한국 국제정치학의 세계화: 가야 할 먼 길

Abstract

The Korean scholars in the academic field of International Relations are hard pressed to produce English articles for the first time in Korean history. They have been engulfed in a “waging warfare” of a kind from about a decade ago to run as many as his or her English articles in academic journals, which are on the list of a so-called SSCI (Social Science Citation Index) that acts as the global standard of social science scholarship. This “warfare” is basically waged not only to survive as a scholar or for the sake of scholarship, but also to support his or her career promotion. Among the attributes contributing to career success, the quantity of a scholar’s publication is most important, while its quality does not count. Yet if professional advancement depends more on the number of one’s articles than on their own intrinsic worth, there can be no assurance that the sum total of IR research findings, as published, are enhancing human welfare and not merely occupying library space of periodicals corner. Is “waging war” to run articles in so-called SSCI journals the right road for Korean scholars to take in order to globalize Korean scholarship and to become a globally distinguished professor? Or is it a wrong road, because it will lead them to be extinguished ultimately? Most of the Korean IR scholars have not been able to escape from, so-to speak, the Tyranny of Scientism and the Iron Rule of Triviality. So long as there are no international political laws of mathematical precision, the discipline of International Relations remains a body of empirical generalizations of limited validity. Then, isn’t time for Koreans to do differently from what American scientists of IR have done by now in order to produce at least new “empirical and/or other theories” based on the “broader definition of international theory”? In doing so, isn’t time for Koreans to try seriously to go beyond “American parochialism” and to contribute to the global academic community of international relations by constructing their own theoretical castles on the academic green field of international relations? Furthermore, the form of academic packaging is also significant for a successful, speedy porter-age of the Korean scholarship to the global scholarship market. Korean scholars should try to publish more books rather than mere articles. Only then, they will be on the right track toward the global recognition of Korean IR scholarship.