John Burton And The Study Of International Relations
...I want to assess the relationship between, the academic discipline of International Relations, by which I mean a set of issues and a community of scholars, and John Burton. The reasons for such an assessment are timely and significant. Firstly the International Relations community has tended to neglect the work of Burton. A survey of many recent assessments of theoretical debates in the discipline, for example, reveals that the references to Burton are usually to work that is nearly three decades old, namely World Society, which appeared in 1972, with a few references to Systems, States, Diplomacy and Rules which preceded it by four years. What is significant is that there is a paucity of references to the vast and arguably more important work done since. Secondly, by the same token, it is perfectly possible, that many scholars who have come to know of Burton's work in the areas of conflict resolution and peace research may be unaware of his earlier, often difficult but necessary involvement with - and departure from - International Relations.
Yet the picture is not one of total neglect and it may be that the relationship is about to change, as I seek to show in what follows. Burton makes an appearance as one of Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations, (1999) notably as one of a group of radical/critical thinkers. There, Martin Griffiths (1999 p.109) notes that Burton's works cannot be easily classified within the conventional frameworks of analysis in the study of international relations. He stresses that Burton has been a trenchant critic of the view that international relations can stand apart from other disciplines in the social sciences. At the same time, Griffiths recognizes that Burton has produced a unique corpus of work that continues to inspire students of world society today.
Moreover, Ken Booth (1997), himself a trenchant critic of...
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