorporate) and invisible omissions. Invisible omissions are those that are unhearable by a research program— normally left out or ignored by both the researchers that form the core of the research program and their critics (Butler, 2001; Edkins et al., 2012; Hansen, 2000). By “unhearable,” we mean either that the omitted content falls outside of the boundaries set for dialog or is assumed by all stakeholders to be by definition irrelevant (for deeper analyses see MacKinnon, 2006; Spivak, 1988). Unlike its visible omissions—variables that its scholars and their critics have added to, re-operationalized, expanded on, or suggested the inclusion of—invisible omissions are often not treated as omissions at all within particular scholarly boundaries.10

The discipline’s “collective” standards for knowledge production, then, can be understood as constituted by social performances of dominance rather than founded on some given or objective notions of what science should be. Rather than being objective judgments of quality, statements like “this is good science” and “these results are robust” are signs without referents used to discipline (Baudrillard, 1995). The invisible disciplining nature of the performative standards of knowledge cumulation is part of the story of Butler’s understanding of performativity. The other part is attention to who is excluded by claims to knowledge cumulation (generally as well as in specific paradigmatic situations), what is left out, and on what axes. These disciplinary standards (both in the conventional and Foucauldian sense) make invisible their own impossibility and their related necessary failure.

For example, a submission to a traditional IR journal in the United States or Western Europe which makes an interesting argument, but is not in the format of, methodologically acceptable to, inclusive of the same forms of evidence traditionally used in, and good science to that journal’s traditional reviewers is unlikely to succeed in getting published.11 This will generally be justified with reference to the “quality” of the piece, and rarely if ever will questions of sex, race, gender, class, and other axes of exclusion be discussed as producers of the standards that then exclude on “quality” where “quality” has been set up in a way that excludes all performances of scholarship which are not mimicry of a particular Western, liberal model (Paolini, 1999).12 Even editors and reviewers who note the exclusionary effect of these standards will often mourn that and move on, imagining the only possible alternative being lacking standards, and seeing such a lack of standards as more insidious than the exclusionary effects of using certain sets of standards. “Knowledge cumulation” then becomes a set of reified and artificial standards rather than a journey for truth or interest.

The answer to this quagmire is sometimes a liberal politics of inclusion (e.g., Nedal & Nexon, 2018)—how do “we” get more women, more minorities, and more people from underrepresented places in the world to be able to meet the standards of good scholarship in the field? That liberal politics of inclusion, while well-intended, can be read as a (subtle, perhaps accidental) expansion of the violence it (formally) seems to abate. It fails to question the utility of the existing standards of good scholarship and assumes that those currently excluded would be happy to change the form, shape, and/ or nature of their scholarship to fit within the (unquestioned/unquestionable) mold of good scholarship, either loosely or strictly understood. As Puar (2006) argues, liberal “inclusion” to absorb the other within can be as violent as if not more so than exclusion even as it appears progressive. That violence is the reproduction of naturalized, bounded identities when identities are liminal and messy when not policed (e.g., Agathangelou, 2013; Haritaworn et al., 2013; Scott, 2013). The bounded nature of IR inclusion excludes liminality, messiness, and outsideness (e.g., Malksoo, 2012).

Expanding the boundaries of IR to include any given particular excluded work maintains an illusion of stability, hiding what is unstable; it maintains an illusion of certainty, hiding what is in doubt; it maintains an illusion of coherence, hiding the rebellious, the failed, and that which remains outside (e.g., Sjoberg, 2017). Queer theorizing of the liminality involved in unstable sex/gender identities shows that even that which is presumed to be the most primordial (sex identity) is really liminality hiding under supposed definition (e.g., Weber, 2016a). Translated to thinking about inhabitability, this theorizing suggests that the apparent safety of (constituting then occupying) inhabitable space hides liminality and uncertainty, and perhaps danger, under its supposed (empirical and normative) clarity (Haritaworn et al., 2014). Therefore, “all the repressive and reductive strategies of power systems are already present in the internal logic of the sign,” such “that violence is an inevitable byproduct of signification” (Baudrillard, 1981).

In this way, not only do traditional standards of knowledge make invisible their own impossibility, they hide the violence of IR’s denials of failure and continued insistence on traveling failed paths despite the condemnation of failure and the privileging of success. IR’s continued recursive enactment of its settled “standards” despite their obvious failure and exclusiveness makes invisible the raced, classed, and sexed impacts of those standards and their apparent objectivity. Baudrillard’s work provides a path for navigating this disjuncture between signs (IR’s “standards”) and referents (the fantastic notion that “good scholarship” exists objectively) (Baudrillard, 1975). He argues that “only ambivalence, as a rupture of value… sustains a challenge to the legibility, the false transparency of the sign… questions the evidence of the use value of the sign (rational decoding) and of its exchange value (the discourse of communication).” This ambivalence, Baudrillard argues, “brings the political economy of the sign to a standstill; it dissolves the respective definitions of symbol and referent” (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 150).

Endorsing the inclusion of nontraditional perspectives, classifying and categorizing them, and assuming inclusion’s possibility may all have violent impacts (for discussions of the violences of inclusion see Haritaworn et al., 2013, 2014; Mbembe, 2019). Moving of the signification “knowledge” from any referent to which it was originally tied makes method and research performances of scholarship, rather than (the illusive) scholarship itself. If “research” is a performance of scholarship, “standards” for research serve to disguise the fantastic nature of knowledge cumulation. As such, there is no space for liminality, uncertainty, change, inadequacy, and failure in structural rather than passing senses. Yet looking beyond the discourse of certainty, those pervade IR. A Baudrillardian ambivalence toward research programs and their truth statements can reveal the recursivity of IR’s standards of knowledge cumulation. This is because condemnation or rejection of any given research program and its truth statements endorses its assumptions about truth, as well as some of its assumptions about what the international arena is and how it works.

As such, the idea that IR knowledge cumulation can be nothing but fantasy is straightforward. If the reification of standards of knowledge cumulation is a signification divorced from a referent, where the recovery of the referent is conceptually and practically impossible, then knowledge cumulation is and will always remain an empty signifier. The only question is how that empty signifier directs and is directed.

We suggest that, in IR, more often than not, knowledge cumulation directs and is directed by discursive seduction. In Baudrillard’s words, seduction is “that which extracts meaning from discourse and detracts it from its truth” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). What makes a discourse of knowledge, of science, and of progress seductive “is its very appearance: the aleatory, meaningless, or ritualistic and meticulous circulation of signs on the surface, its inflections and its nuances. All of this effaces the content value of meaning, and this is seductive” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). Therefore, if there could be an interpretive discourse of knowledge cumulation that reached truth value, that truth value would be selfdefeating, since “the meaning of an interpretive discourse, by contrast, has never seduced anyone.” This is the fundamental contradiction, in Baudrillard’s terms, that makes standards for knowledge cumulation in IR internally impossible. He explains that “every interpretive discourse wants to get beyond appearances; this is its illusion and fraud. But getting beyond appearances is appearance, and is hence subject to the stakes imposed by seduction, and consequently to its own failure as discourse” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). As such, what is left in/of the failed discourse can only be the fantastic, and pretensions to success hollow.

Inhabiting a Failure of a Discipline

The need for success and the denial of failure depend on two things: first, both success and failure existing and being identifiable; and second, presuming a particular normative relationship between success and failure. In IR, as we discussed above, scholars are thought of as successes or failures according to a complicated metric of disciplinary prestige based on publication outlet, “scientific standards,” and perception of the change that they have caused in the discipline. Work is characterized as successful or failed based on whether it contributes to knowledge cumulation. The discipline itself is understood as successful or failed based on the aggregation of those measures. On these terms, the emptiness of disciplinary standards and the impossibility of knowledge cumulation make every piece of scholarship and every scholar in IR a failure and the discipline along with them.13 To us, the identification of success/failure is impossible.

Still, we focus our approach to “disciplinary IR” around questioning the second assumption, that the normative relationship between success and failure is such that success is good and desirable and failure is bad. Failure has been insufficiently explored in disciplinary IR, both in thinking about the disciplinary enterprise and in thinking about the world “out there” which we purport to study.14 Here, we look to theorize the “upside” of the failure of the disciplinary enterprise of IR. It is, after all, failure that Baudrillard called for, in different words—a willingness to drop commitment to and passion for a certain end in the recognition that both that end and its opposite are empty signifiers. Queer theorists have suggested that this sort of failure—failure to live up to expectations which were messy, detached, or a priori untenable—might be worth celebrating (Halberstam, 2011). We build on these two understandings to embrace failure in IR.

Often failure is thought about as either a final end (something has failed), as a stumbling block on a path to success (if at first you do not succeed, try, try again), or as a miscalibration (we thought this was success, but really it is failure instead). With Jack Halberstam, we suggest a normative reinterpretation. Rather than seeing failure as an end point, or as a stopping point on the way to success, it can be seen as itself a politics, “a category levied by the winners against the losers” and “a set of standards that ensure all future radical ventures will be measured as cost-ineffective” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 184). Halberstam uses the example of reproductive success. Inherited wisdom has suggested for a significant amount of time that people should have children—that a heterosexual marriage with biological offspring is the ideal of success in one’s personal life. That could be taken at face value: success (measured in biological offspring to still-married heterosexual, cissexual parents) is to be valued, and failure (measured in some other reproductive result) is to be devalued. Or the very normative value attached to reproductive success is itself a weapon, where associating failure with non-reproduction is a category levied against the losers by the winners. Redefining all reproductive results as successful or changing which reproductive results are measured as successful does not change the weaponized, normalizing character of the concept of success. This is a metaphor for IR’s disciplinary sociology, but it is also directly applicable to IR’s epistemological and methodological engagement with non-heteronormativity

Applied to IR, the normalization of “success” as the thing to which all (researchers) should aspire reifies membership in the categories of “successful” and “failed” and provides the “successful” with a powerful weapon to continue to exclude, put down, and delegitimize the “unsuccessful.” The “winners” are by definition in a normatively superior position compared to the “losers” despite the emptiness of the signification of each category. Understanding individual pieces of work, individual scholars, or research paradigms as failed (a foil to successful) is a categorization wielded by those who have already been classified as successful to achieve and perpetuate the exclusion of those whom they can constitute as inferior. In this way, research success is a category IR’s winners wield against its losers to perpetuate their position as winners, consciously or unconsciously, against a background of a disciplinary IR where the standards for research were created largely by white, heterosexual cis-men and remain largely undisturbed despite the intellectual and representational diversification of IR research and IR scholars.

Failure as a category in IR scholarship serves to “reinscribe and renormalize standards of ‘research success’ which remain unchanged, unchangeable, and regressive” (Halberstam, 2011). The scholarship that makes unconventional claims to knowledge cumulation (or no claim to knowledge cumulation) not only fails but constitutes its researchers as failures—which becomes recursive when “we tend to blame each other or ourselves for the failures of the social structure we inhabit, rather than critiquing the structures… themselves” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 35, citing Kipnes, 2004). In Halberstam’s view, it is the system that privileges success, that is, the problem, and failing within it is an emancipatory possibility which “dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we currently live” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 2).

Realizing the caging nature of the boundaries of disciplinary success, it is possible to think that failure might be perceived as something to celebrate and strive toward rather than something which should inspire shame. Halberstam suggests that “under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, and more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 2–3). In Halberstam’s view, it is only when the norms and metrics by which we aspire to success become both politicized and problematized that freedom becomes possible. It is not failing that we as scholars or as people need to learn to do—we fail all the time. As Halberstam notes, failure is endemic in life and work as “to live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately die,” despite denial, resistance, and constructs of success (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 186–187). Instead of needing to learn to fail, we argue, we need to learn to embrace failure, particularly the collective failure of the enterprise of “disciplinary IR” to achieve or approximate “knowledge cumulation” generally or the aspirations of particular research programs specifically.