Ethnocentrism in IR : Interest and aversion of our discipline for the study of cultural reflexivity

Résumé En

This paper has three main objectives. First, the core elements of cultural reflexivity and ethnocentrism will be detailed based on an overview of the literature in anthropology and linguistics. Second, the relevance of cultural reflexivity vis-à-vis of IR will be demonstrated by underlying three arguments put forward by scholars from the discipline. Finally, I will measure the sensitivity of the field of IR with regards to the question of cultural reflexivity through two empirical studies. A lexicometric analysis based on a corpus of more than 100,000 articles (from 15 IR journals between 1906 and 2011) will count the occurrences of ethnocentrism and its substitute concepts. Then, two hypotheses on the causes of the marginality of cultural reflexivity as an object of study in IR will be tested by examining the 371 articles that do mention ?ethnocentrism? (selected from the 100,000 articles previously mentioned).