The periphery starts in our heads

‘The periphery starts in our heads’ is the main conclusion of a piece by Stefano Guzzini for the special section of the Polish Journal Przegląd Europejski (European Review), entitled ‘International Relations (IR) Scholarship in Central and Eastern European Countries: On Its Way to Cross Regional Boundaries’. This conclusion is based on his experience as teacher at the Central European University and his editorship of the CEEISA journal Journal of International Relations and Development.

What should IR do in CEE – how should it deal with its peripheral status in terms of money, organisation and knowledge? It faces two main problems. The academic study of IR in CEE meets an international community which may well refuse or simply ignore the allegedly universal scientific dialogue. Who has not encountered the ever so tacitly mobilised biases and explicit barriers to our scientific communication: their mother tongue is not English, and then their conceptual vocabulary is not aware of findings elsewhere (for lacking resources), or even if it were: their approach and methodologies may not be en vogue with the on-going “debates”, and finally even if their research would talk to those debates, carefully picking its audience, the communication is not taking place where people would need to listen. The vocation of our sciences may well be a form of knowledge that is fundamentally universal in its origins and reach; its reality is not. Very few people in Europe, West, East, North or South, can elude the periphery.

In fact, with every step out of the periphery, a new rung seems to appear on the top of the ladder. No adaptation seems ever enough. Consequently, the temptation is great not to embark on this laborious journey at all. There is always need for some policy advice, some will say, also on foreign policy and surely in security. Hence, why desperately trying to live up to some foreign and fastidious academic standards when more success can be gained in the research grey zone of think tanks, parties and other public or private actors with quite different research standards (and they are different!)? IR in CEE, and not only, is still greatly suffering from its original struggle to establish itself as a respected and authoritative realm of knowledge independent of, and usually competing with, the world of policy makers, when the latter is often financially better endowed (e.g. military or business funds for research) and occupied by people surely no less convinced of their qualities.

The aim is to develop and be able to use own standards for intellectual recognition that are highly demanding, ambitious and informed by the international state of the art, and hence making oneself independent from the desperate quest for an international recognition that will not be forthcoming for the periphery any time soon. The periphery will stay with us, but it does not have to mean that we cannot do good science – of whatever methodological family.