Interdisciplinarity in East European Studies: A Social Science Perspective
Interdisciplinarity is a buzzword in almost all social science disciplines; there is hardly any debate about the usefulness of an interdisciplinary approach. However, at the same time, area studies, which by definition are based on an interdisciplinary foundation, are frowned upon. Area studies (including Russian and East European studies), from the point of view of most social science disciplines, face two problems. First, they ask the wrong questions (i.e., do not necessarily concentrate on research topics interesting for the mother disciplines). And second, they are based on poor methodological and theoretical foundation, i.e., fail to achieve the level of analytical rigor required.[1]
Why doesn’t the interdisciplinary structure of area studies provide them with sufficient appeal in the mother disciplines? In this essay, I argue that it happens because of two reasons. First, the interdisciplinarity claim of area studies is frequently based on simplified assumptions about how broader social science disciplines work (and, as a result, area studies fail to provide a convincing argument about their usefulness to the broader social science community). And second, true interdisciplinarity is associated with enormous communication difficulties ultimately affecting the incentives of researchers and reducing their chances to get recognition in their mother disciplines.[2] Whenever area studies manage to develop an interdisciplinary research agenda recognized by the mother disciplines, it turns out to be rather narrow in terms of disciplines and approaches brought together.
Why do we need interdisciplinary research?
The argument of area studies making interdisciplinary research necessary is based on two implicit assumptions. First, different social phenomena influence each other, and thus, one needs to bring together different disciplines studying those: understanding the stability of Putin’s regime or the causes of war in Ukraine is impossible without looking at the Russian culture (possibly manifesting itself in Russian literature), path dependencies of Russian history or rent generation in the Russian economy. Second, interdisciplinarity provides us with the necessary context knowledge: without it, we will incorrectly transfer theories developed for a very different culture or region or incorrectly interpret the empirical findings. Thus, simply applying theories of party politics developed in Western Europe or the US will hardly help one to understand the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (or United Russia) (in political science, this problem is known as one of conceptual stretching).[3]
This logic is the foundation of classical area studies research groups (or departments): representatives of different disciplines come together to provide their point of view on the societies and cultures they study. It does, however, face an enormous problem from the point of view of the modern social sciences. While one can doubt whether it has ever been a case in the past, today for sure different social science disciplines (economics, political science or sociology) do not define themselves as scholarly communities studying specific topics. Economics is not a science of banks, markets and trade; sociology is not about family, inequality and social class; and political science is not only about parties, elections and bureaucracies. In fact, in all social sciences we had strong developments towards broadening the scope of investigation. Three major revolutions of economics (economic imperialism, calling for application of rational choice theories to all spheres of social life;[4] behavioral economics, calling for incorporation evidence from psychology in economic analysis;[5] and the credibility revolution, calling for focus on causal identification in empirical research[6]) turned it into a universal science covering all aspects of the society and united through a particular method of theorizing and empirical research. Sociology equally covers all domains of the social. Political science, while remaining narrower, does not shy from studying economic and social foundations of politics. In all fields, there are sub-disciplines, which essentially study the (original) topic of another discipline, but use different methods and theories (political economics or economic sociology). Finally, the historical political economy[7] and the persistence studies[8] make historical data a genuine part of mainstream social sciences.
If it is not the subject of investigation, what determines the boundaries between social science disciplines? One can argue that the real difference between economics, sociology and to some extent political science is the method of empirical research, or, somewhat more broadly, epistemology of scientific investigation. Real boundaries in social sciences exist not between students of markets, of families or of parliaments but between adherents of the critical theory, of postcolonial studies, of formal (mathematical models) or of large-N econometric analysis. These boundaries are more sophisticated than simple differences between quantitative and qualitative research: for example, qualitative research in political science (often aspiring analytical rigor) and in sociology (often focusing on interpretation and Verstehen) are strikingly different. Sometimes methodological boundaries are very vague and are easily crossed within the mixed-methods research, but sometimes fundamentally different understanding of what the science is about and what constitutes contribution to science exist, and this precludes any form of communication. There is hardly any common ground between a hardcore quantitative researcher treating any qualitative data as collection of anecdotes and strictly adhering to Weber’s Werturteilsfreiheit and a gender studies scholar concerned about reproduction of the existing power hierarchies in the supposedly ‘objective’ research and considering personal involvement and empathy a crucial element of research. However, both of them can make statements about the entire range of social phenomena.
From this point of view, if the goal is simply to study a particular society from different perspectives, there is no need to create an ‘interdisciplinary’ project. It is enough to bring together representatives of a particular discipline with different research foci. Interdisciplinarity becomes important if one expects to benefit from different methods and epistemologies. However, this type of interdisciplinarity is much more controversial. If there are differences in what exactly constitutes the goal of scientific investigation, there are no chances for a successful collaboration. In the example I provided above, a gender studies scholar and quantitative empiricist simply have nothing to tell each other: they mutually treat each others research as not scientific. Then an interdisciplinary project is likely to turn into endless discussion (or even confrontation) of adherents of different methodological approaches. Any sort of empirical research becomes impossible.
A solution to this problem is a more pragmatic approach: representatives of individual disciplines refrain from debating methodology and epistemology, instead focusing on simply sharing their findings with each other. But then another danger emerges. It is not clear whether the findings have indeed been produced following the standards of respective disciplines; and without knowing the specific way in which knowledge was produced, it is difficult to correctly interpret the scholarly findings. Therefore, different disciplines are likely to systematically interpret each other in a wrong way, either ignoring the scope conditions for the empirical results (ultimately determined by the methodological assumptions) or focusing on less relevant aspects of empirical results than on the actually relevant findings. Occasionally the same words have very different meaning in different disciplines and epistemologies (‘causality’ is a good example).[9] Whether this environment of mutual misunderstandings can be conducive for knowledge production, is questionable.
An example of what appears to be relatively successful interdisciplinarity today is interaction of political science and economics. Political science (especially the one existing in the US) extensively borrows insights from economics (including both concepts, like rent-seeking or equilibrium, and methods of quantitative research). Economists, in turn, at least to some extent recognize the contribution of political science while investigating political phenomena. In this case, however, interdisciplinary research ‘works’ because of almost identical epistemologies and perceptions of the nature of scientific investigation. Political science in the US and economics, furthermore, have similar publication cultures (in both cases focused on peer-reviewed journals, embracing the idea of journal hierarchy and being relatively open to co-authorship) and expectations about scholarly communication. The same explains why quantitative sociology and economics are capable to ‘talk’ to each other (although there are challenges to this dialogue as well), but qualitative schools in sociology (like critical theory) clearly separate themselves from economics (and, to some extent, use ‘neoliberal’ economics as ‘the Other’ for constructing their approach). In a sense, quantitative sociologists frequently are more likely to engage economists than their qualitative counterparts.
Sometimes the problems of interdisciplinarity are ‘visible’ only for one of the disciplines potentially involved in the dialogue. I have already mentioned the growing interest of social sciences to history and to historical data. The study of historical data inevitably requires some level of dialogue with history (which is ultimately responsible for producing the data social scientists want to use). The problem is, however, that very few quantitative social scientists understand the nature of history as part of humanities and the role of narratives and hermeneutics in historical research. A typical quantitative economist or political scientist scrolls through texts of historians looking for specific facts one can use to construct theories, formal models and econometric analysis – an approach systematically leading to misinterpretation of what historians actually say. This problem, however, is hardly acknowledged in social sciences.[10] Historians, furthermore, frequently engage in harsh criticism of what social scientists do while studying historical phenomena, quoting under-complexity of social science accounts and ignorance about historical context.[11]
The problems become even more severe if social sciences attempt to ‘talk’ to natural sciences: here mutual misunderstandings can reach a critical level. One example is ‘econophysics’, an attempt of physicists to apply the regularities and arguments of statistical physics to studying economic phenomena and financial markets. This time, economists reject the approach because of under-complexity: physics, from the point of view of social sciences, simply works with analogies (e.g., similar shapes of distribution of social data and physical data) and ignores the social processes (interaction of individuals) reflected in these data.[12] Another case is the active use of genetic data by political scientists and economists (in political science, it is referred to as ‘genopolitics’). While econophysics (unsuccessfully) attempts to offer a new way of theorizing and modeling social science phenomena, genetics is believed by economists and political scientists to offer a new source of explanatory variables for human behavior to be included in the standard statistical models. The problem is that many studies of supposed genetical foundation of social phenomena are based on a highly simplified view on genetic research.[13] The studies could be rigorous from the statistical point of view, but not really informative because the data they use is highly questionable by itself or interpreted in a doubtful way.[14]
Area studies and research incentives
The problems of interdisciplinarity thus are associated with both ability of researchers to understand each other and the ability of researchers to separate good from bad scholarship.[15] The last task is in fact essential for any form of scholarly community: the central premise of science, somewhat simplified, is that there exist criteria, allowing us to discard some of the scholarly claims and support others. This type of selection in interdisciplinary area studies, however, faces a very special challenge, which, in fact, seems to contribute to the main problem of area studies from the point of view of the core social science disciplines.
Imagine a dialogue of an economist, a qualitative sociologist and a historian on the contemporary state of the Russian political regime. Let these researchers be genuinely interested in learning what other disciplines have to offer; at the same time, let the researchers be researchers – i.e., willing to criticize each other and using this criticism as the key element of their search for the truth. Each of them presents novel findings on the topic of mutual interest: an economist shows the causal effect of economic hardship on Putin’s support using natural experiments, a sociologist conducts critical discourse analysis of Putin’s speeches, and a historian presents novel work on the power structures of late USSR. A major problem for this dialogue: none of the researchers is familiar with the methodology of another. The historian can hardly check the validity of the assumptions for the natural experiment, and the economist can hardly tell whether she correctly conducted her archival work. So, what are these three researchers going to talk about?
The most likely area, where they will find opportunities to criticize each other, is going to be the accuracy of facts and details on the Russian society and politics. Researchers are not aware of the methods of each other: but they immediately notice a misspelled name of a Russian minister or an incorrect designation of the governmental agency. Ultimately, if the researchers want to engage in a dialogue rather than listen to statements of each other (and at the same time avoid endless discussion about methodological assumptions like the fundamental applicability of quantitative methods to studying Russia), they will focus on the precision and accuracy of facts. Facts are important, but so is the solid theoretical foundation and correct empirical methodology. A scholar looking for her way in an ‘interdisciplinary’ area studies community is going to realize very soon, that problems in methodology and theory in her work go unnoticed by her colleagues, while the factual mistakes are noticed immediately. This creates a clear set of incentives, which, if applied for a sufficiently long period of time, produce exactly the type of area studies community core disciplines so often criticize – one with weak methodology, insufficient theoretical sophistication, but with good knowledge of the details of the countries studied – essentially, more a journalistic than a scientific endeavor.
Pathways towards interdisciplinarity
The arguments above make it clear: a mechanical combination of disciplines is unlikely to produce a functioning research project. In fact, if the goal is to make sure that the researchers are familiar with findings from other disciplines relevant for their work, it is enough to simply let them read texts written by the representatives of these disciplines – something what many scholars do simply out of curiosity, without an explicit ‘interdisciplinary research environment’ like one created by many area studies departments (if the disciplines are sufficiently dissimilar, like natural sciences and social sciences, even mutual reading of texts will most likely be a very challenging task). Still, it is possible to envision two settings, under which interdisciplinary research can be fruitful or at least function.
The first case of interdisciplinary research being successful, as I have already discussed in the second section of the essay, emerges if participating disciplines are sufficiently close to each other in terms of their methodological and epistemological assumptions. They may still use different methodologies, but these differences do not result from fundamentally different understanding of science (like it is the case, for example, for critical theory, postcolonial studies, and rational choice) but rather from path dependence leading to different methodologies being more or less prevalent in individual disciplines. For example, quantitative sociologists, although fundamentally subscribing to the same type of methods as economists, use specific methodological tools (e.g., multilevel regressions), which are unfamiliar to economics.[16] Political scientists and sociologists are more likely to use surveys (including survey experiments) than economists, and the latter are more likely to apply instrumental variable regressions. These small variations do not create a fundamental boundary for a scholarly dialogue. Even more, they allow disciplines to enrich each other – and of course, this applies not only to methods, but also to theories and empirical findings, based on the same epistemological premises, but simply unfamiliar to the other discipline.
The second case when interdisciplinary research is likely to work is a clearly hierarchical relationship between disciplines. In this case, the research program is ultimately determined by one discipline; other disciplines assist this core discipline in providing supplementary insights and also critical reflection of the core discipline’s assumptions. In this case, again, endless discussions can be avoided, because the core discipline dictates the conditions of collaboration. A necessary precondition for this type of projects is, however, the readiness of representatives of the smaller discipline to communicate their research in a way understandable to the core discipline and, in fact, look for aspects of their research core discipline would be interested in. While this type of projects are very likely to work, they are unlikely to provide an equal contribution to all disciplines – most likely, they will be noticed only in the core discipline. And for the representatives of the smaller disciplines, collaboration in such a project can be risky, since they waste time on topics, methods and publication formats irrelevant for their careers in their mother disciplines.
Interdisciplinary collaboration is challenging not only in terms of substance but also from the point of view of research practice. Issues like different publication practices (books vs. refereed journals, attitude towards co-authorship, speed of publication) occasionally make collaboration de-facto impossible. As a result, an interdisciplinary project, no matter how interesting, could create a trade-off for researchers: their contribution will not be recognized in their own discipline. The situation is less difficult if informal norms of the disciplines are more similar, which frequently goes hand in hand with more similar epistemological and methodological foundations. In other cases, finding a common ground for joint work would be much more difficult.
Finally, to complicate matters, one should not under-estimate the importance of even small differences and how annoying they can be for researchers working together. As I have argued, small differences actually make interdisciplinarity appealing; but they can also become a barrier for dialogue. To provide an example: for economists, the most important part of any project is causal identification (the ability to make sure that there is indeed a causal link rather than correlation between two variables). They may use relatively lax language in describing the phenomena they write about (‘democracy’, ‘corruption’ or ‘markets’) or even focus on mathematical models to formulate their theory. Political scientists, on the other hand, are more relaxed when it comes to a rigorous causal identification research design (they may accept even correlational evidence as being interesting or augment quantitative correlational evidence with a qualitative study) but will pay attention to precise definition of concepts. It is easy for both economists and political scientists to claim that the work of their counterparts does not meet the high methodological standards – but an interdisciplinary project to work requires the acceptance from both sides that either approach has merit and can be acceptable.[17] This challenge can be overcome – unlike differences in understanding of science between more distant disciplines, which leave no space for a productive dialogue. Researchers should proactively engage in solving the challenge, but this is not always the case.
Interdisciplinarity in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Russian studies
The case of evolution of interdisciplinarity in Russian studies (in social sciences) is particularly interesting from this point of view. By the end of the 1990s, political science and economics research on Russia faced a deep crisis. The interdisciplinary intellectual program of Sovietology treating Soviet economy and politics as highly specific and assuming the indivisibility of the political, the economic and the social in the Communist societies ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.[18] In the 1990s, different social science disciplines developed their own research programs for studying Russia, which, even if they used the same terminology, frequently failed at successfully communicating with each other (thus, economics of transition, focusing on creation of market institutions, differed a lot from the political science transitology studying transition to democracy). These research programs, focusing on the transformation of the post-Communist societies, in any case, were exhausted by the early 2000s.[19]
Over time, however, a new interdisciplinary program of studying Russia emerged, focusing on the interaction between economists and political scientists (I will refer to it as ‘new’ Russian studies in what follows). The common premise for this program was the perception of Russia as a highly suitable (and, given data availability and access to the field) even unique empirical case allowing research on the functioning of authoritarian regimes. In the 2000s and in the 2010s, Russia appeared to be paradigmatic for modern autocracies, which, unlike their predecessors, refrained from large-scale repressions and focused instead on information manipulation (‘informational autocracies’, ‘spin dictatorships’[20]) and imitation of democratic procedures (‘electoral authoritarianism’[21]). Political scientists and economists found a common ground in being interested in understanding authoritarian systems and also having common epistemological foundation, at the same time being able to enrich each other in terms of the methods of either discipline. Key representatives of this program like Daniel Treisman and Timothy Frye managed to publish in leading journals of both economics and political science, and the program as a whole produced research, which found its way in the leading journals of political science and economics.[22] This was an unprecedented success of Russian studies in these two disciplines.[23]
Interestingly, the research programs of the ‘old’ Russian studies of the Cold War era and of the ‘new’ interdisciplinary Russian studies of the 2010s were based on the opposite assumptions. The Sovietologist’s assumptions were (a) uniqueness of their topic of investigation (the Soviet Union, which cannot be described using the same conceptual language as the one used for Western democracies or for the Global South) and (b) extreme difficulty of collecting data on the Soviet politics, society and economy, which required high level of creativity, deep knowledge of the case and, in fact, interdisciplinary dialogue. These two assumptions protected Sovietology from any external criticisms and ensured its survival as long as society and politics (for non-academic reasons) were interested in understanding the USSR. But they also led to growing isolation from the rest of social sciences and proliferation of highly ideological interpretations and narratives[24] - which essentially signed the death sentence of Sovietology after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, when it became difficult to maintain the assumptions presented above.
Russian studies of the 2010s assumed, on the contrary, that Russia is (a) typical for a certain class of countries, regimes and social phenomena[25] (e.g., electoral authoritarian regimes) and (b) a particularly convenient and easy case of studying them, where access to data is better than in other comparable cases. This turned out to be a recipe for unprecedented success – however, it was also associated with major costs. New Russian studies were associated with massive narrowing down of topics and methodological tools of studying Russia (in fact, only under these conditions interdisciplinary research had a chance at functioning). Only topics, which were interesting for the mainstream disciplines were studied, and only tools, which corresponded to the methodological sophistication of the mainstream disciplines (most recently, primarily survey experiments) were accepted. And, similarly to the Sovietology collapsing after the end of the Cold War, the new Russian studies are facing enormous difficulties after the new epochal change, which happened in 2022: it led to a lot of doubt about their first assumption (which type of regimes and societies Russia is typical for) and turned the second assumption upside down: now studying Russia is extremely difficult and again calls for creativity and non-standard approaches, which could fail to meet the high methodological standards of the disciplines. It remains to be seen, whether the Russian studies will stand up to the challenge without becoming a new edition of Sovietology, reproducing its problems and deficits.[26]
Conclusion
Summing up, an interdisciplinary approach (which is indeed at the core of the area studies) does not automatically make them successful. The most frequent argument in favor of interdisciplinarity – to provide a broad and encompassing view of a region’s society, economy and politics – is in fact not an argument in favor of interdisciplinarity at all. To justify interdisciplinary collaboration, one needs to focus on gains from methodological dissimilarity between disciplines. These gains, however, can be realized only as long as the disciplines still share a common ground in understanding how science works and which contributions count as scientific ones. Attempts at constructing an interdisciplinary dialogue across fields with very different epistemologies is likely to fail.
For area studies, with their claim to encompass very diverse disciplines from social sciences and humanities, this is a serious challenge. Either one has to limit the set of collaborating disciplines to a small set of those sharing common epistemology (like in the example of the new Russian studies of the 2010s, with all the associated risks and costs), or representatives of smaller disciplines should limit their ambition and structure their research in line with the demands of the core discipline, which that this type of ‘interdisciplinary area studies’ will receive recognition only in the core discipline.[27] An open acknowledgment of this challenge is important to avoid the pitfalls of the traditional area studies approach, which led to the rejection of area studies in the mother disciplines of social sciences.
