This book constitutes an up-to-date methodology reference work for International Relations (IR) scholars and students. The study of IR calls for the use of multiple and various tools to try and describe international phenomena, analyze and understand them, compare them, interpret them, and try to offer theoretical approaches. In a nutshell, doing research in IR requires both tools and methodsfrom the use of archives to the translation of results through mapping, from conducting interviews to analyzing quantitative data, from constituting a corpus to the always touchy interpretation of images and discourses. This volume assembles twenty young researchers and professors in the field of IR and political science to discuss numerous rich and thoroughly explained case studies. Merging traditional political science approaches with methods borrowed from sociology and history, it offers a clear and instructive synthesis of the main resources and applied methods to study International Relations.

Constitutes a concise and rich methodological guide for students and professors of IR as well as practitioners in the field Offers a fresh look at methods by French scholars in a field dominated by US/UK scholarship Features concrete examples and cases studied analyzed with the specific objective of showing methods and tools

Autorentext
Guillaume Devin is Professor of Political Science at CERI Sciences Po, Paris, France.

Inhalt

1. Describing, Representing, Interpreting.- 2. Constructing Subjects and Comparison in International Relations Studies.- 3. Consulting Foreign Affairs Archives in France and America.- 4. Taking Images Seriously: How to Analyze Them?.- 5. Imagining and Representing the Spacial Aspect of Actors and Societies.- 6. The UN Internet Portal: Institutional Multilateralism Caught in the Web.- 7. The Field Study .- 8. Interviews in International Relations.- 9. Examples of Quantitative Data Processing in International Relations.- 10. Multiple Correspondence Analysis in international Relations.- 11. On Words and Discourse: From Quantitative to Qualitative.- 12. Classifying, Ordering, Quantifying.