“Conceptual entrapment”: understanding the researcher-concept relationship in critical International Relations and beyond

Abstract

Concepts are the building blocks of language and essential to the academic vocation, yet how conceptual work shapes scholars, research processes, and the production of knowledge remains unclear. Critical International Relations has long examined the interplay between researchers and their research objects and has emphasized how researcher positionality raises important theoretical, methodological, and ethical questions. Yet, it has largely overlooked how concepts mediate these dynamics. Similarly, the emerging field of Critical Concept Studies has focused on the politics of concepts but paid limited attention to the implications for researchers themselves. This article addresses these shortcomings by introducing the notion of “conceptual entrapment,” which captures the complex and often constraining relationship between researchers and the concepts they engage. By introducing autoethnography as a method to critically study concepts and foreground scholars’ reflexivity, the article engages my experience with the soft power concept as an example. In so doing, the article reveals how the concept’s contested performances required me to navigate my commitment to critical distance with the realities of academic work. The analysis demonstrates how researchers can inadvertently become “concept entrepreneurs” and enmeshed in the conceptual politics they seek to critique. These findings challenge (idealized) notions of scholarly autonomy, raising important questions about the ethical and practical implications of engaging with concepts in academic and public discourse. They underscore the importance of reflexivity in studying the researcher-concept relationship and contribute to broader debates about the ethics and possibilities of critical scholarship and the politics of knowledge production in International Relations.

Introduction

Late in 2020, on the eve of my dissertation defense, I opened my emails and found a congratulatory note on my accomplishments. My dissertation conducted a critical study of the soft power concept, focusing on the ways in which “concept entrepreneurs” promoted and contested the concept as a way to shape political thought and action. ¹ The note was kind, and I appreciated that someone took the time to read my dissertation and expressed their appreciation. That said, the email also left me unsettled as it was written by Joseph Nye, the very scholar who had coined the term. One of my aims was to challenge the notion of soft power as a benign, innocent and apolitical concept. Nye’s efforts since the early 1990s to ensure soft power’s status in world politics had been central to my critique. His positive appraisal of my work raised many uncomfortable questions for me: Was my project not sufficiently critical? Had I become too close to the soft power establishment I intended to critique? While these questions emerged out of my complex relationship with my research object, they also begged broader questions: What does “being critical” actually mean? Can we, as scholars, be as critical as we want to be? Do we have any control over it? Do we value “being critical” just for the sake of being critical?

Within International Relations (IR), Critical IR is the field to engage these questions most systematically. Since the late 1980s, Critical IR has challenged the discipline and its major theoretical and methodological assumptions and practices, as well as international politics more broadly by drawing attention to how power and knowledge operate to perpetuate inequality and domination. By challenging the notion of objective and value-free scholarship, Critical IR rejects the separation between researchers and their research objects, for instance by demonstrating how researcher positionality—including elements such as gender, race, class—shape research practices and findings. In so doing, they demonstrate how researchers are often entangled with the phenomenon they study, raising important theoretical, methodological and ethical questions for doing Critical IR. These questions have gained renewed attention as Critical IR has revisited debates on its meaning and limitations, especially amid “post-truth” politics (e.g. see Conway, 2021; Edkins, 2019; Hamati-Ataya, 2013, 2014; Jahn, 2021; Lynch, 2008; Roach, 2020).

Despite raising important questions, Critical IR largely overlooks the role of concepts in the relationship between researchers and their study objects. ² This neglect is problematic: Concepts are the “building blocks” of theories and thought. Before we can understand or discuss how the world functions, we need to grasp what is (Berenskötter, 2016b). Concepts are therefore essential for any researcher, not only as they approach their study objects but also in organizing, framing, and communicating the knowledge gained through their research. Overlooking such dynamics risks missing how concepts can mediate or disrupt the relationship between researchers and their research objects, ultimately shaping the relationship and the production of knowledge in fundamental ways.

By contrast, the emerging and related field of “Critical Concept Studies” (CCS) turns the critical gaze specifically on concepts. Challenging “scientific” approaches to conceptual analysis, CCS examines how concepts emerge and become meaningful only through “conceptual webs,” and are often contested since describing the world in one way rather than another can shape political thought and action (Berenskötter, 2016b; Berenskötter and Guzzini, 2025; Ish-Shalom, 2021). Building on such work, scholars have begun to trace concepts across political and regional contexts to challenge dominant readings of key IR concepts (Nyman, 2023; Winkler, 2020). Others draw from CCS to examine the relationships between conceptual, historical, and socio-political change in international politics (Çapan, 2025; Kessler and Leira, 2024a, 2024b; Riemann, 2025; Wilkens and Kessler, 2021). In short, CCS has emerged as a deeply reflexive project that has enhanced our understanding of how concepts have shaped and continue to shape the evolution of IRs as a discipline and practice.

And yet, with its focus on broad patterns of conceptual change, CCS has paid surprisingly little attention to how these dynamics also shape the entanglement between researchers and the concepts they study and use—how this affects what is and can be known. This is problematic since many concepts (e.g. “power,” “security,” “peace”) perform simultaneously in multiple worlds: Enticing scholars who theorize, operationalize, and measure them; political activists who promote them; politicians and bureaucrats who implement them; and consultants who advise governments and businesses on best practices (Berenskötter, in press; Guzzini, 2005; Ish-Shalom, 2013; Koselleck, 2011).

While these multiple performances offer ample opportunities to study the “politics” surrounding particular concepts, ³ their implications for research itself, and especially for the scholars engaging them, remain underexplored. Researchers are not just external observers of such dynamics, instead, they are often entangled in them as they navigate their roles as theorists, critics, professionals, and, at times, even unwitting “concept entrepreneurs.” Thus understood, these multiple performances not only entangle conceptual change with political change but also (re)shape the scholars who engage them, a process which affects not only the scholars themselves but also how knowledge is produced, which questions are asked in what ways, and what ultimately becomes thinkable and doable in international politics.

This article addresses this key blind spot at the intersection of Critical IR and CCS: the entangled, and at times constraining, relationship between researchers and the concepts they study and use. I introduce the notion of “conceptual entrapment” to capture how scholars can become caught in this relationship. It refers to how the multiple performances of concepts across worlds can lock scholars into a form of concept entrepreneurship they may or may not fully appreciate. A consequence of such conceptual entrapment is that it becomes difficult for scholars to exert full authority over their relationship with a given concept. In particular, their previous conceptual work, the ontology of concepts, as well as the embeddedness of conceptual work in material and social conventions often means that trying to break free from conceptual entrapment is practically impossible without significant cost. At this point, the concept—and its multiple performances—has entrapped the scholar.

The article makes three key contributions. First, it deepens Critical IR’s reflexive sensibility by foregrounding the role of concepts as mediators in the relationship between researchers and their study objects. Second, it introduces autoethnography as a novel method for critically studying concepts, emphasizing its ability to reveal how concepts can become embodied through those who use and study them. Third, it advances CCS by shifting attention from broad patterns of conceptual change to the dynamics of the researcher-concept relationship. Through the notion of conceptual entrapment, it shows how concepts shape not only what is known but also researchers’ identities and trajectories.

Through an autoethnographic retelling of my research on the soft power concept as an example, I demonstrate how my engagement with the concept evolved in complex ways, oscillating between fascination, skepticism, and ambivalence. Despite my attempts to maintain critical distance, the concept—and the broader community of concept entrepreneurs surrounding it—pulled me into its orbit, revealing the tensions, constraints and sometimes also opportunities that characterize the researcher-concept relationship. These dynamics have significant implications for both Critical IR and CCS. They raise crucial questions regarding scholarly autonomy and the pursuit of research questions and methods. By looking at the researcher-concept relationship, the article uncovers dynamics hitherto unrecognized but question both the “ideal” and idealized understanding of what it means and takes to be a scholar—whether critical or not.

From Critical IR to the emergence of CCS

Since the late 1980s, Critical IR has evolved from a marginal area of inquiry into a significant subfield within the discipline (Jahn, 2021). While its precise genealogy remains debated (Conway, 2021), Critical IR here refers to approaches such as Marxism, feminism, constructivism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism. Despite differences in lineage, objectives, topics, and methods, these approaches reject positivism in “mainstream” IR. Rather than assuming a separation between theory and reality or the neutrality of knowledge about international politics, this scholarship examines how institutions, structures, and practices emerged, including the discipline of IR itself, interrogating these as sources of marginalization, domination, and violence while often also devising strategies for emancipation and resistance (for overviews, see Edkins, 2019; Roach, 2020).

Since Critical IR challenges the possibilities of objective research and “scientific” methods, many scholars adopt reflexive methodologies (Jackson, 2011). Reflexivity itself is interpreted in different ways, ranging from researcher positionality, the link between knowledge and social reality, or the discipline’s effects on structures of knowledge and power (see Amoureux and Steele, 2015; Hamati-Ataya, 2013, 2020).

Critical scholars question the separation between research subjects and objects (Hamati-Ataya, 2014; Lynch, 2008), exploring how positionality—class, gender, race, and so on—shapes research and the scholars themselves (e.g. Eagleton-Pierce, 2011). Reflexive approaches thus oppose positivist IR scholarship’s quest for objectivity, generalizability, and detached writing. Drawing on feminist research, they often advocate “standpoint objectivity” whichrecognizes researcher positionality as integral to research practices and findings (e.g. Harding, 2004; Leander, 2016; Tickner, 2006).

Such scholarship goes beyond acknowledging bias to examine power and hierarchy between researchers and objects. Its ethical grounding lies in recognizing that researchers project power through their knowledge claims, but also, that they mobilize (often marginalized) research objects for both research and writing (Ackerly and True, 2008; Edkins, 2005; Lynch, 2008; Vrasti, 2008). In response, critical scholars increasingly use autoethnographic methods to reflect on researcher positionality and the researcher’s self in the research process (e.g. Dauphinee, 2010; Doty, 2004; Karkour and Vieira, 2023; Rowe, 2022). Scholars are thus recognized as “subject and object of inquiry,” who know the empirical world and are also a part of it (Brigg and Bleiker, 2010: 784–785; Inayatullah, 2011).

Recently, Critical IR has revisited debates on reflexivity, examining what it means to “do” Critical IR and be a “critical” scholar today (Austin et al., 2019; Conway, 2021; Jahn, 2021; Schindler, 2020). Scholars question Critical IR’s co-option within broader IR, the ethics of policy engagement while maintaining critical distance, and how to navigate a critical ethos as researchers become increasingly enmeshed with their subjects. These issues remain unresolved and continue to spark debate (de Goede, 2020; Jackson, 2018; Lisle and Johnson, 2019; see also Enloe, 2010).

While Critical IR has made significant strides in addressing researcher positionality, reflexivity, and the ethical implications of power in knowledge production, it has, as noted earlier, largely overlooked the role of concepts as mediators in the relationship between researchers and their objects. This neglect likely reflects the dominance of scientific approaches to concept analysis, which emphasize a separation between analyst and object. Aiming for clarity and precision, scholars seek to purge concepts of ambiguity to make them parsimonious tools for social science research (e.g. Gerring, 2012)—all of which Critical IR is skeptical. And while Critical IR engages the role of language in shaping positionality and the research process (e.g. Gani and Khan, 2024; Karkour and Vieira, 2023), it has yet to fully confront the distinct dynamics specific to concepts themselves.

Recently, a parallel yet intertwined trajectory has emerged that turns a critical lens on concepts. This emerging approach, which this article proposes to call CCS, shares Critical IR’s aim of denaturalizing taken-for-granted assumptions in IR but focuses specifically on the politics of concepts: How they are constructed, contested, and used in ways that shape both academic knowledge and international politics. Rather than viewing concepts as neutral descriptions of the world, CCS highlights their productive power, creating and structuring the realities they ostensibly describe. While CCS lacks a consolidated research agenda or foundational manifesto—unlike the established framework of “Critical Security Studies”—this article argues that CCS is nonetheless emerging as a distinct research trajectory.

Concepts have always been central to the social sciences, often viewed as mental abstractions that help impose order on a complex reality (Mair, 2008: 179; Schedler, 2011). Scientific approaches prioritize refining concepts for precision and value-neutrality, treating them as stable analytical tools (e.g. Gerring, 2012). In contrast, CCS emphasizes the inherent openness and contestability of concepts, interrogating how their meanings are shaped by relationships within “conceptual webs” of supporting, contrasting, and cognate concepts (Berenskötter, 2016b, in press).

In essence, CCS challenges the practices and consequences of conceptual analysis for international politics. It critiques efforts to fix the meaning of concepts, resists their transformation into common-sense assumptions, and examines how dominant concepts shape global politics. ⁴ By focusing on the political struggles around concepts, CCS highlights the role of concept entrepreneurs who seek to influence political thought and action (Hobson and Kurki, 2012; Ish-Shalom, 2021; Winkler, 2020). For CCS, contestation over concepts is not an obstacle to neat research design but a vital aspect of understanding their power and significance (Berenskötter and Guzzini, 2025).

CCS builds on foundations in related disciplines, drawing from insights on the power of language and the instrumental and rhetorical use of language from history, philosophy and linguistics. Aside scholars like Wittgenstein, Foucault or de Saussure, CCS has been especially influenced by the Reinhardt Koselleck’s work on conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) and the “Cambridge School” around Quentin Skinner, both of which examine the interplay between conceptual and socio-political history (e.g. Koselleck, 2011; Skinner, 2002). ⁵

Insofar as CCS denaturalizes concepts and examines their role in politics, it can be considered part of Critical IR. It also shares concerns with other critical strands, especially Critical Security Studies. For examples, J.L. Austin’s “speech act theory” is foundational to Skinner’s scholarship and beyond, and is widely used in CCS to explore how language is used to shape political thought and action—an approach that parallels the use of speech acts in securitization theory (Buzan et al., 1998).

Building on these foundations, CCS is gradually consolidating as a field in its own right. The emergence of student handbooks, edited volumes, and a dedicated “Concepts” section within the European International Studies Association (EISA) signals the growing institutionalization of conceptual analysis in IR (Berenskötter, 2016b, in press; Ish-Shalom, 2021). CCS insights are also increasingly leveraged in related subfields from IR. For examples, scholars addressing the IR’s Eurocentrism have drawn on CCS to examine how IR’s core concepts travel beyond their presumed Western origins. Rather than viewing these transfers as one-directional, studies such as Nyman (2023) demonstrate how non-Western elites innovate and adapt concepts for their own purposes, producing hybrid forms that combine similarities and differences. This opens space to explore how global vocabularies are constantly reconstituted through local and global priorities, adding an important geopolitical dimension to concepts studies in IR (Carrai, 2019; Nyman, 2023; Winkler, 2020).

Historical approaches to IR have likewise begun to draw on CCS, particularly to examine the relationship between conceptual and historical change. They call for more sustained engagement with conceptual history to problematize linear narratives of past, present and future, and to productively engage with ahistoricism. Their work also challenges us to consider whether today’s crisis-ridden era is both reflected in and driven by a conceptual revolution in our key political vocabularies (Kessler and Leira, 2024a, 2024b; Çapan, 2025; Wilkens and Kessler, 2021).

Taken together, both Critical IR and CCS raise important questions about the interplay between knowledge, power, and politics. Critical IR has enhanced knowledge on researcher positionality, its impact on the research process and the ethical implications of doing critical work. Meanwhile, CCS excels at denaturalizing concepts, exposing their politics, and analyzing their contestation in both academia and international politics. Yet, both approaches have important blind spots. Critical IR, despite its focus on power and language, has largely overlooked the role of concepts in mediating the relationship between researchers and their research objects. CCS, meanwhile, has focused intensively on the politics of concepts and broad patterns of conceptual change, has not reflected on how researcher positionality shapes and is shaped by conceptual work.

This dual oversight is problematic for both fields, and for IR scholarship more broadly. Concepts are not neutral tools but inevitable building blocks of thoughts and theory that mediate thought and action in academia and politics. In this way, they profoundly shape the research process and influence how scholars engage with their research objects and how knowledge is produced. Yet, we lack a systematic understanding of the researcher-concept relationship: How it emerges, how it is structured, and how it shapes researchers and the knowledge it produces.

To address these lacunae, this article first turns to one particular insight from CCS with important, yet hitherto unrecognized implications for researcher positionality: The performance of concepts in multiple worlds. While this provides a pivotal starting point, as we will see, it does not fully capture the complexity of the researcher-concept relationship.

The multiple performances of concepts

To understand the researcher-concept relationship better, one CCS insight is particularly important, and that is the recognition that concepts can and do perform simultaneously in multiple “worlds” (Berenskötter, in press; Guzzini, 2005; Ish-Shalom, 2013; Koselleck, 2011). In IR, it is common, often problematically, to juxtapose the world of academia with the world of politics, typically grounding discussions on the merits and disadvantages of “bridging the gap” and producing policy-relevant research (e.g. Nye, 2009).

Yet we can also distinguish the world of academia from the worlds of journalists, think tank analysts, artists, bureaucrats, law enforcement officials or the general public. These worlds are not hermetically sealed since individuals—and with them, their concepts—move between them. Some operate in several worlds simultaneously, such as through a “revolving door” connecting, e.g. academia, government and consultancy (Schwak, 2018). Importantly, the notion of distinct worlds functions as a thinking tool since these boundaries are in practices upheld through continuous “boundary work” that demarcates, for instance, scientific from journalistic practices (Büger and Gadinger, 2007).

A different distinction can be drawn between the “world of observation,” and the “world of practice.” In the former, observers make sense of their environment through concepts. ⁶ Here, concepts perform as “categories of analysis,” distinct from “categories of practice” used in the world of actors (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000). Foucault’s “governmentality,” used to understand the workings of the modern state, exemplifies a concept that performs predominantly as a category of analysis but features little in everyday socio-political life. “Identity” or “sovereignty,” by contrast, circulate in both worlds, such as when right-wing groups mobilize around “identity politics,” or international courts adjudicate “sovereignty” disputes in the South China Sea.

General IR scholarship has paid little attention to how concepts perform concepts across multiple worlds. Diverging “translations” of the same concept—whether in academic interpretations, policy implementations, or geographical variations—are typically viewed as evidence that the target misunderstands the concept or refuses to adopt it for self-serving reasons (Draude, 2017). Moreover, scholars remain commonly unaware of the problem of conflating a concept’s role as a category of analysis with its role as a category of practice, a problem which is particularly pronounced in soft power research (Winkler, 2020). While Critical IR has debated whether to engage the policy world and is attentive to questions of the power of language (e.g. de Goede, 2020), it has thus far also not considered the particular implications of concepts’ multiple performances.

CCS, by contrast, approaches multiple performances predominantly as a phenomenon that renders concepts contestable, and thus a rich site of research. Connolly’s (1993) observation that the “terms of political discourse” are shared across different worlds and invite unsolvable disputes over meaning, boundaries or applicability, has practically become a dictum for CCS. Several works explore the form and consequences of such disputes, including the interplay of multiple performances (Bartelson, 2018; Carrai, 2019; Hobson and Kurki, 2012). Some scholars have recently begun to theorize these different performances as distinct “translations” emerging from dynamic, often contentious and transformative encounters between different worlds (see Çapan et al., 2021). Others foreground the theoretical and conceptual problems that multiple performances imply, particularly in terms of conflation and reification (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000; Jackson, 2006; see also (Berger and Luckmann, 1991; Levine, 2012).

To a more limited degree, CCS also considers the methodological implications of engaging in CCS amid multiple performances. These discussions mostly center on scholarly responsibility and the intended and unintended consequences of conceptual work. Connolly, for instance, juxtaposes his approach to Foucault by arguing that agents are “capable of forming intentions, of deliberately shaping [. . .] conduct to rules, of appreciating the significance of actions for others [and] of exercising self-restraint,” and hence, “worthy of being held responsible for conduct that fails to live up to expected standards” (Connolly, 1993: 233). Ish-Shalom (2013), by contrast, maintains that such expectations ask too much of scholars as the political appropriation of theoretical work cannot always be foreseen or avoided (ch. 7). To him, the intention behind conceptual work distinguishes social scientists who use concepts to gather empirical material from “lay” actors (e.g. politicians, journalists, artists) who use them for other purposes (Ish-Shalom, 2013: 208), which means that scholarly responsibility requires a sensitivity to the possible appropriations of one’s work, a view also held by Jackson (2011: 21; see also Brubaker and Cooper, 2000).

The Cambridge school, meanwhile, does not distinguish between different kinds of authors, instead, it emphasizes reconstructing the intended meaning of someone’s work within its specific historical context, thus suggesting that writers cannot be held accountable for consequences beyond their initial intent (e.g. Skinner, 2002). Berenskötter (2016b) emphasizes that critical conceptual work typically involves resisting how a given concept is understood, normalized or practiced (Berenskötter, 2016b). This suggests that any conceptual work—including resisting the reification of “the West,” or the appropriation of the “democratic peace” in Israeli politics—has a political dimension that goes beyond the fiction of an apolitical gathering of empirical knowledge. Ultimately, the question of responsibility also depends on how political subjectivity is understood. Some critical approaches treat conceptual work as an agent-centered process (e.g. Ish-Shalom, 2021), while others view it as a collective process shaped by intersubjective interactions and gradual shifts in shared understanding (e.g. Berenskötter, 2016a). ⁷

Beyond debates about responsibility, CCS addresses the methodological issue of multiple performances in three ways: Some flatten distinctions between worlds (e.g. Actor-Network Theory, Büger and Bethke, 2014), others highlight ambiguity to understand conceptual histories and discourses (Guzzini, 2016), and some avoid reified concepts altogether (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000; Jackson, 2006). Notwithstanding, certain terms can become so central — “basic” (Koselleck, 2011)— to both academic and socio-political discourse that avoiding then becomes difficult, if not impossible.

Taken together, these insights into the multiple performances of concepts and their theoretical and methodological implications advance our understanding of the relationship between researchers, their concepts and their research objects. They add nuance to Critical IR by highlighting the challenges researchers face when encountering concepts in multiple worlds while having to rely on the same contested language as those they research. They also underscore the politics inherent in engaging in such conceptual work—whether or not such politics are desired or recognized. Finally, they demonstrate how CCS has tried to deal with the multiple performances in practice.

However, to fully grasp the entangled relationship between researchers, their concepts, and their research objects, we must also take seriously the role of researcher positionality, an issue that has received surprisingly little attention in CCS. While CCS engages the ontological concerns raised by reflexive scholarship (such as the ties between knowledge and social reality; e.g. see Guzzini, 2005) or turns reflexivity onto IR’s self (e.g. see Kessler and Leira, 2024a; Nyman, 2023), it is curious that reflexivity has not yet emerged as an epistemic principle in CCS. Beyond limited discussions of scholarly responsibility, CCS rarely reflects on how factors such as gender, race, education or institutional background shape both the process and experience of conceptual work and what ultimately comes from it.

Although other scholars are sometimes the research object (as with Samuel Huntington in Ish-Shalom, 2013), and some even write about “our discipline” and the stories “we” tell (Kessler and Leira, 2024a), critical concept scholars have yet to include themselves and their own conceptual work as part of the phenomenon under investigation. ⁸ As a result, published works often appears just as sanitized and distanced as those scientific conceptual analyses that CCS criticizes. More importantly, by neglecting the researcher’s role in the research process, CCs lacks a basis for critically investigating the researcher-concept relationship and the conceptual and practical challenges it entails, especially given that concepts function as both tools and objects of knowledge.

Against this backdrop, Critical IR and its insights on researcher positionality, along with the challenges faced by critical scholars, offer a path forward. Specifically, they provide a foundation for using autoethnography to systematically explore the relationship between researchers and the concepts they engage with, which the next section now turns to.

Bringing autoethnography to CCS

Initially, using autoethnography to study concepts critically—aimed at systematically exploring how concepts mediate the relationship between researchers and their research objects—may appear counterintuitive. Within CCS, scholars usually rely on forms of textual analysis, including conceptual or discourse analysis. While interviews are occasionally used, other ethnographic methods remain rare (e.g. see chapters in Ish-Shalom, 2021; Berenskötter, 2016a). Moreover, as noted earlier, these approaches have yet to place the researcher’s self at the center of analytical focus. In Critical IR, autoethnographies tend to reflect on researchers’ relationships with specific communities—such as defense officials, or victims and perpetrators of conflict (Dauphinee, 2013; Kurylo, 2023; Löwenheim, 2014)—rather than nonhuman entities such as concepts. Yet, as we saw in the second section, autoethnography aligns with the (ethical) purpose of Critical IR, and helps to illuminate the fundamental dynamics and complexities that structure the relationship between subjects and research objects.

Therefore, using autoethnography to study concepts is a promising novel approach that contributes to both CCS and Critical IR. For CCS, it takes researcher positionality seriously, and generates novel insights into the complex role concepts play in research and international politics. As we will see, it reveals how concepts are negotiated and embodied through the researcher-concept relationship, underscoring their performative dimensions. These insights, in turn, enrich Critical IR by shifting the focus of reflexivity from the researcher-object relationship to the underexplored entanglements between researchers and the concepts they work with. Used in this way, autoethnography goes beyond unpacking researcher identity; it illuminates an inevitable tension in conceptual work: We rely on concepts to make sense of the world, but they also act upon and through us. In this sense, we are never merely users or critics of concepts; we are—whether we want to or not—also their objects.

The autoethnographic study presented here relies on a retelling of a doctoral dissertation that advanced a CCS on the soft power concept (Winkler, 2020). The original project employed ethnographic methods, including interviews and participant observation. Although I kept a private research diary, annotated my fieldnotes and interview transcriptions, including its relation to my scholarly self, and discussed emerging themes with colleagues, the project was neither planned nor conducted as an autoethnography. In this sense, the autoethnographic dimension emerged in hindsight, predominantly throughout various writing endeavors, especially those involved in drafting, revising and reflecting for this very article. Insofar as autoethnographic scholarship stresses how authors emerge through the writing process (i.e. the performance of autoethnography is performative of the self) (Hamati-Ataya, 2014: 163; see also Neumann and Neumann and Neumann, 2015), this approach aligns well with existing literature.

What may be more unusual in my take on autoethnography is the overall structure of the article. It largely follows a common IR presentational style, moving from the introduction to the set-up of the research problems and its methodology. There, I insert a brief interlude that contains the autoethnographic bit, before concluding with a discussion that proposes the notion of conceptual entrapment, again echoing more conventional modes of inductive theory-building. Doing so may give the impression that the personal narrative served only to collect “data” in a field I entered with a clear and predefined research agenda and stable sense of myself.

If that were the case, it would sit awkwardly with key principles of reflexive scholarship and CCS, including the rejection of value-free scholarship, distanced writing, and especially, well-defined research designs. The impression of a stable sense of self would also contradict the reflexive criticism of positivism, which challenges the separation between subject and object. As noted earlier, autoethnography stresses the self as both a source of knowledge and object of inquiry whose various identities are continuously reconstituted before and throughout the research process (Mara and Thompson, 2022). Yet, scholars, as human beings, often remain attached to a stable sense of self, even when attuned to post-subjectivist sensibilities. This may explain why some autoethnographic accounts give the impression that a researcher went “out there” on a personal journey of discovery and change (see also Freitas and de Paton, 2009; Hamati-Ataya, 2014; Vrasti, 2008). Without delving too deeply into how this tension might be resolved, it is worth emphasizing that the personal, my scholarly self(s), has shaped every part of the article and the larger project. A central motivation behind the article was, in fact, my experience of how the research process throughout the original research project fractured my preconceived ideas about the tasks and ethics of a critical concept scholar, a theme I return to in the next section.

Either way, the advantages of a more conventional presentational style are that it feels familiar, more comfortable, and less risky to me as a writer positioned in IR as an early-career scholar. It may also resonate better with audience expectations for an academic article. More importantly, it underscores that my use of autoethnography is one among several possible methods for thinking systematically about the researcher-concept relationship. Some scholars argue that autoethnographies should be evaluated based on whether they create insights unavailable through more conventional methods (Brigg and Bleiker, 2010: 792; Karkour and Vieira, 2023: 4). While pragmatic, this view risks portraying autoethnography as a secondary methodology, only valid when all else fails—an assumption that arguably undercuts its broader potential.

Relatedly, friendly critics sometimes suggest that autoethnography risks becoming too self-indulgent, or too particular to the individual researcher to ground more systematic thinking beyond a single case/experience (Brigg and Bleiker, 2010; Enloe, 2016; Gani and Khan, 2024). Of course, Critical scholarship generally eschews positivist notions of generalizability and causation (see Norman, 2021), while still contending that its insights can illuminate broader phenomena beyond individual cases (e.g. see Guzzini, 2013). Autoethnographic accounts, while deeply personal, can contribute toward this goal. As Mara and Thompson (2022) note, “autoethnography is uniquely positioned to elicit reflection and offer guidance to other researchers,” as it speaks to shared human experiences of doing research, even if some specificities differ across contexts (p. 385).

With that in mind, the article’s use of autoethnography aims to provide novel insights into the researcher-concept relationship and contribute to broader discussions on Critical IR and the role of concepts. At the same time, it seeks to advance CCS by taking researcher positionality seriously, and engaging a concept through an autoethnographic study. Importantly, while the following section centers on my experience with the soft power concept, other concepts could arguably be subjected to similar analyses.

Encountering soft power

To contextualize my own positionality at the outset of the project, some elements including gender, race, career stage, and institutional setting (female, white, early career, and based at a Swedish university) shaped the research process. These factors influenced how I navigated various male-dominated environments across both Western and non-Western, academic/non-academic contexts. I was well-funded, yet not affiliated with an elite institution. My educational background in area studies and International Studies also positioned me within a tradition of critical scholarship suspicious of mainstream IR, while fostering a desire to remain unimbued with the politics around my object of inquiry, soft power, even as I recognized that other critical scholars had emancipatory ambitions.

The project was part of a larger project on a power shift in East Asia which had received funding by a philanthropic foundation. ⁹ While the soft power concept, developed by Harvard professor Joseph Nye in 1990, is typically defined as “the ability to obtain preferred outcomes by attraction rather than coercion or payment” (Nye, 2017: 1), the parent project built on scholarship that conceptualized soft power as a coercive form of power closely tied to identity discourses (e.g. Bially Mattern, 2005). The parent project aimed to further strengthen this conception by exploring how the capacity to successfully shape representations of reality is a form of soft power that plays a critical role in international politics.

As is typical for doctoral projects, I had considerable freedom to shape my research. Nevertheless, I had to align my work with the parent project to meet funder expectations, meaning it had to revolve around “soft power” and international politics. Although some elements of the parent project had long interested me, working with the soft power concept proved more complicated. The deeper I immersed myself in the soft power literature, the more puzzled, and subsequently uneasy, I became about its use in analytical frameworks. The abundance of “adjective + power” terms—discursive, ideational, productive, rhetorical, agenda-setting, narrative—raised many questions. Were they interchangeable? Why use “soft power” if amid so many alternatives? What does soft power do for a framework, and for someone’s work more broadly? Was the distance between such conceptualizations and Nye original conception problematic, perhaps an archetypal case of a concept stretched beyond recognition?

I struggled with how to build a framework that could engage and sort through the myriad different approaches to soft power, particularly given the concept’s pervasiveness in both academia and politics. I also remained unconvinced of the concept’s analytical or practical utility; it seemed vacuous, and practically impossible to implement and measure. In hindsight, this was where I first experienced unease: The financial background of my project coupled with a (at this point) mysteriously catchy concept “forced” me into conceptual work I depended on to sustain an academic career. Walking away was, of course, a possibility, but the longer I stayed, the higher the cost of abandoning the project would be.

Fortunately, the publication of Berenskötter’s (2016a) edited volume marked an important advance in critical approaches to concepts, and proved pivotal in helping me find a way to deal with the soft power concept. My project thus evolved into a CCS of the soft power concept. Specifically, I focused on further theorizing and operationalizing “conceptual politics,” examining how “concept entrepreneurs” across different worlds coined, used, promoted and revisited the soft power concept in anticipation of real-world effects. To address my original unease with soft power’s role in analytical frameworks given its usage by politicians, I followed Jackson (2006) and approached the soft power concept exclusively as an empirical object rather than an analytical tool within my own framework. I purposefully took no position on what soft power truly is, how it works or who enjoys it, precisely because I was interested in what the concept does in its different performances. In doing so, I hoped to establish critical distance between myself and the concept and to avoid participating in the very conceptual politics I was seeking to analyze.

To some degree, this strategy was helpful, serving as a constant reminder of my self-proclaimed identity as a Critical Concept scholar. However, over time, I had to acknowledge the concept’s basicness, and accept that soft power had, in the words of Richter and Richter and Richter (2006), “become indispensable to any formulation of the most urgent issues of a given time” (p. 345).

As is typical for a basic concept, soft power is widely contested, which often made it practically impossible to maintain my neutrality and distance. The concept has a substantial following among scholars and practitioners who strongly feel that soft power is important in world politics. When I encountered them (e.g. at conferences or during fieldwork), I often struggled to explain my critical approach. To them, my project seemed confusing, and my critical distance difficult to tolerate, especially since they viewed it as a scholar’s responsibility to enhance knowledge of the world—which, in this case, meant deepening understanding of the soft power concept itself.

On the other hand, I also encountered many scholars, journalists, or bureaucrats who dismissed the soft power concept outright. In these cases, I found myself defending why the concept was worth studying, even as I continued to grapple with my own lingering skepticism about its academic value. During an early presentation of my project, for instance, a senior scholar slammed her hand on the table and exclaimed, “Soft power doesn’t do anything, it’s all about hard power, you’re wasting your time.” Others responded with indifference, shrugging as they remarked, “Soft power is so 2002, why would you still work on the concept?”

These different responses to my project shared one thing: They all demanded a more definitive stance on soft power’s “true” nature—precisely the exact opposite of my intentions. Of course, plainly explaining one’s research takes practice and time. Yet, even now, as I submit articles from the dissertation and work on a book manuscript, I continue to face criticism for not defining the soft power concept. In this way, soft power’s basicness continues to taunt me. Beyond doubling down on my conceptual work, I have few alternatives if I want to succeed academically. Part of the challenge, then, is accepting that some things lie beyond my control.

The question of decreasing control over my conceptual work and its uptake increased my unease in other ways, too. Early on, before I had spoken or published on soft power, I had substantial leeway to shape my relationship with the concept. Over time, however, this process became increasingly unowned. In academia, for instance, most references to my work highlight only on a small slice of my argument, often ignoring its critical dimension. I am frequently cited to support the idea that soft power is important. There is technically nothing wrong about this statement, nor is it an unfair misrepresentation. Yet, what irks me is how it renders me a soft power person, and thereby someone who fuels the very process I tried to critically dissect.

As the project progressed, I had to reluctantly accept that I embodied many different roles vis-à-vis the soft power concept, and not just the Critical Concept scholar I had idealized. Of course, Critical IR emphasizes that value-neutrality is a positivist fiction, yet maintaining critical distance and avoiding involvement with conceptual politics felt important to my scholarly identity. Over time, it became clear that my attachment to a stable sense of self was increasingly being challenged.

As such, another role I quickly assumed with mixed feelings was that of a soft power authority. Early on, I was surprised by how often I was placed in the role of an authoritative voice by those I encountered during fieldwork where my growing wealth of knowledge on all things soft power merged with my status as an academic expert. In most of my semi-structured interviews (with scholars, diplomats, journalists, or artists), my interlocutors actively sought my views on soft power, its usage and typically, my assessment of their country’s soft power progress. I found these situations difficult to navigate. Avoiding a straight answer felt inappropriate as my interview partners clearly expected something for their time and openness. Yet doubling down on my critical approach to the concept risked shaping the interview unduly. Thus, I had to acknowledge the transactional nature of the interviews and recognize that offering (even conflicted) expertise was, at times, unavoidable.

These exchanges did not occur in a vacuum, but were often embedded in hegemonic contexts. Much of my fieldwork took place in non-Western settings where I gradually came to embody the role of a Western, white knower of soft power. I was, albeit reluctantly, dispensing advice on a concept that I knew, at its core, encouraged the rest of the world to prioritize a very particular notion of attractiveness defined by the hegemonic center.

Yet over time, I realized that my soft power expertise was useful, and I began relying on that authority to advance my research, and thus career. In other words,, I increasingly aligned myself with the concept. For instance, when setting up interviews, I started presenting myself as a soft power scholar and not as a Critical Concept scholar, as I had done before. My interview acceptance rate increased. I also noticed that this “new” identity often created an unspoken bond with my interview partners which helped me get a deeper understanding of their conceptual and practical engagement, which often led to further interview opportunities. In that sense, I used the soft power concept and its many associations (e.g. communication, attraction, exchange, and so on) quite strategically, rather than from a position of critical distance—further solidifying the conflicted nature of my relation with the concept.

Simultaneously, I began to feel more confident as a knower and authoritative voice on the concept. After all, I have spent years researching the concept and tracing its trials and tribulations. Even if I continue to resist taking a position on soft power’s “true” nature, I know extremely well where the concept originated and spread, who its main proponents were, and the many surprising places it has traveled to (including constitutions and Broadway musicals). Across my publications, I do claim a degree of soft power authority, albeit one distinct from that of Joseph Nye or other soft power concept entrepreneurs. Yet, what continues to unsettle me is that, in accepting and embracing such authority, I once again find myself deeply embedded in the phenomenon I set out to critically examine.

One particularly challenging aspect of acknowledging my soft power authority was seeing how strategically it was used by my interlocutors. In conversations with Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials, for instance, my interest in soft power was invoked to justify maintaining or increasing the public diplomacy budget. After all, the interest of “soft power scholar Winkler” had just demonstrated how relevant the concept truly was. In these moments, my research merged with my own role in uncomfortable ways. A major finding of my project was that concept entrepreneurs often invoked Nye’s authority on soft power to support controversial policy propositions. While my name carries far less weight, being cast in a similar role was nonetheless difficult to reconcile with my idealized notion of a disengaged Critical Concept scholar.

Finally, I assumed two additional roles during the research process: that of an object of soft power and a promoter of the concept. I encountered countless situations where my interlocutors (more or less implicitly) expected that our interview, or my participation in an activity, would make me appreciate their country’s soft power. Whether through invited lunches, art installations or detailed accounts of development aid successes, their hope was that I would be swayed by their country’s attractiveness, and in turn, become a kind of spokesperson for the country and its soft power by reporting back to my family, friends, and colleagues. This was especially pronounced during a free study trip with other young European and Central Asian scholars to Japan, where we had to pledge in advance to “promote the attractiveness of Japan” during and after the trip. While these roles reflect idiosyncrasies of the soft power concept since it is centered on attractiveness, they also underscore a recurring dilemma: Simply by reporting on a concept, one becomes part and parcel of the phenomenon while also loosing large swaths of control over the consequences of one’s work.

In conclusion, my complicated relationship to the soft power concept came to the fore in many ways. At times, I experienced this relationship as difficult and somewhat unwanted, yet, with some hindsight, I also became increasingly fascinated by just how personal it has gotten. Nye’s email on the eve of my dissertation, to come back to the opening of the article, captures this tension between unease and accomplishment, which remains central to my conflicted position as a soft power critic. As I continue to write for this article and beyond, my ambiguous relationship with the concept continues to evolve, prompting ongoing reflections on what it means to “be critical,” and how we, as scholars, can become entangled with our own concepts.

Conceptual entrapment

Taking the autoethnographic retelling of my project as a point of departure, this section develops the notion of “conceptual entrapment” as a way to capture the intricate relationship that can develop between scholars and “their” concepts. ¹⁰ Although grounded in a critical study of the soft power concept, since all scholars rely on concepts in their work, the notion of conceptual entrapment is intended to be relevant also beyond CCS and Critical IR. In a nutshell, conceptual entrapment occurs when a scholar becomes entangled with a concept in ways that constrain future conceptual work, generate discomfort, yet also make it difficult to abandon or disavow the concept without accepting unwanted consequences.

To be certain, not every scholar-concept relationship is characterized by entrapment. There are plenty of examples of working relationships where no such tension is felt, or where entrapment is not experienced as a problem. Yet, as my autoethnography suggests, scholars can arguably experience present and future constraints in their conceptual work due to a combination of four interrelated factors: (1) prior conceptual work, (2) growing loss of authority over concepts and conceptual work, (3) the embeddedness of conceptual work in material, social and professional norms and conventions, and (4) the productive power of concepts.

In terms of prior conceptual work, concerns for reputation and legitimacy, and with it, the need to remain credible as a member of a scholarly community, can strongly drive conceptual entrapment. Irrespective of why a scholar engaged in conceptual work initially, once that work is public, it often becomes difficult to revise or distance oneself from it without also risking criticism for inconsistency or contradiction. In my own project, this difficulty surfaced predominantly in the ongoing need to justify the relevance of my project while also refraining from taking a clear position on soft power’s “true” nature.

Even when scholars move on from a given concept, their publications and their respective success can keep them tied to it in the eyes of others. They may continue to be associated with the concept and repeatedly be approached for peer-reviews or contribution requests. I myself have become a “soft power person,” frequently asked to review work on the topic. While I hope to be more than this persona, conceptual entrapment can arguably be particularly pronounced when a scholars authority and prestige are closely linked to earlier conceptual work.

This may help explain why we see practically no examples of scholars fully renouncing concepts they are associated with, be it Joseph Nye and “soft power,” Samuel Huntington and the “clash of civilization” or Pierre Bourdieu and “habitus.” In such cases, conceptual entrapment may be experienced with ambivalence: On the one hand, it grants scholars great influence over the field, on the other, it constraints the ability to reorient one’s research or be recognized for something other than “one’s” concept. ¹¹

The growing loss of control over concepts and their trajectories, reinterpretations, and (mis)uses, as well as over one’s conceptual work, is arguably another reason for scholars to experience conceptual entrapment. Critical concept scholars are generally aware that the very elements that makes concepts contestable—their openness, performance in different worlds, intersubjective nature and politics—also make it practically impossible to retain authority over one’s own conceptual work. Yet, recognizing this in theory is one thing; coming to terms with the (increasing) loss of authority over one’s own work in practice is another, especially when one feels their work has been misunderstood (perhaps even deliberately) or appropriated for intellectual or political purposes.

This discomfort can intensify the more a concept travels across academia and beyond, and as it becomes more contested. While some scholars distinguish between social scientists seeking new empirical knowledge and “lay” actors with different objectives (Ish-Shalom, 2021; Jackson, 2006), the world of observation is arguably not the sovereign territory of social scientists adhering to strict scientific norms of conceptual work. Politicians, bureaucrats or artists also use concepts as heuristic devices to make sense of the world. And while their usage can be comparatively shallow, it can also consist of complex conceptual work, such as, for instance, the “Soft Power 30 ranking” developed by a consultancy firm (Portland et al., 2018).

Once concepts begin to travel, there is little one can do to prevent misapplications, distortions, or appropriations, short of renouncing the concept entirely or doubling down on conceptual work. As discussed in the previous section, navigating the gradual loss of control over my project and how other scholars or interview partners perceived me as a soft power authority, indeed incited a sense of discomfort.

Third, conceptual work is materially and socially situated, involving far more than the task of attaching meaning to reality through developing idea-type analytical concepts. This broader context can also drive a sense of conceptual entrapment. Like any type of scientific endeavor (e.g. see Büger, 2012), conceptual work requires financing, access to material and human resources, and adherence to disciplinary conventions regarding scientific conduct, relevance and academic success. Much of it is funded by states, corporations or philanthropic foundations, whose priorities shape what kinds of work are encouraged, and which may be dismissed as irrelevant to the public good. In such settings, strong incentives often arise to frame one’s work around a specific concept, even if one had little interest in engaging the concept in the first place. The material conditions of my own project, including specific expectations for what the dissertation should address, certainly contributed to my experience of conceptual entrapment.

Similarly, accepting some unforeseeable consequences of conceptual work is often necessary in a world where access to archives, documents, field sites, and interview subjects can be limited. Becoming a “soft power person” greatly increased my success in the field, yet, my instrumental adoption of that persona also left me conflicted. Scholarly conventions can also drive conceptual entrapment, particularly the expectation to situate one’s work within the broader context and history of the field. For scholars studying power, for instance, it is nearly impossible not to mention soft power, at least in passing, regardless of one’s regard for the concept (e.g. Baldwin, 2013). Finally, demands for relevance, citations, and the peer-review process further shape conceptual work, as scholars need to navigate such demands and adjust their work correspondingly.

We might think of these dynamics as a form of self-censorship (Lebow, 2016), but in many ways, they are simply academic business as usual. Like any social field, academia is structured by rules, norms and conventions. Scholars, ideally, enter the field by free choice rather than under coercion. And yet, the way the field enables and constrains conceptual work is a form of power—one that operates not through observable conflict, but by shaping academic possibilities and, ultimately, research subjectivities (see also Lukes, 2005).

Finally, this article has thus far approached scholars as largely rational actors with a clear sense of their interests and resources, encountering conceptual entrapment as a form of (more or less) observable conflict with their concept. This framing reflects this article’s approach to CCS which privileges agency over more structural forms of power. Yet, CCS also underscores the productive power of concepts, and Critical IR scholarship suggests that autoethnography is performative of the self. Both perspectives imply that concepts can shape scholars and their interests, identities, or perceptions of their relationship with the concept. In this sense, conceptual entrapment also emerges from the co-constructed relationship between researchers and their concepts. To me, this became most apparent in the many different roles that I assumed vis-à-vis the soft power concept, and with it, the gradual acceptance of these roles and a growing fascination with the concept up to the point that I have finally become a soft power person. ¹²

These four factors central to conceptual entrapment intersect with researcher positionality. Like academia more broadly, access to conceptual work is privileged, and so are many opportunities of its opportunities, such as being well-funded enough to conduct multi-site ethnographic research, as I was in my study of soft power. Resistance to conceptual entrapment likewise depends on many factors, including gender, race, institutional background and career age. This is the case because conceptual entrapment is strongly related to perceptions of authority. IR and international politics remain deeply unequal fields, privileging voices often associated with whiteness, maleness, Western identity, and elite academic institutions. While authority also increases visibility—and, consequently, invites more room for criticism and appropriation—it often allows greater leeway: More room to ignore contradictions with prior conceptual work, and fewer constraints imposed by material and social contexts of scholarship. Still, conceptual entrapment also stems from internal pressures to conform to an idealized type of scholar, something which is often shaped by individual trajectories.

Since the notion of conceptual entrapment was developed through an autoethnographic project, does it only apply to certain types of concept entrepreneurs, concepts, or empirical research? In other words, how far can the notion travel? Given that these reflections stem from a dissertation, is conceptual entrapment primarily a rite of passage for early career scholars? While that may be the case to some extent (though I doubt it, based on many private conversations with senior scholars), downplaying or concealing conceptual entrapment—whether scholars have settled with it or fear criticism—is problematic, especially given its potentially significant impacts on the research process and future research endeavors.

But could the idiosyncrasy of soft power concept make conceptual entrapment less likely with other concepts? Soft power performs exceptionally well in foreign policy circles, bolstered by Nye’s efforts to expand its community, factors which undoubtedly influenced my research process. My project also relied heavily on interviews, which intensified this sense of entrapment through scholar-interlocutor relationships. That said, conceptual entrapment should be understood as a gradual rather than binary phenomenon. Scholars can feel locked into being a certain type of expert, shaping what they pursue, referee, supervise, or publish—even when the concept in question functions less as a category of practice, or when the empirical material is primarily textual.

All things considered, conceptual entrapment is a particular type of relationship between researchers and their concepts that often constrains researchers, and limits what kind of scholarship and knowledge they can and want to seek. In this way, conceptual entrapment shapes not only researchers and their positionality but also the knowledge they produce. The version of conceptual entrapment presented here is largely one of constraints and unease. That said, there may also be positive effects, such as when increased visibility, networking, and publication opportunities. Nonetheless, focusing on the downsides of conceptual entrapment here is warranted since it challenges widespread assumptions about the scholars as autonomous actors and idealized notions of academic life. We know of course that scholarship is not independent of politics and contemporary events, and that the free pursuit of academic knowledge is, in many ways, an idealized fiction. Yet, the dynamics described here stem from the particular way in which concepts perform across multiple worlds. As such, they represent a distinct and overlooked form of constraint on the relationship between researchers and their research objects.

Conclusion

This article has contributed to Critical IR and the emerging field of CCS by bridging insights from both to explore the researcher-object relationship. It introduced autoethnography as a useful method for studying concepts critically, and proposed the notion of “conceptual entrapment” to capture how researchers can become constrained by “their” concepts as they navigate the tension between idealized scholarly identities and the social and material realities of conceptual work. Concepts, the article demonstrated, operate across diverse worlds, including as tools and objects of knowledge, political slogans, or foreign policy strategy, and in this way, shape not just the world but also the scholars who engage them.

For Critical IR, the article expands the focus on researcher positionality as a practice of situating the researcher by demonstrating how concepts also situate us in ways not yet recognized. While researcher positionality has focused largely on who the researcher is, is has paid less attention on how concepts, as the basic building blocks of thought and theory, shape what we can see, interpret and communicate in the first place. The autoethnographic account reinforces a well-known dilemma in critical scholarship: We can neither avoid nor do away with our conceptual vocabulary, yet, these concepts are also often deeply political and problematic. At a time when new concepts emerge or old ones are repurposed in response to global crises (e.g. Anthropocene; Cold War), this article calls for deeper engagement with the mediating role of concepts in terms of ordering not just the world but also us as something that can, as Hacking put it many years ago, “rewrite our souls,” as individuals and as a discipline. ¹³ In this way, the article joins calls to move beyond positionality statement as mere methodological formalities (Gani and Khan, 2024). Ultimately, though, the notion of “conceptual entrapment” promises neither critical distance nor presumes control but insists on the need to engage our concepts critically and productively.

For CCS, beyond introducing autoethnography and taking reflexivity as an epistemic principle seriously, the notion of conceptual entrapment also exposes an affective dimension to conceptual work. While CCS as a field has often focused on the politics, contestation and circulation of concepts, this article urges scholars to consider how concepts are felt, embodied, and lived by those who work with them. Attending to these dynamics is crucial not only for navigating conceptual entrapment on an individual level but also for grasping concepts, which implicate the production of knowledge in intimate ways.

At the end of the day, while CCS has shifted debate from what concepts are to what they do, this article pushes further by bringing reflexive insights from Critical IR to challenge us to examine what concepts do to and through us—and how this, in turn, shapes the very possibilities of being a critical scholar and doing critical work.