ABSTRACT
The perception of large-scale changes and the struggle of scholars to grasp its nature and direction has animated efforts to recast contemporary scholarship in ways that challenge and transcend disciplinary boundaries and the frameworks and concepts that have developed within them. The engagement of sociology with International Relations (IR), as represented by the emerging field of international political sociology and strands of historical sociology, are contributing to this effort. As an emerging field, international political sociology has thus far employed cultural and critical perspectives to problematize and de-naturalize conventional categories and understandings and challenge them in light of non-Western ‘others’, voices and experiences. Historical sociology for its part has begun to develop an empirical challenge to the Eurocentric historical premises underlying extant theories of many important dimensions of modern society. However, while both have extended the spatial domain of international studies by ‘bringing in’ other regions of the world, both have, at the same time, tended to reinforce national modes of thought and an Eurocentric historiography. Both thus remain intrinsically statist and Eurocentric and this limits not only their challenge to conventional social science categories and frameworks, but also their ability to develop analytically productive approaches to understanding global politics. This chapter first reflects on the tendency of international political sociology and historical sociology to reinforce, rather than unsettle, conventional social scientific understandings and categories. It then highlights an emerging body of work by historians and historical sociologists that suggest avenues of inquiry which break decisively with the ontology and historiography of conventional social science scholarship. This work can be shown to provide a basis for a non-statist, non-Eurocentric political and historical sociological analysis of current trends of change.
