the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

46 the driving forces behind the evolution of issthe balance between and the content of different ISS approaches changedover the past sixty years?Fourth, the debate over internal and external explanations may alsobenefit from considering how the discipline, field or sub-field in questionis situated in relation to politics and policy-making institutions. Thisrelationship refers to the story of a discipline’s founding and to how itsinstitutional location and purpose has been debated. Academic disciplineshave to different extents linked themselves explicitly to crucial externalfactors, including current events and political institutions. Think, forexample, of the difference between the disciplines of Comparative Literature,Political Science and Physics. Since Political Science is to a muchhigher degree defined by a link to contemporary political events, it is alsoquite reasonable to expect its development to be more influenced by thisfactor than the other two disciplines would be. Even within the disciplineof Political Science, ISS is remarkable by being founded in response toa set of (what was perceived as) very urgent ‘real world/external’ issueslinked to the growing threat posed by the Soviet Union, particularly asit became a nuclear power. ISS definitely had a scientific ambition at itscore, and as Wæver (Wæver and Buzan, 2007) has laid out, an optimismabout the usefulness of science and the possibility of finding rational solutionsto societal problems. Yet it was also simultaneously a discipline thataimed at delivering policy relevant knowledge. This dual ambition meantthat ISS was not exclusively driven by the process of internal scientificdiscovery, but also by its engagement in the world of policy and by theinfluence of the policy world upon it. ISS has ever since been (d)riven bythis intertwining of epistemological choices and a perceived obligation tospeak to major political decisions (Williams, 1998). Nowhere is this moreclearly illustrated than in the ‘inner–outer’ system in the US in which itis common for ISS writers (not all of them American) to spend part oftheir career in academia or think-tanks, and part of it in government. Itis hard to imagine that, for better or worse, this cycle does not influencewhat people choose to write about and how they do so, even if not alwaysin any predictable fashion. Comparing ISS to the field of Political Theory,forexample,itmaywellbethatthelatterisexplainedtoahigherdegreeby internal factors, precisely because it has not been constituted aroundan equally strong link with the policy world and hence does not have asimilarly strong sense of external responsiveness (Gunnell, 1993).Our conclusion at the second layer of the sociology of science is that weneed a model that draws our attention to the interplay between internaland external factors, that makes their exact significance and the way in