Both the Heisbourg Report and the Andréani-Bozo Report constitute major steps in the attempts to make of international relations (IR) a ‘normal’ academic field of research. In spite of a general positive consensus about the main points of the two reports, it seems that almost nothing has been done or, at least, what has been done is without proportion with initial ambitions. How to explain that the carrying out of most of their proposals have failed? Academic literature which deals with the issue of IR in the galaxy of social sciences considers that the main problem of IR is that it has always been considered as the poor relation of political science. This is unquestionably true. Nevertheless, deeper reasons may explain the reluctancy – or the indifference? – of officials to implement some of the recommendations made in the two reports.
This proposal has two aims. At first, we shall assess the main proposals of the two reports in a larger context of the difficulties of IR to find its disciplinary perimeter. Afterwards, we shall examine more specifically the reasons for which the status quo seems to be the rule. The point is not to carry out an analysis on administrative reasons. We just intend to examine academic impediments for making of IR an homogeneous field of research. To do so, we shall conduct semi-structured interviews with the main actors of the commission chaired by François Heisbourg, as well as with Frédéric Bozo and Gilles Andréani. Afterwards, we shall test, by the measure of the empirical data generated by these semi-structured interviews, our main hypothesis in order in fine to construct our thesis on difficulties for IR to constitute an homogeneous academical field of research acknowledged as such.
