Revising war: The historical problem in international relations (Israel)

The vast majority of empirical research in international relations (IR), including both qualitative and quantitative studies, is fundamentally historical. Yet despite this fact, very little attention has been given to the problem of historical epistemology. This problem entails first, the basis for grounding claims to historical knowledge, and second, the ability of scholars to have access to such knowledge. This project argues that most mainstream international relations scholarship adopts a problematically positivist epistemology toward history. Positivism is, along with postmodernism and pragmatism, only one of three possible epistemologies toward historical inquiry. The project argues that the pragmatist epistemology suggested by John Dewey is the most coherent and useful of the three preceding approaches. Deweyan pragmatism offers political scientists a solution to the dilemma of having to choose between un-groundable positivism on the one hand, and radically relative postmodernism on the other. In order to assess the problem of historical epistemology, the project examines a prolific instance of historical revisionism manifested in the old versus the new Israeli history of the 1956 Arab-Israeli war. The project lays out two competing historical narratives of Israel politics during 1950s as they related to the Arab-Israeli war. The project also analyzes two distinct sets of IR literature. The qualitative IR literature tests theoretical claims on the basis of the 1956 war. The quantitative literature codes the war by translating historical events into numerical form. Both sets of literature rely solely on the old Israeli history for sources. The project argues that when the two sets of IR literature are assessed in light of new historical scholarship on the 1956 war, both theoretical claims and coding decisions are problematized. The project argues that by adopting a pragmatist rather than a positivist epistemology, scholars can avoid the type of problems that occur when the constructed nature of historical events undermines theoretical claims and quantitative codes derived in light of fixed, static assumptions about those events. The project concludes by offering a number of methodological mechanisms for locating, assessing, and interpreting diverse sets of historical literature in the process of conducting empirical political science research.