Inanna Hamati-Ataya

Dr. Inanna Hamati-Ataya is Professor of Global International Relations at the University of Groningen and Research Affiliate at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge.

Inanna’s research lies at the intersection(s) of global politics, deep history, social theory, natural and historical epistemology, and the anthropology, history, and sociology of knowledge, science, and technology.

Her ERC Consolidator project ARTEFACT (The Global as Artefact) aimed to develop a novel understanding and theorisation of ‘the global’ by examining the constitution and transformation of global political structures from the anthropological perspective of humankind’s epistemic development. Taking as a case-study the emergence and diffusion of four major global agricultural revolutions from the Neolithic to the contemporary era, the project examined the patterns and pathways of socio-epistemic co-constitution and co-evolution that underscore the formation and transformation of increasingly inclusive world systems since human ‘pre-history’.

With her ERC/UKRI project NOAH (A New Noah’s Ark), Inanna took some insights from ARTEFACT to proof of concept. Focusing on the effects of climate change on agricultural production across Europe, NOAH develops a novel model of technology transfer to secure the preservation of ancestral agricultural knowledges across regions variously affected by anthropogenic climate change.

Inanna is the founding editor of the book series Global Epistemics at Rowman & Littlefield, and co-editor, with Arlene B Tickner and David L Blaney, of the Routledge book series Worlding Beyond the West. She sits on the editorial boards of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Social Epistemology, the Journal for the History of Knowledge, and the Journal of International Relations and Development, and is a member of the Social Epistemology Review & Reply Collective (SERRC), and the Advisory Boards of the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK) and the Duisburg Centre for Global Cooperation Research.

In the past years she has served as chair of the International Political Sociology section of the International Studies Association, as trustee of the British International Studies Association, and as member of the European International Studies Association’s Governing Council.

Prior to joining the University of Groningen in 2023, Inanna was Principal Research Associate at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge (2018-2023), Marie Curie Fellow under the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2013-17), Reader in International Politics at Aberystwyth University (2013-18), Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sheffield (2011-13), and Assistant Professor of Political and International Theory at the American University of Beirut (2007-11), where she also served as Head of the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration. She holds a BA, MA, and PhD (Doctorat) in Political Science from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she completed her doctoral thesis in October 2006.

Books

Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, and Nicolas Gäckle (eds.) (Forthcoming 2024) Navigation, Connectivity and the Crafting of Global Spaces. Rowman & Littlefield.

Gofas, Andreas, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, and Nicholas Onuf (eds.) (2018) The SAGE Handbook of the History, Philosophy and Sociology of International Relations. London: SAGE.

Kaplan, Morton A. with Inanna Hamati-Ataya (2014) Transcending Postmodernism. Palgrave Macmillan.

Articles

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2022) Epistemic Demarcations as Social Erasures: Taste and the Politics of Distinction from the 'Revolutions of Wisdom' to the 'Green Revolution'. BJHS Themes 7: 13-38 [open access].

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2021). Global Discipline, Global Thought, Global Culture: Of Category-errors and the Hubris of Scholastic Agency. International Politics Reviews 9: 296-300. [open access].

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2020) Reflexivity and International Relations, Oxford Bibliographies in International Relations, ed. Patrick James. Oxford University Press. [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2019[2012]) “Behavioralism”, revised version, in Oxford Reference in International Studies, edited by Renée Marlin-Bennett, Oxford University Press.

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2018) The "Vocation" Redux: A Post-Weberian Perspective from the Sociology of Knowledge. Current Sociology. (online first) [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2018) The Sociology of Knowledge as Post-Philosophical Epistemology: Out of IR's 'Socially Constructed' Idealism. [Open Access:] International Studies Review 20(1): 3-29 (first published online August 2017).

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2016) IR, the University, and the (Re)Production of Order: Between Perversions of Agency and Duties of Subversion. In Félix Grenier and Jonas Hagmann (eds.) Forum: Sites of Knowledge (Re)production: Towards an Institutional Sociology of International Relations Scholarship. International Studies Review 18(2):366-378. [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2014) Outline for a Reflexive Epistemology, Epistemology & Philosophy of Science 42(4):46-66. [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2014) Transcending Objectivism, Subjectivism, and the Knowledge In-Between: The Subject in/of “Strong Reflexivity”, Review of International Studies 40(1): 153-175. [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2013) Reflectivity, Reflexivity, Reflexivism: IR’s “Reflexive Turn” – and Beyond, European Journal of International Relations 19(4): 669-694. [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2012) IR Theory as International Practice/Agency: A Clinical-Cynical Bourdieusian Perspective, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 40(3):625-646. [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2012) Beyond (Post)Positivism: The Missed Promises of Systemic Pragmatism, International Studies Quarterly, 56(2):291-305. [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2011) Contemporary “Dissidence” in American International Relations: The New Structure of Anti-Mainstream Scholarship? International Studies Perspectives 12(4):362-398. [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2011) The “Problem of Values” and International Relations Scholarship: From Applied Reflexivity to Reflexivism, International Studies Review 13(2):259-287. [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2010) Knowing and Judging in International Relations Theory: Realism and the Reflexive Challenge, Review of International Studies 36(4):1079-1101. [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2010) Paths Not Taken: A Retrospective Systemic Reading of Post-Soviet International Alternatives. International Journal on World Peace 27(3):7-30.

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2009) Faits et Valeurs en Théorie des Relations Internationales: Neutralité Axiologique, Science et Réflexivité. Dynamiques Internationales, 1(1):1-19.

Book Chapters

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (Forthcoming 2025) “Globalisation in Deep Time: Lessons from the Palaeolithic,” in Carmen Ting and Daniel Fuks (eds.), Rethinking Past Globalisation(s). Cambridge University Press.

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (Forthcoming 2024) When Space Became Global: Palaeolithic Navigation and the Making of Cosmopolitan Connectivity, in Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, and Nicholas Gäckle, eds., Navigation, Connectivity and the Crafting of Global Spaces. Rowman & Littlefield.

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2024) From Epistemologies of Land to the Lands of Epistemology, in Felix Anderl, ed. Epistemologies of Land. Rowman & Littlefield. [Open Access]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2022) Preface: Thickening International Theory or Shrinking the Shagreen Skin? in Allan Layug and John M. Hobson, eds., Globalizing International Theory, xi-xiii. Routledge. [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2018) Crafting the Reflexive Gaze: Knowledge of Knowledge in the Social Worlds of International Relations, in The Sage Handbook of the History, Philosophy and Sociology of International Relations, edited by Andreas Gofas, Inanna Hamati-Ataya and Nicholas Onuf. London: SAGE, pp. 13-30. [PrePub]

Gofas, Andreas, Inanna Hamati-Ataya and Nicholas Onuf (2018) The Struggle for the Soul of International Relations: Fragments of a Collective Journey, in The Sage Handbook of the History, Philosophy and Sociology of International Relations, edited by Andreas Gofas, Inanna Hamati-Ataya and Nicholas Onuf. London: SAGE, pp. 3-12.

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2016) IR Theory and the Question of Science, in International Relations Theory Today, 2nd edition, edited by Ken Booth and Toni Erskine, Polity Press, pp. 69-84. [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna and Stephen Norrie ( 2015) From Social Epistemology to Reflexive Sociology, in The Future of Social Epistemology: A Collective Vision edited by James Collier, Rowman & Littlefield International, pp. 39-53. [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2014) “Introduction: The Unknown Kaplan: Synoptic Knowledge After Postmodernism” in Morton A. Kaplan with Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Transcending Postmodernism, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-40. [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2013) Worlding Beyond the Self? IR, the Subject, and the Cartesian Anxiety, in Claiming the International, edited by Arlene B. Tickner and David L. Blaney, New York: Routledge, pp. 27-44. [PrePub]

Encyclopedia Entries

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2024) "Behaviroralism" in The Encyclopedia of International Relations, edited by Beate Jahn and Sebastian Schindler, Edward Elgar.

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2017) “Georges Canguilhem” in The Encyclopedia of Social Theory, edited by Bryan S. Turner et al., Wiley-Blackwell.

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2014) “Epistemology” in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, edited by Michael T. Gibbons et al., Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1116-1126.

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2014) “The French Enlightenment”, in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, edited by Michael T. Gibbons et al., Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1065-1070.

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2014) “False Consciousness” in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, edited by Michael T. Gibbons et al., Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1225-1228.

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2014) “Laicite” in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, edited by Michael T. Gibbons et al., Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 2037-2038.

Book Reviews

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2018) Bourdieu-in-the-Making: On the State and the Craft of Reflexive Sociology. Review of On the State. Lectures at the Collège de France 1989-1992 by Pierre Bourdieu. European Political Science 27(2): 296-303. (first published online on 15 January 2016). [PrePub]

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2012) Neorealism Reconsidered: Human Nature or State Behavior? Review of Political Realism, Freud, and Human Nature in International Relations: The Resurrection of the Realist Man by Robert Schuett, and History and Neorealism, edited by Ernest R. May, Richard Rosecrance and Zara Steiner. International Studies Review 14(2): 303-307.

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2006) Review of The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations by Michael C. Williams. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34(2):587-88.

External Blogposts

Before Social Epistemology: On the Limited Efficacy of 'the Scandal' (2014) Social Epistemology Review & Reply Collective (SERRC) -- Collective Vision.

Defining Theory Down (September 2013) Duck of Minerva & European Journal of International Relations -- 'End of IR Theory' Symposium.