Summary

Looking at the contemporary Polish political sciences in a wider international perspective—and specifically analyzing their location within the global hierarchies of academic knowledge production—may not only shed new light on the field but will also provide interesting insight to workings of social sciences in peripheral context. The position of the Polish political science, as measured in terms of international rankings or indexes of citations, is rather low. Moreover, its dominant intellectual schools and most commonly used methodological approaches may be considered old fashioned from the perspective of leading Western centers of the discipline. Descriptive analysis and traditional institutionalism dominate, while more sophisticated behavioral approaches or new institutionalism are rare. On the other hand, the field as such may be seen as quite strong, especially given its visibility in the national media, its considerable institutional and human resources, or high numbers of students attracted each year. Moreover, it can be argued that the field has achieved considerable autonomy from the global political science system and has successfully endured post-Communist transformation, retaining most of its staff and institutional assets from the previous regime (which was not the case in most other central European countries). At the same time, one can find within it a smaller faction of internationally oriented scholars. They contest the dominant, locally oriented majority of the field and are well connected to global academic networks. In effect, an interesting duality within Polish political science may be observed and interpreted as a phenomenon typical for many peripheral countries, understood in terms of the world systems theory. Relying on Wallersteinian perspective on the global system of social sciences coupled with Bourdieusian field analysis allows for reconstruction of the genesis and underlying structures of the contemporary field of political sciences in Poland, which may be interpreted as a case of successful autonomy building of a peripheral field of social sciences.