The Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations recently released its 2009 Survey of International Relations Faculty. Here’s a quote discussing American hegemony in international relations theory and research.
“How one answers the question of whether there is diversity or an American hegemony in IR will depend largely upon one’s definition of hegemony. If hegemony means that most of the resources (richest universities and private foundation in the world), most authors in the top ranked journals (76 percent in 12 peer reviewed journals), and top universities (16 of the top 20) come, overwhelmingly, from the United States, then, yes, American IR is hegemonic. U.S. scholars are recognized more often as the “most influential” scholars in the discipline by their peers in the United States but also in the rest of the world, and there simply are many more IR scholars in the United States than in any other country in the world…
If, however, hegemony means that there is a single discourse, epistemology, ontology, paradigm, method, issue area, or regional expertise among IR scholars as dictated by some mythical American consensus, then there is more diversity than hegemony in IR. There exists no distinctively American school of thought reflected as a mono-culture across the globe.”
In short, in any measure that counts, US thinkers have a hegemony on international relations theory . The only caveat is that Americans dominate each school of thought, and thus do not have a monolithic, dominating ideology. Good for the US.
