The Time of Global Politics: International Relations as Study of the Present 9781009386814, 1009386816

Citation preview

|

The Time of Global Politics

How can we better relate and respond to the political times we inhabit? Temporal relationships play a central role in the questions at the heart of global politics, but political commentators and observers focus almost exclusively on the past as a means of predicting and preparing for the future. Christopher McIntosh argues that although past events are meaningful for our collective future, the present remains vitally important. McIntosh emphasizes the importance of the present as a conceptual resource and analytical category for thinking about international politics. The present, he suggests, places an orientation toward difference and a recognition of the human limits of understanding alongside an emphasis on process and change. This book will shift current thinking about prediction and better enable the use of knowledge about international politics to meaningfully and positively intervene in present-day concerns. christopher mcintosh is Assistant Professor of Politics at Bard College, New York. His research focuses on developing a concept of time, war, and social theory in international politics, and he is one of the first international relations (IR) scholars to establish time and temporality as a separate area of research inquiry and theory.

The Time of Global Politics International Relations as Study of the Present

christopher mcintosh Bard College

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05-06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009386814 DOI: 10.1017/9781009386838 © Christopher McIntosh 2024 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2024 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McIntosh, Christopher, 1977- author. Title: The time of global politics : international relations as study of the present / Christopher McIntosh, Bard College, New York. Other titles: International relations as study of the present Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023022482 (print) | LCCN 2023022483 (ebook) | ISBN 9781009386814 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009386821 (paperback) | ISBN 9781009386838 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: International relations–History–21st century. | World politics–21st century. | World politics–21st century–Forecasting. Classification: LCC D863.3 .M45 2023 (print) | LCC D863.3 (ebook) | DDC 327.09/05–dc23/eng/20230622 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023022482 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023022483 ISBN 978-1-009-38681-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgments 1

Theorizing with the Present: Past, Present, and Future in International Politics

page vi 1

2

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

33

3

A Presentist Approach to International Relations: A Toolkit for Political Analysis

65

4

The Temporality of IR Theories: Global Politics from the Present

100

5

The Time of War

143

6

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

168

7

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction: Alternative Futures

198

8

Theorizing Responsibly: Temporality, Positionality, and Difference

234

Conclusion: Toward an Intellectual Ethos for Time Scholarship in Global Politics

263

References

282

Index

329

v

Acknowledgments

This book should not exist. Not in the sense that all life is a miracle – although that is true, too – but in the sense that no reasonable person would have predicted this. I am enormously blessed that this long, winding process has ended successfully and, hopefully has resulted in something that generates at least a little bit of thought and reflection. There are people to thank. There are always people to thank. I am going to try and do right by the many people who – intentionally or unintentionally – helped make this miracle happen. That said, I know that I will not be able to do it, mostly because no one can. I should probably start with Alexander Wendt – he is the reason I got into academia and has continued to help shape my writing and thinking in countless ways ever since. Andrew Hom is a phenomenal scholar and colleague – he has included me in countless projects and opportunities and more importantly has been an invaluable, generous, and incredibly gifted intellectual that I am privileged to call my friend. He has read all of this multiple times, and I cannot thank him enough for his comments and assistance on this. Much of the work that led to this version of the project is a direct result of a book workshop held at Bard in 2019. Kathryn Fisher, Andy Hom, Dan Nexon, and Ty Solomon, along with Ian Storey, provided invaluable feedback and camaraderie, and I cannot thank them enough for their generosity and work, intellectually and emotionally. This book also gained steam at a workshop on temporality I attended at the University of Glasgow in 2016, and I particularly want to thank Ty Solomon, Cian O’Driscoll, Tim Stevens, and Andrew Hom for their insights and encouragement there. While it never was a formal workshop, the regular Zoom discussions with Terilyn Huntington, desRaimes Combs, Kathryn Fisher, Brent Steele, Amy Eckert, Luke

vi

Acknowledgments

vii

Campbell, and others really helped sustain me throughout the pandemic. I would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their willingness to take on the burden of reviewing all of this and the detail with which they read it. And I would also like to thank John Haslam for being a brilliant editor and in particular his belief in the project throughout the process – without him this manuscript does not become a book. There are a number of people at Bard who have been instrumental in whatever success I have had here and helped shape my intellectual growth. Rob Culp has been an invaluable mentor ever since I arrived. Scholars such as Duff Morton, Sophia Stamatopolou-Robbins, and Kevin Duong all generously read my work concerning time and temporality and provided important commentary that shaped my thinking on the issues that dominate this book. Aniruddha Mitra, Michael Martell, and Bill Dixon helped make the day to day of writing and teaching enjoyable. Evelyn Buse, Eboni Grooms, and Brian Araque all provided important research assistance and editing for which I am thankful. I would also like to thank my students more generally as their intellectual growth and engagement have undoubtedly shaped my own and the opportunity to think with them is something for which I will always be grateful. Parts of Chapters 1 and 2 draw from C. McIntosh (2015), “Theory across Time: The Privileging of Time-Less Theory in International Relations,” International Theory 7(3): 464–500, https://doi.org/10 .1017/S1752971915000147. Chapter 5 is an expanded and rewritten version of C. McIntosh (2020), “Theorizing the Temporal Exception: The Importance of the Present for the Study of War,” Journal of Global Security Studies 5(4): 543–558, https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ ogz040. A version of Chapter 6 previously appeared as C. McIntosh (2020), “The Trump Administration’s Politics of Time: The Temporal Dynamics That Enable Trump’s Interests to Determine American Foreign Policy,” Time & Society 29(2): 362–391, https://doi.org/10 .1177/0961463X20909048. I am thankful to Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage for permission to reprint this material in this book. Finally, I can only end this where it all begins. My family is the center of everything, and while it is difficult to properly express in writing my gratitude for both Michelle and Owen, it is simply impossible with

viii

Acknowledgments

respect to Michelle. From graduate school on, our lives have been inextricably intertwined in all the best ways and I hope that never changes. She makes every part of my life better, and given how much of my life I have put into this book, she, more than anyone, is responsible for its good parts. Together, the two of them are the most important people in my life. This book is for them.

|

1

Theorizing with the Present Past, Present, and Future in International Politics

Theories provide a way of packaging patterns from the past in such a way as to make them usable in the present as guides to the future.1 —John Lewis Gaddis

Introduction International Relations (IR) is stuck in the past. Scholars of IR admit it – “history matters for international politics. Everyone who studies the subject knows this. The institutions and attitudes inherited from the past always affect present-day decisions, and most of the time change is incremental; so the impact of the past is strong.”2 Unsurprisingly, the field of IR faces a recurring identity crisis whenever it encounters the inevitable shifts of an evolving world. The changes of the contemporary moment cause us to constantly reconsider the utility of our work in light of new information and events. While the field is unavoidably shaped by the present and its apparent novelty, it refuses to directly engage it, placing IR in a constant loop of crisis. International relations needs to ask itself: When is IR? When does IR take place and when is it valuable? When is it not? How can we better relate and respond to the political times we inhabit? Following the end of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis characterized the crisis this way. Given the inability of scholars to anticipate the end of the Cold War, “no approach to the study of international relations claiming both foresight and competence should have failed to see it coming. None actually did so, though, and that fact ought to raise questions about the methods we have developed for trying to understand world politics.”3 More recently, observers of politics have spilled a great deal of ink trying to understand how they could miss the rise of the right in Europe and the United States. For many, the election 1

Gaddis 1992, 6.

2

Keohane and Fioretos 2017, 322.

3

Gaddis 1992, 6.

1

2

The Time of Global Politics

of Donald Trump, Brexit, and the success of other right-wing groups in electoral democracies worldwide signal a sea change in Europe and America’s role in the world, a devolution of major liberal democracies into “authoritarian populism,” and a rise in global instability.4 Scholars of IR wonder whether these developments have upended the international order and thrown everything we think we know about alliances, norms, and institutions into disarray. To many, both in and out of academia, the failure to accurately predict these events represents yet another disciplinary crisis. And because these events were largely unanticipated, it calls into question whether we can still rely on our existing theories of the past to explain present reality. In short, our present – yet again – appears to be at odds with what we thought we knew. Whenever we try to make sense of global politics in the moment, historians warn us against “presentism” – reading the past only through the light of the present, disconnecting it from antecedent events or historical analogues. They especially warn against overstating the apparent novelty of the contemporary moment. And as Keohane shows, this is a fear nearly all observers and scholars of global politics have internalized. Qualitative researchers, foreign policy experts, and even critical scholars all emphasize the role of history in shaping our present. While these groups may make for strange bedfellows, each shares the belief that the present is simply the tip of the iceberg and an extension of the past. More mainstream and “scientific” scholars also seek to divorce themselves from the presentist trap, but in a slightly different way. The turn to positivist approaches and science is an attempt to excise entirely the apparent novelty of the present by generating knowledge that transcends context. Scientific claims seek “time-less mechanisms” that govern behavior regardless of where they occur on the timeline. Wherever one locates these mechanisms on the timeline – past, present, or future – if they are robust, these claims should hold, removing the novelty of our contemporary moment and rendering it nothing more than an ever-vanishing point on the timeline. Regardless of theoretical commitments or scholarly positioning, the present remains largely an afterthought. If we take a step back for a moment, this is deeply counterintuitive because global politics is inexorably tied to the present. Media cover 4

Inglehart and Norris 2018.

Theorizing with the Present

3

issues of the day, experts opine on current foreign policy dilemmas, and scholars write books and articles in order to better understand contemporary concerns – such as today’s wars, climate change, current economic inequality, and the like. Whether we are talking about foreign policy pundits, government officials, or scholars analyzing these decisions, the issues of the day – or issues of the time – dominate. Virtually no one is interested in theorizing topics such as seventeenthcentury land battles that predate air power or economic interactions absent modern telecommunication in and of themselves. When they are, it is only because those explorations have some sort of theoretical payoff and shed light on a contemporary concern. For many observers, recent events such as the rise of right-wing groups with authoritarian ambitions, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the increasing rate of disasters caused by human-induced climate change all contribute to a sense that the political present we inhabit is not just deeply troubling but a world-historic moment. From this perspective, everything has changed, even if some concerns appear similar. International relations theorists trained in Euro-American traditions emphasize the tensions between new and old great powers and the return of aggression within Europe. Others wonder about the rise of China and the effect of the pandemic on its future trajectory. The international economic order is supposedly facing dramatic change but also finds itself impacted by new issues like climate change and ever-present concerns about systemic inequality. This appearance of change is particularly acute in the United States, where the government’s failed response to COVID-19 has resulted in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. On top of that ongoing failure, there is a renewed and growing awareness of systemic racism and the violent enforcement of white supremacy, generating widespread uprisings and a repressive state response, all of which are likely to continue. With the unprecedented actions and excesses of the Trump administration, the possibility of his re-election in 2024, and the continued viability of Trumpism within American political institutions, some are calling into question the future of the United States as a world leader as well as the order it claims to lead.5 For many, these represent the type of shifts that Gaddis saw at the end of the Cold War. From this perspective, the globe has been cursed 5

Haass 2020.

4

The Time of Global Politics

to live in “interesting times” and actors, scholars, and observers of politics need to proceed accordingly.6 Yet, for many others, these developments barely register and represent nothing more than a continuation of the structural and political dynamics that enabled European and American interests to masquerade as the totality of “world politics” and IR for centuries. While some might characterize the contemporary moment as yet another failure to anticipate the challenges of the present, others see it as exactly the opposite. For them, the supposed divergence of the present from the past reflects an idealized account of the past that was never really true in the first place. The existing desire to position recent events as wild deviations from an orderly international system ignores the realities, histories, and experiences of much of the globe and reflects an urge to normalize the continuation of American and European dominance. From this vantage point, it is – and always has been – shocking that an academic discipline claiming to explain world politics would base their claims largely on the past, present, and future of Europe and the United States. While we appear to be in the midst of a temporally complex situation, what we are experiencing is not particularly unique. Contemporary international politics always possesses an ambivalent relationship with the past. Many argue that cyberoperations, AI, autonomous weapons, and hybrid warfare call into question ideas about warfare that currently dominate the field of IR and national security, just as the longbow did centuries ago.7 At the same time, others insist that what is new and different is just the most recent manifestation of old problems. Climate change may indeed be new and meaningful for international politics but only insofar as it affects military planning or international economics. Structural violence, racial and/or gender inequality, or settler colonialism may be politically important, but material concerns such as territorial sovereignty are 6

7

“May you live in interesting times” is largely understood in the American context as an “ancient Chinese curse” and this social understanding provides a good example of the heterogeneity of pasts, presents, and futures. The phrase is not actually ancient, but a twentieth-century invention that appears ancient to later generations that have forgotten this fact only because it is absent from their past. And it isn’t even of Chinese origin, but largely recognized as an American development playing on American (and white supremacist) understandings of China as a society still shaped by its antiquity. Goldsmith 2013, Grut 2013, Junio 2013, Altmann and Sauer 2017, Scharre 2018.

Theorizing with the Present

5

paramount to the security of peoples. Nuclear weapons remain central to global politics as does the threat of great power war.8 From this perspective, IR is so settled a field that scholars can comfortably (mis)cite Athens and Sparta when debating the future of the United States and China nearly 2,500 years later.9 Not only can one cite examples from antiquity and beyond as a means of explaining current great power relations, one must, lest we fall into the dreaded trap of viewing global politics with a presentist bias. Such criticisms are unavoidably shaped by the present. How we answer questions about the future does not rely exclusively on our analysis of the past but also on assumptions about the continuity of political practice across time. Whether we are interested in how to interpret the rise of lethal autonomous weapons or looking to explain the impact of climate change, the ways that we relate past, present, and future are vital and unavoidable issues.10 Temporality – specifically, the temporal imaginary of international politics – determines how we even begin to formulate these questions, let alone attempt to answer them. One cannot articulate the potential causes of World War II, for example, without first periodizing the conflict, because we cannot even imagine the universe of possible answers to that question until we know which conditions constitute the time “before” – rather than during, or after – the war. The fear of ignoring the lessons of the past runs so deep within IR that the present drops out nearly entirely. This book argues that this is a problem not only for those interested in time and temporality but across the field because of the centrality of time in all of our work. It is one of the central factors in our recurring crisis over the “point” of IR; after all, IR is the study of a particular type of political relations, and relations unfold over time. It is also a problem because the present is so deeply embedded throughout our work. The central move of this book is to foreground the category of the present as a conceptual resource and analytical category for thinking about IR. The present – particularly when understood as relationally bounded, heterogeneous, and contingent – places an orientation toward difference and a 8

9 10

It is for this reason that the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize recognized international measures taken toward a legal ban on nuclear weapons (see, e.g., Fihn 2017). Allison 2017. Agathangelou and Killian 2021, Marquardt and Delina 2021, Altmann and Sauer 2017, and Scharre 2018.

6

The Time of Global Politics

recognition of the human limits of understanding alongside an emphasis on process and change. It also represents a significant shift in our ontological understanding of temporality, time, and timing, with profound implications for substantive, epistemological, and ontological orientations within IR. When the present is theorized – rather than ignored – it provides a theoretical platform and set of tools for thinking about the big question that consistently animates the field – what is the “point” of studying IR, anyways?11 Until we look directly at this lacuna – this donut hole at the center of IR – we will remain unable to accurately see ourselves, our relationship to what we study, or the global politics that motivate our interventions.12 International relations is always already motivated, shaped, and constrained by the present – it is the site of our scholarly knowledge production and at the center of the political practices we seek to explain, understand, and/or critique. Yet, even as we use the present to frame the past and future, we ultimately fail to theorize our own starting point – the frame itself. Recognizing the importance of the present as a motivating force, spatiotemporal position and theoretical concept reformulates core theoretical claims, conceptions of prediction, our positionality as scholars, and our interactions with contemporary politics. This does not require jettisoning the past as the historians’ fear, since those seeking to understand the present always have to take it into account. What the emphasis on the present accomplishes here is a refusal to diminish the present’s role or to treat it as a single, inarguable, universal experience. It instead uses the present to build a better appreciation of the political dynamics we focus on as well as the role of observers in understanding and producing them. What this book offers is nothing less than a new way of approaching the study of global politics, one that refuses to be intimidated by the potential “end of IR” and confronts the question of what the “point” of our work is by focusing on and unpacking the missing middle of IR’s analytical focus – the present. It rejects Gaddis’ belief that work is “incompetent” if it does not possess the “foresight” to deterministically predict the future.13 But it also refuses to concede that the past is all there is when it comes to theorizing, testing, or understanding 11 12 13

Dyvik, Selby, and Wilkinson 2017. Thanks to Andrew Hom for this specific turn of phrase. Gaddis 1992, 6, Dunne, Hansen, and Wight 2013, Grayson, Coward, and Oprisko 2016.

Theorizing with the Present

7

global politics. The goal of this book is to offer a new way of thinking about IR as an area of knowledge production. Rather than remaining beholden to the spatial imaginary of the discipline’s past, we should orient ourselves within a specific present and actively theorize time’s role – explicitly, intentionally, and ontologically. Confronting the implications of this directly displaces this binary of either rejecting IR entirely or continuing on while uncritically accepting its faults – we cannot escape our disciplinary or world-historical present, but that only makes a systematic and resolute confrontation with “the present,” in all its analytical valences, more vital to IR. This allows us to build upon work from both ends of this spectrum, without losing sight of the profound challenges that exist. Like most revolutions, IR’s temporal revolution is already underway – this book seeks to acknowledge it, build upon it, and employ it as a resource for thinking about IR.14 Adopting a different temporal imaginary is not merely a metatheoretical question; it has distinct implications for how we view and practice IR. At the structural level, it can reshape ontological and epistemological commitments, but equally, it can also open up new areas of analysis and research for those theorizing the relationships that constitute global politics – regardless of methodological and/or critical commitments. Similarly, at the level of interstate relations, it has the potential to open up new ways of understanding key concepts such as war and political violence, better enabling us to explain and understand them as an outcome and event in global politics. Finally, at the unit level, an alternative temporal imaginary can help better explain foreign policy decision making, the political dynamics that shape what opportunities are available, as well as what decisions are likely to be made.15 In short, in addition to the theoretical work, this book concretizes the value of this turn back to the present in everything from war to climate change to high theory to foreign policy. Each are shaped by the temporal imaginaries that enable them to exist as an intelligible political issue. This chapter will proceed in four parts. To some, questions of time and politics may appear extraneous. Temporality may be a valid issue 14

15

I draw the understanding of revolution here from Arendt’s (2006) essay “On Revolution” which I see as emphasizing the circularity of the concept – revolutions are not only an overturning of the status quo, but a return of sorts, even as it never can finally return from where it came. Hom and Beasley 2021.

8

The Time of Global Politics

to study but not a central concern for contemporary IR, much less a necessary one. For them, it is just another area of study and deciding whether to pursue it is a matter of personal choice, as if one were choosing between theorizing nuclear arms control or currency manipulation. The first section shows how international politics and time are already intertwined and argues that time impacts the main issues of concern for IR. The second shows how IR is “stuck in the past” – even as it furiously gestures toward the future – because it theorizes temporality and time as universal and linear, privileging the past, all while resisting thinking about the present. The third section briefly introduces what I call presentism, an alternative temporal imaginary for IR that explicitly values the present, thinks in time, and resists naturalizing the contemporary political dominance of universal, linear time. The final section outlines the rest of the book, identifying theoretical and conceptual implications, concretizing both by showing how it enables a different perspective on war, American foreign policy during the Trump administration, and IR’s primary theoretical architectures. A political imaginary centering the present has implications for both positivists and postpositivists, which is demonstrated through the concepts of prediction and positionality, respectively. In short, turning our attention to the present as a concept, resource, and methodology gives anyone who wishes to better explain and understand international politics a new set of tools with which to explore.

The Politics of Time: How Temporality Matters for International Relations and Global Politics Time is not only conceptually relevant for scholars and practitioners but also a critical element of substantive politics. The politics of time are already apparent, if we only stop to take a look. Time is “hiding in plain sight” in everything from “World War I [and] the thermonuclear revolution . . . [to] the peaceful end of the Cold War.”16 It is a central feature of IR’s basic building block – the state. In order to function as a meaningful collective, the contemporary nation-state has to elevate certain histories and narrate its identity in a coherent fashion. “The rhetorically fixed national identity is” only made visible “by manipulating the variety of coexisting temporalities” into a dominant 16

Hom 2020, 111.

Theorizing with the Present

9

narrative of unity.17 These states constitute modern centers of surveillance where the time and position of nearly everything are tracked and recorded. In everything from policing to warfighting to border control to economic activity, we are increasingly tracked and governed by algorithms that create a world where “time and space, similarity and difference morph into each other.”18 In order to fully understand cyberspace and cybersecurity, attention must be paid to its “chronopolitical dimensions” and the “human and nonhuman temporalities” that are “enmeshed in vast sociotechnical assemblages like the internet” and its contours determined.19 Postconflict reconstruction requires theorizing past and future due to “its liminality in distinct periods of political change” and logically, “as its very name would suggest, transitional justice (TJ) is inherently defined by its temporality.”20 To even conceptualize migration and borders, we need to theorize the “temporality of control” constitutive of the “techniques and modes of migration governmentality.”21 International institutions are not born fully formed but develop, establish themselves, and disappear – their “logic . . . is highly constrained by temporal dimensions like the ordering of previously adopted solutions.”22 The discipline of IR imagines itself arising in the aftermath of World War I with a focus on the “factors precipitating war and the measures to prevent its recurrence.”23 Unsurprisingly, given the influence of diplomatic history on these origins, the narratives we study – whether quantitative, qualitative, or interpretive – possess temporal dimensions that are never far from view. Even the markers by which we demarcate time periods – events – are fundamentally temporal. A meaningful political event only comes into view once we establish a time scale and settle upon the pasts and futures with which the event differs.24 For instance, Al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the United States echoed Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, something American officials continually emphasized – even utilizing a similar 17 19 20

21 22 23

24

18 Väyrynen 2016, 589. Aradau and Blanke 2017, 386. Stevens 2015, 45. McCauliffe 2021, 2. See also McLeod 2013, Muller-Hirth 2018, MacGinty 2021. Tazzioli 2018, 14. See also Cohen 2018. Fioretos 2017, 17 and Fioretos 2019. This is a point of contention, and not the position of the author. Halliday 1994, 8. Sewell 1996.

10

The Time of Global Politics

shorthand to December 7, “9/11.”25 While both ultimately resulted in global conflict, the comparison relies on a shared sense of narrative continuity for its affective force. The two events – separated by almost fifty years – only appear analogous if the United States as a concept and institution, as well as the meaning of warfare, attack, and enemy, all remain constant. Absent these careful constructions of continuity and relative stasis, comparisons become increasingly difficult as time goes by. The more time transpires between events, the harder it is to claim sufficient similarity to draw meaningful conclusions. While Clausewitz is often revered as possessing “timeless” wisdom, he explicitly warned about the passage of time and the dangers of drawing on analogies from the distant past.26 Military strategists who drew lessons from wars long concluded were making a mistake because “military history . . . is bound with a passage of time to lose a mass of minor elements and details that were once clear . . . what remains in the end, more or less at random, are large masses and isolated features, which are thereby given undue weight.”27 He even provided a periodization for his own work, declaring that strategists of his time should resist comparisons that predate the War of Austrian Succession – less than a hundred years prior to the publication of the “timeless,” On War, strategists still turn to today, almost 200 years later.28 When viewed this way, the march of time represents something lurking in the background, everpresent, but rarely explicit – it is a problem to be solved. This “problem of time,” Hom argues, represents the dominant temporal imaginary for IR.29 Time is an external force that “operates of its own accord” and impacts everything within the known political universe.30 According to this view, it is beyond anyone’s control, impervious to human influence, and distinctly not neutral, resulting in “dissolution, discord, and death.”31 World War I soldiers, for instance, hated their government-issued wristwatches because they brought their time of death just that much closer.32 They were not wrong. As the war drew to an end, soldiers were needlessly sacrificed by postponing the armistice until 11:11 on 25 26

27 30

Hoogland-Noon 2004. Handel (2001, 1) argues from the outset that strategy should be like “physics or chemistry” with the same governing laws regardless of spatiotemporal location. 28 29 Clausewitz 2003, 173. Clausewitz 2003, 173. Hom 2020. 31 32 Hom 2020, 4. Hom 2020, 4. Hom 2020, 4.

Theorizing with the Present

11

11/11.33 The Biden administration adopted a similar position and initially claimed that it would postpone the end of the war in Afghanistan until September 11, 2021 to mark the twenty-year anniversary of the 2001 attacks on Washington and New York.34 In the Vietnam war, the North Vietnamese foreshadowed a tactic of Al Qaeda and other insurgent groups by martialing “slow time” as an asset to sap the enemies’ momentum and ability to fight.35 Time and timing are of obvious importance in warfighting, but they also shape the “wartime paradigms” that “emerge at the intersection between socio-technological and security-political imaginaries.”36 The postCold War, “wartime paradigm” of NATO and its partners, for instance, “is geared toward optimizing for speed and treating war as risk management.”37 Attrition warfare, information operations, and other strategies are left for others with a different temporal orientation. The politics of time is perhaps most clearly crystallized in the beginning and end dates of wars.38 Wars define national histories and state development, but they also operate as a timing mechanism to demarcate different eras, stages, and periods. Within IR and for EuroAmerican actors, wars are times of violence bracketed by times of peace. They begin, are fought, and eventually progress to a conclusion – satisfactory or otherwise.39 Accounts of war then use the timeline to measure its duration and rate of speed and identify the moments where they are “won” or “lost.” Yet, these accounts are incomplete as time can also be a point of contention. The War of 1812’s Battle of New Orleans famously occurred after the war had already been ended by mutual agreement in Ghent because the news had yet to reach military leaders in the field.40 Worse, British officers were under secret order to continue fighting even if they heard words of such an agreement for 33

34 36 38 39 40

Hom (2020, 4–5) uses this example, as well, and I similarly employ it here as it provides such a tangible demonstration of the role time – even as currently conceptualized – can play in war, but others point out the futility and incomprehensibility of the decision; see, for example, Persico 2007, who wrote an entire book outlining a narrative history of the last day of the war. 35 Ryan and DeYoung 2021. Hom 2018b; Hom 2020, 4. 37 Schmitt 2020, 404. Schmitt 2020, 404. Dudziak 2012, Barkawi 2016. Hom, O’Driscoll, and Mills 2017, see esp. 235–236. See also Hom 2018b. I take this characterization from Carr 1979, Hickey (2016, 15–17) characterizes this as a “myth” that ignores the need for Senate ratification of such a treaty, citing previous instances of signed treaties that did not result in the agreement’s ratification and conclusion.

12

The Time of Global Politics

fears that it could be an American trap.41 Similarly, submarine commanders in the Cold War wrestled with what to do should they lose contact with their respective governments.42 Would it represent the beginning (or end) of hostilities – that is, a nuclear exchange had already leveled the country – or did it represent a mere glitch in the system?43 Thankfully, in the case of the Cold War, this scenario never fully materialized, but the British in 1812 were not so lucky. Because of bad timing, thousands of British soldiers were killed in a battle that could not change the outcome.44 Time itself still remains a point of political contestation. In 1949, China imposed a single official time zone because the leadership at the time believed it would “emphasize China’s (then aspirational) unity and the power of the central government, a desire made especially urgent by the fact that fighting did not cease until the 1950s and social unrest even later.”45 What this means today is that setting one’s wristwatch to the time of one’s province – for example, Xinjiang – can be deemed sufficient evidence that one is a separatist and thus should be treated as a “terrorist.”46 For similar reasons, ISIS employs a distinct temporal register that produces a false past where medieval ideologies flow uncontested into the present alongside a distinctly modern approach to spatiality via internet communities. Linked together, they operate as a means of attracting support and creating a sense of inevitable victory.47 Even the United States’ war on terrorism is littered with temporal contestation.48 The beginning of the war itself – usually dated to 2001 – reflects only the perspective of one side of the conflict as the war began for Al Qaeda years earlier.49 The end of 41 42

43

44 46 48 49

Lorusso 2019. This scenario nearly came to pass in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but a single officer prevented a Soviet submarine from firing a nuclear torpedo at US vessels, refusing to believe that the lack of communication was due to the outbreak of war. The decision to use nuclear weapons required all 3 executive officers to agree. Vasiliy Arkhipov arguably saved the world with his actions, which came at some cost to him as he was deemed to have deviated from protocol, Wilson 2012. Nuclear strategy and culture, as well as its materiality – the “sociotechnical assemblages” it constitutes – create new temporalities and temporal linkages, see Shapiro 2016, 32–60. 45 Carr 1979. Hassid and Watson 2014, 180–181. 47 The Independent 2018. Bashir 2016. Jarvis 2008, Jarvis 2009b, Campbell 2001, Lundborg 2012. Shultz and Vogt 2010.

Theorizing with the Present

13

the war remains out of reach at least partially because the war has come to represent an “eternal present” and no longer exists as a means to an end, let alone a demarcating line between war and peace.50 No one has a clear idea what the end of this war would be like – President Obama’s 2013 NDU speech remains the most detailed public statement on the subject, and it references a feeling of “safety” and terrorist groups being “destroyed” as when the war will fully be over.51 Unsurprisingly, the war’s durational quality – the time it occupies – is now “growing older than those enlisting to fight it.”52 And even as the Biden administration claims it “will not” engage in “forever wars,” this seems to only apply to Afghanistan as the Biden administration’s national security strategy emphasizes that the United States will “right-size our military presence” so that it can continue to “disrupt international terrorist networks.”53 Before the temporal break that was 2001, the United States’ conceptual understanding of national security was very different. The Bush administration initially declared China a “competitor” and placed the management of its “rise” as a vital national security interest.54 Eventual national security adviser Condoleeza Rice wrote that managing the rise of China was a “key priority” of any “Republican foreign policy,” along with a desire to end nation-building and “deal decisively with the threat of rogue regimes and hostile powers.”55 After the 2001 attacks, the administration returned to the mean for contemporary administrations, “moderating” its tone, decentering China as a concern, and alternating between calling it a “partner” and calling it a “competitor” depending on the issue.56 Twenty years later, as the war on terrorism has receded in prominence for foreign policy makers, concerns about China have risen back to the top.57 This discourse creates the impression that China is only “rising” when the United States is looking and remains static when they are not a concern. One thing that unites the American understanding of China as a security issue is an “assumption” that “China’s rise is a problem in search of 50 53

54 57

51 52 Rao 2020. Obama 2013. Hom 2020, 5. Biden 2021, 15. I do not capitalize “national security strategy” here, because it is technically an “interim national security guidance document,” but in practice this document has been received similarly to National Security Strategies issued by previous administrations. 55 56 Xiang 2001, DeLisle 2011. Rice 2000, 47. Qingguo 2006, 24. McCourt 2021, 655–656, see also Edelstein 2020.

14

The Time of Global Politics

the correct US response.”58 As always seems to be the case, much of the debate turns on the role of past analogies and selecting which ones should guide the American approach.59 Stripped to its theoretical essence, the “rise of China” discussion effectively illustrates the temporality of the primary analytical frame for IR and its practitioners: What situation in the past is this situation most like? What type of mechanism is at work and how has that functioned in the past? More directly, what does our understanding of the past events of global politics reveal about China’s so-called rise? When timed from the perspective of US national security, the “rise of China” inevitably necessitates present day action, not only because it is a problem in need of a “correct US response” but also because if the United States refuses to act in the present, they could find themselves in a worse off position in the future. From a temporal perspective, it raises the question: When will this process be over? When will China cease to be a state “on the rise” and become one that has “risen” and established itself as a great power?60 This is not only a question for academics but also one that American governments seem to ask and answer all the time. It is operated for so long now that it has even been adopted and deployed in Chinese state and political discourse. This is only likely to continue because within China itself, “the mainstream discourse on the question of whether China has risen is that it has a long way to go.”61 In theory and in practice, this frame rarely changes, regardless of year.62 From Nixon on, each administration has positioned the rise of China as both a present-day problem and future concern, while having radically different ideas about what this actually meant.63 During the second Bush administration, the US military needed to be so strong that it would be “inconceivable” for China to consider using force against American interests, thus keeping them in a perpetual state of “rising power.”64 While the Obama administration resisted language that direct, its “pivot to Asia” and “rebalancing” of its forces in the Pacific left no doubt as to the importance of the issue or what they were prepared to do to “solve” it.65 Trump positioned China as a constant punching bag on the campaign trail and enacted trade restrictions in 58 59 60 64

McCourt 2021, 655. Morgenthau 1972, Hoogland-Noon 2004, and Siniver and Collins 2015. 61 62 63 Wang 2017. Wang 2017, 32. McCourt 2021. Nye 2020. 65 Rice 2000. Manyin et al 2012.

Theorizing with the Present

15

office yet did all this while offering concessions designed to advance family business interests.66 And finally, part and parcel of America being “back” on the world stage post-Trump means recognizing China as a rising threat.67 The NSC director for Chinese affairs in the Biden administration authored a book that could have been written at nearly any point in the last half century: The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order.68 This is a recurring dynamic – American scholars in the 1990s predicted China’s arrival as a peer and threat to the United States in 2025.69 Now the claim is that China has a “secret strategy” that will conclude in the year 2049 to coincide with the 100 year anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic.70 What happens when – or if – the power balance changes permanently, where China is no longer rising but actually surpasses the United States? International relations answers this by pointing to theoretical knowledge about power transitions. Questions like which states are likely to act revisionist?,71 under what circumstances?, and how can the established power effectively respond?72 are answered by looking to the past and using theory to transcend the context of the time and distill the actual mechanisms that recur. What are the dynamics of an order disrupted by a “transition” and the “rise” of a new power?73 How do the differing time horizons of leaders/leaderships shape the likelihood of conflict or cooperation?74 At its core, revisionism itself operates as a temporal concept as it turns on which states are willing to accept, reject, or revise the status quo. In other words, how will states respond to the present? More worryingly, would contemporaneous scholars even know that it had happened or would they continue to frame the “rise of China” as a central question long after the issue had been settled? Analytically centering temporality casts a different theoretical light upon these questions. How temporally continuous are world politics? Is there sufficient continuity to usefully compare situations fifty, 100, 66 69

70 71 72 73 74

67 68 Cohn 2017 and Helmore 2018. Madhani 2021. Doshi 2021. Nye 1997; Scholars also enjoyed using 2015 as a benchmark date, see e.g., Khalilzad et al 1998, 59–62 and Shambaugh 1997. Pillsbury 2016 and Doshi 2021. Johnston 2003, Fravel 2010, Edelstein 2017, Murray 2018, Chan et al 2019. Johnston 2019. Lebow and Valentino 2009, Lai 2011, Kim and Gates 2015, Huang et al 2020. Edelstein 2017, Edelstein 2020.

16

The Time of Global Politics

or 200 years ago – let alone 2500? Are comparisons like these valuable or have politics changed such that what we think of as the past no longer matches up with reality, as Clausewitz warns? International relations asks these questions all the time, but the temporal position from which we ask these questions is largely untheorized. Even with the establishment of the importance of narrative in IR, we rarely ask which temporal frame makes one narrative of political time powerful – and thus usable in adjudicating claims about the past – while others are dismissed and left aside.75 Beyond questions like the rise of China, the “emergence” and increasing importance of climate change also call into question much of what IR thinks it knows about global politics and time. The dominant narrative frame of IR begins with the signing of the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This has to come to constitute one of the socalled “benchmark dates” of IR along with 1919, 1945, and 1989.76 For IR, the treaty represents a sort of “big bang” where space and time began.77 Spatially, the “world” of IR becomes enclosed, dominated, and controlled by states. Temporally, it represents the beginning of time – any evidence from before is potentially unusable and in some ways literally prehistoric. Climate change, however, reveals that this periodization is no longer sustainable because the ontology that this timing mechanism undergirds cannot be both time-bound and timeless. If climate change becomes accepted as a primary international security threat, these dates and the periodization it represents are caught in a dilemma. Either politics has always been constituted by ecology and the nonhuman – meaning that dating the international to the emergence of the state misses something important that has always been there – or it means that climate change, like the development of nuclear weapons, represents an ontological shift in political reality that requires a radical break with past knowledge and theory to fully understand.78 The emergence of climate change challenges our collective understanding of the past as well as the future because it shows how relationships that transcend existing periodizations are centrally important to global politics and IR. At a minimum, as climate change 75

76 78

This is not to discount discussions of history, rather it is to emphasize that typically these questions are only understood in historical terms, rather than temporal. 77 Buzan and Lawson 2014, 438. De Carvalho, Leira, and Hobson 2011. Doyle 2010, 278.

Theorizing with the Present

17

progresses, it will create global interactions that devolve power to new actors and/or structures that are no longer – if they ever were – solely determined by humans.79 The very idea of the Anthropocene, for instance, requires a vastly different temporal lens that invokes geologic time scales, rendering most of what we know about IR a mere blip.80 Equally so, it challenges us to think more carefully about temporal locality and temporal difference as the Anthropocene is not an event or institution or actor but a set of relations and processes that disrupt and do violence to humans and nonhuman entities in time. If we fully accept the challenge of climate change and ecological damage, IR will need to reconceptualize key concepts, including the way it understands time.81 Climate dynamics also reinforce the heterogeneity of collective and individual temporal experience – human and nonhuman.82 While climate change is occurring at a staggeringly quick rate, from the perspectives more familiar to IR – for example, the temporal scale of human bodies or the lifespan of a particular politician – it appears much less immediate, which calls into question its existence as “change.”83 Even wrapping our collective minds around the problem is difficult because global climate as a concept cannot easily map onto IR’s current understandings of the world. This is because “IR’s whole focus has been on territories and sovereignty, self-interest and attachments; it has thus failed to take a stance on the world, consistently and systematically refusing to grapple with environmental issues, and possible mass extinction.”84 The universality of climate as “world” is both bigger and different than anything IR has attempted to theorize.85 It requires us to jettison the flattening effect of universality, temporal directionality, and the reliance on fixed borders if we are to have any hope of contributing knowledge to the crisis.

International Relations’ Approach to Time and Temporality: The Universal Time of the Clock Despite being everywhere in world politics, temporality is largely ignored in the study of IR. This is not unique to IR as “the relationship 79 82 84

80 81 Busby 2019. Neumann 2018. Burke et al 2016. 83 Amoureux and Reddy 2021. Neumann 2018. 85 Agathangelou and Killian 2016, 322. Youatt 2020.

18

The Time of Global Politics

between temporality and production of knowledge is something that has been given relatively little attention in cultural or social theory” because the multiple temporalities at work in our lives “have suffered displacement or sublimation due to the overpowering domination of clock-time.”86 Along with much of the rest of the world, IR scholarship accepts the conception of time that animates traditional scientific and social scientific inquiry – clock-time. Clock-time is simply the common-sense notion of time we use in our everyday lives. Time is seen as “present everywhere, the same everywhere, independent of anything we do. It carries no descriptive label and has no need to advertise or to repudiate that label. When seen as this uniform background, time is quantifiable. Its measurable segments are exactly the same length, one segment coming after another in a single direction.”87 This classical, scientific understanding of time derives primarily from classical physics and remains influential in terms of both our “common-sense understanding of the world” and the “assumptions of social scientists.”88 Time is measurable and natural and operates independent of human experience. According to Adam, the representation of time as “clock-time . . . incorporates recurring cycles as well as the linear, unidirectional flow of time; duration as well as instants” and constitutes “a spatiotemporal representation of time.”89 Clock-time imagines time as a linear progression occurring at a universal rate, but it also views time as “unitary” and “neutral” – concepts that significantly implicate assumptions at work in IR. In combination, this empties the past and future of meaning, devaluing the importance of temporal context and replacing it with history or culture. This is because if time is unitary, then there is nothing to analyze, let alone dispute. While the names attached to points on the timeline can be debated, the actual time to which it attaches cannot. When represented in this manner, clock-time produces a single temporality that lacks the need for interpretation – it simply is regardless of one’s position, context, or (mis)understanding.90 The classical view of time also holds that time is neutral, producing a temporality where time has no independent explanatory power on its own. If time itself is neutral, theoretical pronouncements can – and in 86 88

89

87 Hassan 2003. Dimock 2002, 911. Adam 1990, 48; This continues, despite the fact that Newtonian mechanics, at least at the subatomic level, have been superseded by quantum theory. 90 Adam 1990, 54. McIntosh 2015.

Theorizing with the Present

19

fact ideally should – be time-invariant. This is as true for time as it is for space, something that continues through the predominant utilization of the nation-state as “a container, representing a unified spatiotemporality.”91 It is this characteristic that allows theory to apply to any imaginable location in the international sphere, even if it is only based on events in Europe and North America from the past two centuries. Theoretically, identical events can occur three days, three years, or even three centuries apart. Nothing is intrinsic to the passing of time that prevents future events from replicating what happened in the past. If IR produces a “law” that trade flows above a certain percentage preclude conflict, then that law should govern behavior whether it occurs in the future or the past, like the law of gravity. A classical view of time creates reality in a way that encourages theorists to strive for laws, theories, and hypotheses that apply across time and are thus generalizable. Theory should explain behavior regardless of time – taken to its ideal, it should be time-less. When it inevitably falls short, deference is given to the theory that applies to the largest section of time. For scholars who identify as positivist, this notion of time fairly explicitly governs their work. Most conceptions of time presume that time is clock-time (rather than represented as clock-time) and therefore is linear, neutral, and beyond human influence or construction. This is not to say that time is completely absent from consideration – there is indeed much work that addresses the subject. Quantitative work – which occupies the center of the discipline in the United States – is becoming more and more sensitive to the role of change over time.92 Ideas like “changepoints” and recursive analysis offer directional and nonlinear approaches via Bayesian work utilizing computational approaches.93 Institutionalists currently – and historically – address path dependency and institutional development over time.94 Regardless of method or substantive area of inquiry time may be present, but not something to be analyzed. To paraphrase feminist theory, these approaches may take on a more sophisticated approach to the topic, but they ultimately just “add time and stir.” Time itself remains outside the analytical frame and unquestioned. Events occur 91

92 93

Which is the point of departure for the article, not a claim actually advocated by Sassen 2000, 215. Park 2010, Nieman 2015. 94 See e.g., Western and Kleykamp 2004, Park 2010. Checkel 2015.

20

The Time of Global Politics

against the backdrop of an empty timeline, even though the continuities, trends, and entities under investigation are all inextricably constituted by temporal relationships. If we take seriously the idea that the present is a “locus of reality,” then treating time as an external marker still ignores a vital element of politics, regardless of how sophisticated the methodology gets. It reifies political phenomena – time and temporality – as something natural, essential, and unchangeable.95 In short, these approaches leave the ontological question of time largely unexamined. IR either accepts conceptions of time as commonly represented or folds it into critical expositions of history. Strangely, these scholars, who are among the least acceptant of time’s ontological complexity, appear most willing to employ complicated measures to try and incorporate it better. Time-series data, sequencing, and changepoints are all attempts to better take time into account – even as they remain silent on what the concept actually entails. Alternatively, the more attuned one is to temporal complexity and its role in sociopolitical life, the less emphasis there is on building an affirmative conception of time and temporal relationships. In short, those who accept time “as is” use it to creatively build better models, while those aware of its politicality identify particular construction(s) of temporality in practice but resist formulating an alternative for reflexive use.96

Making Space for the Present: A Presentist Approach to Politics This book is admittedly ambitious – it seeks to demonstrate that a novel approach to time, temporality, and global politics is both needed and advantageous. It does so in the belief that turning to the present offers an innovative and analytically compelling approach that distinguishes itself from other aspects of IR through reading the present as something other than historically determined or a point continually vanishing from our view. The present represents a concept we need to engage relationally, intentionally, contingently, critically, and with humility to use effectively.97 The wager this book makes is that by moving away from clock-time and an emphasis on the reality of the past, IR scholarship can better explain, understand, and critique 95 97

Abbott 1992, Abbott 2001a, Abbott 2001b. Thanks again to Andrew Hom for this insight

96

Fisher and McIntosh 2021.

Theorizing with the Present

21

international political practice. Presentism, as represented here, challenges the current temporal imaginary constituting IR by taking the position that “from the point of view of the present, there is no objective past in the history of individuals, institutions, or societies. There is no past to be captured, understood and described in its pure essence. There is only a past – or a plurality of pasts – constructed from the point of view of an ever-changing present. The ‘what it was’ is always established through the ‘what it is’.”98 The value of such an imaginary lies in its ability to better theorize events, recognize emergent qualities in the present, and better understand the dynamic processes of which IR is most interested. [T]his is a dynamic, processual phenomenon: ‘the picture this offers is that of presents sliding into each other, each with a past that is preferable to itself, each past taking up into itself those back of it, and in some degree reconstructing them from its own standpoint.’ The intersecting of many such perspectives is the basis of sociality and, as seen above, perspectives themselves only exist because of sociality99

Objectivist scholars, positivists, and critical theorists have all made a turn toward processes and events, necessitating new thinking about the temporality of relationality.100 From this perspective, politics is about the “interpenetration of continuity and change” in the present.101 Presentism, then, makes plain something crucial about IR’s understanding of political reality. If IR is about processes and relations, then continuing to treat time as natural and outside the frame of inquiry reflects positivist, sovereign, and uncritical norms of reality itself. Butler writes: To understand this, we have to think for a moment about what it is to be formed and, in particular, to be formed by norms . . . Such norms act productively to establish (or disestablish) certain kinds of subjects, not only in the past but also in a way that is reiterated through time [emphasis added]. Norms do not act only once . . . they are ones that establish the temporality of our lives as bound up with the continuing action of norms, the continuing action of the past in the present . . . the normative production of the subject is an iterable process.102

98 100 101

99 Edkins 2003, Jarvinen 2004, 47. Tillman 1970. Jackson and Nexon 1999, Abbott 2001a, Jackson 2010. 102 Adam 1990, 40. Butler 2009, 166–167.

22

The Time of Global Politics

Much work in IR already accepts the state, international institutions, and political actors as the product of intersubjective relations. What Butler reminds us, however, is that those productions are “iterable” and only come into being across time. They are constituted by, and constitutive of, temporal relationships reified under the universalizing metaphor of “time.” Temporal relations – including what we understand “time” to be – are intersubjectively formed. Turning to the present as a basis for a temporal imaginary, then, is not a move without precedent, but it is a radical one because it actively theorizes the present, rather than solely focusing on time. It foregrounds an issue already central to the ongoing adoption of ontologies that are relational, processual, and constructed.103 Temporal assumptions will be – and already are – critical to this shift. Presentism offers a way of unifying these together because it can be both physicalist and social. How we see past and future relating and how we understand their ontological existence are just as important for a positivist exploring capital flows as they are for a critical scholar exploring the coeval emergence of sovereignty and Western practices of “timing.”104 At its root, the present is about change – events of the moment are constituted by a break with the past in some manner, even if that slippage is only in terms of temporal position. This is, after all, how we know something is happening. The border between past and present is one of the ways that the new becomes visible.105 Because change is an inevitable feature of politics, IR should shift toward articulating change and discontinuity as the baseline of political practice, rather than exceptional behavior to be linked back to its antecedent past.106 Instead of contingency, crisis, and change operating as exceptions, a presentist IR would move toward centralizing these concepts in our epistemological and ontological commitments. They are part and parcel of the present itself, not something to be incorporated after the fact. While this represents a distinct way of knowing, it more closely replicates issues IR is most concerned with like explaining the “breakout” of a war, the emergence of a refugee crisis, or the collapse of an international structure that extends deep into the past. Complexity theory, self-organization, and quantum theory are all offering 103 106

104 105 McCourt 2016. Hom 2010. Mead 2002. See “Understanding Change in World Politics,” International Studies Association’s 58th Annual Convention, February 22–25, 2017; Peltner 2017.

Theorizing with the Present

23

profound challenges to physical understandings of the world upon which mainstream social science is based.107 A presentist ontology is one way to enable these developments to be read alongside each other rather than forcing us to pick a side – science or sociality. A choice which, as should be clear given the positions outlined here, represents a false dichotomy. While no one can anticipate the implications a shift in temporal imaginary would have for all areas of as vibrant and diverse a field as IR, the book sketches out some of the ways in which this might work. It offers a toolkit for studying and theorizing the present. Taking the present seriously as a conceptual frame has implications in a variety of areas, but particularly for how we understand war, a current center and originary concern of the field. It also provides an opportunity to think differently about how we taxonomize and construct IR theory. At the unit level, it provides a distinct lens for looking at foreign policy decision-making that accounts for the political manipulation of past, present, and future and the temporal experience of those involved. Finally, the book offers potential insights for positivist and postpositivist approaches by theorizing prediction – a defining feature of scientific research – and the postpositivist emphasis on positionality through the lens of the present, offering conceptual apparatuses that better incorporate temporal difference and contingency. A presentist approach also has advantages for studying and intervening in contemporary politics because logically enough, the present and its politics become a site for inquiry rather than only the breaking point between past and future to be ignored when developing “good” theory.108 IR’s research is always already motivated and constrained by contemporary concerns, and these issues inescapably implicate the present of IR scholars. While issues like terrorism and insurgency, as well as power transitions, may dominate “our” present, that begs the question of whose temporality “we” inhabit. This is unsurprising from a presentist perspective because: What determines or selects the meaning of the past for me (a particular emergent event) is the particular present within which I find myself. In other words, my present perspective actually creates, reconstructs, my 107

108

See e.g., Wendt 2015 and Cederman 2002 “Project Q: Peace and Security in a Quantum Age,” https://projectqsydney.com/. See Revsbaek and Tanggard 2015 and Lundborg 2016.

24

The Time of Global Politics

past. The past has meaning and value only through my present. The past ‘can reach us only through our own frames of reference or perspectives.’ Emergence, then, implies perspectives.109

Present-day problems always orient our thinking, despite our scientific and historical pretensions. No one, for instance, is currently interested in theorizing arm races in bladed weaponry. Predictions are oriented toward the future (broadly conceived), while critical engagements with the present typically refuse to directly intervene with recommendations for how we could do politics otherwise. Obviously, this is a sweeping statement, and it is not meant to demean those who do not fit this description as there are important exceptions. Instead, the observation is meant to celebrate this work as exceptions to an otherwise widespread norm. As well, IR scholars are indeed doing a great deal of work to apply their research to contemporary problems – some could argue that we are in a “golden age” of scholars applying their insights to politics – but scholarship itself does not do this and largely disincentivizes it by treating it as something other than “robust” scholarship. In Chapter 8, I argue that this is at least partially due to the epistemological and ontological commitments that produce IR scholarship as scholarship. Presentism’s reorientation toward change and the emergent identifies the lack of intentional engagement with the contemporary as a facet of the dominant way we imagine time to be, where the novelty of the present is continually washed out – “once it has occurred, we start on the arduous task of reconstructing the past in terms of it . . . with the new perspective on the past, continuity is re-established. The emergent loses its status as emergent and becomes an event naturally following from its causes and conditions.”110 Ultimately, this accounts for our collective obsession with “how we got here” rather than the politics of “now,” the consequences of which are far-reaching.111 Locating ourselves and our work in the present makes positionality central. Scholarship is many things, but it is always an intervention into a particular present. One has to ask the question which present do these ideas engage? Historical, cross-temporal research may be valuable but not in and of itself. At an ontological level, the Correlates of War project and the history of the Pelopennesian War are just as 109

Tillman 1970, 537.

110

Jarvinen 2004, 49.

111

Der Derian 2016.

Theorizing with the Present

25

conditioned by the present as a policy paper on the current status of US–China relations. This different importance of pasts in the present is why, for instance, some argue that to understand global politics as currently practiced, one must recognize that the world is disproportionately shaped by European developments in the late 1800s, while others see events that transcend this border as continuations of “world politics” and part of a single global timeline.112 All of these can be weighted equally in developing their patterns that explain the world. Adopting a temporal imaginary of the present forces difference and positionality to the front and center of any investigation of global politics. It necessitates inquiry into the politics and ethics of knowledge production. Denaturalizing our understanding of the past as irrevocable demands an openness that requires acknowledgement and theorization of positionality and difference. If “the” past does not exist but is instead produced by the present, then we must confront the overlapping political (as well as societal, economic, gendered, racialized, etc.) presents “sliding into each other” and provide an account for how our scholarship relates to it. From this perspective, this is no longer an option but analytically required. If timeless truth claims are incommensurate with reality, it forces IR scholars to ask what exactly it is we are doing when we produce knowledge as an IR scholar.113 Accepting that timeless knowledge claims are unattainable may seem intuitive to those outside the field, but fully embracing this idea changes things dramatically for the IR scholar.114 If scholars are “writing” knowledge within the field of practice they claim to be separate from, it raises a host of questions, many of which have been asked and answered. Adopting a temporal lens, however, makes some new ones visible. What effect will that knowledge and those interpretations have on present political life? Whose present will this knowledge impact? What role does the contours of my present – and its attendant pasts and futures – play in its production? While this may limit IR scholarship in some ways, it also opens up the possibility of new questions and currently unimaginable futures.115 It affirms scholarly 112 113

114 115

Buzan and Lawson 2012, Musgrave and Nexon 2013, 639. Revsbaek and Tanggard 2015. This is a question that is continually asked and answered within IR (Guzzini 2020), the move I’m emphasizing that is novel is the linkage to collective understandings of temporality. See e.g., Boldizzoni 2015. See Butler 2004, Butler 2009, Ahlqvist and Rhisiart 2015.

26

The Time of Global Politics

agency because “the possibility for agency lies in this very presentist openness and temporal movement,” where the transformative potential is “in the midst of the now of discursive political sites,” where “one needs to throw oneself in . . . and rework oneself, to rework the pastness one is constituted by.”116 In other words, once one accepts the “heterotemporality” of international politics, ideas that seem radical and impossible because of extant structures, trends, and institutions become more thinkable.117 They become not just possible but necessary and something to which we have a responsibility.118 The critical urge to resist directing new ways of ordering the world becomes less tenable when there is no inevitable shared future that we can presume our scholarly interventions will positively impact or universal past we stand astride. More optimistically, if the future is not merely an outgrowth of a fixed and deeply embedded past, the possibility of radical change becomes increasingly thinkable and realizable.

Outline of the Book The book makes the case for centering time and the present in nine chapters. Chapter 1 has illustrated the centrality of time to global politics and introduced the concept of the present as an analytical approach to political life. Chapter 2, “The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations,” expands on the previous sections by identifying specific characteristics of the way IR conceptualizes time and temporality, along with the way it understands past, present, and future. It outlines the dominant representations of time and temporality within the discipline and shows how they produce a specific understanding of international politics as well as shape IR’s epistemological and ontological commitments. Trying to develop claims that travel from the past to the present/future reproduces a metaphysics of time privileging the past as the “reality” out of which the present and future grow. This chapter then outlines the drawbacks and negative implications of this representation, such as its difficulty with emergent phenomena and the emphasis on continuity in politics, theory, and 116 117

118

Honkanen 2007, 10, Söderbäck 2018. Thinkable, but not necessarily realizable in practice. These are separate, but related, characteristics. Hutchings 2008. Hutchings 2008.

Theorizing with the Present

27

ontology.119 This understanding of time makes theory more conservative and less able to deal with the entities, properties, and/or structures that break with the past.120 Epistemologically, new events only grudgingly disrupt previous orthodoxies because durational applicability is privileged. Finally, the chapter concludes by briefly mapping the field of IR via temporal commitments, providing a taxonomy for thinking about the temporal assumptions and implications of current theory, with a more detailed and concrete engagement with IR theory in the following chapters. Chapter 3, “A Presentist Approach to International Relations: A Toolkit for Political Analysis,” outlines aspects of a theoretical architecture for theorizing IR from a presentist perspective. Theorizing politics as a collection of ongoing “presents” is a profound shift. Systems and ideas may appear to possess stickiness across time, but this is not because of the reality of some objective, “real” past inserting itself into the contemporary moment. It is the interplay of specific pasts and futures in a specific present. This chapter lays out the central attributes of a conceptual orientation and ultimately offers a presentist “toolkit” for approaching international and global politics. This toolkit includes conceptual apparatuses emphasizing change, emergence, nonfixity, amplification, and heterotemporality. These tools offer a way to cast the political present as emergent, sociality as composed of interactions and events, and position entities as the product of relations in temporal contexts, rather than entities existing across time.121 The next three chapters shift away from a theoretical discussion of politics and time toward concretizing the value of the present for IR specifically. It does this by using the conceptual tools and orientations developed in Chapters 1 through 3 and shows how they can create new understandings and approaches toward global politics at three levels – system, interstate, and unit. Chapter 4 articulates the stakes involved for mainstream scholars and those interested in traditional 119

120

Interestingly, the metaphor of “growing” out of the past is one that builds upon a biological process which is much more complicated and creative then acknowledged by most political scientists. Given the importance of this representation of the relationship between past and future it could be fruitful to engage this literature to employ those techniques be they self-organization or the like. See Wendt 2003, Wendt 2004, and Bell 2006. 121 Hutchings 2008. Marks 1998.

28

The Time of Global Politics

international political concerns by using a presentist approach to critique the “theoretical programmes” that historically have dominated IR – realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism.122 Doing so provides a widely intelligible example that others can use to guide their own work, even if they have no interest in the particular theoretical architectures used here. Employing these tools makes new things visible, exposes different questions to ask and answer, and enables different ways of understanding what we believe we already know. Each of these examples illustrates how presentism’s approach is not an external critique but one that – if taken seriously – alters key assumptions and conclusions for concepts already considered central to IR’s systemic understanding of global politics.123 The chapter also draws out implications at the epistemological and ontological levels, defending ideas like temporally contingent epistemologies, ontological nonconsecutivity, and an ontology that fully embraces the present Chapter 5, “The Time of War,” shifts the level of analysis from the system to interstate relations, focusing on the issue that arguably produced the discipline itself – war. It establishes that war is an intrinsically temporal concept, an event, and requires a number of contestable ideas to be resolved in a specific way in order to cohere in its contemporary form. It shows how ideas like heterotemporal coherence, temporal fluidity, and the production of temporal borders are constitutive elements of war that must be theorized. War requires a collective imaginary to even exist; otherwise, it is just a group of individuals engaged in lethal force. Attending to the temporal levels of analysis within and among these imaginaries as well as resisting the epistemological privileging of generalizability is vital to a better understanding of it. Our understanding of war is largely dependent on which presents are being analyzed, rather than the produce of timeless, objective mechanisms or objectively analogous situations. The level of analysis shifts to the unit in Chapter 6 – state foreign policy. “Making America Great Again, Again, and Again” focuses on a recent example of state behavior – US foreign policy during the Trump administration – to illustrate how these tools and concepts 122

123

Or more accurately, this present understands them as having dominated IR historically. Intellectual history is never as unitary or smooth as a discipline articulates and this is especially the case for IR, Bell 2003. Bennett 2013, 461.

Theorizing with the Present

29

can enrich our understanding of the present moment. The Trump administration was viewed by many as historically novel and one whose actions might radically reorder the world, while others saw it as merely an extension of deep historical processes. How one positioned this present largely turned on their conception of past and future. By placing emergence and change as ontological constants and centering this heterotemporality and discontinuity, we can better identify the temporal dynamics that characterized the Trump administration’s – and thus American – foreign policy. This chapter identifies four temporal dynamics that characterized the Trump administration – temporal othering, the production of simultaneity in a heterotemporal political environment, the accelerated pace and tempo of political action, and the (re)production of an indefinite present. Together, these dynamics encouraged three outcomes for American foreign policy – an explicit lack of restraint, transactionalism, and decisions dictated by personalist motivation. In short, this chapter shows how presentism is more than a conceptual and theoretical apparatus but a framework for theorizing recognizable outcomes in foreign policy. It illustrates value for more “traditional” areas of concern as well as demonstrating the advantages of a more temporally flexible epistemology. In short, it enables us to better contextualize the present and recent past without waiting for it to become settled history.124 The next two chapters move away from levels of analysis and focus on showing the value of the present for positivist and postpositivist approaches, respectively. Chapter 7 does this by drawing out implications for a defining element of a positivist approach – prediction. Prediction is the primary way positivist scholarship engages the future as well as one of the elements of analysis that define it as “scientific” rather than historical or critical.125 Moving away from the idea that practices travel unproblematically across time significantly complicates this understanding of prediction. Presentism demonstrates that while 124

125

“Traditional” is in quotes, because, as should be clear, this is a position and characterization that is meaningful, but not quite in the way that many accept. “Tradition” operates as a way of continually insisting upon one past, present, and future as universal for a field, abrogating the responsibility one has to a particular present. In other words, each of us participate in the maintenance of these fictions by accepting the idea of what is – or is not – traditional. One lesson of presentism is that at any moment, it could be otherwise. Ray and Russett 1996, Jackson 2010, Ward 2016.

30

The Time of Global Politics

those who do not study history may be doomed to repeat it, those who do study the past are not guaranteed to predict it. Chapter 7, “Beyond Disciplinary Prediction: Alternative Futures,” lays out how the presentist move implicates what I call “Disciplinary Prediction,” the predominant way that IR approaches and imagines the future.126 This chapter evaluates what happens if we divorce the concept of prediction from temporal assumptions that presume continuity and regularity. Once prediction’s temporal scope is allowed to be more limited, contingent, and indeterminate, projects that de-emphasize linearity, actively theorize temporal recurrences, incorporate cycles, and allow for contingency, emergence, and flexibility become increasingly viable. Predictions based on critically informed scholarship also become much more imaginable, enabling a better theorization of the politics of critique as action. Shifting away from positivist approaches and toward the postpositivist, Chapter 8 focuses on a central concern for postpositivist work – subjectivity and the role of the scholar/scholarship. If our collective temporal position can no longer be assumed as universal, then we must reflexively theorize when our IR claims are from, when they apply, and when our knowledge intervenes. Chapter 8, “Theorizing Responsibly: Temporality, Positionality, and Difference,” places the scholar and their scholarship in time, exploring their temporal positionality and political relevance. If the past is a construct of the present, the position of the scholar shifts from that of an actor engaged in a value neutral, transhistorical process of knowledge accumulation to that of an actor intervening in a particular present. Thinking about this positionality from a temporal perspective centers scholarly reflexivity, elevating questions of intellectual responsibility alongside analytical concerns.127 Finally, the conclusion, “Toward an Intellectual Ethos for Time Scholarship in International Politics,” concretizes the present as an ethos and sketches out elements of a future research agenda. It further develops the idea of the present as an analytical orientation, a conceptual approach, and a set of assumptions and offers a glimpse of a future where we take the present seriously when theorizing global politics.

126

Weber 2016a.

127

Hom 2018a.

Theorizing with the Present

31

Conclusion Whether or not they realize it, all scholars engage the issue of time. This is true regardless of where they locate themselves in the discipline. Thinking from the present provides a shared intellectual ethos and axis of inquiry that links together work from varying perspectives without requiring debates to be resolved one way or the other. Just as some scholars use gender as a “lens” and “look at gender to see where it leads,” the present provides a lens for engaging political practices while accounting for temporal multiplicity.128 Taking the present seriously represents a conceptual focus but also represents a “method of analysis” and analytical orientation.129 Foregrounding temporality necessitates an inter-/multidisciplinary agenda.130 Hassan notes that “temporality and knowledge are not singular, universal ‘things’, but instead are processes, techniques, understandings and experiences that are marked by diversity and multiplicity that suffuse and help shape our being-in-the-world.”131 When focused on questions of temporality, hard science and philosophy find themselves in inevitable conversation. Time itself straddles these boundaries. The conception of the present developed here emphasizes the ontological heterotemporality of “the present” requiring attention to difference, reflexive analysis of scholarly positionality in time and space, and a resistance toward totalizing narratives.132 A “heterotemporal orientation” denies universality because it “decentres the position of the. . .theorist” and resists “the assumption of a fusion between his or her particular present and ‘the’ present of world politics.”133 IR is already quite good at “thinking the present” in the critical sense but only as the top of a sedimented past and not as a dynamic space framed and reframed by widely varying sociopolitical context(s) and their attendant pasts, presents, and futures.134 Taking the present seriously as a dynamic, diffusely bordered space where past and future combine in unexpected, contextual, and emergent ways enables an approach more appropriate to the contemporary global environment. 128 130 132 134

129 Sjoberg 2013, 45. Hoy 2012. Weber 2016a and Sjoberg 2017, 159. Hutchings 2008, Hutchings 2011. Jameson 1991, ix; Hutchings 2008.

131 133

Hassan 2003, 227. Hutchings 2016, 10.

32

The Time of Global Politics

IR concerns itself with questions of difference at the highest levels of politics yet continues to insist that the one area where politics and difference remain absent is time and temporality. Without a temporally dynamic approach to international politics that recognizes the heterogeneity of past, present, and future, the radical contingency of political life, and the opportunities afforded by the emergent qualities of socially shared presents, IR is unlikely to remain flexible and attentive enough to respond to the problems that threaten the planet. The knowledge produced by the field that articulates itself as “international relations” can be deeply valuable and normatively desirable and provide insight into some of the largest and most dangerous problems facing humankind. Equally so, it can replicate and reproduce some of the most dangerous pathologies the world has seen in the form of political violence but also ecologically, racially, and in terms of gender, colonialist, and anti-indigenous politics. To ethically study IR is to engage in an act of faith that one’s actions could somehow be beneficial – no one studies IR to make the world worse. But as is the case with all such matters, a radical humility must also attach. Even our most certain claims will inevitably be found incomplete and impermanent. At any moment, our understanding of the world could radically and permanently shift. Focusing our work conceptually, analytically, and theoretically on the present can never be the only choice, but it is a vital and necessary way to restore the sense of humility needed to accurately and effectively engage such an enormously complex, rapidly shifting, and powerful assemblage like the one we know as global politics.

|

2

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

Each seeks to beat the clock, to rescue human freedom from the linear determination of mechanical causality —Roger Neustadter (1992)

Introduction In some ways, the fear of presentism animates how we imagine the world politically, which carries over into our analyses of global politics. One of the central ways that time has been foregrounded in IR is through the moves to incorporate historical sociology. At the outset of this effort, Hobson called for IR scholars to “hear” rather than simply “see” historical sociology. This was because IR’s treatment of time constituted a “chronofetishim” and “tempocentrism” that resists a “temporally relativist” view where the past contains the potential to “reconfigure the present.”1 In his view, it was important to avoid using the past to “confirm extant theorizing of the present” but to instead “rethink and problematize the analysis of the present, thereby reconfiguring the international relations research agenda.”2 If we really “hear” Hobson’s point, then the implications extend well beyond his area of interest and demand significant response by all areas of IR. According to the dominant narrative of time, we live our lives in the space between a concluded, “real” past and an unknown and unknowable future. Logically enough, the discipline studies the past because it constitutes the reality from which we can discover how the political world actually operates. IR scholarship may be, in the words of Berenskoetter, a “future-oriented enterprise,” but it drives by looking in the “rearview mirror.”3 Der Derian sums it up this way: “political science is too busy looking in the rearview mirror to prove how we got 1 3

2 Hobson 2002, 5. Hobson 2002, 5. Wendt 2001 and Berenskoetter 2011.

33

34

The Time of Global Politics

here with models and numbers to deal with now [emphasis added].”4 From this perspective, knowing what has happened is the best way to understand what is happening and thus to explain what will happen in the future.5 Alternatively, recent investigations of temporality’s role in IR have revealed how the lived experience of time – temporality – is a constitutive feature of international politics. These efforts position processes and events as the “locus of reality” for IR and that “entities – such as states and international organizations” are no longer “the basic units of world politics,” but “constituted by ongoing processes . . . and relations as analytical primitives.”6 The move away from static ontologies and rigid structures is already commensurate with an emphasis on time because it views reality as a process that only comes into being across time, occasionally punctuated by “events” that are both singular and irreducible to their representations.7 Perhaps most importantly, notions of the present and inquiry into “our understanding” of it privilege a “sovereign voice of reason” that does not recognize how the assertion of a present as “the present” is a political act in and of itself.8 What it also does is produce one singular past as “the past” that constitutes our shared and singular political present. Accepting this present reifies political privilege and the dominant discursive structures configuring international politics. Those left outside its boundaries are, quite literally, “out of time.”9 Most understandings of time, however implicit, possess a paradox. As a marker, time enables analytical inquiry and comparison, but time itself remains beyond theoretical reach. It remains the province of philosophers, physicists, and theologians, but for the rest of us, it just is. However commonly held the view, the approach to time that positions it as natural and universal is one that analysts of social 4 5

6 7

8 9

Der Derian 2016. There is debate about the value of historical analogy, to be clear, but the past – whether viewed as analogy or basis for theoretically derived laws that fit past realities – remains central. McCourt 2016, see also Jackson and Nexon 1999. This is not to say this trend is unique to this work by any means, but that it is most clearly necessary when one takes an ontological view of entities as emergent phenomena through time. See Jackson and Nexon 1999 and Jackson 2010. Lundborg 2016. Thus, the normative motivation behind her call to “Think the Present,” Hutchings 2008.

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

35

phenomena have repeatedly called into question. This is not only because time’s physicality is contested but also because it is “a social practice that translates temporality into meaningful codes and organizes temporality’s material influence.”10 Temporality and time are better understood as products of and producers of sociality – including themselves – rather than the other way around. For them, as a concept central to political life and political relations, time is a product of politics, not purely an external phenomenon. When we speak of time in IR, we are invoking a representation mediated through a particular system of knowledge, regardless of context. Given that our ultimate concern is explaining, understanding, and critiquing politics, this makes sense, but this dynamic of mediation means that our choices privilege a particular temporality that can shape and constrain international politics. While particular representations of time and their attendant temporalities appear to be in the background, their influence and impact are dramatic and telling.11 Take strategic studies, for example. Despite being separated by centuries, and from contemporary events by centuries more, Clausewitz and Sun-Tzu’s writings are revered not just for their apparent applicability to the current moment but because their claims appear to explain vast swaths of military and political history.12 Given their apparently universal applicability, we presume that they have discovered something fundamental about strategy and politics. In the words of one scholar, even those who see the two as representing “radically different . . . approaches to the art of war” have to recognize “that the basic logic of strategy was universal [emphasis added] . . . To say otherwise would be to assert that Russia, China, Japan, and the United States each follow distinct theories of physics or chemistry.”13 In short, the most revered authors are the ones who have hit upon the universal laws that a Newtonian perspective insists apply equally across time.

10 11

12 13

Moran 2015. Hutchings 2008, Jarvis 2009b, Hom 2010, Hom and Steele 2010, Lundborg 2012, McIntosh 2015, Hutchings 2018. McIntosh 2019. Handel 2005, also, this is why Howell and Montpetit can make observations about the raced ways in which “Foucauldian Security Studies” has “whitewashed” its own history and claims, see Howell and MontpetitRichter 2019.

36

The Time of Global Politics

The commitment to this idealized version of cross-temporal claimmaking exists in practice as well.14 The proper use of history and historical lessons is a constant debate among policymakers trying to pick between policy options. Decisionmakers are constantly seeking to understand the past to calibrate their present-day actions to achieve future goals. Often times, this rests on choosing among competing historical analogies, like deciding whether a conciliatory approach is a Chamberlain-esque appeasement or a Nixonian breakthrough in relations.15 For many practitioners, history is the ultimate arbiter of a claim’s validity, so the stakes over these debates are as high as the decisions they inform. Temporal imaginaries shape how we theorize and practice politics. This chapter identifies important elements of IR’s temporal imaginary and outlines its contours. It does this in five sections. While many scholars of time have invoked social theories of temporality, little attention has been paid to the philosophy of time literature. The first section turns to metaphysics and debates within the philosophy of time to shed additional light on the temporality that informs IR’s theoretical imaginary. The approach IR uses presumes that the present and future “grow” out of the past, much like a tree. Yet, this is only one way of understanding time, even within metaphysical discussions, and alternatives exist that are more useful and accepted within this literature. The second section focuses on IR’s conception of the past, showing how IR positions it as fixed, objective, and real, rather than heterogeneous, constructed, and variant. The third section shows how IR uncritically adopts a conception of time that is natural and universal to better enable the discovery of recurring patterns and regularities. Even when this universal temporality is called into question and explicitly critiqued, IR refuses to consider alternative frameworks that better capture the temporal complexity and dynamism of world politics. The focus on natural, universal time and the universal past it creates prevents a proper appreciation of emergent phenomena, which the fourth section argues is a significant drawback. It also precludes an effective theorization of the relationships between past, present, and future or the dynamics of the boundaries between them. The chapter concludes by mapping the field theoretically and offering a schematic that shows how temporal assumptions shape different schools of 14

Berger 1997.

15

Berger 1997.

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

37

thought and clusters of scholarship. Doing so provides another way of envisioning the topography of the field and the relationships – or lack thereof – among theoretical positions.

The Metaphysics of Time in International Relations While IR scholars may not explicitly endorse a single approach to time and/or temporality, the way we imagine time tracks closely to the linear and unitary vision that animates Newtonian physics. Despite the many innovations and insights derived from critiques of positivist inquiry, one legacy of positivist thinking that has stubbornly remained is the conception of time and temporality. Positivist IR, broadly speaking, engages in a search for patterns that extend into the future.16 Whether these patterns are linear, cyclical, or something else entirely, the idea is that once a pattern has been established, we can safely assume that it will replicate itself if the right elements line up. Even critical approaches operate with a similar understanding of time. Murphy – as well as Zanotti – argues that this temporal commitment is part of the social dominance of a “Newtonian physical imaginary.”17 What this means is that “epistemologically . . . social sciences have long been bound by the causal closure of physics,” where “regardless of how far their specific methodologies may travel from positivism, he ‘know[s] of no interpretivist, post-modernist, or other critic of naturalistic social science who says that social phenomena can violate the laws of physics.’ (Wendt 2015, 10).”18 This “Newtonian physical imaginary” represents “a boundary of the infinite, limiting the space within which all things are possible” – especially our conceptions of temporality. Regardless of whether they are theoretical, conceptual, or empirical, theoretical approaches begin by examining past events. In doing so, they uncritically adopt the present-day temporal conceptions of the scholar, rather than varying them by the area and/or type of inquiry.19 As is the case with the “Newtonian physical imaginary” that 16

17 19

The use of the term future here is inclusive of the present—both because the present is understood as the future when viewed from the perspective of the past, but also for simplicity sake (rather than including “the present and future” every time this relation is invoked). 18 Zanotti 2019, Murphy 2021. Murphy 2021, 7. Jameson 1991, Jameson 2003.

38

The Time of Global Politics

dominates thought, these temporal conceptions reflect only one particular philosophy of time. Within the metaphysics of time,20 there are three dominant approaches to the metaphysics of time.21 While all are contested categories in and of themselves, the figures capture the dominant positions around which philosophers congregate. The middle imaginary – possibilism – captures the understanding dominant in IR. Here, the future is something that “grows” out of the real past like a tree. Reality is beside and behind us, and there is continuity between past, present, and future. This idea can be usefully juxtaposed with the two more generally supported positions of presentism and eternalism. Eternalism imagines the ever-present existence of all spatiotemporal reality at once. Just as past events are “real” but beyond the reach of the present, symmetrically speaking, the future is similarly “real,” albeit unreachable and therefore finally unknowable. Those things that have not happened yet – the future – remain real in the present moment, albeit not directly accessible.22 For the eternalist, “it seems obvious for many, especially those working in physics, that there can be no objective ground for distinguishing between these three categories: all are equal, the universe consists of a solid block of events spread throughout time and space.”23 Presentism, by contrast, views the metaphysics of time quite differently. Each moment in time is a separate “slice” of time that may – or may not – be directly related to that which has come before. Under this view, just as is the case with the common understanding of the future, the past is understood as nonexistent in any sort of real sense, creating a temporal symmetry. Just as the future is radically open and unknowable, presentists argue that the same is true for the other side of the timeline. Not only events that have transpired are inaccessible from the present but also ultimately, their reality is just as indeterminate as events of the future. For presentists, the reality of the past lies in that which is constructed, produced, and

20

21

22

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/spacetime-bebecome/#PresPossEter. While this is true in philosophy, the term “possibilism” is less prominent elsewhere and is typically understood as the “growing block theory of the universe” in physics and other disciplines. Miller 2013. 23 Stoneham 2009. Stoneham 2009, 201.

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

39

reproduced as the past in the present – what Augustine referred to as the “present of past things.”24 For IR scholarship, this understanding of reality constitutes the ultimate arbiter of the truth value of any particular claim. We look to the “real” events of the past to confirm our understandings of how the world works. This allows us to better approach the future, the thinking goes, because this corresponds to the way metaphysical reality unfolds in time.25 Metaphysicians are interested in the question of what is and is not real and what the “reality” of space time is.26 Under IR’s gradualist view of time, reality lies in the past and present and is steadily expanding through the addition of the unknown and unknowable future.27 Future events fall upon the past/present like sediment and form a new past/present, as we all move through time at a simultaneous rate. While IR largely accepts this idea – we look to the past to discover what futures are possible – it is not only IR that does this. Most secular conceptions of time operate this way, making it a reflection of political practices in the world – particularly the “world” as imagined by English-language IR in the Euro-American intellectual space. These assumptions place enormous figurative weight on the past when assessing what can happen in the future. If the future is understood as “growing” out of the past, it is less open and always in some way connected to past events. This makes sense, at least partially, because it corresponds to our collective understanding of the future and the bodily experience of time at the individual level.28 For embodied creatures, our temporality is deeply influenced by the relationship between the deterioration of our bodies and the passing of time. As I get older, my opportunities – physically speaking – become increasingly limited due to the limitations of the human body. Collective entities, however, are not similarly embodied. The state’s “body” is at best an institution and is not a physical body subject to inevitable deterioration.29 Turning to this temporality, then, is another way in which the anthropomorphism of states seems to influence our thinking as scholars.30 Drezner observes that even our understanding 24 25 28 29 30

Augustine and Pine-Coffin 1993, Edkins 2003. 26 Mead 2002 and Savitt 2006. Lyre 2008, Carroll 2010. Adam 1995, Flaherty 1999, Moran 2015. Wendt 2004, see also, Purnell 2020. Wendt 1992, Wendt 2004, Lomas 2005, Krolikowski 2008.

27

Ellis 2007.

40

The Time of Global Politics

of the core elements of power – for example, that power loses its strength at a distance – may be inapplicable when viewed from a temporal perspective.31 Under this “gradualist” temporality, the future is open but not infinitely so. This is because the past has already transpired and is fixed. In order to understand someone’s perspective, for instance, I should hear their “story” which requires a narration of the past that reflects their actual, prior lived experience – their past reality. At the level of the individual, it is intuitive that these “stories” are representations of past, present, and future. When the entity is collective, however, these stories have the potential to be highly divergent from actual experience. Even a cursory glance at the nationalism literature reveals that stories told in the present do not always correspond to the past, placing the past’s reality in a more liminal position.32 While the past may represent “resources from which cultural imagination can be excavated,” the process of doing so “underscore[s] the fluid ways in which interpretations of time’s passage become the idiom and the accent of a nation’s trajectory.”33 As the countless directions of debates about the nation’s past take show, one particular temporality based on individuals inhabiting human bodies should not be relied upon when we are thinking about the interactions of collectives and their notions of past, present, and future.34 Adding the perspective of philosophers of time, rather than relying only on social theorists, has advantages for challenging IR’s current imaginary. Many philosophers of time – as in, the real, “actual” nature of time and reality – are ultimately physicalists in their ontology.35 This has important implications for all of IR, but particularly positivist IR, given the insistence that their claims should be privileged because they best reflect reality.36 First and foremost, the debate over time’s 31 34

35

36

32 33 Drezner 2019. Mälksoo 2012. Johnson 2001. Even this “individual” temporality is increasingly coming under question, particularly as scholars appropriate quantum metaphors of human agency which displace the individual/collective binary even at the level of human consciousness. Some philosophers of time would object to being labeled “physicalist” – my claim here is simply that they are explicitly not focused on the human experience of time and are seeking answers in a more final, ontologically grounded sense that is considered independent of human experience. This book obviously does not enter into or seek to resolve issues in these debates. These observations are instead, just that, observations, that have potential utility

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

41

universality and its connection to reality is just that, a debate – reasonable people disagree about the answers advanced. Consequently, the idea that there is a universal timeline or that there is a fixed and knowable past relies on the validity of a single position over all the others. It is neither natural nor inevitable, that time is linear and universal. Second, philosophers of time and reality tend to coalesce around the poles of presentism and eternalism.37 The idea of an asymmetrical reality where the past and the present are real, yet the future is not – the position that animates IR – does not attract a great deal of support.38 Third, philosophers of time are seeking to understand time and reality in and of itself rather than its representation or linguistic figuration. This approach focuses only on time itself, treating temporality and human experience as derivative, bypassing debates about the relevance of sociality in a material world. While less work of late explicitly debates the social/material binary, IR still largely organizes itself along this axis as it is the type of metatheoretical issue that determines the “parameters of our inquiries” and “the kinds of practically relevant knowledge we can produce.”39

IR’s Construction of the Past For scholars and political actors, the past represents the place to go in order to assess and evaluate our competing claims and observations about politics. It is a shared terrain to be explored and discovered.40 Discoveries about the manner in which the world “works” – if correct – are assumed to be constant across time. So whether it is a data set or a historical case study, if the lesson represents a truth about global politics, it should be timeless enough to be replicated at a later date. From this perspective, IR should just be like Handel’s assessment of

37 38

39 40

for the discipline’s thinking on time and speaks to the importance of thinking critically about time, regardless of whether one has a physicalist or social ontology. See e.g, Wendt 2015. Savitt 2006, Lyre 2008, and Carroll 2010. This is known in some circles as “possibilism” and is also understood as the expanding universe theory. See e.g., Ellis 2007. Reus-Smit 2013, 590. The potentiality of replicability and the increased awareness and commitment to it as a concept in IR captures this understanding perfectly, Gleditsch and Janz, 2016.

42

The Time of Global Politics

strategy – physics or chemistry – and whenever we find a mechanism or causal relationship at play, we should expect the same outcome.41 The notion of past as terrain logically emerges from the spatiotemporal representation of time imagined by Western models. Here, I isolate four of its components. First and foremost, the past is seen as something that is real – events of the past actually transpired and are out there in the temporal landscape regardless of what we think or feel. Examining them allows us to discover patterns that reveal the natural manner of things.42 This is not to oversimplify disciplinary debates about history as certainly not all scholars treat the past as a repository of data accessible by all at all times. Debates about the proper use of history in IR are vibrant and productive and show careful attention to history and importantly historiography. It is true that many IR projects are deliberately sophisticated in their approach to the past.43 Yet, this historical sophistication largely remains in the service of developing claims that travel across time, rather than accepting the full implications of viewing history as a production of the very politics and history we seek to understand. At a more foundational level, IR is in a sense intrinsically “empirical” in that there is no real capacity for strict deduction. Even the “deductive” models at work in IR arise out of some observation about world politics and assume continuity between past and future, as is the case with the “explanatory theories” that dominate the major schools of thought in (American) IR.44 Yet, these deductive theories are “deductive in form, even though when they are applied, no deductions are derived,” which is odd because ultimately, “the rhetoric of deduction does not match the reality of how the theory is applied.”45 The “real” events of the past for IR are products of history, sociology, and representational narratives but not quite real enough to create “covering laws” from which deductive claims can be determinatively grounded.46 A war in Europe known as “World War II” certainly happened, for instance, but “World War II” is an idea and a representational construct, fundamentally limited in terms of what it can capture. These limitations have consequences. Colonial and imperial 41 42 43 44 46

At least, the version of physics we were taught in school. Goddard and Nexon 2016, Montgomery 2016. Alker 1984, Lustick 1996, Kratochwil 2006, Fioretos 2011, Fioretos 2017. 45 Smith 2000a, quoted in Humphreys 2010. Humphreys 2010. Humphreys 2010.

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

43

ideology, for instance, continues to inform the dominant periodization of World War II because it ignores the colonialist and imperial violence leading up to and continuing after “WWII” itself.47 Second, the past is read as fixed – events, actions, and actors of the past have run their race and the outcome is already decided. The past is an area to be explored and a space for discovery but constitutes a fixed and unchanging terrain. Once events move from the right side of the timeline to the left, the temporal boundary of the present marks the space where potential for change disappears.48 Japan signed a peace treaty conceding to the Allied powers in WWII, and nothing that happens in the future can change that historical “fact.”49 IR, however, rarely engages in the type of facts that are indisputable – wars are won or lost, agreements are signed, and norms are established, but these are all products of countless interactions of individuals, collectives, institutions, actors, and structures, all of which are mediated by representation and conditioned by a set of politics and political structures.50 Some elements of the past may have occurred and are in fact “fixed” – the US dropped atomic weaponry on Japan in August of 1945, for example – but the meaning of that action (even the notion of that as “an action” itself ) only comes into being in the future.51 While this approach might be so intuitive as to appear the only way one could approach the field, this is largely a result of the intellectual history IR assumes for itself. While IR’s existence does owe a great deal to the discipline of history, historical methods and approaches are not the only way one can relate the present to the past. As a scholarly choice, this move appears intuitive, even as scholars working in ontological security theory identify the complications and interpenetrations of past, present, and future intrinsic to political identity for states and other major collectives.52 This intuitiveness, however, may be both a mimicking of our central objects of inquiry and the continuing influence of our intellectual origins. Regardless of cause, it is not the only 47 48

49 51

52

Paine 2012, Barkawi 2016. Yet even this is socioculturally constrained as the Aymera people in the Andes see the future as behind them and the past in front, see Spinney 2005. 50 Becker 1955, Lustick 1996. Becker 1955. Lundborg 2012 and Lundborg 2016, and for a discussion of the historical trajectory/temporal dynamics of the atomic bombings of Japan, see Shapiro 2015. Mitzen 2006, Solomon 2012a, Solomon 2019.

44

The Time of Global Politics

way to approach present and future. Geologists, for instance, invert this perspective and use the reality of the present to understand the unobservable past. Both geologists and historians study the past, but they have divergent views of the present. Geologists are unambiguously presentist. They believe that the observable present is a crucial resource in understanding the past because in the observable present, we can see and study the processes that have occurred in the unobservable past. For geologists, it is largely uncontroversial that the past not only can but also should be interpreted with reference to the present. For historians, our relation to the present is more ambiguous, but generally, we are antipresentist . . . Anglophone historians tend to view the present with distrust. We believe that the past must be approached on its own terms, and excessive reference to the present tends to impede this approach.53

IR scholars, unsurprisingly, tend to replicate the attitude of Anglophone historians, viewing the present as largely irrelevant to scholarship and thus safely absent from inquiry. To truly understand “the way the world works” requires separating the world “as it really is” from how it “appears to be.” Third, and logically following from the previous two, the past is seen as objective. Questions about the ultimate disposition of past events can be answered with finality – Ferdinand was or was not assassinated, WWII happened or did not, and President Bush did or did not begin the US war on terrorism. This finality is independent of whether one views the world as exclusively physical or entirely socially determined because the events under examination are separate from us.54 Even if the actions of the present are relational and intersubjective, for instance, while our descriptions of that past may change, the past itself cannot – interpretations may change, but not the “reality” of the past itself.55 Whether we describe Ferdinand’s death as an assassination, an accident, or an act of terrorism, his death remains an indisputable fact.56 However, the relevance of a past action such as this does not lie in the prosaic facts of one man’s unfortunate demise. It only becomes important once translated into terms that IR finds intelligible. 53 55

56

54 Oreskes, 2013, 595. Zanotti 2019, Barad 2007, Murphy 2021. Despite its attention to temporality at a foundational level, assemblage thinking and new materialism risks replicating this characteristic of the past employed by “mainstream” IR thinking. Price 1997 and Weberman 1997.

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

45

Many people die, but most deaths in and of themselves are inconsequential for IR. This method of interpretation – of making past events intelligible – always reflects a present and its present-day politics. Japan is constantly engaged in diplomatic and domestic debates about the historical narrative its institutions (e.g., the state education system) present regarding their actions vis-à-vis China in World War II.57 The United States is plagued by constant debates about the role of Confederate “heroes” and whether they should be honored with statues in the present.58 Questions of what “really” happened are as much the product of present-day political practice as they are the analytical product of intellectual inquiry, something work on collective memory makes plain.59 Treating the past as continuous is at best an oversimplification and at worst dangerously reductive. Even something as seemingly settled as the start date of the war on terrorism can change via future political practices. Because actors and practitioners are self-aware, these changes can effectively alter the frames that enable present-day decisions to be decided upon. For example, Obama Administration lawyers took the position that the war on terrorism legally began well before the 2001 AUMF or the September 2001 attacks that prompted its passage.60 The position was designed to justify holding a suspected conspirator in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole under military authorities rather than civil, which requires the concurrent existence of a war. The problem, from the administration’s perspective, is that the Cole bombing was in 2000 and predated the US declaration of war in 2001. The administration was effectively arguing that the US military response as well as the 1996 declaration of war on the United States by Al Qaeda meant that the US was already involved in a “global armed conflict.”61 Regardless of how this particular issue was resolved, it illustrates that powerful actors will try and change the past should it prove politically beneficial. Finally, in IR’s temporal imaginary, the past is knowable. The past, potentially speaking, is always accessible. Given perfect documentation of a governmental decision, for instance, we could in theory truly 57 58

59 61

Lind 2004. This book obviously does not take the position that they are heroes, but it is an idea that is alive and well in contemporary American politics. 60 See e.g., Lind 2008 and Gustafsson 2014. Eviatar, 2016. Eviatar, 2016.

46

The Time of Global Politics

“know” the past. This is at odds with reality, however, particularly for a discipline whose actors are inherently collective – it is difficult to get inside the mind of another individual, let alone many. It also misunderstands how our present looks from someone operating in the past. Mead utilizes a thought experiment to show how our knowledge of the past is inescapably conditioned by the knowledge of the present. If we could know everything implied in our memories, our documents and our monuments, and were able to control all this knowledge, the historian would assume that he had what was absolutely correct. But a historian of the time of Aristotle, extending thus his known past, would have reached a correct past which would be at utter variance with the known world of modern science, and there are only degrees of variance between such a comparison and those which changes due to research are bringing out in our pasts from year to year.62

This assumption of “knowability” creates a type of temporal asymmetry.63 The present and the future are not understood in the same way as the past. The future possesses an inherent unknowability, and the present is similarly unapproachable, albeit for slightly different reasons.64 The unknowability of the past varies by degree, but the unknowability of the future differs in kind. I may not be sure what happened in World War II, but in theory, I could be, whereas no one can speak with certainty about the future.65 What this adds up to is a view of international politics that supposedly orients itself toward the future yet remains analytically focused on the past. IR’s temporal imaginary frames questions in a manner such that most begin with an implicit “given what we know about the past . . .,” is this claim true or false? This focus applies just as much to critical theoretical work as it does for IR’s grand theories, formal models, and various means of hypothesis testing.66 To understand present and future actions and events in IR, one must be able to draw lines from or alternately identify timeless relationships in this fixed, objective, and real past. Undergirding this approach is an expectation that understanding how past events are related to each other must 62 65

66

63 64 Mead 2002. Price 1997, Price 2002. Wendt 2015. With the possible exception of purely structural and/or teleological theories which have been for the most part, left behind by contemporary IR. See Wendt 2003. Hom 2018b.

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

47

implicate how the future will unfold. Building up arms results in either external or internal balancing, for instance, regardless of where on the timeline it occurs. Regardless of substantive area – whether political economy, security, or institutions – if the past is objective, real, fixed, and knowable, these relationships can be discovered. It may be difficult, complicated, or inevitably incomplete, but those relationships are out there and could be found, even if in practice it is precluded by any number of factors – for example, incomplete data, competing histories, or inadequate records.

Temporal Assumptions and Temporality in IR Scholarship IR’s conception of the past reveals much – but not everything – about IR’s understanding of temporality. The past is what matters because it is all that exists. Time is understood as real in a physical, ontological sense – it is tied to space and the Earth’s rotation and subject to the laws of physics. It is not up for debate or discussion. Time is perhaps the most natural, essential, and unchangeable idea IR confronts because “nothing can halt the passing of time.”67 Yet, there still remains the question of what time and temporality are. Although the political project of the book argues that temporality and time are contextual and relationally produced through politics, there still must be some provisional understanding of the terms. I follow Hoy’s approach where he articulates a “provisional . . . distinction between the terms ‘time’ and ‘temporality’,” where “‘time’ is universal time, clock time, or objective time” and “temporality is time insofar as it manifests in human experience.”68 The value of temporality as a concept apart from “time” is that it connotes an openness to things being otherwise even as it invokes common understandings of time. The productive tension between what is apparently subjective – our experience of time – and time itself, which we understand to be an objectively occurring phenomenon, should be left open, rather than resolved with a definition. Temporality is both “a concept” and “a method of analysis” where “human experience is temporal, whether or not we are conscious of the temporal.”69 For Hoy, “we know then that temporality is real” and while “the question of the source of time” is an open one, it “is obviated by the undeniable occurrence of temporality” 67

Moran 2015.

68

Hoy 2012, xiii.

69

Hoy 2012, xv.

48

The Time of Global Politics

which is simultaneously both “subjective and objective.”70 By “focusing on temporality,” we can “avoid many of the metaphysical questions that arise about the reality or the ideality of time” itself but retain focus on the important questions that arise when thinking about it in terms of international politics.71 Taking seriously the notion that time and temporality are constructs and relationally produced poses a conundrum. Time may not exist in the way we articulate it, but it very much does exist as a meaningful practice within human and nonhuman life. The question that bedevils anyone who seeks to write about these issues in English is how can one use the signifier “time” while at the same time calling it into question. Ultimately, the term is used here as an “interruption.”72 Doing so “permits a rethinking of . . . past and future . . . at the same time as putting the underlying conception of time into question.”73

IR’s Temporal Assumptions: Time and Politics Broadly speaking, IR seeks to identify recurring patterns within international politics in the hopes that doing so can reveal the mechanisms and structures that animate relations across time. The hope motivating the pursuit of these regularities, trends, and continuities across time is that they will extend in some identifiable manner into the future. This assumption of continuity remains one of the critical disciplinary boundaries differentiating IR from history and area studies.74 Left undertheorized, however, is the temporal imaginary – what Glencross refers to as IR’s “historical consciousness” – shaping IR’s conception of politics itself.75 By accepting time as universal and the past as objectively real, scholars leave in place one particular means of structuring our understanding of the present and its relationship to past and future without inquiring, theorizing, or justifying its continued existence. The implications of such silence are stark. The world of IR is irreducibly relational and concerned with events – for example, wars, conflicts, trade flows, capital flight, institutional development, structural violence, ecological change – and the understanding of the past 70 73 74 75

71 72 Hoy 2012, xv. Hoy 2012, xv. Hodge 2007, 22. Hodge 2007, 22. Finnemore and Sikkink 2001 and Munck and Snyder 2007. Glencross 2015.

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

49

structures the assumptions used to frame the entities, events, and relations that constitute the discipline itself. Foregrounding time is consonant with IR’s focus on sociality as many of the thinkers central to the field’s understanding of politics as social phenomena saw conceptions of time and temporal relationships as critically important. Giddens – whose work was instrumental in the early emergence of constructivism – placed an emphasis squarely on attending to conceptions of temporality, calling it “the fundamental question of social theory” and “the problem of order . . . is to explicate how the limitations of individual presence are transcended by the stretching of social relations across time.”76 Bourdieu links this explicitly to politics in Outline of a Theory of Practice, stating that “the social structuring of temporality which organizes representations and practices, most solemnly reaffirmed in the rites of passage, fulfills a political function.”77 Mead explicitly proposed an ontology of the social world where “the world is a world of events.”78 This is not to say that the temporal relations animating scholarship are not explored outside of temporality studies. We think and speak about time throughout the discipline, yet rarely do we think reflexively about what we mean when we speak of time itself or how the answers and assumptions we make shape our understanding of temporal relationships. What remains less developed, however, is inquiry into the ontological question of time and its relationship with temporality (and temporalities) in politics and theory, leaving implicit assumptions in place to quietly influence our work. As a result, this makes it increasingly difficult to take “temporality seriously” and comprehensively pursue the implications of such an inquiry to its radical conclusions.79

Taking Temporality Seriously: Current Inquiries into IR’s Temporal Assumptions80 The past is not merely that which confirms the present contours of international politics and its study but is relationally constituted by this present and constantly in process. While the temporal rethinking Hobson called for has yet to occur throughout the discipline of IR, historical sociology, broadly speaking, has followed Hobson’s lead. 76 79

77 Giddens 1984, 35. Bourdieu 1977, 165. 80 Büthe 2002. Büthe 2002.

78

Mead 2002, 35.

50

The Time of Global Politics

These approaches have sought to marry a critical sensibility to the past with the rigor of sociological claims, while inquiring into the temporal relationships the scholarship posits. While these moves offer important insights and provide ample evidence of the emerging shift toward temporally sophisticated theorizing and are worth building upon, they leave some important concepts unexamined. First, historical sociology still relies upon a past that is “out there” for scholars to explore, identify, and address. The past remains a separate place for inquiry, rather than a heterogeneous construction in the present with multiple overlapping temporal frames and presents “sliding into each other.”81 In historical sociology, the ontological reality of the past remains largely unquestioned. For these projects, “there can be no easy escape from or solution to the problems that emerge from assumptions concerning the existence of a separate ‘ground’ on which ‘history’ and ‘sociology’ are supposed to coexist.”82 This “ground” of the past remains extant for history and also for historical sociology, and the politics of its grounding are left outside the frame of inquiry. When taking Derrida’s deconstructive critique seriously, any attempt to make claims about the past in relation to the present becomes deeply problematic. That is not to say that we cannot or should not make any claims about the past . . . we do it all the time, and without doing so, there would be no politics (or history) in the first place . . . one of the most serious shortcomings of the HSIR project is its tendency to gloss over the problems inherent in assumptions of an already-constituted ground.83

Ideas of “the past” are deeply political – relying upon them as arbiters of reality reifies a “category of practice” as a “category of analysis.”84 Historical sociology’s influence in IR, while important, leaves the present’s political production of the past and its present, along with the ontological status of time itself, relatively unchallenged, something that denies the heterotemporality of the global present. Where the most work on time and temporality has taken place is by those scholars influenced by critical theory and poststructuralism. These approaches resist broad narratives and universalist representations, instead focusing on processes, relations, difference, and the potentiality embedded within structures. It is self-consciously juxtaposed with approaches that rely upon a more determinate 81 84

Tillman 1970, 539. Brubaker 1996.

82

Lundborg 2016, 2.

83

Lundborg 2016, 2.

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

51

understanding of politics as the outcome of historical structures and rigid narratives of the past.85 Unsurprisingly, this theoretical tradition has done the most to engage its temporal assumptions in reflexive critique as well as foregrounding temporal practices in substantive inquiries of international politics. Berenskoetter argues, and Hom later echoes, that there is a “temporal turn” emerging within IR that acknowledges past, present, and future as heterotemporal and that relations of power mediate temporal concepts and practices.86 Recent moves identify how time and temporality impact international political practice at all levels. Hutchings taxonomizes global politics (world political time) as possessing distinct temporalities she identifies as chronotic and kairotic – linear, ongoing times versus times of action where significant, even radical change is possible.87 Approaches like hers denaturalize the conception of “political time” as something unitary or natural (as Western conceptions of time understand it to be) but instead rearticulate it as power-laden and relational. Her overall work at this intersection focuses primarily – although to be clear, not exclusively – on international political theory and normative thought.88 Lundborg argues that the construction of events as “events,” for example, “9/11,” possesses an indeterminacy – especially in relation to the “pure event” as Deleuze articulates it – covered over through dominant, often sovereign, representations.89 To better understand the dynamics of cybersecurity, Stevens draws upon J.T. Fraser’s account of “emergent temporality” and brings it in conversation with ideas like “chronotypes” and “chronopolitics” to develop a “politics of time” that approximates a “sociotemporality” or “a constructed temporality – a temporal assemblage” within this particular area of security politics.90 Debrix is notable in that he is one of the first within IR to turn to theological notions understood as “religious” rather than “secular” to better our understanding of the manner in which the sovereign constitutes time as “forces of disorder.”91 Still others have already drawn upon conceptions of anticipation and anticipatory governance in geography,92 theorizing

85 87 88 90 92

86 See e.g., Campbell 1998a. Berenskoetter 2011, 664. Hutchings 2008. 89 Hutchings 2007, Hutchings 2008, and Hutchings 2011. Lundborg 2016. 91 Stevens 2015, 49. Debrix 2015, Hom 2020. Amoore 2007, Adey and Anderson 2010, Anderson 2010, and Amoore 2013.

52

The Time of Global Politics

catastrophe,93 and postcoloniality94. Hom’s work on time and timing in ontological assumptions (i.e., state sovereignty), events (e.g., Arab Spring), commemoration, and IR theory is foundational in this regard as it denaturalizes time and analyzes the actual political practices by which “timing mechanisms” become represented simply as “time.”95 The role of temporal understandings in security and sovereignty has been particularly prominent in work at the intersection of temporality and IR. Part of this is due to the forward-looking conception of threat that animates present-day security discourse. As well, both the flattening of time in contemporary security figurations like cyberspace and the emergence of “network time” and the accompanying “speed” and “accelerated” nature of politics factor into the type of fears contemporary populations experience as threatening.96 The early twenty-first century emphasis on pre-emptive strategies relies upon a production of the future that is reproduced by campaigns like the US war on terrorism. Its foundational moment – “9/11” – still operates as a means of demarcating time and periodizing history.97 Even the conception of American identity ostensibly defended by this war necessitates a temporal lens to fully understand. Temporal practices are fundamental to a narrative powerful enough to justify two decades worth of conflict that directly impacts nearly 40 percent of countries around the globe.98 There are some aspects of this emerging literature that could be better emphasized. The first is that a recognition of temporality’s role in IR could displace the relationship between time and temporality that animates positivist and historical scholarship and could also make the impact of explicitly temporally focused work more forceful. Even with explicit critique, there still remains a specter of time that informs the reader’s notion of temporality as something human-constructed and separate from time as it “really is.”99 Hom’s work has done the most to take stock of the literature on temporality and its own assumptions 93 95 96 97 98

99

94 Van Munster and Aradau 2011. Agathangelou and Killian 2016. Hom 2010, Hom 2016, Hom 2017, Hom 2018a. Virilio 1995, Hassan 2003, Stevens 2015. Lundborg 2012 and Stockdale 2016. Campbell 1998b, Jarvis 2009a, Solomon 2014, Solomon 2015, Hom and Steele 2016, Cassano 2017. Certainly each of these authors themselves have a nuanced view of time itself – my argument is that the work is read in a manner in which the notion of time as clock-time, separate from human influence or construction, has become so dominant that more must be done to de-emphasize its ontological place.

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

53

about time, ultimately arguing that this literature tends to reify time as natural, poses time as a problem in need of a solution (e.g., time-series analysis, or adding temporal complexity to a model), or identifies and critiques clock-time as a statist practice.100 Currently, “temporal analyses seldom engage with one another . . . many of them manifest deeply embedded habits of speaking and thinking about time . . . that limit our ability to unpack its significance and analyze it rigorously. In particular, both mainstream and critical approaches marginalize dynamic processes and reify time as a static thing apart from social life.”101 Hom rightly observes that scholarship on temporality rarely engages each other, particularly when situated across disciplinary divides. The result is that these discussions reify a binary where time is positioned as natural and beyond sociality, while temporality is primarily a product of sociopolitical discourse. Both Hom’s move toward “timing practices” and Lundborg’s critique of the politics of “grounding” move away from this binary, as does Stevens’ comprehensive approach to the “politics of time,” but otherwise, the reification of time is an issue that could be better addressed, something that a turn to the present emphasizes.102 Continuing to focus on hegemonic representations of time and the ways they shape and constrain political practices risks mistaking these processes as unyielding and unresponsive to change, when change itself might be an ontological condition of their existence. Scholars of IR inevitably produce and reproduce countless assumptions and relationships across time, yet the insights being developed are largely incongruent and noncollaborative.103 The biggest challenge facing temporally sophisticated treatments of time – both those already in existence and those to come – is how to link these insights to each other and broaden their reach throughout IR.

Temporal Boundaries: Emergence and the Relationship between Past, Present, and Future An important disadvantage of IR’s current imaginary is that emergent properties, self-organization, crises, and contingent events are difficult to address. Occurrences that significantly break with the past do not 100 102

101 Hom 2018a, 69. Hom 2018a, 69. Lundborg 2012, Hom 2016, Hom 2018b.

103

Hom 2018b.

54

The Time of Global Politics

easily fit into the current temporal imaginary. This is a major concern as the issues that have historically been most pressing for IR – wars, power shifts, trade flows, refugee crises, norm developments, and now especially worldwide pandemics – are precisely those things that do not easily fit with the past. In many cases, their importance is directly related to their apparent novelty. Even though significance is understood via an event’s deviation with the past – for example, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the end of the Cold War, the beginning of the war on terrorism, “9/11,” and the emergence of COVID-19 – each time these events occur, they are treated as unusual occurrences rather than an inevitable product of a complex and multifaceted “international system.”104 Due to this imaginary, much of IR might be looking at the world backward. If one wishes to explain apparent deviations from politics as usual such as wars, arm races, disease outbreaks, and power transitions, then why build a theory that indexes out those exceptions to focus on the “normal” patterns of things? Why not begin with an imaginary that centers contingency and change? Some of this becomes more visible when we focus on the articulated boundaries between temporal spaces as IR’s representation of time produces a paradoxical understanding of the relationship between past, present, and future. On the one hand, temporal locations are understood holistically, which ultimately renders them meaningless for explaining and understanding international political life. Here, time is understood in a manner I refer to as boundless. Paradoxically, past, present, and future are also understood as radically separate, constituting a bounded approach to time and temporal relations with the past and future split by the border line of the present. The past and future do not overlap. This contradictory view of time as both bounded and boundless produces difficulty for IR overall, but particularly so when it seeks to relate to the present. The result is that the present becomes a liminal space seen as either a meaningless concept or a point that continually recedes from view.105 Even within the temporality literature in IR, there is little development of the present as an area of inquiry, analytic orientation, or

104 105

Lundborg 2012. Mälksoo 2012; In some ways, this replicates debates regarding McTaggart’s Aand B- series of time, see e.g., Oaklander 1996.

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

55

conceptual frame. This remains one of the reasons why emergence is underemphasized. The past is that out of which the present has arisen and irreversibility has its critical value in such conditioning . . . the doctrine of emergence asks us to believe that the present is in some sense novel, abrupt, something which is not completely determined by the past out of which it arose. A present, if it is really new at all, will have in it an element of temporal and causal discontinuity. Recent quantum physics has taught us to believe that such indetermination is quite consistent with rigorous physical analysis.106

This “novelty” and its accompanying “temporal discontinuity” are not just potential facets of the present but ontological conditions. Given the inevitability of distinct human perspectives, movement, and mobility, change occurs from moment to moment. There is an important political and theoretical potential to the present’s intrinsic newness107 where “the political challenge is thus to engage with . . . ‘the political promise of the performative’” where we “allow for a performative excess of social temporality that resists being totalized and captured by the authoritative forces of signification.”108 If the world of international politics is a world of events, then we must take seriously the idea that the “singular event” is “an event that can[not] be placed in a chain or narrative structure of events. It can only emerge as something absolutely singular, other and incomprehensible.”109 Given this fundamental inability to capture it in its entirety, explaining and predicting international politics is somewhat akin to modeling a soccer match. Soccer is a game involving 22 actors in continuous relation with very few opportunities for fully rehearsed, preplanned actions over the course of a 90+ minute match.110 While there have been some exceptions, for example, Dynamo Kiev in the 1990s famously had a playbook hundreds of pages long and more recently, England’s men’s team made it to the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup primarily due to their utilization of rehearsed plays following stoppages in play; these are largely the exception. The overall outcome 106 107 108 110

Murphy in Mead 2002, 16. See e.g., Connolly 2011 and Katzenstein and Seybert 2018. 109 Athanasiou and Butler 2013, 140. Lundborg 2016, 17. There are some exceptions; e.g., Dynamo Kiev in the 1990s famously had a playbook hundreds of pages long and more recently, England’s men’s team made it to the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup primarily due to their utilization of rehearsed plays following stoppages in play.

56

The Time of Global Politics

of the game usually turns on a tiny fraction of those interactions, decisions, and occurrences –for example, at one moment, an actor receives the ball and kicks it past the goalkeeper, resulting in a one– nil victory. Put differently, the understanding of a football match after it is concluded – Manchester United defeated Barcelona 1–0 – turns on a moment or two that emerges out of a highly complex series of interactions that number in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Theorists of sport science and complexity theorists have done just this, but others have had some success by orienting themselves with the idea that what they are seeking to explain is the emergent exception and the unlikely event. These events, while crucial, cannot be explained by disaggregating every relationship, finding the universally constant mechanism of each and linearly adding up the mechanisms to try and mimic the game.111 Much of it turns on continually updating knowledge based on the relative success of discrete actions in gameplay, not ever more precise understandings of the mechanism of a pass or shot. IR scholars have to be somewhat reductionist because no one can perfectly model every interaction that influences or constrains behavior in the international space. What is also the case, however, is that IR privileges explanations that possess continuity across time because the temporal imaginary flattens time such that those are the possible and expected explanations. The linear notion of time privileges claims that possess temporal continuity, but this comes at the expense of the singular and emergent exceptions – which in many cases are what really concern us in the first place. “Goals change games” says the cliché, just as wars change political structures. Obviously, the analogy breaks down somewhat as wars cannot be equated to goals even were one inclined to theorize international politics as a game, but they are similar in that relative to the totality of political interactions in the system, wars are exceedingly rare events. Taking an approach that privileges continuity rather than emergence makes it difficult to incorporate this exceptionality. While temporal breaks may exist and context may matter at certain times, the operating assumption of IR is that the future will replicate 111

McGarry et al 2002, Davids, Aruajo, Shuttlesworth 2005, Reed and Hughes 2006. That said, conventional measures such as “expected goals” (xG) largely follow a baseball-like set of statistical methods, and are designed to assess the likelihood of creating chances and then evaluating how likely those chances are to result in a goal.

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

57

the past; otherwise, there would be no way to identify mechanisms that explain how the world “works” because those mechanisms would be inextricably time-bound. If the past is real and the present is only one slice of time added upon that block of reality, then nothing about the events within that space is singular or unique. The fact that they occurred in the past is simply an observation, a value-neutral analytical categorization. Even so, the past looms large in any understanding of the future because it (supposedly) supplies the material from which the future can emerge. This long shadow of the past means that theory shifts slowly because the time orientation of politics is constant and backwardfacing. The arrow of time may change directions, but these shifts are slow and sluggish, like a large ship changing course.112 IR accepts that crises may erupt and structures may fall, but these occurrences are notable due to their rarity – like a cruise ship going down in a storm or a cargo ship running aground on rocks.113 To understand international politics, since there is so much that goes into making a state a state, linkages with the past are the norm and not the exception. Contemporary actions in international politics are positioned as the next step in a series of steps that can extend centuries into the past – given these deep roots, new events that significantly diverge from the past are not to be expected. To understand what is likely to occur in the future, we can look to the long tail of history and get a sense of possible outcomes from which we can then assess probability. This inevitably devalues more radical interpretations or actions – even as they continually occur. Spatially, the terrain upon which international events transpires is open, flat, and meaningless. Events and actors operate within a “timeless present” where the distinctions between what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen collapse.114 Treating time as empty privileges a viewpoint where the past, present, and future are equivalent, thus universalizing heterogeneous pasts subject to extant power relationships, for example, colonial legacies in the present or the role of race and white supremacy in contemporary IR.115 On the other hand, past, present, and future are also seen as radically separate. The 112 114 115

113 Hutchings 2008. Or a ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal. Barcham 2000, 139 Doty 1993, Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam. 2014, Vitalis 2015, and Younis 2018.

58

The Time of Global Politics

past and future are completely separated by the present, yet the dividing line of the present is a point that is always “not yet” or “just passed.”116 Like a line or point in mathematics, it is meaningful but lacks any actual space of its own. If we are always proceeding in time and time is always passing, then the present falls out entirely because the present is constantly in a process of becoming, which renders it impossible to fix for objective analysis.117 The point is that the temporality of those actors and elements under investigation rarely lines up with the temporal assumptions of the observer, nor are these assumptions likely to operate in a singular manner that can be assumed across time and space.118

Mapping the Field International relations has historically been plagued by a series of divides that prevents scholarship on similar substantive areas – that is, origins of war, structures of violence, and national security decisionmaking – from speaking to each other, much less building on the other’s work. Recent work continues to emphasize the role of the causal/constitutive binary in structuring thinking about theory, but similar concerns arise regarding the social/material divide and ontological commitments regarding the nature of the state.119 As many have observed, IR seems increasingly split between those who identify as “post-positivist” – for example, critical theory (broadly speaking), securitization and the Copenhagen school, poststructuralists, and those informed by gender, gender identity, race, colonialism, indigeneity, and class – and those who continue the behaviorist focus on positivist, causal explanations of international phenomena.120 What is important here is that the separate epistemological, ontological, and methodological commitments between the more “mainstream” scholarship and those understood as operating in a more self-consciously “critical” tradition are separate and distinct. Patrick Jackson observes that “testable hypotheses and general claims are thus portrayed as 116 117

118 120

Adam 1990, Hutchings 2008. More precisely, there may be points where we are at rest (or appear to be at rest) but we cannot represent those moments except retroactively. 119 Hutchings 2008. Goddard and Nexon 2016, Montgomery 2016. See Bennett for a useful catergorization of IR along three axes, positivist/postpositivist, methodological, and “inter-paradigm.” Bennett 2013.

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

59

almost unquestionable goals of IR scholarship” and are so unquestionable that they “hardly even” need “the label of ‘science’ to distinguish them from alternatives.”121 Even for those who reject this perspective, the idea that IR privileges these understandings as “mainstream” is well accepted. IR’s temporal imaginary helps maintain these intellectual divides. While Chapter 4 will identify how this works through substantive examples from central debates in the field, this section argues that two theoretical commitments – static ontologies and commitments regarding prediction – reveal the influence temporality has on theoretical orientations. Despite obvious splits that continue to orient the field, debates that seek to resolve these splits are increasingly less prominent. The functional result is increased segregation.122 Formal modelers speak to formal modelers, positivist work is in conversation with other positivist claims, and poststructuralists largely engage other poststructuralists. This is a strange outcome for a discipline that supposedly arose out of a normative desire to generate knowledge regarding the origins of global conflicts in order to prevent them from recurring.123 In theory – and in practice – most scholars agree that work should ideally be focused less on the means by which scholars arrive at their contributions and more on the implications they have for the present and future worlds (both scholarly and political).124 This is not to argue for a return to the “time-less present” Lundborg identifies as the subject of Cox’s foundational critique of the dominant “problem-solution” framework informing IR but rather to acknowledge that the goal of IR is not solely to generate better philosophy of science, formal modeling techniques, or critical investigations of the Enlightenment subject. IR’s temporal imaginary privileges a view of the world populated by static entities with attributes that vary across time. In sociology, Abbott refers to this as the “entity/attribute” dichotomy.125 We see this throughout much of IR as actors possess characteristics that vary, even as their ontological status remains constant across time. Whether talking about states, “terrorist groups,” national separatist groups, institutions, or other actors/entities, this assumption remains the foundation upon which theoretical claims can be built. In order to make 121 122 123 125

Jackson 2011, 7. Humphreys 2010, Bennett 2013, and Dunne, Hansen, and Wight 2013. 124 Sjoberg 2013, 13–14. Maliniak, Peterson, Powers, and Tierney 2018. Abbott 2001c.

60

The Time of Global Politics

predictive claims – or at the very least claims that are not strictly historical observation and more or less generalizable – one cannot compare past apples to future oranges. States and their sovereignty may historically vary in terms of their fixity, but incorporating that variance comes at a theoretical cost. The more ontological variance, the less the claim is able to travel across time. The more time-invariant a claim is, on the other hand, the more it will be applicable to the future. In short, IR views the commitment to static ontologies as inextricably related to its capacity for prediction. If “states” – full stop – pursue security through arms acquisition, then that theory should explain and predict nineteenth-century British behavior just as much as it does twenty-first-century Chinese decisions on aircraft carrier development. Alternatively, if states are the product of processes produced and reproduced in contemporary figurations of politics, then temporal context matters deeply, making the application of a theory that explains German behavior pre-WWI potentially irrelevant to assessments of contemporary Russia. Military strategists debate this issue all the time given constantly changing security environments, technologies, and actors.126 Positioning a commitment to static ontologies as a prerequisite for generalizable, predictive knowledge is not necessarily commensurate with reality outside of IR. We can see this in newer approaches to IR still informed by physicalist, scientific observations and draw on quantum physics, complexity theory, and biology as well as computational systems and approaches employing the wisdom of crowds. Focusing on temporality reveals another intellectual boundary. In Figure 2.1, I offer a taxonomy of IR scholarship that varies along two axes – ontological commitments and the value of prediction. These are two axes of difference reproduced by the temporal imaginary informing IR, and each is scalar. Those that are closer to the center have a more ambivalent position with respect to these two axes. Figure 2.1 identifies how this impacts IR theory development. The upper left quadrant – “explanatory theory” – is where a significant amount of American IR locates itself.127 Self-described realist theory with its explicit commitment to positivism and behaviorism fairly obviously fits here given the commitment to time-invariant claims and explicit endorsement of static ontologies and predictive 126

Siniver and Collins 2015.

127

Humphreys 2010.

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

61

Prediction Predictive

Static

Non-predictive

Explanatory

Constitutive

New Social Science

Post-positivist and critical theory

Ontology Processual

Figure 2.1 Temporalities of IR theories

claims.128 Offensive realism, defensive realism, and even neoclassical realism to a lesser extent seek to make predictive claims about the pursuit of power and the observable regularities that produces. Liberal international order scholars and democratic peace theorists operate in a more liminal space but still retain a commitment to static ontologies and predictive claims. At a broad level, questions of institutional design, the value of institutions in promoting trade and dampening conflict, for instance, assume similar ontological commitments to states and privilege time-invariant claims. The focus on democratic peace, for instance, is at least in part due to its status as the “only” time-invariant claim IR scholarship claims to have developed.129 Institutionalists such as Fioretos, Snidal, and others, however, have sought to incorporate insights from historical sociology, historical institutionalism, and other temporally nuanced approaches to develop claims that are more context-specific and temporally informed, and these would be placed closer to the line than realists or other institutional design scholars.130 Even so, as these claims are advanced, their predictive scope is necessarily and admittedly lessened and deemphasized. Constitutive theory, for example, constructivists, especially the ones influenced by Wendt and Katzenstein like Finnemore, Barnett, Tannenwald, and others, was explicitly committed to a static ontology and a “rump materialism” that accepted the existence of “material fact[s]” like the state or physical determinants of power like 128 129 130

Waltz 1979, Glaser 1997, Mearsheimer 2001. Owen (1994) goes beyond the idea of it being a law, calling it a “truism,” 87. Fioretos 2011 and Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017.

62

The Time of Global Politics

military capacity, population, or territory.131 While few constructivists actively debate this point and/or currently remain agnostic on it, it is generally considered a point of distinction between critical and constructivist work and still retains resonance when looking at the field today.132 Ontological security theory, where much identity-based scholarship continues today, has scholars whose commitments to this materialism is obscured but appears to remain in place, even as they question the static nature of state identity and sovereignty.133 In the bottom right quadrant are postpositivist and critical scholarship – these approaches share ontological commitments that are process-oriented and nonpredictive. This is one of the places we see significant expansion in IR’s substantive focus, epistemological standards, and ontological understandings, particularly when compared with two decades ago. While the postpositivist priors of many scholars in this box preclude commitments to static ontologies and produce profound skepticism regarding prediction, these preferences are exacerbated by IR’s temporal imaginary. The result is that it encourages those focused on processes, unmasking power relations, and examining assemblages to reject predictive claims. While in practice critical theorists in IR avoid predictive claims for normative reasons, there is no analytical requirement that precludes a poststructuralist, for instance, from offering provisional predictions as a generative intervention.134 Gender scholars articulate good normative reasons to resist the drive for scientific objectivity, but that does not necessarily preclude all predictive claims – nor does it preclude objectivity itself.135 Postcolonial scholars articulate important reasons to decolonize thought – including western scientific precepts like scientific prediction – and many who advocate ethnography adopt the anthropologist’s resistance to prediction. But just as materialists do not have a monopoly on addressing material aspects of politics, science – as imagined by the discipline’s positivists – does not possess a monopoly 131 132 133

134

135

Finnemore 1996, Katzenstein 1996, Tannenwald 1999, Wendt 1999. Campbell 1998a, Kristensen 2015. To be clear, I am not making a totalizing claim as not all scholars working on ontological security theory have these assumptions/priors, but a position on this does not appear to be a prerequisite for ontological security theorizing. See David Campbell for a discussion of the ethicality of resisting offering positive claims on the basis of critical theory and/or deconstruction. Campbell 1999 and Campbell 2001. Barad 2007.

The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations

63

on the question of prediction. Even if alternative predictive claims are not provable in a scientific sense, one can still advance claims that are assessable. At a minimum, such claims would be intellectually generative, apart from their validity as conventional predictions. The taxonomy in Figure 2.1 is not dichotomous – constructivist work, for instance, is closer to the intersection of the two axes than offensive realism. With that in mind, I wish to close with three observations about the “map” found in Figure 2.1. First, temporal imaginaries play a critical and underexamined role in thinking about IR. Presuming that the past is fixed and the present is in a state of becoming leads one to de-emphasize near-term analysis and prediction as placing time itself beyond temporal context appears an essential element of generalizable predictions. Second, prediction in IR is understood primarily mechanistically, which limits our ability to theorize it in a more complex manner or with a different set of assumptions. Finally, and most importantly, without recognizing the deep-rooted impact of IR’s temporal imaginary, this segregation of the field is likely to continue and worsen. The temporal imaginary that dominates reinforces the splits identified in Figure 2.1. Scholars bracket themselves along these axes, devaluing work that transcends these boundaries, stunting the growth of IR within the substantive areas of concern themselves. The next chapter outlines some of the implications this imaginary has in terms of epistemological and ontological commitments, showing how the openness of a “presentist” approach allows IR to move beyond these traps.

Conclusion The combined effect of the dominant characteristics of IR’s temporal imaginary is that IR becomes intrinsically conservative136 – conservative not in the sense of contemporary figurations of political conservatism or neoconservative foreign policy, but conservative in that theory takes on a status quo bias. Continuity and inertia are privileged over change. This occurs in theory and practice and should be a concern for all scholars. Scholars with positivist orientations, despite their intellectual commitments toward continuity, are oriented toward change. Why do wars break out? When will trade flows expand or contract? 136

Hutchings 2008.

64

The Time of Global Politics

How will economic policy implicate demographic shifts and migration? The study of the past may be about continuity and identifying ways in which temporal consistency can be established, but it is almost always in the pursuit of explaining and understanding change. No one studies why the US does not invade Canada, for instance, because to do so would be to “discover” why the status quo continues.137 Whenever this temporal imaginary dominates, Newtonian understandings of the world are privileged. When read onto a conception of time that reifies clock-time as real and beyond human influence, this temporal imaginary places Newtonian ideas at the center. Mechanisms are prized, and entities exist across time. Context theoretically could matter, but if the model is properly constructed, it ideally washes out. Put differently, a mechanistic explanation of how arm races heighten the risk of miscalculated conflict is unquestionably accepted as legitimate, presuming that it matches up with past examples. Context may indeed matter, but it need not. An acontextual explanation only makes sense, however, with a series of priors that enable a mechanistic approach to travel across time. Newtonian approaches remain unquestionably acceptable. Even when other forms and models of reality emerge, they are always understood in relation to this baseline, rather than vice versa. The next chapter will lay out a different temporal imaginary based on an ontology that is presentist. This chapter demonstrated that the seemingly natural and objective understanding of time and temporality which dominates IR is an essentializing product of social and political constructs. For the presentist, these constructs manifest in the/a present rather than within a supposed atemporal arc of continuous, indefinite time. Such a shift enables space for temporal relationships that are more fluid but no less real than the ones articulated in the contemporary moment. Who the present is for, where the present is located, and who gets to decide are all foundational questions of international politics. IR needs to take these questions seriously rather than continue to replicate the dominant political power structures it studies in its analytical practices. 137

It is not the case that this is a question from which nothing useful could be gained, as is argued in later chapters, but rather to demonstrate that there is a bias against status quo claims which influences the questions asked and answers given in IR.

|

3

A Presentist Approach to International Relations A Toolkit for Political Analysis

Introduction What might happen if we ignored the fear of presentism that looms over the discipline – or better yet, leaned into it? How might things be different if we took the present seriously, rather than as a ghost haunting our work? Put differently, if the view of time used in the analysis of global politics is a conceptual choice, what would happen if we chose otherwise? How would IR be different if it did not center the past or universality as characteristics of time? Most importantly, what would be revealed for IR if we adopted this perspective? Ultimately, for IR, time and temporality are a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. International relations is not primarily concerned with resolving the reality of temporal dynamics but orients itself around questions of politics. It must identify and assess the advantages and disadvantages of the current approach to time and weigh it against alternatives. The past will likely always remain the primary means by which we view politics, but just as a focus on the past has the appearance of revealing regularities and continuities, adopting a lens of the present could have distinct advantages. The temporal imaginary we adopt is never “a factual given” and “cannot be observed directly,” so if we were more intentional about our choices, it could provide the opportunity to shift our orientation away from the “category of the past” and toward a “category of the present,” accruing advantages historians do not envision.1 This chapter outlines one such imaginary for IR that differs from the current approach in two ways: one, it centers the present in its understanding of reality, and two, it is explicitly committed to an understanding of reality that is not universal but heterotemporal. Combined, this starting point resists the assumption that “the” past is universal and warrants our exclusive focus, and that it alone 1

Hartog 2015, xvi.

65

66

The Time of Global Politics

holds the keys to guide a better present and future, in large part because in global politics, there is no one past to which we can turn. The implications of this choice are significant for our view of history, time, and thus our overall understanding of politics: Depending on whether the category of the past, the future, or the present is dominant, the order of time derived from it will obviously not be the same. Hence, certain behaviors, certain actions, and certain forms of historiography are more possible than others, more – or less – in tune with the times, untimely, or seemingly perfectly timed . . . in its very conception it is intended as a tool for comparative study.2

Making the “category of . . . the present” dominant means that the choice of what events, ideas, and past(s) to privilege is inextricably influenced by the present under investigation and not subject to the extant assumptions of the scholar or received disciplinary wisdom. It opens up different ways of understanding, different ways to intervene, and new research agendas. Just as a focus on the past enables generalizable claims, a search for recurring patterns with predictive power, and an emphasis on continuity in political life, a focus on the present reveals underemphasized phenomena, amplifies marginalized perspectives, and reveals alternative ways of knowing global politics. One of the wagers this book makes is that theorizing the present offers greater analytical purchase for IR. The category of the past would not disappear as an approach – nor would the insights it has generated – but they would instead represent only one particular choice among a variety of options, each with distinct advantages and disadvantages. Even if this wager ultimately ends up a losing one, the process of imagining IR’s temporality differently is valuable because it destabilizes the hegemony of status quo temporal assumptions. It shows how our “historical consciousness” could be otherwise. While the alternative formulations offered in this chapter might fail to succeed as a specific alternative trajectory, all discussions and debates of IR’s underlying temporal imaginary reinforce the recognition that IR’s temporal imaginary is a choice and not an inevitability. Temporal assumptions, once they are shown to be assumptions, cannot be turned back into natural, objective, and inarguable claims – it is a bell that cannot be unrung.3 2

Hartog 2015, xvi–xvii.

3

Wight 2006, Reus-Smit 2013, McIntosh 2015.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

67

The alternative outlined here uses the present as an analytical and conceptual resource to better incorporate temporal dynamics and difference. Doing so offers a theoretical framework for global political analysis but repositions the present and future not as derivatives of a continuous past but as products of particular political presents. In short, it offers a “toolkit,” with which “[one] can, by understanding key concepts, apply them to the world and understand it better.”4 Just as regularities and universality are concepts that logically follow from an imaginary that emphasizes the past, a presentist approach enables alternative conceptual apparatuses and areas of focus. It offers a “new framework for analysis” that comprehensively shifts the approach to international politics as well as the knowledge we value and seek to produce.5 Doing so provides a way to use temporality “as a tool-box which others can dig in to find a tool with which they can make good use, in whatever manner they wish, in their own area.”6 In the first section, this chapter identifies central elements of a presentist approach to IR by drawing on Mead’s theory of sociality and Butler’s concept of performativity, ultimately showing how this understanding of political reality differs from IR’s current approach.7 The second section identifies how to use the present as something beyond a point on the timeline when viewing global and international politics. The third section identifies a discrete set of conceptual “tools” and points of emphasis, focusing on what would shift with this temporal approach. Change would be privileged over continuity. Emergence would be positioned as an ontological feature of politics. Relationality would become a baseline – even for materialists – and nonfixity would represent both an assumption and a site for substantive inquiry. Amplification, rather than discovery or ex ante creation, would orient both scholarship and the view of political reality. The final section identifies epistemological and ontological commitments, juxtaposing them with the assumptions of the contemporary temporal imaginary. Fundamentally, IR is always engaged in “historical reflection” and a “‘dialectic of choice’ in which . . . the past is recollected and joined with the future by means of a ‘political project’” – but that political project occurs in “the present.”8 “Thinking the present,” to 4 6 8

5 Smith 2010, 2. Buzan, Waever, and De Wilde 1998. 7 Foucault, 1972 in Shapiro 2017, 131. Hartog 2015. Kratochwil 2006.

68

The Time of Global Politics

use Hutchings’ formulation, would become critical to assessing the “truth” claims of IR scholarship reinforcing the idea that knowledge production is a political project in a specific present.

A Temporal Imaginary of the Present If we view the present as possessing substance, rather than a fleeting and uninhabitable moment, it creates a radical shift in our positionality. The present becomes something with duration, characteristics, and meaning. It makes it a space to inhabit and a home for political actors, structures, and practices. For in many ways the quest of all modern thinking on TimeSpace has been to be filled by and to amplify the presence of the now, to make the present habitable and visible by remaking what constitutes past and future, here and there. How can we inhabit the present as if it were a place, a home rather than something we pass in a mad scramble to realize the future? Somewhere here is a politics, part feminist, part ecological, part visionary which can help us to stop and ponder what we are doing.9

If the present is a space we “inhabit,” then it warrants the same reflexive analysis and theorizing to which all other spaces are subjected. Lived spaces of the political are constructed, heterogeneous, power-laden, and constitutive – something to be thought and theorized, rather than assumed into existence, or worse, ignored entirely. International actors may exist in space, but they only relate via a conception of time. Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, as long as IR remains relationally focused, it represents a study of time and temporality. As of yet, however, there has not been a robust inquiry or school of thought centered around time and temporality.10 Presentist IR provides a theoretical approach where temporality can be foregrounded for political analysis, rather than treated as an external force for mapping and measuring global politics.11 “Thinking the present of world politics,” to follow Hutchings’ call to action, offers 9 10

11

May and Thrift 2003, Schatzki 2010. Berenskoetter and Hom identify a nascent “temporal turn” but would not accept the idea of a unified school of thought or research agenda. Berenskoetter 2011, Hom 2018b, and Chamon 2018. Or as Hom forcefully and persuasively argues, a force that poses a “problem” for international politics in a variety of dimensions. See Hom 2020.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

69

one way to retain a focus on global politics while centralizing the study of time and temporality in its analysis.12 Unlike the past-centric imaginary of contemporary IR, a temporal imaginary based on the present views it and “the” past as a product of its particular social relations and individual memories and/or perspectives. “The present of course implies a past and a future and to these both we deny existence . . . for that which marks a present is its becoming and its disappearing . . . To extend this fraction of a minute into the whole process of which it is a fragment, giving to it the same solidarity of existence which the flash possesses in experience, would be to wipe out its nature as an event. Such a conspectus of existence would not be an eternal present, for it would not be a present at all. Nor would it be an existence. For a Parmendiean reality does not exist. Existence involves non-existence; it does take place. The world is a world of events”13

Here, the present is a place without determinate foundation and in a constant process of becoming. Ontologically, politics is a “world of events” where process constitutes substance and past and future are constructs of a particular present. Here, the past is not “an antecedent present” but its own moment and event unto itself, “not a piece cut out anywhere from the temporal dimensions of a uniformly passing reality.”14 Instead of being only a reconfiguration of the past, the present’s “chief reference is to the emergent event, that is, to the occurrence of something which is more than the processes that have led up to it and which by its change, continuance, or disappearance, adds to later passages a content they would not otherwise have possessed.”15 Mead’s thinking on the present is particularly valuable because it also seeks to provide a “toolkit” of sorts for those who choose to engage in temporally sophisticated social analysis, rather than focus on a philosophy of time. It provides a “conceptual apparatus” by which we can apprehend the world without reifying conceptions of time coconstitutive with capitalist market expansion and/or state sovereignty.16 Mead’s concern with the present arose because he saw it as intrinsic to his primary focus which was appreciating social life. This concept of the present as “locus of reality” is especially valuable for 12 14 16

13 Hutchings 2008. Mead 2002, 23. Mead 2002, 15 and Mead 2002, 52. Hom 2010, Zanotti 2019.

15

Mead 2002, 52.

70

The Time of Global Politics

global politics because it incorporates temporality more easily and also because it amplifies contemporary approaches in IR. For example, the practice turn’s advocacy of pragmatism, identity, and practice theory in political analysis all implicitly emphasize a nuanced approach to time. Practice theory, for example, has a “better grasp on contingency and change” because “structure . . . is largely formed through routinization, which refers to its temporality.”17 The notion of the present Mead offers is also important because it is capacious. It provides a “big tent” under which we can think metatheoretically, even if our substantive and/or ontological frames differ – mainstream or postpositivist, we all analyze and reproduce a politics of time. Mead developed his idea of the present with an explicit concern for how to combine insights from materialist approaches with extant social analysis, something that has troubled IR for decades. Adopting this perspective is one way of recognizing the value of scientific insights and innovations without resorting to a de facto scientific realism.18 Despite its resistance to the dominant representations of time purporting to reflect scientific consensus, Mead’s concept of the present is by no means antiscience. His concept can also accommodate recent moves within IR toward a “quantum social science” and “quantum social theory,” which was something Mead himself recognized nearly a century ago.19 His emphasis on time and the present was at least partially motivated by the implications the quantum revolution of his time could have for social thought, stating that “we are getting interesting reflections of this situation from the scientist’s criticism of his own methods . . . from the implications of qanta . . . he finds himself quite able to think as emergent even those events which are subject to the most exact determination.”20 His emphasis on indeterminacy and emergence in sociality deliberately paralleled insights from the physical world – “recent quantum physics has taught us to believe that . . . indetermination is quite consistent with : rigorous physical analysis.”21,22 Echoing moves already taking place in social fields informed by mathematics and complexity theorists, he stated, “I am simply 17 18 19 20 22

Bueger and Gadinger 2015, 456. Curtis and Koivisto 2010, Jackson 2010, and Wight and Joseph 2010. Wendt 2015, Zanotti 2019, Grove 2020, Murphy 2021. 21 Murray in Mead 2002, 16. Murray in Mead 2002, 16. Mead 2002, 47.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

71

indicating . . . rigorous thinking does not necessarily imply that conditioning the present by the past carries with it the complete determination of the present by the past.”23 This is part of the reason why many who are interested in time turn to a “politics” of it that goes beyond scientific realism: “despite its grounding in scientific realism, Fraser recognized that science would be insufficient to attempt this task” of explaining and understanding “all the forms of time . . . in which we might be interested,” necessitating work that is “self-consciously and necessarily interdisciplinary.”24 Barad’s materialist and feminist approach to theorizing sociality based on quantum ontologies, along with IR applications like Murphy, Zanotti, and others, illustrates how science may not be the real problem, but rather our insistence on Newtonian representations of reality – including time.25 When applied to global politics, this means that the present – and by extension political reality – possesses an irreducible newness that distinguishes it from that which has come before. Put differently, an event only becomes an event via its divergence from that which came before. Wars emerge out of peacetime, refugees arrive where they previously were not, and a “crisis” erupts when least expected. The important insight a presentist perspective offers is that the political events we seek to explain are those that diverge in some way from the past because political events – as well as practices, structures, agents, and so on – all exceed the boundaries of the articulated and expected past. In other words, as manifestations of a present relational reality, they possess an emergent ontological quality. Rather than denying the importance of the past or the future, a presentist ontology emphasizes the value of understanding the importance of particular pasts and particular futures as constructed in specific presents. Temporal context matters in deep, important ways when seeking to understand social practices, but that context is multiplicitous in its manifestations, effect, and import. Moran writes, “Temporality does things. Although it is not wholly material, temporality has an influence in the world. More precisely, it has many influences on the

23

24

A point echoed by those utilizing “rigorous” science like chaos theory and complexity models who emphasize the way international politics is an “open system,” Mead 2002, 47, and Kavalski 2015. 25 Stevens 2015, 46. Barad 2007, Zanotti 2019, Murphy 2021.

72

The Time of Global Politics

world. Temporality happens in every moment and we are quick to notice it because we are susceptible to it. The sun rises, an eye blinks, an event is scheduled, a room reminds one of the past, events happen in sequence, a library cuts back its hours. To experience the influence of temporality is not uniquely human; wood ages and cracks, plants flower and die, sedimentary layers accumulate and harden. Temporality is ‘‘out there’’ in the world precisely because it is ‘‘in here’’ for so many objects that are themselves out there in the world. To recognize the pervasive role of temporality requires an ability to sense temporality and a willingness to regard phenomena in temporal terms.”26

At a basic level, centering the present leaves us much better equipped to investigate temporality in all its facets because it already assumes the possibility of temporal difference, rather than asserting an ontology that leaves it out entirely. To bring this back to IR more directly, “a presentist believes that our ontology . . . should only include what exists right now, i.e. at the time we draw up the list. A gradualist believes that our ontology should also include what used to exist even if it does not exist now, so the British Empire is part of our ontology but my great grandson is not.”27 Temporal location and the constitution of relationally constituted realities implicate the ontological status of those entities and institutions we believe exist. Given IR’s emphasis on the continuity between past and future, it leads us to overemphasize the reality of the past – states, militaries, or the “British Empire” – and underemphasize the future’s indeterminancy, unknowability, and potential discontinuity. Looking to the past as an arbiter of truth claims about the international system – imperial overstretch, power transitions, war initiation, arms races – reinscribes this imaginary past into the present as it locates what we imagine the past to be as materially real, rather than the production of a particular present. Centering IR on the present also emphasizes that these pasts are constantly reconstructed in new presents that either exist alongside “the present” or occur at some point in the future. To use a central debate within IR over the past half century, when seeking to unlock the present and future actions of great powers, the “British Empire” as understood by twenty-first-century scholars may indeed matter more

26

Moran 2013, 286–287.

27

Stoneham 2009, 202.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

73

than the behavior of a future Chinese or Russian empire that could emerge in the latter half of the twenty-first century, but not necessarily because it reveals something eternal about great power interactions. It matters because its conceptual, historical, social, and material existence is somehow present in contemporary social/political life. Or it might be due to path dependencies that make the behavior of presentday empires sufficiently similar to previous empires, for example, the British, that these claims appear – or are – transhistoric within the contemporary world political present. When formulated this way, the question of the behavior of previous empires remains relevant, even though its supposed ontological continuity across time disappears. This forces us to actually research why it is that the British Empire matters for the contemporary present, when it matters, and whether it matters to the specific present and futures of which we are concerned.28 Bain lays this out clearly in his analysis of the English School’s use of history, stating that “writing history is always unfinished: there are no complete histories . . . Rather, historical narrative can be nothing more than an interim report; and as historians, ‘the best we can do at any given point the best any of us can do only represents the present [emphasis added] state of knowledge in respect of the subject with which we are dealing’ (1952, 70).”29 For him, IR’s use of the pasts largely represents a “didactic history – and whatever lessons it offers is an illusion made in the present for the present, which is neither historical or instructive.”30 The supposed distinction between history and the historian, between fact and interpretative act, is “unsustainable” because each is a construct of a particular present.31 When positioned in this way, it becomes clear that the gradualist understandings of the past and present rely on eternalist characteristics. When looking to understand the mechanisms at play in international politics, IR scholarship believes that the experience of the great-grandchild could end up being just as important as past events, even if not yet accessible. The emergence of major technologies, for instance, and the norms, practices, and behaviors that attach emerge simultaneously but require some time to be fully

28 31

Knopf 2003. Bain 2007, 520.

29

Bain 2007, 519.

30

Bain 2007, 513.

74

The Time of Global Politics

appreciated. Think of nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, or battleships – the regularized patterns of the behavior of states and political institutions we now associate with these technologies are only now visible because of the temporal distanciation between their initial emergence and the present. Similarly, our understanding of cybersecurity will only fully mature as an area of research after it has been around for an as yet unknown period of time.32 The further we get into the “future,” the more terrain we will have covered, the more we will know, and thus the more certain we can be about the claims we make.33 The reality of IR is purportedly constituted by relationships and mechanisms with timeless and transhistoric characteristics, but it also possesses a directionality that is intrinsically progressivist and present-oriented, creating a “paradox” for “current historiography in IR” where “it is both anti-Whig and ‘presentist,’ since it is not disconnected from disciplinary agendas.”34 Work from 5 years ago is generally privileged over work from 50, yet there is no real warrant for this move without the intellectual work done by these implicit temporal assumptions. If IR was truly dealing with the past in a scientific manner, then the newness of analysis would ultimately be irrelevant in terms of its validity. Much of the physics taught in school is based on insights from hundreds of years ago. If IR is really as unchanging or as mechanistic as many scholars like to hope, certain insights from Foreign Affairs in 1950 or by Du Bois in 1915 should be as valuable as those contained in the most recent issue of International Security.35 While perhaps unintentional, Waltz’s observation regarding the inability of knowledge and theory to accumulate reveals something important about IR’s temporal assumptions – it recognizes that IR is always wrestling with the issues of the present.36 And the theories of the past always seem to lose out to new ones without prompting a thorough investigation into why.

32 35

36

33 34 Stevens 2015. Hutchings 2007, Hom 2017. Guilhot 2015. And should be studied as well. Race scholars in IR have noted that the prominence of the journal Foreign Affairs represents the erasure of past, given its previous name was Journal of Race Development. This move illustrates just how much the “race-neutral” discipline of IR and its intellectual history is conditioned by racialized thinking. See Vitalis 2015. Waltz 1979, 14.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

75

From the Past to the Present: Using the Present as a Frame of Analysis The present is the space where politics takes place, but it also constitutes a frame for making politics. The events and relationships that make global politics intelligible as global politics rather than something else are produced through the ways we frame them in time. Wars, for instance, are events that emerge and are never fully realized in any one particular moment but are discursively and materially produced over time. This is partially why Butler turns to the idea of the frame in their theorization of war and political violence.37 Their influence in IR has been significant for areas adjacent to temporality, particularly via the notion of performativity, which radically reshaped understandings of sovereignty, security, and “resilience,” as well as intersections of gender, queerness, subjectivity, and identity.38 This makes sense as performativity is an irreducibly temporal process because it theorizes ongoing processes of relationality and what they produce and reproduce.39 Butler says this explicitly, arguing that the point is “not just to become mindful of the temporal and spatial presuppositions” of performative dynamics but to recognize “that our understanding of what is happening ‘now’ is bound up with a certain geo-political restriction on imagining the relevant borders of the world and even a refusal to understand what happens to our notion of time if we take the problem of the border (what crosses the border, and what does not, and the means and mechanisms of that crossing or impasse) to be central to any understanding of contemporary political life.”40 The present is something beyond the “moment of now,” a temporal frame by which we make sense of the world but not one that emerges ex ante. These frames that make global politics global politics reproduce spatial and temporal borders that inform the limits of our political imagination. International relations has been quite good at theorizing spatial borders as processes of reproduction, for example, international borders, but it has been less attuned to the temporal borders that inform the representational imaginary of international and global 37 38

39

Butler 2009, 2–25. In particular, critical security studies and poststructural IR, more broadly. See Campbell 1998a, Weber 1998, McDonald 2008, Brassett and VaughnWilliams 2015. 40 Honkanen 2007. Butler 2009, 103–104.

76

The Time of Global Politics

politics.41 To properly understand the constitution of politics, more attention needs to be paid to the borders – and the crossing(s) of those borders – between past, present, and future. How we frame events42 in time shapes our interpretations, understandings, and normative responses. This is because “the frame tends to function, even in a minimalist form, as an editorial embellishment of the image, if not a self-commentary on the frame itself.”43 It is both “editorial” – in effect, a form of writing or imagining that constitutes and is constituted by practice – and a choice, a moment of bounding that defines itself in juxtaposition with the remainder outside. Similar to the present itself, while the frame “seeks to contain, convey, and determine what is seen,” it “depends upon the conditions of reproducibility in order to succeed” and therefore must “break(s) apart every time it seeks to give definitive organization to its content.”44 This idea emphasizes that the “frame . . . itself becomes a kind of perpetual breakage subject to a temporal logic by which it moves from place to place.”45 We can imagine the present – socially, politically, culturally, materially – as just such a frame. While the present is bookended by past and future in linear narratives of time, it can equally be enframed by a multiplicity of pasts and futures and overlapping presents or in relation to conceptions of the divine or world-historic (as in an “eternal present”). These frames are neither real nor inevitable but contextual and meaning-making. Yet, they are also part of that which is being enframed. The present always plays an inextricably important role – albeit one that can vary in every imaginable way – in that which is used to construct it. Pasts, futures, and the borders separating them are conditioned by it, and it retains significant capacity to frame past and future. To frame is an act of exclusion that simultaneously emphasizes the importance of what is left out, but it is never only a one-off occurrence. “When a frame breaks with itself,” Butler argues, “a taken-for-granted reality is called into question, exposing the orchestrating designs of the 41

42 44

This is an observation that parallels moves by scholars like Der Derian and Cox who emphasize IR’s “chronopolitics,” “speed,” and “continuing present,” respectively. Der Derian 1990 and Cox 1981, as quoted in Lundborg 2016, 209. See also, Walker 1991. 43 Or to be more accurate how events and ideas are framed. Butler 2009, 9. 45 Butler 2009, 10. Butler 2009, 10.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

77

authority who sought to control the frame.”46 War and instances of political violence are the point of departure for Butler, but others within IR have shown how these ideas apply more broadly. Iain MacKenzie distinguishes political events from “things” or outcomes by their action-oriented elements and political “significance” – both of which require interpretation and the assignment of relationships across time.47 Events – at the international level – operate as the aggregation of countless actions at multiple levels of society that are imagined and interpreted – framed – in a specific, unified manner.48 To continue the war example, the realization of a set of events as a war only comes into being via a backward- and/or forward-looking aggregation of moments in political time.49 What we think we know about IR is largely the product of theorizing events after they have concluded.

The Present as a “Toolkit” for Thinking International Relations The past silently and implicitly occupies the primary place in IR’s imagination of the world. It informs how we view the present, its future, and the regularities, patterns, and theories we think are possible. It is our primary resource for inquiring into global politics, for formulating questions, generating answers, and imagining possibilities. As such, it represents a toolbox from which we develop concepts, apparatuses, and ways of knowing that become the toolkit by which we apprehend the world. Ideas like objectivity, separability, and the desirability of claims that “travel” across time and space have deep roots in our understanding of space and time. Concepts like generalizability are not free-floating ideas but constitute a tool we use to develop knowledge about how the world works. While valuable, these represent merely a means to an end – they are neither incontrovertible nor inevitable. Centering the category of the present brings other concepts to the fore we can use as “tools” to develop knowledge and guide 46 47

48 49

Butler 2009, 12. MacKenzie 2008. As should be clear, I use the term event throughout the book in a much more broad way than McKenzie, although his concept is useful and informs mine. Becker 1955 and Lustick 1996. Or alternatively, though a forward (and backward) looking imaginary that narrates these events – regardless of whether they have actually transpired – in such a way that together they constitute a war.

78

The Time of Global Politics

inquiry into global politics and IR. In what follows, I isolate five conceptual “tools” or “apparatuses” that constitute a “toolkit” based on the temporal imaginary above.50

Change and (Dis)Continuity Change is currently identified through its divergence with a settled timeline. It assumes a future into existence where, but for the change, things would have continued on just as they had in the past, continuing through the present and into the future. This presumes that the status quo possesses inertia and is fundamentally static, requiring active effort to disrupt. Alternatively, if the past, present, and future are constructs of the present, the underlying relationship between change and continuity is displaced.51 Currently, there is an assumption about the reality of time itself – despite acknowledgement of its varied experience(s) – that posits a continuous and harmonious relationship between past, present, and future.52 This is why time can appear so unyielding and be represented via a timeline or clock – it is entirely absent change. Minutes are minutes are minutes regardless of what we think about them. It creates a sense of reality that is continuous and unchanging, upon which meaning – and all that entails, including politics – sits. If we instead see time as the “social practice that translates temporality into meaningful codes and organizes temporality’s material influence,” then meaning and sociality – and politics – are not sitting atop a reality conditioned by an absent timeline but active participants in the creation and maintenance of it.53 In this case, because the present is a temporal location that lacks physical and spatial fixity and whose borders are in a constant process of construction, change becomes the ontological basis of reality in IR. While this positions politics as less continuous, with this imaginary, politics better retains its politicality and openness to the future and is less a series of outcomes inexorably conditioned by that which came before. Treating change as the ontological condition of the political present offers a different lens by which to construct our understanding of political reality. The “present,” however defined, is articulated via its difference with “the past,” “a past,” or “many pasts.” Put differently, 50 53

51 Zanotti 2019. Subotic 2016. Moran 2013, 283.

52

Moran 2013.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

79

it is constituted by the changes that exist between them. This is fundamental as “any satisfactory theory ‘must embody an understanding of the interweaving of change and permanence, each required by the other’.”54 Change becomes the presumption, the baseline, and the expectation, as opposed to a deviation from an established reality determined by the “real” past extending into our present and future. Continuity obviously does not disappear with this perspective, but it becomes a function of changing relations and/or an appearance, an apparent and temporary stabilization of that which is ever changing, emergent, and new. The spatiotemporal emptiness of atemporal, timeless reality and the theory it supports disappears. In its place is a series of presents, some overlapping and some not, some continuous and some not, all in need of temporal demarcation, explanation, and understanding. One ultimate effect is that it centers “heterotemporalities of historiography” for all of the field, displacing the Eurocentric construction of past and future as the only timeline from which we can draw.55 While it makes IR inevitably more difficult, attempting to understand political relationships that literally span the imagined political universe should never be easy.56

Nonfixity A presentist temporal imaginary articulates the world and international politics as unfixed, including its conception of the past. Despite intellectual resistance when scholars are directly asked about this, nonfixity of both the status quo and the past seems to characterize much of the discipline already. Those writing in critical and social theory largely accept the constructed and historically contingent nature of the present – and its past – when it comes to sociality, narrative, memory, and historiography.57 That said, there remains a positivist understanding of time as linear, empty, and directional that informs these projects as well as an asymmetrical emphasis on that which has 54

55 56 57

Rosenthal 1996. For a discussion of change as the foundational ontology in other disciplines, see e.g., Whitehead 1933, 73 and Fabian 1983. Griffiths 2017, 3 and Chakrabarty 2009. Bernstein, Lebow, Stein, and Weber 2000. This is perhaps due to the imagined historical origins of IR as history and a greater willingness to engage sociality in IR scholarship – see e.g., Oren 2016, Maliniak, Oakes, Peterson, and Tierney 2011, and Sitaraman 2016.

80

The Time of Global Politics

happened when seeking to explain and understand events in the international system. This ignores the paradox of timelessness embedded within past-centric approaches – if the past contains everything, then where does novelty and emergent phenomena come from? if the past provided everything for the present, then nothing new could appear; the apparently new would be merely a configuration of the old. Since the past is fixed and final, novelty is possible only by the intervention of something eternal or a-temporal; the future exists as possible in the form of inert, fixed, objective real possibilities. The ingression of eternal objects into events is Whitehead’s way of getting contingency from a fixed, fully determinate past that cannot itself adequately allow for contingency and emergence.58

In other words, part and parcel of a conception of the past as fixed and unchanging is the assumption that the future is ontologically dependent on that past, necessitating an explanation of where the newness of the present comes from absent some sort of Augustinian divine intervention.59 The point here is not that positivists, objectivist scholars, and others who accept the IR temporal imaginary as is are always and everywhere susceptible to the same claim – the observation about the problem of time and novelty is by no means without response in a variety of literature studies. For IR specifically, however, there remains an inevitable skepticism of new, divergent futures that are not obviously related to or somehow originate in the past.60 This is despite the increasing influence of pragmatism and processual ontologies, which could constitute a “third way, a properly conceptual one, one consisting in the attempt not only to admit novelty, but also to understand and explain it. The central point . . . is . . . the concept of process..”61 Returning to the distinction between the time of the scholar and the time of practice, to presume that this fixed past extends into the future creates an aberrant temporal understanding.62 Worse, however, this “sovereign voice of reason” linking past to future in knowable, definitive ways that are controlled by the scholar replicates a category of practice as a category of analysis.63 In other words, the move to 58 60 62 63

59 Rosenthal 1996, 544. Augustine 1993, 32. 61 Rosenthal 1996, Rosenthal 1997, Brioschi 2013. Brioschi 2013, 2. Bourdieu 1977, Hom 2016, Solomon and Steele 2017, Hom 2018b. Lundborg (2016) advances these claims in his critique of historical sociology, Lundborg 2016.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

81

articulate a singular temporal frame capable of anticipating the future is a reflection of sovereignty, state subjectivity, and neoliberal governmentality both politically and within scholarship.64 Hom’s work on the coemergence of Western notions of time and state sovereignty and Solomon’s linkage of subjectivity and temporal dynamics to ontological security are specific on this point. A switch to a presentist understanding of time and temporal relations better enables IR the ability to approach the temporal relationships we already articulate with the temporal nuance they require.65 It also allows us to better examine the manner in which those relationships are conditioned and shaped by the political practices we encounter and seek to engage.

Heterotemporality The present is defined by its relationality – there is no singular present but one that emerges in relation to pasts, other presents, and futures. Observers cannot finally disentangle themselves from that which they observe. This is as true for the scholar as it is for the practitioner. Rooting this claim in temporality is not merely a means to rehash the importance of sociality, history, or positionality, but rather to emphasize that locating reality in the present means that there is no longer a single objective location outside of time from which one can articulate an Archimedean point of observation even. Instead, subjects – global actors, but equally scholars and their scholarship – operate in a heterotemporal present where presents interrupt, engage, and exist in relation with each other. The task of the analyst and/or critic is to theoretically honor that by allowing it to shape their theory, rather than using their theory to domesticate these radical differences. Temporal plurality is a condition of existence and not a construct of scholarly imagination. Deleuze’s approach to time makes temporal plurality a characteristic of being and experience, rather than a mysterious ‘otherness.’ Individual human beings and social practices and institutions participate in a variety of chronologies, and the mutual incompatibility of the ‘presents’ inherent in, for example, my middle age and the globalisation of capitalism, does not make them either wholly unconnected or mutually unintelligible. When time is understood in this way, it becomes perfectly possible for the critical theorist 64 65

Brubaker 1996, Hom 2010, and Stockdale 2013. Hom 2010 and Solomon 2015.

82

The Time of Global Politics

to engage with diverse temporalities without reference to a higher level principle of historical organization. In this sense, it takes us back to Cox’s original call for a critical theory sensitive to the immanent structures and forces of international politics, but this time in the light of the call of feminist and postcolonial critics to attend fully to the voices silenced by the hegemony of Western power.66

This is not necessarily a new observation, as Hutchings’ claims track to what many already accept as an implication of intersubjective relationality constituted by difference. By foregrounding temporality, however, we can identify a basis for this claim that remains agnostic as to the role of sociality vis-à-vis materiality and instead offers the insight of subjective and intersubjective reality based upon conceptions of time and temporal imaginaries that transcend questions of materiality.67 In other words, even the most hardened positivist must account for this. Most importantly, it allows us to emphasize the multiplicity of perspective, environment, and context(s) operating at each moment. Global political dynamics are never truly universal spatially or temporally – the “world-political present” is always “polytemporal.”68 Put together, these characteristics emphasize the lack of presumed continuity across time and the subjectively produced, present-based nature of existence.69 Whether reality is understood discursively, socially, physically, or something else entirely, once the continuity assumption is removed, a past event or occurrence must somehow be intersubjectively “present” to be relevant. As a condition of reality in global politics, this becomes a central question and major research agenda for one who adopts this “toolkit.” One cannot simply answer in advance the question of what constitutes the “meaningful past,” privilege present meanings over absent ones, or focus on collective memory to the exclusion of other methods of explanation. Instead, the importance and multiplicity of the past and its interactions become something to be discovered – where and when it matters and most importantly how. By emphasizing the reality of the present, this move pushes scholars to theorize why past events matter for this present, 66 68

69

67 Hutchings 2007. See e.g., Büthe 2002. Hutchings 2008, and I take the term poly-temporality from Bjornerud 2018 with thanks to Orfeo Fioretos. From the presentist perspective in IR, there is an answer to the cliché: trees falling in the forest do not make a sound, a point drawn out – albeit not via this phrase – in Bain 2007.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

83

rather than asserting their relevance through a mechanistic view where events of the seventeenth century matter simply because a politically dominant history records them as meaningful. Even approaches that self-consciously try and move the study of security beyond static notions of anarchy and state centrism explicitly reinforce “that a focus on the mechanisms of mobilization can productively bring together orthodox and heterodox approaches to security” through “further specifying the mechanisms of power politics and the implications of a process-based approach to the study of power politics.”70 Simply by invoking the idea of mechanisms, an understanding of temporal universality attaches which privileges the universal past and continuous time. One way to make this idea more concrete is through the notion of “lost” histories or the idea of pasts that are no longer relevant to the contemporary imaginary that one seeks to explain.71 Fashion trends, music, and even the relative greatness of athletes can only come into being through relation with something articulated as temporally present. That past can take virtually any form but must be intelligible to a broader environment. Logically, “an interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself.”72 An avantgarde movement in art, for instance, only exists via a temporal relation to that which has come before – innovation requires a past against which it can be positioned as exceeding.73 Baseball history in America largely constitutes comparison with previous “greats,” yet that past is often times bounded and changes over time. A “great” player in 1920 looks very different from someone breaking home run records during the steroid era of the 1990s and different still from someone playing today given contemporary defensive strategies and shifting uses of pitchers. How this implicates present interpretations of actions 70 71

72 73

Goddard and Nexon 2016. The idea that a history is “lost” can be interpreted as reinforcing a universal temporal position, which this project rejects, thus the quotes. It is however, a term that is consistently invoked regarding historical trajectories and narratives that are underrepresented. For a discussion of these issues, see Bain 2007, Chakrabarty 2009, and Glencross 2015. Derrida 1991, 66. Interestingly, “avant-garde” began as a military term and initially kept its political associations. It was only “during the 1880s that it become a synonym for artistic innovation in the modern sense and lost its political connotations,” Hobbs 1997, 5.

84

The Time of Global Politics

and thus potential future trajectories can best be appreciated via a more heterogeneous understanding of the past and its relationship to present and future.74

Emergence The present itself possesses emergent qualities because of its collective constitution and articulated difference with past and/or future. Building on Stockdale’s observations regarding the “politics of preemption” which “implies a radical shift in the way political power is exercised,” which “enhances the discretionary power of state-decisionmakers” and creates a “link between the logic of preemption and a politics of exceptionalism,” I argue that this observation travels beyond issues of preemptive strikes and anticipatory governance.75 The present itself, in many cases, operates as a temporal exception, even if this exceptionality is decidedly not a reflection of the present’s natural qualities. From this perspective, the present differs from that which has come before – even if only in the minutest of appreciable ways – but also inevitably contains difference because of the multiplicity intrinsic to relationality among temporal entities. Mead and others identify this through the overlapping of perspectives that inevitably accompanies any encounter between subjects, but it is a shared assumption for most presentists that the idea of the present has an element of emergence and is in some way new. How this newness presents is a matter of context, but even in cases where the present is understood as completely continuous and ongoing, there remains a set of constitutive actions that include an element of the new. This element of newness means that the time of the present in politics inevitably possesses an exceptionality that must be attended to. Tensed time is 74

75

Projections in baseball, for instance, given the significant number of apparently measurable and recurring interactions, offers an ideal place for prediction, but also demonstrates the way in which knowledge about the game produces its own type of innovation. Tactical defensive shifts, adjustments for era, and arcane issues like pitch-framing all operate in a semi-transparent space of strategy where discoveries from data result in strategic shifts, necessitating counter-shifts, which recursively show up in the data. Some of the best “sabermetric” analysis takes this into account. As a frame for viewing politics, prominent journalists like Nate Silver have had an outsized effect on political discourse by linking the two, see e.g., Butterworth 2012. Stockdale 2013.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

85

generally understood as a product of language or sociality.76 It is created/produced through socially shared meaning, however that is understood to originate or occur, and thus like all ideas is constituted through difference.77 In the case of temporal relationships, the present is defined by its difference from the past (and future), and thus, an inextricable element of the political present is this newness. Because politics is constituted by contestation, that contestation must inevitably lead to new figurations and formations.78 Arendt speaks to this with her notion of natality and her taxonomy of thinking and action, which locates “temporality of action” and “time for beginning” as centered in the human experience of existing in the “gap between past and future.”79 Political action in the present is thus always already something that is operating in both a political and prepolitical space, an aporia that is covered over through narrative.80 Politics is continually producing and reproducing itself in a way that constructs the appearance of continuity, stability, and security by employing assumptions about time’s apparent universality. Other fields have already let the recognition of time’s fluidity impact their practices. For these disciplines, “despite the significant differences in the approaches of these theorists, therefore, their foundational understanding of time as a fluid underlying process, flow, or flux is comparable,” and for these fields, “this intrinsic temporal ontology has become a defining feature of social analysis.”81 Fluid time, as we can term it, is inherent in current theoretical models as the (chiefly metaphorical) motor facilitating the ongoing reproduction and modification of social life and is a constituent component of many varied forms of social analysis broadly treating of “historical,” “processual,” “political economic,” or “practice-based” approaches – despite the fact that, as James and Mills point out (2005b: 13), “the realm of time is not agreed even by the specialist physical scientists and philosophers to be one thing, one field.”82

While fluvial metaphors come with their own downsides and blindspots, and we should resist the urge to reduce alternative conceptions 76 77

78 80 82

Hodges 2008. Connolly in particular, as one would expect given his work on difference and identity, is among the most prominent making this point. For a discussion of this in the context of normative thought and world politics, see Hutchings 2011. 79 Foucault 2003. Marchart 2006. 81 Ricoeur 2010 and Solomon 2019a. Hodges 2008, 401. Hodges 2008, 402.

86

The Time of Global Politics

of time to “flow” – particularly because they smuggle in a host of assumptions about time’s continuity – the observation here is useful.83 One implication of this recognition is that once temporal understandings are formulated in this manner, the directionality of time is no longer assumed but theorized. Ultimately mechanisms could exist that are meaningful and/or hold across time, but skepticism is warranted given the ontological indeterminacy of institutions and the entities themselves.84 Der Derian, Virilio, and others have usefully analyzed the importance of time’s directionality, acceleration and/or deceleration, and the political relevance of divergences from the expected flow of time.85 For IR in particular, Der Derian established that changes in sociality and time were part of why the reflectivist/poststructuralist turn was so important. This was because of the “chronopolitical” nature of international politics where “these (post)modern practices are elusive because they are more ‘real’ in time than space and their power is evidenced through the exchange of signs not goods – their effects are transparent and pervasive rather than material and discrete.”86 Discourses are in the process of production and reproduction, and the present – where these actions, events, and occurrences take place – possesses distinct attributes when read in combination with the received and/or articulated past. Politics is experienced and conducted in these spaces even while the boundaries of the present are contested, yet present nonetheless.

Amplification IR is a quirky discipline. It purports to make global claims that travel across time and space even as it obviously remains a largely provincial exercise limited by its privileging of currently powerful actors and structures, Euro-American history, and English language scholarship.87 If the present is heterotemporal – as are those that constitute it – then many things that IR claims to “discover” or “bring in” already exist in global politics. Often times our scholarship simply 83 84

85 87

See Hom 2018a for an effective critique of fluvial metaphors. Skepticism, it should be noted, as in it warrants observation and critical examination, not rejection. 86 Der Derian 1990, Virilio 2006. Der Derian 1990, 297. For a particularly adept reading of how foreign policy interests and preferences shape the academic study of international relations, see Oren 2021.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

87

amplifies that which is already present. This is valuable and useful, but with a different temporal imaginary, we can better recognize this process as it occurs rather than positioning it via the dichotomy of either a “new” discovery or an “old” contribution that adds nothing. Amplification as a tool moves us away from a rhetoric of discovery with its colonial overtones and centers the process of reflexivity and humility regarding our claims. A new claim for IR is important and worth pursuing, but awareness of its existence in other pasts, presents, and futures will only add to its value.88 For example, adopting this temporal imaginary, while seemingly originating from a point of rather radical departure, actually captures some of the extant moves, scholarship, and knowledge already being produced within IR. Some of the conceptual points of departure for a presentist approach, such as the emphasis on nonfixity, subjective truth claims, and privileging change over continuity, already flourish in certain areas of the discipline, particularly those informed by social thought and critical theory. To some ears, these points may appear so obvious as to be banal or to simply represent “old wine in new bottles.”89 But in some ways, this is part of the point of a presentist approach – identifying that which is already present and articulating its limits and strengths and showing how it does or does not impact other presents. The point is not to displace all of IR’s temporal conceptions or to throw out any conclusion drawn from the old temporal imaginary. It is to build upon these claims by first making these assumptions visible and then identifying how IR can think temporality otherwise. One potential result might be a flat rejection of status quo temporal understandings, but it could also result in recastings of existing ideas. However these issues are resolved, the future simply cannot be known in advance. What the shift toward the present can do, however, is foreground the central role conceptions of time and temporal relationships play in the shaping of IR scholarly practice and international politics as currently constructed. What makes this “new wine” is the recognition of the role the temporal imaginary plays in

88

89

There are of course, also many normative reasons to adopt such a position based on an ethical orientation toward difference in all its guises. Although one sees this cliché utilized often in IR, Gasper (2005) uses the metaphor to examine the relationship between extant human development ideas and the move toward human security.

88

The Time of Global Politics

the continuation of these practices and the need to take seriously the idea of a bounded, contingent, and emergent present.90 While there might be a desire to “Forget IR,” IR is always remembering and forgetting its past(s) and constructing a present, however that present is understood or demarcated.91 A presentist temporal imaginary provides a better framework for intentionally deploying and reflexively critiquing these moves.

Epistemological Assumptions and Ontological Commitments with the Present Unsurprisingly, shifts in temporal understandings and commitments have a significant impact upon the ontological and epistemological assumptions at work in IR. Epistemologically, IR privileges accumulated knowledge and values knowledge claims which explain more of the past over those that are more limited. A temporal way of expressing the privileging of generalizability in IR is that the more “space” in time a claim remains valid, the more clearly the claim is understood as “true.”92 Democratic peace theory, for example, holds such a strong place in liberal institutionalist thought at least partially because of its apparent temporal breadth and depth. For those who accept the claim that democracies do not fight each other, part of its power comes from the way that it seemingly encompasses so much more of the past than alternatives.93 To use another claim, most would agree that some arms races result in conflict, but because democracies almost never engage in war with each other (according to advocates of democratic peace theory), the latter claim is more widely accepted.94 While it may appear intuitive, human intuition may not be the best basis for evaluating epistemological claims about politics at the global level.

90 93

94

91 92 Elshtain 1998. Bleiker 1997, Guzzini 2020. Jackson 2010. Accounting for the dynamism and change over time within this “conventional wisdom” has been usefully explored within this literature, see e.g., Gartzke and Weisiger 2013. The editors of International Security refer to the democratic peace as “conventional wisdom” in the opening to the special issue, Russett, Layne, Spiro, and Doyle 1995. There’s a reason we typically refer to democratic peace theorists as working on the democratic peace and security scholars working on arms races as realists or something else.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

89

Epistemological Implications Epistemological debates within IR can appear somewhat impenetrable from the outside. While every scholar confronts these questions, most simply resolve the issues for themselves and address their work to those who think similarly. The stakes of these debates, however dormant and alienated, are enormous. They are particularly significant for precisely those scholars who refuse to foreground their epistemological assumptions and rely instead upon replicating extant understandings of the past. What constitutes “good” knowledge production in IR is either heavily implicated by a timeless set of viewpoints that replicate the scientific approach or heavily influenced by past assumptions and literatures. If temporality and the present are both produced by the political phenomenon we examine, then multiple implications arise for how we value and assess the knowledge we produce. Here, I isolate two – skepticism toward generalizable knowledge claims and the incorporation of temporal difference into what is and is not considered “good” theory.

Knowledge Production without Accumulation: Against Generalizability Since the linkage between past and future is discontinuous, the idea that knowledge accumulates cannot be automatically justified. Mechanisms that supposedly speak to the way in which things operate independent of context cannot be assumed to be universal across time when radical shifts in duration or the directionality of political temporality exist. Shifts in tempo, duration, rhythm, and the like all not only implicate the relationships between entities but also shape the entities themselves.95 Alternatively, for the presentist, knowledge may accumulate in absolute terms, but its application and utility for the present and its potential futures are where its value arises, not through an implicit progressivist assumption. Where this diverges from critical IR scholars who would agree with this sentiment is that the notion of accumulation or future expectations is complicated by political context. What this means as an alternative to those who wish to retain a future orientation, for example, prediction, is that it calls for an emphasis on addressing the temporal boundaries and temporal 95

Solomon 2019b.

90

The Time of Global Politics

location of specific claims. For instance, and most simply, a prediction about East Asian conflict and power transitions could limit itself to the next 25 years.96 A more sophisticated manner of going about it would focus on the important elements of the present that the scholarship speaks to, as well as looking at recurring elements of the rise and fall of specific presents. The very resistance to the idea that temporal limitations and emergence can shape epistemological assumptions, however, betrays something important about the distinction between presentist approaches and mainstream IR conceptions of temporal relationships. Some would respond to the characterization of generalizability made here as a scarecrow argument: “Of course, we’re not making ‘time-less’ claims,” some could argue, “IR isn’t astronomy and no one really believes even the ‘scientific’ claims in IR are big T truth.”97 What presentism does, however, is fully embrace this idea and its theoretical implications for how we understand the political world. It does this by identifying a basis for it that goes beyond assumptions about the situatedness of knowledge claims, but in the shared understandings of temporality animating the discipline. Presumption gets turned on its head – the accumulation of knowledge is only relevant insofar as it implicates the political present at play. It cannot be employed as an assumption enabling the indefinite validity of a claim or as a means to assert its likelihood in the future. We are already increasingly accepting claims that are, if not explicitly spatially limited, de facto spatially limited. Shifting this to include the temporal dimension is the next logical step to better understand those limitations. “Terrorist” organizations track directly to the understanding of “violent non-state actors” offered by states and in particular the United States and Europe in the twenty-first century. The slippage between insurgent groups, separatists, and “violent non-state actors” occurs in concert with the American foreign policy establishment treating these issues as similar, rather than from a strict analytical separation.98 Even the centering of foreign policy in the study of terrorism betrays American and European categorizations that 96

97

98

Presuming, of course, that it was empirically warranted and that such a round number is appropriate for the upper limit of one’s claims. A comment frequently heard when initial drafts of the project were read by colleagues. Jarvis 2009a.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

91

diminish right-wing analogs at the domestic level – even when that violence is more lethal and widespread. The study of migration patterns is similarly determined by a shared present – the European experience looms large in security studies, while shifts elsewhere are relegated primarily to area studies or other specialists. This is part of why the push toward global IR is so important because the manner in which assumptions about the boundaries of the present replicate EuroAmerican interests remains largely implicit, even for theory that positions itself against Eurocentric knowledge creation.99 A claim made at this particular moment, for this particular present, may appear to be generalizable, but if the ontological status of the present to come is new and emergent, then basing our predictions off of generalizations that explain the largest part of the past seems inappropriate. A coin that comes up heads 15 times in a row is only likely to do so in the future if we retain our understanding of what is and is not heads, a coin, what it means to “flip,” and a variety of other variables needed to insure replicability. Most importantly, those data we have collected must be relevant to the future we seek to predict.100 All of these are simply a long way of saying that if our ontological understanding of what it means to be the present – future or current – is that it diverges with the past, then an epistemological assumption that privileges claims that explain the “most” of the past can be neither automatically correct nor the necessarily ideal way to best anticipate the future. Most importantly, it cannot be expected to address precisely the type of crises and emergent events that motivate IR in the first place.

Temporally Contingent Epistemologies With a heterotemporal shared present, epistemological assumptions can vary as they are prone to shift based on the present described, occupied, or engaged. This is not to say that epistemological assumptions disappear – epistemic communities certainly exist and construct themselves with duration across time. Rather, it is to say that these assumptions cannot safely be relied upon or justified ex ante as 99 100

Acharya 2014. King and Zheng (2001) articulate this well in their assessment of the problems of scientific techniques for analyzing and predicting the future of “rare events.”

92

The Time of Global Politics

something that exists outside of time. A move like this has typically been characterized as intellectually dangerous because any step toward a world with temporally variable truth claims and covarying epistemological assumptions can appear relativistic and anarchic. For a presentist, the notion that epistemological assumptions are somehow cross-temporal or transhistorical is already impossible – ideas may be able to travel across time, but their ontological existence is ultimately bound in relationship to a present or multiple presents, however defined. For instance, current IR scholarly assumptions about what constitutes useful knowledge and truth claims track closely to those of the actors we are most interested in, namely, American and Western European institutions. Smith argued over fifteen years ago that IR reflected “American political, economic, and cultural hegemony” where there is a “commitment to studying the world behaviorally,” the result of which is “to skew the discipline toward the policy concerns of the United States and to ensure that the available theories for studying these concerns are theories that fit the US definition of ‘proper’ social science.”101 At least partly because of IR’s temporal imaginary and its attendant epistemological assumptions, his claim still rings true today. Linear time and its temporal imaginary reinforce the IR scholar’s understanding of what is and is not a truth claim because it reinforces their understandings of philosophy of science. It also reflects dominant neoliberal and sovereign state discourses that treat linear clock-time as inevitable and biologically predetermined, rather than reflections of the political power of those systems102 What presentism adds is a recognition that these understandings are coconstitutive of a particular political present, forcing debate regarding whether or not to accept them in specific work on specific presents. Different epistemological values may need to be different for different projects with different goals. Moving away from a fixed notion of time where debates need to be resolved in a “time-less” manner better enables this epistemological flexibility. For instance, dominant conceptions of globalization and sovereignty privilege a notion of calculable, linear time that is progressive and accelerating.103 Ideas and concepts produced and reproduced by the institutions that discursively privilege this notion of time and the temporal understandings that arise from it combine to form a unified 101

Smith 2002.

102

Hom 2010.

103

Virilio 2006, Hom 2010.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

93

temporal imaginary. But the appearance of unity should not be conflated with the ultimate reality of unity. Globalized, sovereign entities and the environment in which they operate – their world political present – may be understood as distinct from other collective presents, such as those of multinational corporations, indigenous groups, “invisible” labor forces in rural areas, or even global “terrorist” groups like the Islamic State.104 But they are also likely to overlap and coconstitute each other. Theorizing these overlaps and interruptions requires a move to understand the manner in which temporal relationships operate between these temporal–political frames. A singular epistemological frame based upon an extant dominant present precludes important issues from investigation. An epistemological assumption that privileges knowledge with apparent temporal breadth, for instance, may be especially useful for projects seeking to explain and predict the likely outcome and/or stability of politically privileged and extant power structures. For those engaged in a project at odds with this present, however, or one that seeks to disrupt it, those epistemological assumptions should be resisted. While this is not necessarily a new concept, what presentism does here is show how the differential treatments and variance in assumptions are not necessarily evidence of competing ideas. Rather, it is that these assumptions can vary based upon the temporal present (or presents) engaged and purpose of the work. Doing so ultimately displaces the need to resolve the binary of positivism/postpositivism that continues to animate scholarly debate and appears to force a scholarly choice one way or the other.105 Ontological Implications Given the role of time in our understandings of space and relationality, altering our ontological understanding of time has significant impact on the ontological assumptions we deploy when thinking through international and global politics. Similar to the epistemological endorsement of implicitly scientific approaches, our ontological assumptions employ tropes from universal clock-time that lead us to privilege certain forms of knowledge over others. Universality in time 104 105

Bashir 2016 and Porter and Stockdale 2016. A choice typically made in practice, rather than through public profession of position as was often the case among participants in debates about grand theory – especially in the 1990s.

94

The Time of Global Politics

produces assumptions regarding the universality of collective entities across space. Continuity in the timeline pushes us toward inertial views of entities and assemblages that are only able to change with external intervention, rather than being at all times constituted through emergent change and overlapping presents. Finally, homogeneity in time limits efforts to articulate ontologies in and of difference, raising an implicit barrier for important work in gender, coloniality, race, and queer politics and obviating the transformative impact they should have already had. In short, this temporal assumption further marginalizes those perspectives and experiences that are not currently privileged by dominant political formations. I isolate two areas where ontological shifts could take place – an ontology that places entities and relations back in time – the present – and replacing ontological continuity with ontological assumptions of change.

An Ontology of the Present Presuming the existence of entities across time produces the static ontology that many authors have critiqued as a problem for a variety of reasons – for example, the inattention to difference, reductiveness regarding process, and the variance with which it stands in relation to political practices.106 One way of framing the different ontological assumptions informing these approaches is as a temporal shift toward entities being continually produced and reproduced in the present. With this understanding, political practices exist within the present. Indeed, this is the only space that politics can exist, because ontological reality shifts from the past to the present. To be clear, this is not an uncritical endorsement of Heidegger’s “vulgar time” or a statement that the present as a series of nows is the actual present as individually experienced or politically constituted. The present, under this temporal imaginary, is defined by its characteristics of movement, absence, and the negotiation of difference, rather than simply as a there to be identified. This is something Hoy characterizes as “movement.” Furthermore, this autoaffection generates the illusion of time as a movement from one “living present” to another, and it even covers up the metaphorical 106

See e.g., Wight 2006 and Croft and Vaughn-Williams 2017.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

95

character of the word “time.” For Derrida, the living present is not really fully self-present, but instead is “always already a trace.” The history of metaphysics has tried to cover up the illusion we have that the self of the living present is primordial. What Derrida suggests is that temporal difference is what generates the sense of the living present as being self-same, rather than the other way around. In other words, temporalization makes possible the conceptual distinctions between subject and world, inside and outside, existent and nonexistent, constituted and constituting, and even space and time. Whereas the metaphysics of presence presupposes these distinctions and tries to explain experience in terms of them, Derrida shares Heidegger’s sense that thinking about temporality requires an explanation of how these distinctions emerge from the primordial activity of temporalization, or temporality temporalizing.107

In the context of politics, especially security politics, this seemingly abstract sentiment is already the basis for much contemporary thinking on security. Threats, for instance, possess an ontological status that project existence across time but in reality only exist in a present it is constantly escaping. The production of security necessitates a construction of temporal relationships between past and future, as well as present and future, in order for a “primordial” subject – the state – to emerge.108 One can also point to the “shadow of the future” that informs institutionalist thinking – and realist critiques – in IR.109 One does not have to enter (or exit, as it were) Plato’s cave to understand that to cast a shadow requires both an entity’s existence and a light to illuminate it. This “shadow” that determines action is a selfconstructed one, apparent in the present only due to contemporary figurations of politics rather than a recognition of something fixed and predetermined regarding the nature of the future. Put differently, the shadow cast by the future does not manifest via the future imposing itself on the present. It is instead the other way around – a projection of a specific imagined future from a shared political present. The privileged ontological assumption of contemporary IR remains the state, but the state is neither timeless nor acontextual.110 From the 107 109

110

108 Hoy 2012, 79. Campbell 1998a, Weber 1998, and Stockdale 2013. This is a widely held trope within this line of scholarship, see e.g., Axelrod and Keohane 1985. The idea of privileging is important here as the argument is explicitly not that all, or even most of IR, ontologically relies upon the state, but rather that it is operates a center around which scholars position themselves.

96

The Time of Global Politics

presentist perspective, nothing is timeless and entities are constituted through narrativizing the political present as one where their existence is indefinite, inevitable, and recurring. In international politics, entities become themselves by articulating continuity. This articulation is both forward- and backward-facing and includes the production and reproduction of pasts and futures that create a discourse of continuity that is ontologically prior and prepolitical even as these moves obscure the processes themselves. Walker puts it thusly, “Claims about a point of origin, a tradition or an essentially timeless form known as the state have had an enormous impact on what world politics is assumed to be, and thus on what it means to participate in or offer a legitimate account of world politics.”111 David Campbell’s work on the performative relationship between sovereign subjectivity and security implicitly captured the temporal dimension of the state’s narration of itself as timeless, a point he builds upon later in his analysis of the early stages of the war on terror.112 Initially, he states, “the history of America is effectively de-historicized, for this privileging of the spatial over the temporal in American experience has given history the quality of an eternal present” invoking Cox and the “eternal present” that Lundborg usefully identifies in his critique of the present’s status in historical sociology.113 Alternatively, a presentist temporal imaginary removes the ontological foundation upon which IR’s ontological assumptions rest – namely, that entities exist in time, rather than are constituted by it and therefore are a form of time – a timing mechanism itself.114 For an entity to even exist within IR, it must be part of a series of temporal relationships. Sovereign states possess a temporal depth that extends deep into the past and will continue throughout the indefinite future. For the most successful of these states, it becomes an “eternal present” giving these secular authorities a divine cast.115 Despite IR’s pretensions that it is engaged in the generation of scientific knowledge and accumulated wisdom, it appears that – as noted before – “nothing seems to accumulate, not even criticism.”116 But while Waltz characterizes this as a failing, it may just be an inevitable function of the subject matter itself and something IR scholars 111 112 114 116

Walker 1989: 179 (in Hoogensen, Gunhild, and Kirsti Stuvøy 2006, 220). 113 Jarvis 2009b. Campbell 1998a, 132 and Lundborg 2016. 115 Hom 2010, Moran 2013. Campbell 1998b, Lundborg 2016. Waltz 1979, 18 in Oren 2016, 77.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

97

should actively embrace.117 Politics occurs primarily in the present, however imagined. Aspiring to accumulated knowledge claims may be missing the point of politics entirely, and a temporal imaginary based on change, discontinuity, and an ever-emergent present might even bring us closer to the politics we seek to explain and understand. In other words, the continual focus on the present and the difficulty IR has in developing knowledge that accumulates is a reflection of the practices our work engages and not a failing.118 The misstep lies in the maintenance of a temporal imaginary at odds with the processes under investigation. On first look, ontological indeterminacy may appear to preclude definitive statements about the future or present, but this understanding does not call for a retreat into historical description nor does it preclude assessable claims or ideas that engage the future. Ontological Nonconsecutivity Presentist approaches to sociality necessitate an underlying presumption of the possibility of nonconsecutivity between moments in time. If we no longer presume temporal consecutivity, however, it leaves us with one of two choices – one is that all “causal” claims, no matter how broadly we label that idea, are impossible because there are never adjoining moments in time where the internal dynamics of the causal mechanism can implicate each other.119 Alternatively, causality could still occur in a nonconsecutive manner.120 Debates about causal theory, what constitutes a causal claim, and the manner in which these mechanisms can be proven through quantitative, formal, qualitative, or any other methods are expansive and need not be summarized here. At a more colloquial level, however, scholars all include a notion of causality in their thinking. To say that a relation results in some transformation, however conceptualized, often times implies a “cause” in a very loose sense. The nuclear taboo, for instance, may not “cause” nuclear restraint and may be wholly “constitutive,” but there are 117 118

119

120

Sjoberg 2020. Or alternatively, represents a failure that should be embraced, Fisher and McIntosh 2021. Zeno’s paradox – where the arrow covers ½ the distance remaining with each segment of time, yet never actually reaches its target – is illustrative here. This is part of the appeal of “assemblage thinking” in IR and social theory more broadly speaking, see Banta 2013 and Acuto and Curtis 2014. See also, Vaughan-Williams and Lundborg 2015.

98

The Time of Global Politics

elements of the phenomenon that can be teased apart where one thing “causes” another, if by “cause” we simply mean this results in that.121 Informing these methods of approaching politics, however, is an assumption of continuity across time – namely, that time has no influence on these relationships in and of itself. The passage of time is empty, linear, and therefore continuous.122 For the presentist, however, this is not necessarily the case and temporal context must matter because of the existence of temporal difference. Specifically, what we have characterized as “causality” is a function of the presents we observe and theorize. The causal-constitutive debate has made this well-trodden ground, but the epistemological implication is important to recognize here and emerges from a specific temporal understanding rather than positivist orthodoxy. A constitutive claim appears more time-bound and thus is difficult to make into an assessable “causal” claim because it cannot be drawn consecutively. But we see this in science all the time – fractals, self-organization, quantum nonlocality – and it is perhaps even more easily imaginable for those focused on large social relations.123 For a presentist, a different understanding of social relations is necessary even for those engaged in constitutive theorizing and critical theory. Much of this type of work relies upon a deep sense of temporal consecutivity, even as this work focuses on individual events, crises, socially constituted narratives, and paradigmatic shifts in social structures. The production of meaning, production of subjects, and the reproduction of discursive structures still implicitly rely upon an imaginary of consecutivity and linkages between past, present, and future.124 Interpellation of the subject, subject formation, and meaning-making presume continuity across time even as these processes resist articulating continuity in the discursive formations constitutive of these processes.125 If those functions are occurring in a present that is already continually creating itself, rather than unfolding from the past to the future in one singular, shared metanarrative, then theorizing the implications of our claims, what value they offer going forward, and the way in which they should be interpreted becomes an 121 123 124 125

122 Ward 2016. McIntosh 2015. See e.g., Kavalski 2007, Kavalski 2015, Wendt 2015, and Montgomery 2016. Honkanen 2007. It is here where one can see the co-constitution of relationships and temporality most clearly.

A Presentist Approach to International Relations

99

important question. Answering that question requires justifying one’s claims without relying on ontological temporal assumptions regarding consecutive occurrences, accumulation, or temporal depth.

Conclusion Shifting the focus of IR away from an exclusive focus on the past to one centered on the present can have far-reaching effects and implications on IR. At the same time, however, this move builds upon and amplifies already existing themes and movements in the field. A focus on process, relationality, and change seems to characterize much of what constitutes innovative IR work at this moment. Presentism captures exactly that via a temporal imaginary that is more flexible and capacious than the one we currently work with. It is not an attempt to resolve the ultimate reality of time or to replace the singular understanding of time with a different, similarly hegemonic, representation. Presents overlap, parallel, and intervene with each other. Boundaries can be firm and fixed or blurry and ill-defined. A presentist imaginary better enables IR to replicate and appreciate the multiple, disparate presents that constitute international political life by refusing to universalize time. This refusal is positive and productive, enabling a better appreciation of change, newness, and emergence and the importance of temporal relationships in structuring and constituting politics. In some ways, this is a radical move, but it also allows us to better understand that which we already know. Employing a new “regime of historicity” does not make history disappear but does enable it to be rethought and allows us to reformulate our understanding of the present and to ask new questions. The following chapter identifies some of the specific ways in which this can occur in the dominant, received methods of IR theory and international politics.

|

4

The Temporality of IR Theories Global Politics from the Present

Introduction Theory is perhaps the site where concerns about presentism are most apparent. At root, theory seeks to explore the past in order to distill patterns and regularities that provide evidence for theoretical claims that apply across large swaths of history. Theory acts as a way of limiting the apparent newness of present-day events and bringing it back into the ultimately explicable passage of history. Consequently, if the conception of the past changes and our “historical consciousness” shifts more toward the present, rather than the past, it represents a foundational shift with a widespread impact. If the past looms over all that we do theoretically – positivist or postpositivist – scholarly claims must be different if we adopt a different temporal imaginary. Temporal dynamics are no extraneous concern to theory and theorizing. As “temporal beings,” we all “have different senses of temporality” that inform our analysis. What is true for human experience is also “true of theoretical programmes, which contain within them assumptions about the nature of historical time.”1 Throughout the past half century, IR has been intellectually influenced – and at times organized – by “theoretical programmes” like realism, liberal institutionalism, and/ or constructivism. The different temporal assumptions at play in these “programmes” matters. They impact the questions asked and the universe of possible answers, and help determine which ones we find acceptable or “correct.” For the majority of scholars – as well as many practitioners – part of the formal introduction to the field of IR involves learning these schools of thought. While IR theory contains multitudes, these schools of thought are privileged as points by which the study of IR orients

1

Bell 2003, 807.

100

The Temporality of IR Theories

101

itself.2 The residual effects of these schools, along with the debates they stimulated, remains significant. Even as much of IR has progressed beyond debating the validity of realist claims versus constructivist challenges and focused instead on the projects these debates enabled like ontological security theory or, alternatively, using hypothesis testing to identify global political dynamics, these theories still echo. While much of the impact of this intellectual trajectory has been made explicit, one area that has been largely overlooked is in the implications their assumptions and understandings of temporality have had for contemporary theorizing. If we employ the conceptual tools provided by taking the present seriously, for example, heterotemporal difference, the construction of past and future, points of emergence, and discontinuity, what else can we learn about IR theory and global politics? What does it reveal about the ways we use theory to understand the international system? How would IR theory look different? The present can reveal important elements of contemporary state behavior in global politics and sharpen our understanding of key IR concepts at the systemic, interstate, and unit level. This chapter uses tools developed in Chapter 3 to explore the practice of IR theory, an approach that focuses on the systemic dynamics of global politics, while the following two chapters address interstate relations – war – and unit-level dynamics – foreign policy. While time and temporality may be ephemeral concepts, they are also ubiquitous. That said, while important, time is not some sort of master narrative for unlocking all the mysteries of IR scholarly practice. While this might be an ideal to shoot for, attempting to identify all the ways in which a presentist lens could change our understanding of IR theory is a project doomed to failure. That said, failures can be generative, subversive, and meaningful.3 While this chapter will inevitably fail to “resolve” the question of whether a presentist imaginary is the preferable alternative with any sort of finality, it does present a

2

3

I use the word “privilege” intentionally, rather than “accepted,” as many of those educated in the discipline of IR explicitly do not accept this idea. However, for those who position themselves critically or in opposition, their positionality implicitly confirms the privileged position of these schools of thought. Virtually no one, for instance, argues that realist IR is not part of the discipline, even if many would argue it shouldn’t be. Halberstam 2011, Sjoberg 2019.

102

The Time of Global Politics

generative intervention that can further attention toward the crucial role time and temporality play in theorizing IR.4 This chapter assesses three of IR’s “theoretical programmes” – realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism – utilizing the theoretical tools provided by the present. The first section lays out the case for considering these theoretical architectures, even if only heuristically, rather than simply ignoring them and moving on. The present is not a singular research program in and of itself but an “ethos” and orienting point – this chapter uses realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism as examples to show how IR theorizing could change by adopting such an approach.5 The next sections focus on four concepts – temporal scope, emergence, contingent change, and heterotemporality – to show how each set of theories could be different if informed by the present and its attention to temporality, temporal difference, and the relationships between past, present, and future.

The Contemporary Value of the Paradigms for Thinking about IR and IR Theory IR is, and always has been, the study of the present. It is not that pasts and futures do not matter – they do, and indeed, they must. Without them, the present loses much of its meaning. Yet, as much as past and future are constitutive of the present, the present is similarly constitutive of the past and future. The theoretical position advocated here does not ignore past and future as historians imply when using presentism as a dismissal. Instead, rather than evacuating the meaning, purpose, import, and effect of the/a present by treating it as solely dependent on the past, the move here operates as a means to better understand all three – past, present, and future. From a sociology of knowledge perspective – rather than a normative or intellectual one – the critiques of scholarly practice that have been most effective typically provide “analytical purchase” on already established research areas. For the majority of IR scholars – particularly those working in mainstream scholarship – critical work that lacks specific examples of what could be different represent something 4 5

Fisher and McIntosh 2021. The idea of “ethos” I use here borrows from Campbell’s positioning of poststructuralism and critical theory as an ethos for exploring and understanding security, Campbell 1998a, 226–227.

The Temporality of IR Theories

103

potentially interesting, but not anything that requires change.6 By thinking more carefully across the canonical theories in areas like temporal scope, emergence, contingency and change, and heterotemporality, IR theory could improve its understanding of the dynamics central to successful scholarship, even on its own terms. It represents an immanent critique, utilizing a language already intelligible to current actors and scholars.

Why the Ism’s, Again? If we used the main schools of thought taught in many introductory classes to map the field’s current research, we could end up quite confused. These schools of thought would be nearly useless in providing “directions” to anyone seeking the lay of the land in contemporary IR. But they prove valuable as a heuristic and starting point for understanding the contours of debates, the questions, and the topographical features one could expect to find in contemporary IR – even if their precise applicability is in question.7 While debates between and among these traditions may not represent the cutting edge of published work in the field, they do represent dominant elements of scholarly training – particularly in the US – and many of the debates that are now the focus of scholars who resist or deny the relevance of the school (s) from which they originate began in these spaces.8 For example, leadership studies, while highly quantitative and oriented toward hypothesis testing, owes itself to debates on levels of analysis going back to Man, the State, and War.9 Focusing on these schools of thought shows the potential of a presentist approach, not because these are mimetic representations of how the field functions at the moment but because these discourses are part of an intellectual history that connects IR to an imagined past the 6

7

8

To be clear, this is not a position consistent with a presentist approach, because new ways of knowing and thinking rarely emerge simultaneously with a fully formed alternative or course of action. Collaboration and contestation are productive endeavors that often require durational time absent a fully formed solution. That said, because the presentist position is in conversation with mainstream scholarship, engagement with this way of thinking remains important. See Barad 2007 for the conception of topography used here. Kristensen 2016, I employ “topographical” here much as Barad does in her “agential realist” approach, Barad 2007. 9 Colgan 2016. See e.g., Waltz 1979, Horowitz and Fuhrmann 2018.

104

The Time of Global Politics

discipline shares. Knowledge of these traditions also serves a gatekeeping function at the level of undergraduate and master’s training. It is something someone must be conversant in, regardless of whether it has any utility for their own work going forward. This scholarly imaginary reproduces a narrative of continuity where past, present, and future cohere to produce an intellectual field that scholars can place themselves within and/or against. Doing so makes the study of IR, whether as a stand-alone discipline or a subfield within American political science, a meaningful idea but does not necessarily reflect the field’s center of gravity at any particular moment. While well-worn and resisted by many scholars – whether someone self-identifies as a realist or institutionalist is largely irrelevant and passé for most scholars currently emerging from graduate schools – these still offer a shared language for IR regardless of the vernacular one practices “in the home.” It may represent – like Latin – a dead language, but studying it can illuminate some of the quizzical directions our discipline has taken. It is also a way of better understanding the supposed “classics” of IR that inexorably lead us to this common moment. And much like classics as a field, it is a canon that can never be accurate or fair but still constitutes a boundary by which an epistemic community defines itself and emerges. It is a vocabulary we all understand even if we speak in different dialects and identifies potential sites for discourse and research.10 Even as we exceed and deny the relevance of these schools of thought, they still animate our scholarly present.11 Additionally, part of their value lies in their ability to reveal some of the animating assumptions and sites of debate within IR. For example, ontological security theory comes from constructivist debates with realism on identity, its creation, and its maintenance in state politics.12 Debates about the future of the liberal world order flow straight from more theoretical investigations of democratic peace, economic interdependence, and the value of institutions.13 Great power conflict and the 10

11

12 13

More accurately, are expected to understand, particularly by those who provide professional rewards such as grants, hiring, and publication. Thinking through the manner in which this retains these ideas and necessitates a continued production of this past, rather than “forgetting” for instance, is an important project that critical theorists are engaged in, albeit in different terms which largely accept the centrality of the past and its ultimate reality. Mitzen 2006, Suboti
c 2016. Reus-Smit 2013, Ikenberry 2017, Reus-Smit and Dunne 2017, Ikenberry 2018.

The Temporality of IR Theories

105

future of US “hegemony” as well as questions regarding nuclear weapons and their use, production, and dismantlement all can be tracked back to central theoretical questions within realism as well as some of the responses offered by constructivists.14 The point is not to adjudicate whether this is an accurate depiction of the intellectual history of the discipline – much work already shows how this is not the case. It is however a story of IR’s past that one must familiarize oneself in order to contribute in the present. The idea of “schools of thought” presented here is that they exist as projections of a particular present, operating as a shared past that we acknowledge as legitimate work – regardless of one’s personal positioning and even if one sees this legitimacy as detrimental. It is the scholarly past against which new perspectives engage to produce new insights, ideas, and fields of study. The point of this chapter, it should be clear, is not to reify a specific past of IR but to deploy it as one extant past against which new ideas – specifically a presentist imaginary – can emerge.

Realism Both classical realism and structural realism situate themselves within the long history of political realism, a tradition that predates the formation of the sovereign state, let alone the discipline itself.15 Hobbes, Thucydides, and Machiavielli, among others, are all drawn upon as classical justifications for realist thought. Even Waltz and Mearsheimer and their contemporary adherents saw themselves as the most recent manifestations of this tradition – structural realists – as applied to international politics.16 While that through line of history is articulated as continuous and direct, from an intellectual history perspective, contemporary imaginaries of realism have an ambivalent relationship with political realism of the past, even diverging from canonical authors as relatively recent as Morgenthau. The history of realism as understood by IR has little to do with the actual historical genealogy, Molloy argues, and realism should not be equated with

14 15

Most famously, Tannenwald 1999 and Tannewald 2005. 16 Osiander 2001. Humphreys 2013 and LaRoche and Pratt 2018.

106

The Time of Global Politics

contemporary structural realism, as others have developed neoclassical and reflexive versions of realist thought.17 Even for those who are not realists or do not accept its canonical characterizations, realist theory’s primary assumptions and points of emphasis still operate as important sites of debate. Wohlforth sums it up this way: It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the academic study of international relations is a debate about realism. Realism provides a foil against which many other schools of thought define themselves and their contributions. Take realism out of the picture and the identities of these other schools as well as the significance of their arguments become much less clear. The study of international politics thus is in an important sense inexplicable without a grounding in realism.18

Contemporary19 realist thinking has many strands, but its core assumptions remain its commitment to anarchy, viewing the international system as constituted by sovereign states, and the centrality of power – particularly military power – in shaping relations and producing influence.20 The influence of realism is particularly significant for those who focus on security. Even for those who are not explicitly realist, the orthodox study of security as realpolitik is shaped by “the persistent effects of a shadow of realism that looms over our understanding of realpolitik . . . a realism distorted by, first, the stubborn reliance on a states-under-anarchy framework, and second, a misunderstanding of what it means to claim that military power remains the ultima ratio of international relations.”21 What is most striking from a time-based 17 18 19

20

Williams 2004, Molloy 2006, and Hom and Steele 2010. Wohlforth 2008, 35. I use contemporary intentionally to emphasize two ideas. One is that contemporary is agnostic about the historical or temporal meaning of the present and its position – whether it is new or old, cyclical, progressive, or wholly emergent, contemporary is simply a statement about collective intelligibility. It is recognizable as such, even if its position as contemporary is disputed. Secondly, it is part of an intentional resistance to terms such as “modern” or even “current” because these terms include a set of normative values. This is not to say contemporary does not, but rather my usage here is meant to distinguish from any sense that this is the most “new” or the inheritor of a set of practices from history such as “modern” and its relationship to modernity. 21 Goddard and Nexon 2016. Goddard and Nexon 2016, 5.

The Temporality of IR Theories

107

perspective is that these assumptions are posited as timeless, operating at every moment we encounter international politics. Practitioners of realpolitik argue that they are the true gatekeepers of thinking on international politics because they are the only ones who see the world as it really is. Many (neo)realist arguments, claiming to draw on the wisdom and experience of the ages, suggest that there are perennial features of intercommunal politics, and that as a result it is necessary to recognize these and to act in accordance with their dictates. In so doing, realists articulate a specific conception of historical time, as static and unchanging, and consequently they stress the inescapability of the logic of power politics. Such ‘realism’ thus forecloses the possibility of substantial global transformation; consequently, it annihilates the future through denying any possibility of transcending the obdurate trajectory of the past.22

All theoretical programs possess a temporality – realism, with its focus on power politics and its emphasis on “timeless” characteristics, has one that is particularly explicit, even if not necessarily intentional.23 Realism’s temporality is both static and cyclical – static in that it presumes that the characteristics and ontology of the system are “timeless” and cyclical in that balances of power will shift but ultimately remain governed by equilibriums that will inevitably reset. It is no accident that realism turns to canonical theorists of politics because its understanding of political reality de-emphasizes the temporal context of political practice and elevates those thinkers whose writing is regarded as timeless. This temporality and its attendant assumptions are central to its worldview and supposed dominance within the field, at least partially because it provides the epistemological edifice upon which realism can assert timeless statements about the international system. In the process, this supposed timelessness bolsters the claim that contemporary realist theory – although privileging European and American experiences in the past 200 years – also immediately applies anywhere else in the globe. While there is a cyclicality to global politics, rather than linear progression, given the emphasis on equilibriums, there are multiple ways of seeing this timeless approach.24 Ultimately, the supposedly recurring aspects of this theory’s temporality reflect the 22 24

Bell 2003, 807. Lundborg 2015.

23

McIntosh 2015 and Drezner 2021.

108

The Time of Global Politics

temporal perspective(s) of those agents and structures who retain power in that present. Given the supposed dominance of sovereign states in global politics, it is unsurprising – but also warrants questioning – that a past that centers sovereign states in anarchy dominates the IR imaginary. Beyond states, given the depth and breadth of the neoliberal global system in the past half century on top of the ongoing power of sovereign states, it is also unsurprising that the dominant temporalities of the “international community” are articulated as linear and progressive in a way that continually reproduces the very same structures that enable these actors to retain dominance. Beyond an imaginary that frames relations among states against a backdrop of anarchy, realists are also at least somewhat responsible for the focus on power. Yet, power – even military power, the central concern of realists – can also be understood as a temporal concept. Drezner identifies the ways in which power is inextricably temporal in its political manifestations, varying over time, but also by temporal distance and relationship – what he refers to as the “temporal returns” to power and its “temporal scope.”25 Strategic studies are increasingly explicit about the role of time and warfare, the material form of power realists typically emphasize as trumping all other forms and vindicating their particular worldview.26 Think of what constitutes power in the contemporary moment and the manner in which that may differ from scholars of the nineteenth century or even fifty years ago. Limiting the temporal scope even further, one could argue that information operations very recently became central and then were immediately – although potentially only temporarily – overtaken by disease control and surveillance as a potential determinant of great power relations.27 Even limiting our focus to materiality, technological shifts in global communications technology, the splitting of the atom, and the development of the Internet all constitute emergent phenomena largely unimaginable from the present of the nineteenth century. And yet, it is now impossible to imagine even an ontology of politics that ignores these forces. Put differently, it is an inevitable and anticipatable possibility that the present will be understood quite differently when it becomes the past. This consequence is not epiphenomenal but includes the supposedly timeless concept of power itself. Katzenstein and 25 26

Drezner 2021, 35–36. Carr 2021 and Rynning, Schmitt, and Theussen 2021.

27

Biscop 2020, 234.

The Temporality of IR Theories

109

Seybert’s concept of “protean power” moves away from current conceptions of power as “control,” for example, emphasizing “agility” and “contingency” and the productive elements of each – it illustrates how a temporally variant approach can gain greater analytical leverage on power politics at the global level.28 Returning to Drezner’s temporal analysis of power, unlike assumptions that track to spatialization, international political power may increase the greater temporal distance it covers. Conventional assumptions about power track to space, assuming that as the distance between actions/actors increases, power necessarily decreases. Even by IR’s dominant standards, concepts like this demonstrate the value-added of a “temporal view” of power itself, which remains the central concern of realists.29

Scope Temporal scopes operate within realist theory in explicit and implicit ways. For instance, Edelstein shows how the time horizons of decisionmakers during great power transitions shape state behavior depending on the relative importance each gives to their long-term versus shortterm interests. States oriented toward longer-term outcomes may initially act more competitive than cooperative, but doing so simultaneously “opens the space for cooperation, rather than foreclosing it.”30 Equally so, it creates what he calls a “now or later” dilemma where states oriented toward the long term can choose to prevent an opponent’s rise or alternatively “procrastinate,” in the process creating an environment where cooperation is more likely. Ultimately, he demonstrates, “threats are not just a product of capabilities and intentions. They also have a temporal component” where the “shadow of the future often looms ominously over great power politics.”31 While the applications to power transitions might be intuitive due to the relevance of threat projection intrinsic to times of transition, temporal scope also plays a role throughout realist IR. Often times, boundaries regarding scope implicitly govern thought but remain unstated. For example, how far into “the future” do established theoretical claims go? Are we speaking about the near term? Fifty years from now? 100? Structural realists ultimately make claims that are indefinite 28 31

Katzenstein and Seybert 2018. Edelstein 2017, 152.

29

Drezner 2021.

30

Edelstein 2017, 1.

110

The Time of Global Politics

due to the static and cyclical nature of the structure they articulate. Neoclassical realists following Morgenthau may be a bit more humble, but given the ultimate basis of their claims relies upon human nature, there is a similar assumed expansiveness to the scope of their claims. Despite these theoretical positions, most scholars themselves would be leery of explicitly adopting the position that these claims remain valid for centuries. Alternatively, for a presentist, scope dynamics are a product of political life and must be theorized and not assumed ex ante. This is because as long as there is a temporal gap between our anticipated claims and the present from which we advance them, newly emergent phenomena will intervene. Whether they will disrupt the veracity of the claim or disable the mechanisms identified is always an open question, but it requires research to answer rather than epistemological assumptions. This is at least one reason why Waltz’s work – among other realists – has retained such value. It explicitly claims that it is not a theory of causality or foreign policy, arguing instead that system effects make certain outcomes more or less likely while remaining agnostic about the “how” at the state level.32 The balance of power is explicitly central to realist IR and similarly impacted by boundary conditions related to scope. This happens because “balance of power politics prevail wherever two, and only two, requirements are met: that the order be anarchic and that it be populated by units wishing to survive.”33 Balance may be an equilibrium, but what is most intriguing – even, if not especially, for realists – is the divergences from it. Where there is the absence of a balance of power, there are the instabilities that result in war, conflict, and other crises that motivate IR in the first place. Scope claims are obvious – even if balances occur, how and when do they endure? And what does it mean to endure? A moment of balance is not a balance, while a decade of convergence in relative power may be an ideal example of one. While these distinctions may appear to be intuitive and inconsequential, a great deal of space exists between a moment and a decade – time scales do a great deal of work in making balances apparent. One specific implication centers on the need for identifying presents where we believe that there is a balance and theorizing what specific pasts and futures make that balance visible. Similar work could be done with 32

Waltz 1979, 122.

33

Waltz 1979, 121.

The Temporality of IR Theories

111

respect to the survival assumption. While most accept that states rarely “disappear,” there are a host of implicit scope conditions that enable this claim that leaves out entire histories. Small states, empires, annexed territories, nations without national territory, and other politically meaningful entities temporally transcend and complicate the idea that state survival is a binary, much less one with a universal history.34 Attention to the temporal boundaries of the security dilemma might also be fruitful. Does iteration necessarily reduce the tensions associated with the security dilemma?35 How can time impact it? Does duration impact these dilemmas in a more effective manner or is it tempo? Accelerated buildups are already known as more dangerous, but this presumes a universal past and future. In certain cases, there may be less concern regarding the tempo of a buildup because there is a past where the dilemma has persisted without erupting into conflict. In other words, there is a point at which a dilemma ceases to be a problem and instead becomes a way of life. Mitzen’s work on security dilemmas as constitutive of identity might usefully point toward an amplification of the temporal scope of dilemmas – similar work on nuclear proliferation points toward the role of distinct actions mattering differently at different times depending on where in the sequence of acquisition a state might be.36 Adding attention to the scope and their respective relationship to past and future could enrich this work, as those who emphasize the constructed nature of threats in the present make evident.37

Emergence Conceptually, realist theory identifies dynamics that, absent some sort of ontological shift, can logically be expected to continue into the future, providing a basis upon which to make predictions. Historically for the discipline, what this has typically meant is looking at one history – European history – to anticipate future political behavior worldwide. We see this most obviously in the “rise of China” debates popular in the United States and Europe for the past 34 36 37

35 Savage 2020. MItzen 2006. Mitzen 2006, Debs and Monteiro 2014, Debs and Monteiro 2017. Stockdale 2013.

112

The Time of Global Politics

few decades.38 These debates are illustrative of canonical realist thinking.39 Perhaps unintentionally, Friedberg put it best in an article that asked, “Is Europe’s Past, Asia’s Future?”40 The formulation of the research question explicitly articulates the approach and its limits. Study “the” past to understand and predict “the” future. When framed this way, it also illustrates how realist temporal frames miss the potential for emergence. This is by design, as realist thought emphasizes the “inescapable” realities of global politics, like the “pursuit of power” and flattens the potential for systemic change.41 Yet, emergence is both anticipatable – it is constitutive of any sociopolitical present – and unanticipatable – it contains the element of newness that makes the present distinct from the past, at the same time. For realists who emphasize the timelessness of realist assumptions and dynamics, this duality poses significant difficulty. When applied to specific questions like the likelihood of great power conflict, or the possibility of American and European power withering, it becomes even more so. That difficulty goes beyond methodological concern as it calls into question the supposed continuity in the reality that realists claim a monopoly on accurately apprehending. Intuitively, for those who are not committed to a realist worldview, the answer to the question of whether Europe’s past will match Asia’s future must be no because the future can never perfectly replicate the past. While it very well could produce developments that appear identical due to a specific shared lens, it cannot be finally identical because it is temporally and thus irreducibly different. Realists might argue that this misses the point as the proper question is whether China’s rise and the United States’ “fall” spark the same type of conflict dynamics we saw in the first half of twentieth-century Europe. This is a reasonable question but again represents only one way of understanding time and politics. Whether it is the same or different is a matter of perspective – if a twenty-first-century China– US war that directly mimics the European descent into World War II occurs, ontological emergence may not actually impact theories of great powers because the differences are not meaningful for the questions asked, the answers given, and the methods used to adjudicate between them. Again, though, that question can never be answered ex 38 41

39 See e.g., Shifrinson 2020. See e.g., Kristof 1993. Smith 2000a, 387, Mearsheimer 2001.

40

Friedberg 2000.

The Temporality of IR Theories

113

ante, but only from a particular perspective, meaning it is also likely that the inevitable differences could produce extremely important divergences, even if we were to maintain focus on the very narrow question of whether it replicates European conflicts of the past. This is partially why realist frames of past and future continually appear valid for framing research and thinking. The mistake we make is presuming that this is a function of universality, rather than a quirk of perspective. Once we leave the assumption of temporal universality behind, it allows us to think more carefully about what parts of Europe’s past are most like Asia’s future and how, if at all, Asia’s future will compare to Europe’s past. It also enables us to better appreciate the way continuity is produced because it is unexpected, rather than assumed. Reformulated under presentist terms, the question remains but is temporally circumscribed – will Asia’s future – given the boundaries of the present at work and the emergent presents still to come – replicate the European past as understood by the current present? In what ways? And what does the formulation of the research – the attraction we have to that type of question in the first place – reveal about “our” heterotemporal and inevitably circumscribed political present? Despite the Euro-American emphasis on theorizing this security environment, the role of the past and its potential divergences has largely been covered over. Yet, these divergences have been shown to be uniquely relevant by East Asia scholars who resist this formulation of past and future specifically, with some calling for a separate “East Asian IR.”42 This is because “the East Asian historical experience [emphasis added] provides an enormous wealth of new and potentially different cases, patterns, and findings, which promise to enrich our IR theories . . . the intellectual contributions of this emerging scholarship has the potential to influence some of the most central questions in international relations: the nature of the state, the formation of state preferences and the interplay between material and ideational factors.”43 In effect, the argument is that the past(s) of East Asia are left out by the supposedly universal present of IR. Doing so stunts the discussion of East Asia’s present and future in security politics and makes understanding the present and anticipating the future more difficult. It also shows in a concrete way how the supposedly universal 42

See also, Johnston 2012 and Kang 2013.

43

Kang 2013, 182.

114

The Time of Global Politics

ontological assumptions on time profoundly distort our understanding of global politics on its own terms, even as it insists on generalizability. On the broader question of great power competition – for example, Russia, China, and the United States – taking emergence seriously has other potential implications even for those narrowly interested in identifying likely outcomes. First, one can look to whether the presents of the respective competitors line up and are indeed comparable. The unstated assumption is that Europe in 1936 is potentially comparable enough to any other political scenario on the timeline that the research question can be asked and answered – and this is without engaging the question of shared antecedent conditions in Europe and Asia, something moves toward an “East Asian IR” call into question.44 Ontological assumptions regarding states, anarchy versus hierarchy, and the importance of sociality may vary significantly between these times and spaces, let alone the future divergences produced through emergence. Second, regardless of how we choose to answer the question of “Asia’s” or the world’s “future,” in order for the claim to work, we need to have a sense of what we imagine the Europe’s “past” to be, how relevant that is, and on what basis we assert its relevance. Perhaps Europe and Asia share a past that informs contemporary and future actions in global capitals through the continually unfolding collective memory that constitutes global politics as “international politics,” with its history and self-evidently appropriate “strategy.”45 It might be the case that the past we understand Europe to possess evidences mechanisms that should hold in the Asian context merely because they attach to states. Regardless of what the answer to that question is, how it is answered matters deeply because the assumed “we” asking and answering these questions does a lot of theoretical work and not always to the good. Third, there is the question of how much the “future past” matters. Post-Brexit, for instance, will the narrative trajectory surrounding Europe’s past differ as this future becomes another future’s past? What if in the next ten years, the EU is not seen as the realization of a century-long process of institution building but merely a decade-long detour from centuries of ongoing great power conflict, particularly if Germany and/or France take on a more assertive and nationalist foreign policy? While only currently a hypothetical, 44

Inoguchi and Newman 2002.

45

Langenbacher 2010, 23–25.

The Temporality of IR Theories

115

given recent American ambivalence toward NATO and shifts in the conventional wisdom regarding its unifying force within Europe, this appears to be increasingly thinkable.46 These examples are particularly useful because they illustrate just how different assumptions about the future are when writing from the present versus looking backward and knowing what actually happened. When – largely realists – were writing about the rise of China at the beginning of the twenty-first century, theorizing about 2025 was a meaningful and acceptable temporal scope. Discussions focused on aircraft carrier development, blue water navy capacities, and military buildups in space, all of which remain relevant and important to assessments of any country’s military capacity.47 But if a writer in 2001 knew that there would be an attack on the United States that would stimulate two decades of global war and the American occupation of multiple countries, their ideas about the contours of possible futures might change dramatically. Not only in terms of specific predictions but equally so regarding the explanatory strength of the existing theories as these “new” developments became a history that required explanation by existing theoretical architectures in 2001. And those developments do not include the more recent political movement(s) that resulted in an American head of state actively unraveling international institutions, agreements, alliances, and norms, all while eroding democracy at home, promoting an insurrection, and explicitly adopting a politics of white nationalism. When recent political developments are looked at in their totality, emergence cannot be waved away as noise. Unless we are willing to say that the emergent changes of the last two decades are so unique as to represent world-historic exceptions, IR should assume that developments like these are inevitable and meaningful and plan accordingly.

Heterotemporality Undergirding the idea that the world and its politics can be explained by timeless concepts is a universalization of the past, present, and future. All who occupy 2023, for example, are assumed to be operating 46

47

Goldgeier 2019, and for a slightly different perspective see, Sperling and Webber 2019. See e.g., Nye 1997 and Ross 1999, and Gartzke and Lindsay 2020.

116

The Time of Global Politics

in a shared temporal location, and this universality is what allows claims that supposedly transcend geographical locations to hang together. Differences in temporal context are not meaningful in and of themselves – they only become meaningful if some dynamic intervenes. Each of us in this universal world present is shaped and constrained by the same past that the present moment sits atop. When pressed, however, few would accept this as how social or political experience works. Temporal dynamics vary wildly in global politics. The manner in which the global past is made meaningful relates to the present or future, and the tempo, rhythm, and durational qualities of supposedly universal time are as variant as the people, structures, entities, and institutions who constitute globality itself. In the contemporary present realists imagine, deterrence operates as a central orienting frame within world politics. When looked at from the perspective developed here, however, the concept – particularly nuclear deterrence – appears as much a temporal dynamic as a material one. It provides a useful heuristic for illustrating the manner in which the heterogeneity of experience is largely eradicated by these imaginaries. Deterrence requires an articulated temporal universality, where by denying heterotemporal experience, a shared past and future emerge that can stabilize relational dynamics indefinitely – provided a relationship of deterrence holds. Ultimately, deterrence is about leveraging the future as a means of preventing aggression in the present.48 Through concepts like second strike, adversaries create a shared future where regardless of the choices adopted in the present, only one future can result and it is a mutually tragic one. Where it is successful, there remains an indefinite present that keeps the dangerous future at bay.49 What this requires, however, is a sufficiently similar understanding of the past, understanding of the present, and coterminous expectations of what futures will arise if deterrence breaks down. In nuclear deterrence, for instance, challenges exist, like differential rates of nuclear development, unauthorized or accidental launch, and thirdparty theft and use.50 Each is heterotemporal in its own way. Differential rates of nuclear development produce a sense of time that is distinct for each actor – those threatened with a first strike and lacking a credible second face a “use it or lose it situation,” while those 48 50

49 Fearon 1998. McIntosh 2020. Sagan and Waltz 1995, Sagan 1997, and Debs and Monteiro 2014.

The Temporality of IR Theories

117

with a credible first strike face a window of dominance that is threatened by the future only if a second strike is not available.51 Unauthorized or accidental use acknowledges the existence of actors with a distinct set of pasts, presents, and futures that could impact decisions to launch – individuals concerned with a state’s lack of aggression or the alternative timekeeping of the material weapons themselves, far removed from human notions of timing and subject to factors like decay or natural evolutions/emergences that technology has not accounted for.52 Finally, third-party theft and use call into question the entire edifice of realist theory and its supposedly timeless qualities as it implicitly acknowledges that the centrality of states is neither timeless nor inevitable even when it comes to questions of nuclear weapons. It also denies their universalist portrayals of a singular past and future that must be maintained for the security of all; otherwise, there would not be actors willing to undertake such dramatic action.53 Deterrence is not the only concept that negotiates heterotemporality in this way. The security dilemma, the balance of power, offense– defense balance, and other structurally informed concepts central to contemporary realism all presume a universal time inhabited by all and shaped and constrained by a singular past. But as many have noted, differences exist, amplified by geography and sociopolitical inequalities. Anywhere Waltz sees as operating outside the timeless assumptions of anarchy, states, and power – or, more appropriately, is not already understood by Euro-American realists as fitting into that model – becomes liminal to realist theory’s reach.54 But given the centrality of realism to IR’s development, this means that areas understood as liminal – frequently due to racist and ethnocentric ideologies that were explicit from the beginning – became secondary and thus not a concern for anyone theorizing IR.55 Latin America, Africa, Oceania, and indigenous communities all have pasts (and futures) that are largely absent from realist theory.56 Intentional or not, it now functions as a trick that positions one specific conception of time as universal in order to ignore the heterotemporality that would make geographically universal predictions difficult. 51 54 56

52 53 Debs and Monteiro 2014. Blair 1993. Rao 2020. 55 Lynch 2019, 277. Vitalis 2015. Some have sought to rectify this with respect to indigenous communities, see e.g., Szarejko 2020.

118

The Time of Global Politics

Change and Contingency Given the overall temporal emphasis on timelessness, it is unsurprising that change and contingency are both concepts difficult to incorporate within realist theory – particularly the structural variants. Waltz addresses this by functionally bracketing it out entirely. He emphasizes that his theory is one of “outcomes” and to not “mistake a theory of international politics for a theory of foreign policy” because “balance of power theory is a theory about the results produced by the uncoordinated actions of states.”57 Uncertainty plays a key role in the theory as a constant in the world system, albeit one that varies “as the number of states increases” because “even if one assumes that the goals of most states are worthy, the timing and content [emphasis added] of the actions required to reach them become more and more difficult to calculate.”58 Put most directly, for Waltz and many other structural realists, “systems are either maintained or transformed.” So long as anarchy is not replaced by a world state, the system will hold and structures will vary based on the management of these uncertainties. What varies is the timing of specific actions – outcomes and “results” vary based on the differences in power this timing produces. What is lacking here is a theory of change, something theorists like Mearsheimer and Glaser attempt to offer through adding state-level assumptions that remain constant like rationality.59 This is not to reify the “constructivist/rationalist” divide that Williams refers to as a “pervasive recent categorization” along the lines of “realism and liberalism.”60 Critiques of rationality are well established but have yet to displace this mode of thought, with the rational theorization of conflict and international politics widespread and particularly dominant within the United States.61 Attention to change as a temporal concept could improve them, but building contingency and ontological change into the theories and assumptions themselves would make the theories less “rigorous” in the positivist sense. However, that also might make them more useful to those in the present and more capable of assessing contemporary issues as they occur.

57 59 61

58 Waltz 1979, 122. Waltz 1979, 165. 60 Mearsheimer 2001, Glaser 2010. Williams 2005, 10. Hendrix and Vreede 2019.

The Temporality of IR Theories

119

For example, bringing the idea of change articulated here into the central unifying element of realism and realist theories – the anarchy assumption – would look a little like Williams’ “wilful realism,” which seeks to move away from the “thick theoretical blanket of abstractions” that “smothered” realist thought of the past half century.62 Even if “anarchy . . . remains the core concept of most understandings of political Realism in International Relations,” it could contain more temporal humility about the inevitable variance these abstractions obscure and seek better ways of addressing these and other contingencies. The assumption that actions without significant duration are unlikely to produce systemic effects is precisely the problem that needs rectifying. The stakes are immense as these singular “contingencies” can represent the outbreak of a war, a global power transition, or the erosion of well-established norms. For example, anarchy – even if it exists in the manner proffered by realists – is produced and reproduced in a constantly changing political present rather than functioning as an assumption or extratemporal structure conditioning politics at every single moment.63 This does not lead inexorably to binary debates about anarchy versus hierarchy but instead to theorizing anarchy as a form that is constantly negotiating emergent changes in a way that makes it intelligible as part of a universal past and future. The manner in which contemporary realists use the present to produce a past and future consonant with these ideas contributes to this dynamic. The proliferation of rereadings of realism by scholars illustrates the malleability of this supposedly stable through line of intellectual and political history.64 Cultures of anarchy, as Wendt describes them, or practices of anarchy, may exist and indeed may be reified, but they are not inevitable because they are subject to change at any present moment – whether past or future.65 Even the most ardent realist66 would admit that there is an implicit temporal limit to their claims as they only operate post-Westphalia, leaving out the vast historical record of security interactions between

62 63

64 66

Williams 2005, 204. For simplicity’s sake I say “a present” but more accurately it is a present and/or many presents sometimes simultaneously. 65 See e.g., Williams 2005, Molloy 2006, and Molloy 2020. Wendt 1992. Again, contemporary realists would agree, classical and neoclassical ones might not.

120

The Time of Global Politics

and among polities across time, something that could be amplified if we so chose.67 Anarchy would not have to disappear under a new temporal imaginary as it remains rectifiable provided temporal relations and processes are specified. The contemporary political present may continually reproduce an anarchic environment and do so for many years to come, but what cannot be assumed is that the future will necessarily replicate the past simply because it is the next point on the timeline. Presents are multiple, overlapping, and potentially separable – even if anarchy remains a constant in one set of presents, it can potentially be implicated or usurped by events in others. In times and spaces where it is not, understanding why that is the case would provide a powerful insight into the structuring dynamics of the international system.

Liberal Institutionalism/Liberalism Institutionalist assumptions have historically overlapped with realist understandings and, as a result, represent an approach to the world with broad similarities. Anarchy is assumed to be timeless and continuing, states remain the central players, power remains a crosshistorical concept, and claims are advanced that seek to explain divergences from a continuing status quo. Presumption lies with continuity in politics and not change, and liberal institutionalists emphasize the amount of cooperation in an environment that is more conducive toward conflict. In some ways, they view the components of the world in the same way as realists but see the arrangement of those components and their respective behaviors much differently. Many distinctions exist between the schools, but two warrant mentioning in the temporal context.68 While states are still central, they are no longer unitary, “billiard balls” as domestic politics matter, particularly in terms of regime type. Second, states – despite their political 67

68

This is not to say that this does not occur, particularly among neoclassical realists and others, but that it represents a space that could be better utilized going forward. The centrality of the state and its periodized history to 1648 still retain great influence in a discipline that is expressly state-centric. Neumann argues one way to expand our temporal scope is through the study of monuments that have survived well after the polities that created them have disappeared, Neumann 2018. Keohane and Martin 1995.

The Temporality of IR Theories

121

authority and control of the means of violence – are not the only meaningful actors in the international sphere. International institutions are not simply epiphenomenal manifestations of state power dynamics as realists argue but shape behavior in and of themselves.69 The significant amount of unexpected cooperation is what requires scholarly explanation, not conflict. Democratic peace plays a large role for many, as does information sharing, or international law.70 Regardless of the particular approach or issue area investigated, their temporal imaginary places enormous weight on the past. One blind spot that results is that key concepts like the democratic peace might be better understood as constitutive of a spatially and temporally bounded present.71 While some boundary conditions attach to democratic peace theory’s periodization of its history, the temporal imaginary largely retains a timeless quality. Mechanisms are “discovered” and debated, but rarely are these mechanisms temporally circumscribed; instead, they are characterized as inevitable facets of democracies or the effect of interactions among democratic states. In the process, the idea that the finding might be an ontological contingency – a temporary constellation, rather than an inevitable outcome of democratization as a timeless process or democracy as a timeless phenomenon – is pushed aside. Equally important, the democratic peace could be a backwardfacing claim advanced in the present based on a particular construction of a specific imagined past. This emphasizes the need to ask about the boundaries of that present, which past supports it, who that present benefits, and who it disadvantages. It also presumes a particular understanding of “peace,” something Bell usefully complicates with a four-part taxonomy, showing how contemporary conceptions of it rely upon nineteenth-century understandings that may not match up to twentieth/twenty-first-century methods of governance steeped in violence like colonialism, hierarchy, or other structures of domination.72 One insight informing liberal institutionalism and liberalism more broadly is that continuity creates stability and stability is best suited for the type of cooperation that prevents conflict.73 Temporally speaking, the dynamics here are direct – stability privileges continuity and stasis, 69 71

72

70 Mearsheimer 1995. Koremenos 2012. A point that poststructuralist scholarship – combined with political geography – has noted. See Bialasiewicz et al 2007. 73 Bell 2020. Keohane 1995, Rixen and Viola 2016.

122

The Time of Global Politics

presuming an underlying temporal environment of inertia. If stability exists, it will continue, barring some disruption, invoking the linear, universal notion of time to place the presumption in favor of continuity, rather than change. Even on its own terms, however, stability is never fully stable, for two reasons. Heterotemporality means that contemporary politics are always already constituted by differences in terms of pasts, presents, and futures. What appears as stable is the product of power and discourse, along with narratives that articulate a universal past and future by which the stability of the present can be made intelligible. And these narratives actively displace alternative narratives that call this universality into question. Because that apparent continuity is a function of power and a process of production and reproduction, what appears temporally consistent is rarely as static as it appears.

Scope Process and change are central to institutionalist debates – these discussions should be more intentional regarding the inextricable role temporal assumptions play. For instance, the idea that institutions need to be “sticky” to exist across time may have some explanatory and predictive value.74 Yet, if temporal relationships are continually being constructed in the political present, those relationships may generate expectations of continuity across time, all of which are reinforced given the durational qualities of institutional action. The longer this process can create perceived continuity, the more inevitable it appears. This could occur through elongating visions – using shared future agendas to maintain identities and status, privileging certain relationships over others, and producing the state as itself.75 In cases like these, conceptions of temporal relationships matter greatly. A ten-year or twentyyear future projection is very different than making a claim that is absent time considerations. It necessitates a discussion of what constitutes the meaningful, relatable past even as these powerful institutions themselves help shape the temporal horizons and temporal dynamics of their projects. For instance, the UN acts as a means of collective legitimacy and the WTO acts – among other aspects – as a means of

74

Fioretos 2019.

75

Mitzen 2006, Solomon 2019a.

The Temporality of IR Theories

123

reducing transaction costs associated with international trade.76 The value of each requires a conception of temporal relationships that orients one toward the long-view and eventual payoff versus shortterm gains accrued through either defection or self-segregation. In short, both require, as many have observed, iterability, which is a concept that produces temporal relationships as it unfolds. Investigating the differing manner in which these relationships are temporally constituted could be revealing of mechanisms that may result in improved institutional design, something Historical Institutionalism (HI) specifically seeks.77 It is no surprise that in IR more broadly, those invested in HI as well as historical sociology are the ones most closely attuned to the meaning and impact of these assumptions and temporality itself, broadly speaking.78 A presentist approach could offer better attention to the temporal boundaries produced when we bring institutions into existence. Institutions, even those that appear long term, do not last forever but emerge through the invocation – however implicit – of a time scale. From one temporal perspective, the over 75-year continued existence of the UN is an enormous achievement, but from the perspective of eras or geological time, it is merely a blip. How we relate temporal depth to our current environment is obviously important, yet we do not spend much time theoretically justifying our periodizations. While it may appear intuitive to some that geological time is an inappropriate timescale, the centrality of climate change and the Anthropocene in global politics shows how even expansive timescales shape contemporary political configurations. Focusing on temporal boundaries also reveals different ways of thinking about the disappearance of states and institutions.79 Institutions, successful ones, appear inevitable, sometimes right up until the point they do not. With a focus on the new and contingent, accounting for the disappearance of institutions becomes a bit easier. For instance, research on the occurrence of exits from international organizations (IOs) lays out the dynamics of actions taken by countries to withdraw from IOs – overlaying that with a sense of temporal horizons and the imagined pasts at the present of withdrawal could 76

77 78

Claude 1966, Keohane 1989, Barnett 1997, Moravcsik 1999, Baccini 2014, Lenz and Viola 2017. Fioretos 2017, Lenz and Viola 2017, Fioretos 2019. 79 See, e.g., Go and Hobson 2017. Faisal 2011.

124

The Time of Global Politics

be helpful in identifying patterns.80 The English vote to leave the EU was an exemplary instance of this as it was seen by institutionalists as “shocking” and something that could not really happen.81 In the wake of “Brexit,” it became clear that there was a generational split with young people overwhelmingly in favor and older people overwhelmingly against. This is suggestive, at least, of a distinct temporal framing among different segments of political discourse that led one to privilege one set of options over their opposite.82 Hom and Beasley characterize it thusly, “As Brexit shows, the ‘ground’ of the decision-making process is not fixed in time, and resembles an unstable temporal terrain subject to occasional upheavals more than a solid and unchanging bedrock.”83 This shifting “temporal terrain” is at least partially created by the very actors who are making these decisions but is not unique to foreign policy regarding the EU. The possibility of shifts in leadership – brought into sharp relief by the Trump administration’s indifference and outright hostility to any institution that was not explicitly transactional – has exposed that the seemingly stable terrain of the world political present is malleable and possesses the potential for radical change at any moment. One specific formulation of the question of temporal scope is the question of the future of the “liberal world order” – a question which already invokes presumptions about its existence and continuity. From a temporal perspective, international order is defined by its duration and universality – a “strong” international order lasts for a long time and covers the globe, while a weak order/disorder is constituted by uneven duration and events that rupture continuity and possesses a ragged area of applicability. Political or economic crises may come and go, but a crisis for the order itself reveals that the order is temporary – historically speaking. A crisis of the order, rather than within the order, potentially represents a break in the smooth continuity of patterns that allows us to even articulate a claim as allencompassing as the existence and potential “end of the liberal world order.”84 The juxtaposition of the Trump administration’s explicit contempt for liberal institutions and order with the Biden 80 82 83

81 Vabulas and Borzyskowski 2019. Beaumont 2018. Goodwin and Heath 2016 and Hom and Beasley 2021. 84 Hom and Beasley 2021, 268. Ikenberry 2018.

The Temporality of IR Theories

125

administration’s declaration that America is “back” turns almost entirely on the scope of the past, which past(s) gets privileged, and how much the past – for example, Trump administration efforts to dismantle existing markers of order – still shapes the boundaries of the possible in the contemporary political present.

Emergence Returning to the democratic peace, the particular past – and present, it should be noted – that informs it is policed by Eurocentric constructions. Democratic peace claims rely heavily upon democratic understandings and histories that center on Europe and America, whitewashing the violence intrinsic to these states, even as it insists on the applicability of the experience of a narrow set of democracies for the global future. The implications of such a move are not without consequence, as shown by early twenty-first-century neoconservatism. The behavioral choices it calls for can be violent, deadly, and disastrous, as in the occupation and invasion of Iraq or the Israeli invocations of “democratic peace” in their occupation of Palestine.85 As well, institutionalists – particularly rationalist theories – undertheorize the idea of a mechanism itself, assuming that mechanistic operations simply “work” across time.86 Even recent calls for a feminist institutionalism emphasize this idea of replicable mechanisms across time in order to explain continuity and change – “Feminist research, in turn, can help NI [New Institutionalist] better to theorize the gendered nature of formal institutions . . . [and] the relations of power across institutions . . . NI and FI scholarship each provides important insights but further work is needed to synthesize analyses and search for common causal mechanisms (of power, continuity, and change).”87 For the presentist, the focus turns to the present practice of political contestation that enables narratives that support the analytical faith in the existence of transhistorical mechanisms that explain both continuity and change. With a presentist approach, the centrality of emergent change could be amplified. This is not to argue that there is no work on democratization or the production of the democratic peace that confronts it. On the contrary, some of the most advanced work on change and 85

Ish-Shalom 2013.

86

Bennett 2013.

87

Mackay et al 2010, 584.

126

The Time of Global Politics

contingency has been in this sphere. Cederman’s work on learning, and Keck and Sikkink on norm cascades and development, is dynamic and temporally textured, but the temporal dimension is not always explicitly developed and typically drops out entirely when the ideas travel beyond their own work.88 In some ways, from a presentist perspective, realists are correct – international institutions and organizations could conceivably collapse at any moment. Yet, they do not; they cohere and persist despite having to constantly negotiate new occurrences and environments. But two things differ here for a presentist perspective versus an institutionalist. One is that this potential for collapse and erosion is true of everything, including those elements of global politics realists – and others – take as ontological. As relational entities constituted by process, institutions could always decohere, but equally so could states or other entities. A second point of difference is that this flips around which areas require explanation – in an emergent environment, the exception in need of explanation may be coherence itself given the inevitable temporal limitations and constitution of all formations. Given a long enough timescale, everything is temporary. For a presentist, part of what makes institutions an important area to study is because of the ways in which they negotiate emergence and represent significant political configurations always in formation. Similar questions arise with the democratic peace. Rather than focus on why it is that the democratic peace is actually enduring, the question becomes why does it appear to have endured and what forces and political configurations contribute to this particular production. Taken to its conclusion, the question of what futures are likely to emerge out of this ongoing production of political forces becomes the focus of “prediction.” Presents are constituted by the encounters of differing perspectives which generate emergent and new phenomena. Emphasizing temporality through the ontological openness of the present is not the only way to arrive at these values, but it is an approach that builds upon extant moves in the discipline. A presentist temporal imaginary would expand the research agenda, asking what pasts and futures have to dominate for the democratic peace to continue. Equally important, it raises the question of what the prevailing view of past/ present/future within this area of work leaves out. 88

Keck and Sikkink 1998, Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, Cederman 2001, Cederman 2002, Donovan 2018.

The Temporality of IR Theories

127

Political theorizing on democracy from those whose thinking is centered on questions of “the present” and time emphasizes just this contingency. Derrida’s “democracy to come,” democracy as political contestation, and other moves explicitly recognize the inevitable newness and emergence intrinsic to the concept itself as a source of political potential.89 For the presentist approach, this points toward investigating – empirically, theoretically, or both – the temporal assumptions informing these ideas. Democracy’s staying power as a political practice may be due to its capacity to successfully engage multiple disparate contingent temporalities without requiring a sovereign temporal enclosure of the politics within each. Focusing on the frames, structures, and/or narratives that allow this to take place and recur over time would allow us as IR scholars to incorporate these insights and treat democratic regimes more as a capacious and temporally variant category of practice. The democratic peace is as much a question of peace for whom and where as it is a question of its mechanisms and actions over time.90 The question of “when” which arises when investigating the political present adds depth to its metaphoric representation as a space. Bringing these together is not simply a matter of drawing borders in terms of dates and times, relying on crude markers or notions of duration exclusively tied to the calendar. Instead, it is about how different groups coincide and diverge in terms of their connections of events across time or the “timing” of events in which “temporal tropes prefigure important explanatory and normative choices . . . although purportedly describing time per se, tropes actually indicate attempts at timing events in a way that renders them more intelligible and secure.”91 Looking at the production of temporal borders, particularly through the “temporal tropes” used to time events within a specific narrative – both in theory and in practice – is valuable. This could be especially so when taking the democratic peace beyond anarchic and state-centric assumptions. Think of antidemocratic forces in the US and Europe – both rely on a narrative where the past needs conservation and protection from the threat of the unruly present. Better understanding when this narrative took hold or where actors draw the

89 91

Fritsch 2002 and Dallmayr 2017. Hom 2016, 166.

90

See e.g., Kahl 1998 and Hayes 2012.

128

The Time of Global Politics

line between events across time can reveal how these dynamics arose in the first place. Questions of emergence also shape the debate regarding the future of the liberal international order. If the present contains ontological emergence, then the question of order becomes a little bit different. Given that order is most easily viewed from distance – either temporal or spatial – and that it is largely a temporal phenomenon, because order must possess temporal depth, it means that answering the question of whether an order has ended or is flourishing is nearly impossible without a significant temporal distance from the present moment. This is a problem when temporal distance is only understood via the universalist clock-time of days and years, meaning that we must wait for the Earth to go around the Sun an “appropriate” number of times before we can validate or invalidate these claims. This poses a problem when attempting to answer questions in a timely manner, but it also hinders the development of a politics that responds to the contemporary dynamics of existing order. By the time we can confidently answer the question of whether the order has ended or is flourishing, it will be too late to make things otherwise.

Heterotemporality Key liberal institutionalist concepts like order, interdependence, and the impact of institutions on state behavior all rely upon and reproduce a singular temporal narrative. Similar to the realist insistence on the universality of the present of global politics – as well as past and future – liberal institutionalism views the world in a temporally unitary manner. Fukuyama, for instance, could only advance such a stark claim regarding the “end of history” because of an assumption that history was only one thing – or that there was a global history that dominated order, interdependence, and institutional development. He writes, “I would argue that virtually everyone believes in the existence of a directional history” and “By ‘History’ or ‘universal history’ we mean a coherent and directional transformation of human societies that affects the whole, or nearly the whole, of mankind.”92 While most resisted – and continue to resist – Fukuyama’s claims regarding history’s end, the underlying idea that there is a unified 92

Fukuyama 1995, 31–32.

The Temporality of IR Theories

129

experience of time is what enables the possibility of a universal history and thus a universal future for global politics. Even one that ostensibly stops the directionality of history itself and exits into an indefinite present. For example, the US has relied on this idea of a universal history to justify a universalist understanding of the democratic peace in formulating its foreign policy for decades. Because the world’s (shared) history of democracy creates peace, anywhere and anytime the United States – or any actor – can produce democracy it will create similar dynamics, regardless of the means used to produce it. Nearly every national security strategy makes this argument, and it was explicitly invoked as a justification for war by the neoconservatives in the Bush administration.93 Even the Trump administration maintained lip service to those claims, while it simultaneously dismantled the political and legal apparatus that maintained it.94 “As many observers of American foreign policy have noted,” Schmidt and Williams write, “there is a widespread conviction that American economic and security interests are advanced by the spread of liberal values and democratic institutions abroad. Neoconservatives fully embody this belief and strongly support the notion that American foreign policy should actively, and at times forcefully, work to spread democracy.”95 Universal temporal relationships do a lot of work here – the presumption of a simultaneous present (and past and future) shared across the international community and the privileging of claims that possess temporal depth combine to insure the validity of the conclusions. Yet, each is complicated by a presentist frame. For many of the presents that are left out of this claim, the times of “democratic peace” gestured to by this consensus are a time of civil conflict, imperial encounters, covert actions, and proxy wars, rather than “peace.” And this does not even account for the indexing out of bodies and collectives that are considered unintelligible by the political framework that enables the supposed democratic peace, such as those in indigenous communities. Indigenous politics and indigeneity pose a particular problem for the temporal universality of the world political present. It is not surprising that indigeneity does not constitute a significant part of the dominant 93 95

94 Bush, Clinton, Obama NSS. Trump NSS. Schmidt and Williams 2008, 199–200.

130

The Time of Global Politics

global political present because indigenous politics expose the articulated naturalness of politics as it is currently practiced by powerful actors and institutions as a reflection of political power and violence. Yet, if one resists the temporal universality of global politics and acknowledges the “temporal multiplicity” of the present, it “opens the potential for conceptualizing Native continuity and change in ways that do not take non-native frames of reference as the self-evident basis for approaching Indigenous forms of persistence, adaptation, and innovation.”96 Instead, it is important “to pluralize temporality so as to open possibilities for engaging with Indigenous self-articulations, forms of collective life, and modes of self-determination beyond their incorporation or translation into settler frames of reference.”97 Given the centrality of self-determination in political assumptions about state sovereignty and the settler understanding of the binary between continuity and change, this type of pluralization is vital, particularly for efforts that seek to link democracy and violence. What is true for indigenous politics is true for other groups dispossessed by the international status quo – other collective temporal experiences matter here as well. The manner in which an individual with inadequate access to water due to poverty exacerbated by the trade flows among “peaceful countries” marks or “times” their life may be very different from elite decisionmakers deciding whether to initiate a war that could eliminate that access entirely.98 Enloe’s work on the economies and experiences of workers in the areas surrounding American military bases shows just how distinct the temporal frames of actors in global politics can be when the heterogeneity of life and its times are taken seriously.99 These temporalities and experiences are not merely additive but call into question the definitions of violence used in the political present. This is up to and including those ideas of violence that constitute the “democratic peace” as something beyond a time of war, not least because the tempo and durational quality of deprivation and suffering within this “peace” are typically indexed out as meaningful violence by universal, that is, Euro-American, conceptions of politics.100 Returning to questions of order, heterotemporality requires us to think about the temporal dynamics that have made whatever process 96 99

97 Rifkin 2017, preface Rifkin 2017, preface. 100 Enloe 2014. Cohen 2018.

98

Hom 2020.

The Temporality of IR Theories

131

we identify as existing appear indefinite – indefinite enough that the “end” is surprising or shocking, rather than anticipated or unremarkable. Historical institutionalists insist upon what Nexon refers to as the “temporal embeddedness” of institutions that shape and maintain this order, but if they are a constant creation that is pushing back against the nonfixity of the present, then they must also consistently be producing pasts, presents, and futures that enable the universal narrative to continue and become seemingly inevitable.101 One way of thinking about this in the context of contemporary ideas is through the liberal international order. The order as currently understood looks very different in 1965 than it does in 1985 or 2015 because at each point in time, there must be a production of pasts and futures that make the order visible, ongoing, and sufficiently deeply rooted – temporally speaking – so as to represent a historical formation rather than a formless snapshot of time. The shape those narratives take differs depending on the moment, but their rough parameters are politically appreciable. So during the Trump administration, twenty years into the twenty-first century, it is much easier to assert its continuing existence simply because of what has happened already and how long it has lasted. In 1965, it might be much more difficult, which is why there may be less reference to what constitutes it as a specific order in those moments, even as we insist upon its continuous existence throughout its constitutive temporal moments – that is, any and all moments after its identified point of origin are moments where it exists just as much as it does today, even if its characteristics shift. These produced visions of past and future, however, are always going to be complicated by inevitable difference. This is why asserting and politically instantiating a shared future is imperative. If we adopt a different perspective – perhaps from a region or set of countries in which the so-called order is anathema to their interests and a narrative that is at odds with their own political understandings of past, present, and future – that past will look different, so the question of the future will also look different. Because the “end-times” of the order might be desirable, rather than a disastrous divergence, they may be constituted as much more thinkable. Even the debate itself benefits specific actors. Debating the future of the international order presumes a future that is shared and universalizable – which, it must be said, is a nifty trick for a 101

Nexon 2012.

132

The Time of Global Politics

political order where the foremost goal is to unite the globe politically. Once you structure the debate in that way – “we all share a singular future, so what’s it going to look like?” – you excise differential experiences as people mirror that universal future onto the past. Latin American or Iranian governments, for example, will have a vastly different reaction to a promised future where the “rule of law” and “sovereignty” are defined and “protected” by the United States, given past US efforts to thwart popularly elected governments and/or justify military invasions.

Change and Contingency Even as institutionalist work wrestles with and seeks to understand how change operates within and across institutions, there remains a past-centric bias within it. While this reinforces the idea that the present is nothing more than the tail of history, it also creates an imaginary where institutional development and democratic norms can appear consistent and credible across time. How the temporalities of the present imagine past and future determines the narratives that position these institutions as relevant across time. It is critical to attend to these dynamics when attempting to understand these political practices. Institutional design and development are, logically enough, one of the areas with the most attention toward temporal relationships and change. For realists, given the anarchy assumption, institutions are aberrant manifestations that disrupt and manage the inevitable conflict presumed by realist thinking. Given the challenge animating much early work regarding the claims advanced by realists that institutions are epiphenomenal, institutionalists continue to think through questions of institutional development, their continued existence, and whether or not institutions are anything more than an outgrowth of power relations. While this is particularly advanced within historical institutionalism, it is less so among the rationalist or sociological approaches that dominate the institutionalist agenda.102 This is at least partially fueled by an intellectual trajectory that saw the “institutional turn” move away from attention to history because “rationalist and sociological approaches . . . captured the analytical 102

Fioretos 2017, 4.

The Temporality of IR Theories

133

epicenter of IR.”103 It is for this reason that historical institutionalism appears more commensurate with a presentist approach than realism or rational/sociological institutionalism because it “puts the stress on concepts with temporal properties and on processes and mechanisms that impact the origin, stability, and change of institutions over time.”104 Broadly speaking, order is a temporally distinct concept that relies upon juxtaposition to gain meaning. Order requires a “purposive pattern” with “a particular set of goals, objectives and values” that “lead to a particular outcome” – in this case, a world composed of liberal institutions that supports liberal values such as free trade and the rule of law.105 This most clearly emerges when “regular patterns of human behavior” are “juxtaposed with chaos, instability, or lack of predictability.”106 Central to this juxtaposition are temporal characteristics – in this case, order defined against change or discontinuity. For international politics, order is a solution to the negative elements of disorder, such as political violence, displacement, or an inability to pursue cooperative solutions to collective problems, for example, environmental destruction. At its core, order relies upon a temporal continuity that is politically produced, rather than reflective of a natural evolution in time. It relies upon a series of ongoing parts – for example, meetings at the UN, the production of WTO documents, distributions of political and economic power, as well as the continual insistence on the existence of order by the actors that shape global discourse. Particularly for this last reason, articulating the temporal parameters of the problem of order – whether it will continue – requires an understanding of the temporal dynamics that have allowed it to continue.

Constructivism Capturing the essence of constructivist thought is difficult, but in broad terms, constructivism in contemporary IR follows a “social constructionist” approach that emphasizes the “social construction of reality” but does not have a singular position on neopositivist or scientific

103 106

Fioretos 2017, 2. Hurrell 2007, 2.

104

Fioretos, 2017, 12.

105

Hurrell 2007, 2.

134

The Time of Global Politics

epistemologies and methods.107 Adler, assessing the state of constructivist IR, argues that “despite – or because of – the internal debates going on within constructivism, its ‘middle ground’ (Adler 1997) has moved just a little bit closer to critical and linguistic constructivist approaches without uncritically adopting their ontological and epistemological arguments.”108 For some, it is this refusal to treat all aspects of IR – not only substantive and ontological, but epistemological and methodological as well – as socially conditioned and ascientific that distinguishes constructivist IR from critical approaches.109 Constructivism has also operated as a middle ground by filling the vacuum Guzzini identifies among binaries that structured the field.110 It appeals to those emphasizing the importance of sociality, for example, but not quite ready to engage in a fully critical approach or to abdicate the epistemological assumptions animating conventional IR. For instance, Wendtian constructivism retains a deep commitment to scientific realism and rejects the more antipositivist/antiscientific tenets of scholars similarly influenced by social theoretical work.111 Smith characterizes this position as arguing for a “science of international relations” that “sides with positivists in terms of epistemology, but post-positivists in terms of ontology.”112 Because of this scientific commitment, many critical scholars have moved on from the constructivist approach into a more self-consciously critical mode.113 As IR specifically, and social science more generally, moves away from notions of Newtonian science and neoclassical physics, temporally flexible understandings of the physical world – or at least understandings of it that are not predicated on the linear timeline of Newton – will become more prominent in thinking.

Scope Constructivists who follow the Wendtian perspective share a number of assumptions with other forms of IR theory. Anarchy among states provides the ontological foundation for theories of sociality. Materiality undergirds and shapes the social, even as its hegemony in explanatory power is denied. Russia’s nuclear weapons may post a 107 108 110 111

Finnemore 1996, Wendt 1999, Guzzini 2000, 160, and Adler 2013, 113. 109 Adler 2013, 113. Campbell 1998a, 207–229. Guzzini 2000, Adler 2013, Onuf 2013, and McCourt 2016. 112 113 Smith 2000b. Smith 2000b, 151–152. Ashley 1986.

The Temporality of IR Theories

135

different threat than Britain’s, but they both remain materially dangerous and significantly more so than other forms of warfare like information operations or conventional weapons. Power is similarly assumed to have a material basis, even if primarily socially shaped. As a result of the shared emphasis on states, much of the work assumes a similar periodization. In short, constructivism – when considered separately from critical theories, following Adler – uses sociality to theorize a world that is imagined as very similar to realists and institutionalists but gives a central role to the social in explaining, understanding, and predicting political life. In this way, it is implicitly juxtaposed with realist statements about the world even as it adopts a starting point that realists would immediately recognize. Debates surrounding the existence of the so-called nuclear taboo provide a clear example of the parameters of discussions regarding the role of norms in regulating material behavior.114 Nearly all theorists agree that the nonuse of nuclear weapons since 1945 poses a puzzle – is it “sheer luck” or is there something else going on?115 And what can we presume the future will look like? As Tannenwald argues, “a normative prohibition on nuclear use has developed in the global system, which . . . has stigmatized nuclear weapons as an unacceptable weapon of mass destruction.”116 The main “rival hypothesis” is a “realist account which claims that the non-use of nuclear weapons can be explained solely on the basis of material factors.”117 Constructivists argue that realism cannot account for the nonuse of these weapons against non-nuclear states, the failure of deterrence when non-nuclear states attack nuclear states, and the relative peace of non-nuclear states, despite occupying an existentially precarious position.118 The nuclear taboo, then, operates as a useful concretization of constructivist thought and theory that neatly juxtaposes its claims and assumptions with realist ideas. Even for those who accept its existence, the continued existence of the norm is a deeply fraught institution. The norm against use is predicated on the idea of states refraining from detonating these weapons, but those decisions are ultimately in the hands of individuals. This is best illustrated by the history of nuclear accidents and 114 116 118

115 Tannenwald 1999, Tannewald 2005. Tannenwald 1999. 117 Tannenwald 1999, 433. Tannenwald 1999, 434. Tannenwald 1993, 433–434.

136

The Time of Global Politics

near-misses after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The contingent nature of norms becomes much more apparent when we bring the individual back into the frame. Nearly every state with weapons has concentrated launch authority in such a way as to minimize public and/or legislative oversight – this is done to insure a speedy response in case of attack. This condensing of the decisionmaking space in the temporal dimension represents an antidemocratic move that functionally enables a small cader of individuals to decide the “fate of the Earth.”119 As the duration of deliberation is squeezed, so is oversight. The existence of the norm also depends on a clear line between use and nonuse, but it is a deceptively slim one and constantly in danger of eroding. The United States has already deployed a lowyield nuclear weapon in its submarine fleet, ostensibly to increase the credibility of American deterrence by heightening the usability of the weapon.120 By lowering the impact and narrowing its use to the battlefield, the thinking goes, its use becomes more “thinkable.”121 This move directly challenges the taboo by testing its boundaries, similar to what Schelling referred to as salami-slicing tactics in the context of extended deterrence in Europe during the Cold War.122 It is important to imagine potential futures post nuclear use as well – what happens to a “taboo” or strong norm when it is finally violated? Part of this turns on how important the past is – and will be – should that scenario come to pass. The norm against nonuse represents a puzzle that is primarily temporal where the duration of the norm’s existence is constitutive of its power. While this is generally the case – norms that have been established for longer are considered more robust than those that possess less durational space – the norm itself is predicated upon the existence of a non-nuclear past in the present. The taboo is not saying that states generally avoid aggression or follow international law but rather that post 1945, there has never been a use of weapons in the context of an interstate dispute and thus never will be so long as the norm holds. This places its past in a more powerful place than in the functioning of other norms. It is not simply the duration that makes it powerful, but the past remaining constitutive of the present – and vice versa – which determines its intelligibility as a 119 121

122

120 Doyle 2010, 290, Schell 1982. Sonne 2020. Broad and Sanger 2016, Sagan and Valentino 2017, Van Munster and Sylvest 2021. Jackson 2017, 45 and Schelling 1966.

The Temporality of IR Theories

137

taboo. So what happens if that taboo is broken and a country like the United States uses nuclear weapons? I choose the United States deliberately because many assessments of the likelihood of nuclear use focus on countries beyond Europe and the United States, implicitly employing an Orientalist frame that informs the conclusions of the argument.123 Post detonation, the idea of “norm cascades” could potentially operate in reverse, where the shattering of the taboo reorients thinking on the weapon, rendering it a newly thinkable option available to military strategists.124 On the other hand, it could have the perverse effect of reinforcing the norm of nonuse, as may have happened in 1945. If the reason behind nuclear nonuse is a public unwillingness to expose others – even enemy others – to such a massive, devastating, and long-term catastrophe, then an attack could stimulate moves to eliminate the weapon entirely. That said, the outcome post attack also obviously depends on the scenario for usage. A low-yield nuclear weapon used at sea against an abandoned outpost that had been given ample warning time prior to the strike – that is, one of the newly developed islands in the South China Sea – might have a very different impact compared to an intercontinental missile detonating in an urban area. These contingencies are varied and important – something as simple as whether the attack is captured on video and widely distributed could be the singular determinant as to whether the shattering of the norm results in a new nuclear age or represents the final act of an era the global public decides is now over.

Emergence Given that constructivist thinking focuses on constructions of politics within a conception of anarchy that privileges the state as a site of power, many of the arguments in previous sections apply.125 For instance, Jackson and Nexon argue that IR’s “reification” of how we understand sovereignty, states, and societies reflects “substantialist” philosophies where these entities exist within “bounded containers” rather than as the product of processes and relations.126 When scholars enter these debates and seek to resolve them – or offer a temporally 123 125

126

124 Gusterson 1999. Finnemore and Sikkink 1998. Jackson and Nexon 1999, 300. For a more recent assessment, see Bucher and Jasper 2017, 409 and Jaeger 2017. Jackson and Nexon 1999.

138

The Time of Global Politics

“enduring” contribution to these sites of inquiry – there is a subtle emphasis on the ultimate goal of fixing meaning. The ultimate contribution to one of these discursive structures would “resolve” or “end” the debate. Conceptually, this would grant the claim a type of temporal permanence, which in sociality, as well as the physical world, is ultimately impossible. Fully accepting this ultimate indeterminacy must go beyond quips that gesture toward scholarly work not being infallible and instead comprehensively explore the temporal humility and conceptual implications of treating these conclusions as a final goal and one that is positive. It requires a move to foreground temporality because while the articulation of truth claims remains important and crucial, even the most “permanent” and “static” ideas are always already provisional. This is what makes politics politics as it is always engaging “essentially contested concepts.”127 Paradoxically, this opens up IR to analytically mimic the practices it engages, opening scholarship’s politics in a way that may enable more politically meaningful as well as analytically “accurate” ideas to be advanced. Finally, and most simply, for constructivists in IR, the problem of change remains a central one – Finnemore and Sikkink characterize constructivism at its root as “a social theory that makes claims about the nature of social life and social change.”128 With change as the presumptive status quo, rather than continuity, presentism better enables the already occurring shift toward seeing identities in process, rather than static, just as early critiques of constructivist work argued. A presentist approach could offer some insights via the focus on emergence – where do norms come from and when do they disappear are questions that might be easier to address if temporal discontinuity is more accepted.

Heterotemporality Despite its robust theorization of binaries between sociality and materiality, constructivism reproduces a separation of time and temporality that makes meaningful engagement with either more difficult. While many will accept the idea of sociality as potentially temporal, this often serves to reinforce the idea that time itself is physical and universal. Moving beyond this frame is at least partially what motivated the “practice turn” as it seeks to build on the insights regarding 127

Connolly 1993, 9–44.

128

Finnemore and Sikkink 2001, 393.

The Temporality of IR Theories

139

the importance of sociality and bring in the lived experience of the present.129 Looking at the world from above and usually backward in time, researchers do not feel the proximity to, and urgency of, practices in the way that agents do. As a result, it is all too easy for social scientists to substitute the practical relation to the world, comprised of hunches and forward thinking under time and contextual constraints, for the theoretical relation to practice characterized by rationalization, hindsight, and timelessness. When constructivism equates materiality to the basis upon which meanings are constructed, it reduces it to an object of (theoretical) interpretation instead of the immediate environment by means of which practice emerges.130

Given the situated position of the scholar in a present temporally distinct from that of the actors, agents, and structures under investigation, as Adler and Pouliot note, there is a tendency to replicate Bourdieu’s observation regarding the “de-temporalizing move” of the observer.131 Operating backward in time, scholars read their own temporal frames upon actions that only come into being in a present, “the immediate environment by means of which a practice emerges.”132 Pasts and futures meet in this environment in unique ways to shape decisions, actions, and behaviors but largely wash out with interpretations of social processes across time or explanations that rely on materiality. Presentism would necessitate focusing on the emergent time spaces where political action occurs and resisting this backward-facing move. Treating temporality as constitutive of the configurations we study in the past, present, or future would be of enormous value and is something for which practice-oriented approaches are uniquely suited within IR. From some perspectives, norms in global politics largely represent a means by which the neoliberal governing present disciplines actors and asserts itself as universal.133 If this is correct, then there could be times where there is sufficient continuity – spatially, mechanistically, and temporally – where broad-based claims may be useful. For instance, balancing may be a useful heuristic, along with alliances and their dynamics when theorizing strategy, but they are also inevitably limited by the profound heterogeneity of the relations in time that constitute global politics. The power of heterotemporality is that merely by 129 132

130 131 McCourt 2016. Pouliot 2010, 297. Bourdieu 1977, 9. 133 Adler and Pouliot 2011. See e.g., Fougner 2008.

140

The Time of Global Politics

invoking it as a descriptive term, it immediately truncates and refuses political universality as ever truly universal. Once a mechanism is identified, it must also be understood as the product of a specific temporal frame, which automatically brings into being the possibility of other ways of making the world. Returning to the example of nuclear weapons is useful on this point. The impacts of nuclear weapons in the present are often times pushed on to marginalized groups like indigenous communities. Elements of the nuclear weapons infrastructure like testing, uranium mining, or the storage of waste all constitute ways in which the pasts, presents, and futures of marginalized communities call into question the supposedly shared past where there has been no “use” of nuclear weapons since 1945. When acknowledged in IR, indigenous groups are often conceptualized in relationship to borders – either because their “territory” traverses state borders or simply because their existence calls into question the manner in which dominant state politics violently constitute borders between persons, places, and collectives.134 Borders are sites of production that can reveal larger structuring frames and forces at work in politics.135 Similarly, examining the temporal borders of the present is a way of making the impacts of global political practices on marginalized and dispossessed peoples – for example, the maintenance of nuclear arsenals – more visible.

Change and Contingency Given the intellectual history of constructivism within IR, the initial emphasis on norms makes sense. Temporally speaking, social processes and relations in international politics are constantly in motion, so where can one turn to show a fundamentally static discipline how they matter or their role in that imagined political environment? Norms – like order – represent a point of continuity and apparent stability. Behavior is regulated out of the system by the establishment of a static, shared concept – for example, prohibitions against torture, nuclear weapon use, or landmines. Sociality is more complex than that – which constructivist work on norms recognizes, to be clear – and this is where the temporal complexity and ontological priors of a presentist temporal imaginary might amplify moves already occurring 134

Simpson 2014.

135

See, e.g., Campbell 1998a.

The Temporality of IR Theories

141

within constructivist thought as well as offer new paths of inquiry. A presentist temporal orientation better enables conversations across schools of thought, especially by those that are most clearly linked substantively and working with similar intellectual influences.136 Theorizing the contingent present could operate as a shared intellectual agenda that remains open to multiple resolutions of positivist/postpositivist debates, precisely because of humility that the contingency of social life in time brings about. Once we remove the commitment to natural, universal time, some of the distinctions between critical theoretical approaches and constructivism become more easily bridged even if constructivism were to maintain its scientific priors. Positivist social science as practiced is seen as reductive, dismissive of difference, and noncontingent, none of which is necessarily true of all scientific approaches, much less those loosely understood as “social scientific.” This also allows the contingency of sociality to be incorporated via shared language across the field, even for those approaches that do not view contingency as necessarily constant. All schools deal with the past, theorize temporal relationships, and address the nature of material reality especially insofar as they shape political relations at the global level – temporal dynamics become critical. This is only more so for an approach like constructivism that distinguishes itself by privileging sociality.

Conclusion The emergence of new presents brings with it new politics. While there may be continuities, these are exceptional and created and not the rule. The cliché “we now know . . . ” can be more usefully framed as “we know now.”137 In other words, from this present location, the following things are more or less “true” and they may or may not continue to be so in the future. This is because the emergence of the future present always risks disrupting the continued validity of a claim across time. Centering the present as the “locus of reality” emphasizes currently underrepresented substantive research agendas as well as potential new formulations of extant theoretical claims. It also 136

137

See e.g., Grove 2020 for a discussion of how this replicates early 20th century interdisciplinary work among philosophers, physicists, and theologians. Gaddis famously titled his history of the Cold War with this aphorism, Gaddis 1992 and Leffler 1999.

142

The Time of Global Politics

reinforces moves in such diverse areas as the “new materialism,” forecasting, Bayesian models, computational and artificial intelligence, quantum theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and ontological security by providing a nonfoundationalist temporal imaginary better equipped to enable collective inquiry among those with very different approaches. These brief sketches of the implications for major debates and theoretical traditions within IR are just that, sketches. In the following chapters, I show how this could work at the interstate level – war – and at the level of the unit – foreign policy. Each provides an increasing level of concretization of the claims this book has been building by narrowing the focus. In later chapters, I identify some other theoretical implications for positionality and prediction, as well as responsibility. The goal in this chapter has been to identify some of the central sites of difference for a present-based temporal imaginary in IR at a broadly intelligible level. In effect, this chapter serves as an answer to the “so, what?” question at the theoretical and systemic level. This type of temporal imaginary may appear impossibly new and unworkable to some or banal and obvious to others. Paradoxically, this divide reinforces the concept that multiple presents are operating within IR itself. Much like the political present, this incongruity is generative. These types of disjunctures and contestations are precisely where politics and insight happen. Continuing to only focus on the past in an attempt to resolve these complications and flatten out their challenges to extant thought remains a seductive trap that IR should resist.

|

5

The Time of War

Introduction Times of war are perhaps one of the most important elements shaping the fear of presentism animating IR’s turn to the past. Wars are vital matters of state and tragedies that have taken more lives and caused more suffering than virtually anything else in politics. In large part, they define political history. Given the stakes involved, and their status as constitutive elements of history, it is unsurprising that IR turns to the past to best understand present manifestations of armed conflict and political violence. While intuitive, there are disadvantages to such an approach, just as there are drawbacks to ignoring the past and treating the present as something absent the influence of past events. As theoretical tools, time, temporality, and the present face a challenge. Theorists of war already accept that time matters for security, violence, and war, but only insofar as it is a universal and natural feature of all aspects of life.1 Social understandings of time – what Adam refers to as the “social life of time” – have a more circumspect relationship with violent conflict.2 Yet, war also appears to be one of the most intuitive areas where a temporally sophisticated approach can offer insight. Wars are events – both in the narrow theoretical sense and in the colloquial manner.3 They create meaning, organize societies, mark history, and shape IR. Historical time is often periodized by wars – for example, “the pre-revolutionary period,” the “inter-war years,” or antebellum society – elevating certain pasts over others, in the process animating specific presents in ways that shape contemporary politics and their likely futures. War itself might best be understood as a time, rather than the location where violence occurs. War time is a recognizable legal, social, and political concept used to enable supposedly exceptional behavior.4 It possesses directionality 1 3

2 Rynning, Schmitt, and Theussen 2021, 1–8. Adam 1990. 4 Lundborg 2012, Holmqvist 2013b, Narozhna 2021. Dudziak 2012.

143

144

The Time of Global Politics

and tempo, and instantiates new pasts and futures. The time of war is generative – the present of war is a site with tremendous meaning, impact, and influence. War time, however, is largely viewed by IR scholars and practitioners in a past-centric manner. Wars of the past are studied again and again to divine the timeless lessons of conflict. Specific lessons from past analogs provide a guidebook for successful action – provided the appropriate analog is invoked.5 Practitioners and scholars operate very similarly on this point. War is a generative activity conducted between adversaries that imagine themselves to be in competition. Clausewitz saw this as a space crying out for “genius” where the most effective commanders would know when and where to diverge from the lessons of the past.6 For him, those who performed best in war used new and emergent tactics and strategies that confounded their enemy and fit the situations of the moment, rather than blindly following supposedly scientific, timeless laws of war. Focusing on the past to explain that the future has value, but without actively theorizing the present – conceptually, methodologically, and as an area for intentional analysis – something important is missed. Where the previous chapter showed how the present could better inform theory at the meta- and systemic levels, this chapter adds to that by showing how the present can improve theory at the level of interstate relations. Given the concept’s ubiquity and long history, an important insight developed here is that there is no one possible “theory of war.” Instead, war works best as an area for theoretical and critical inquiry and as a conceptual interlocutor for thinking about political and structural violence. Adopting this approach can better theorize complex dynamics and deepen contemporary theories of war. Attention to temporal dynamics generally, as well as presentist concepts like heterotemporality, emergence, change, and nonfixity, enables a more nuanced approach to understanding war’s ontology, its causal dynamics, and how wartime possesses characteristics in its present that cannot be captured by only looking at the past and future. This chapter identifies how a presentist approach would benefit thinking on war. In the first section, I show how war is intrinsically temporal as well as what the value of bringing war and temporality 5

6

Interestingly, Clausewitz in On War makes the explicit claim that wars prior to a certain date are insufficiently like contemporary war (for him) and thus should be ignored. Clausewitz 1976, 100–112.

The Time of War

145

into explicit conversation is. In the second section, I identify five specific points for greater consideration in the study of war. One is temporal malleability and how the dynamic and innovative elements of warfare are ontological features of it, not quirks of particular contexts. A second is the impact of temporal borders, the contestation that exists, and the interrelationships of past, present, and future that arise and shift as wars begin, continue, and end. A third is that war itself is dynamic and heterotemporal – collective violence requires the interaction of countless entities, individuals, materials, and bodies, each with their own and shared temporalities. The production of a present as the present constitutes a collective imaginary that must be accounted for when assessing and explaining behavior before, during, and after war, rather than flattened away through scholarly distance or historical narrative. One way of doing this is through attending to temporal levels of analysis within and among these imaginaries. Finally, there are good reasons to resist the epistemological privileging of generalizability in thinking about war and moving toward an emergent and discontinuous set of insights regarding war itself. The applicability of any insight depends upon the present being analyzed, rather than operating as some sort of timeless, objective truth. As the previous chapter demonstrated, theories of IR possess nuanced and distinct temporal dynamics and concerns. War and wartime possess similar dimensions, and any analytically serious account should take this seriously.

Why Study War through the Lens of the Present7 War remains one of those concepts that are widely understood and employed yet rarely comes under scrutiny regarding its precise meaning.8 Some analogize the concept to “terrorism or sovereignty” as one of those concepts that will never possess an accepted definition precisely because it is describing a contestable set of practices that cannot fit any fully objective or “timeless” definition – it only emerges in 7

8

I choose not to use a question mark here to emphasize that this is not a choice, and that we are always occupying a present whenever we engage in analysis, study, or theorization. I take this move from David Campbell’s article (1998b) “Why Fight,” which employs a similar formulation. Particularly in political practice, but similarly – albeit not to the same extent – in contemporary IR and security studies.

146

The Time of Global Politics

relation to extant power structures.9 The point of departure for this chapter is that we should treat war as critical scholars have regarded terrorism, as a term that is power-laden, legitimizes certain acts of violence over others, and is largely defined in relationship to a particular present and its power relationships. It does not possess analytical objectivity or final separability from its temporal context. Studying war requires us, even if only implicitly, to think about what IR traditionally considers a war to be and whether or not that is what it has actually been throughout its long history.10 Adopting a presentist approach means thinking carefully about the shared understandings that inform collective imaginaries, which pays special attention to the ontological assumptions animating these imaginaries. Barkawi and Brighton argue that “war, then, is in the situation of being both taken for granted in its meaning and radically underdeveloped as an object of inquiry.”11 Nordin and Oberg argue that this recognition means there is an “imperative” to examine assumptions built into the “ontology of war” that “may limit what we see.”12 Within the contemporary state system, war has been normalized in a way that resists direct conceptual investigation, even as it remains central to the contemporary understanding of international politics, state sovereignty, and security.13 In some ways, what I lay out here follows Guzzini’s call for “ontological theorizing” – or what he refers to as the study of a “concept.”14 From a temporal perspective, “concept analysis” is an intuitive fit because of its reflexive nature, constantly unfolding and updating itself over time. Concepts like war deserve this treatment because they constitute the field’s “ontology . . . the building blocks of a theory” as well as “the components out of which theorists generate their arguments.”15 War, as one of the “concept(s) prominent in IR,” is a “broad and complex phenomena whose material manifestations are plural, shifting, and incomplete – if they are accepted to even exist in the first place.”16 Part of what Berenskoetter and others are alluding to regarding its “incomplete[ness]” is that the concept changes over time – or to use the vocabulary employed here, it differs in different presents. 9 10

11 13 15

Cronin 2002. Mueller 2021 argues that inter-state war is close to becoming obsolete, and at a minimum has dramatically receded in its occurrence in international politics. 12 Barkawi and Brighton 2011, 127. Nordin and Oberg 2015, 394. 14 Lipschutz 1995. Guzzini 2013 and Berenskoetter 2017 x. 16 Berenskoetter 2017, 1–2. Berenskoetter 2017, 5.

The Time of War

147

A separate element of war that warrants temporal and presentist analysis is the backward-facing nature of political violence itself, something Roger Thornton refers to as its “peculiar temporality.”17 Thornton identifies violence as “a social fact of a peculiar kind.”18 He claims, “that violence is ultimately explicable,” yet by treating it as “peculiar,” Thornton shows that “events or episodes of violence have a special temporal character that make them necessarily perplexing, and that the perplexity that violence occasions is not due to ‘inadequate’ social theory, but rather derives from the fact that violence is genuinely ‘original’ or ‘emergent’ in a fundamental sense.”19 A presentist approach similarly emphasizes the emergent quality of politics – political violence is no exception. What is particularly notable about political violence is the manner in which it disrupts the continuities that we rely upon to make sense of the world, eventually telling stories and narratives in reverse to overcome this break. Lee Jarvis and Tom Lundborg articulate the war on terrorism and events of September 11, 2001, as examples of this fact – temporal breaks that require narration in order to make sense of the world and/or the event in and of itself.20 “Thus, if retrospective accounts of violence appear clear and decisive, it is only after the fact, and never before that we can achieve such clarity. Before the fact, violence is always a ‘risk’ or a ‘probability’, but never empirically predictable or confinable to one moment, place, person or mode. This paradox is what I call the ‘peculiar temporality of violence’, that is, that it is only clear that it happened, and only clear that it was really violence in retrospect. Violence, then, is statistically probable, but fundamentally unpredictable and is therefore ‘chaotic’.”21

Put differently, social scientific practice as well as conventional foreign policy discourse has difficulty explaining and understanding war in a continuous, scientifically valid way. This is no accident or mere problem of execution. It is because of the chaotic, emergent temporality intrinsic to collective violence. Continuity and historical causation are narratives we construct and not undeniable aspects of the world as we know it. The reasons we prefer to believe in these continuous 17 19 20 21

18 Thornton 2002, 43. Thornton 2002, 43; see also Butler 2009. Thornton 2002, 44. Edkins 2003, Jarvis 2008, Jarvis 2009b, Lundborg 2012. Thornton 2002, 43.

148

The Time of Global Politics

narratives are oblique. It might be as a legacy of behaviorist social science, replication of sovereign temporalities as Andrew Hom argues, or a psychosocial desire to eliminate the suffering that inevitably accompanies violence. Regardless of motivation, these are narratives that are articulated, not mechanisms discovered.22 “The event of violence and any outcomes of violence are inherently uncertain from the point of view of any observer, and are therefore unpredictable. This ‘uncertainty principle’ means that violence is only apparently explicable in retrospect. Invariably, however, explanations of violence are construed as if previous states of affairs caused the violent event they seek to explain. Instead, each episode requires interpretation each time. This accounts for the perennial perplexity of the social sciences in the face of violence. It does not, however, account for violence.”23

Thornton goes so far as to treat violence as an event beyond the reach of “causation” in the way we normally understand it – as an outcome or result of time/structure/place. He instead emphasizes that “it is not violence itself – the act and its destructive consequences – that is causally effective or the ‘instrument of power,’ but rather our narratives about violence we construct after the event of violence.”24 This dynamic orders violence as at either the end of a process of which it is the inevitable result or the beginning of a new trajectory now realized in the present. What this leaves us with is a better appreciation of war as a practice of narrative construction in a political present. This construction could be imagined as primarily in the past, it could be used to constitute ongoing actions into a single project or to project futures into existence that enable disparate violence to cohere as a war. None of this is to the exclusion of its materiality but rather as a way of articulating coherence for collective imaginaries.25 There is an inherent narrativity to the violence that continually articulates a past as war. These constructions narrate an assemblage of violence that continually produces and reproduces the pasts and futures that must connect in order to cohere. For example, the first shot in a war projects a future that promises to realize the necessary size and scope of material action to make this a first shot in a war, rather than a meaningless incident between two entities in a state of peace. 22 25

Hom 2010. Grove 2019.

23

Thornton 2002, 45.

24

Thornton 2002, 43.

The Time of War

149

The United States sees this firsthand in the ongoing narration of what happened during the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Those present attempted to prevent the certification of the electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election, with its ultimate failure effectively ending former president Trump’s institutional/quasilegal options for overturning the election results. While it was not a war per se, the peculiarity of the violence – conducted by actors who appeared simultaneously absurdist, satirical, and menacing – required theorization and a language to account for it. In some ways, because there is not a well-established set of concepts in 2021 American political discourse to capture what happened, it makes the normalization of war’s violence as war more visible. From the American perspective, for instance, the occupation of Afghanistan was indisputably a war – thus, President Biden could characterize the American withdrawal of forces as an end to one of the “forever wars” he promised to conclude in his time in office.26 This, despite the fact that the AUMF authorizing American military force in Afghanistan and eventually countless other countries around the globe, for example, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and so on, remained in place. While an indisputable fact for some, the violence that constitutes war is no less peculiar; it only differs by its normalization and the collective recognizability that accompanies the expansion and establishment of sovereign ways of knowing violence. The insurrection was further complicated by reticence within largely white spaces to acknowledge the white supremacism motivating the antidemocratic attack that sought to retain Trump as president. As time goes on, it has become increasingly understood as a deliberate attack that sought to capture and kill elected officials in exchange for their acceptance and acquiescence to the continued rule of their designated leader.27 Although it technically is not a war, as an act of political violence, the peculiarity of political violence and the need to fold it into existing frameworks and conceptual apparatuses was put on display for all to see. What is also left underdeveloped by the current approach is the relationship between scholarly and analytical presents. Any analysis of war from an IR perspective is inevitably at odds with that of the actors and structures constituting the conflict under investigation. The 26

Smith 2021.

27

Devega 2021, Graham 2021.

150

The Time of Global Politics

present of the scholar is distinctly not the present of the actor(s). Theorizing war, then, always runs the risk of mistaking hindsight for an effective understanding of events as they occurred, and this is something that strategic studies, for instance, has always recognized, going back to Clausewitz and Sun-Tzu. This requires returning to Hutchings’ approach to temporal divergence, adopting a “heterotemporal orientation” that pays close attention to the idea of the present in its multiplicity.28 Because scholars do not occupy the same present they analyze, this difference needs to be theorized. The production of “the modern political present” is a process of grounding in and of itself, rather than a stable ground everyone shares at each moment in time.29 This grounding is a participatory process that the scholar similarly – although often unwittingly – participates in via their implicit assumptions about time, the present, and its universality. For instance, comparing actions in World War II to a crisis response to North Korean aggression requires an accounting of how the two presents differ, where they were the same, and what knowledge, discourses, and temporal dynamics were at play. For instance, returning to the example of US foreign policy in the Trump administration, their present was informed by a heightened tempo of events, a willingness to discount future costs or value past gains, as well as an emphasis on maintaining and consolidating political power. Together, this creates pushes and pulls that encourage some positions – for example, risk aversion for anything that threatened the continuation of these dynamics and risk acceptance for anything else – over others. This is not to say that comparisons cannot be made to previous crisis bargaining, but rather that actively theorizing the temporal dynamics of that present matters and matters deeply when trying to figure out likely behavior.

What the Present Can Reveal: The Value of the Present for Understanding War If war is essentially a temporal concept, then centering the present – rather than the past – offers potential insights underemphasized by other approaches. The present emphasizes emergence, change, nonfixity, and heterotemporality. Shifting away from viewing it as primarily a space of battle, a cleanly bounded set of moments in time, a recurring 28

Hutchings 2011.

29

Lundborg 2015.

The Time of War

151

phenomenon with timeless characteristics, or an outcome to explain would benefit IR theory immensely. In this section, I isolate five areas where the theorization of war would benefit – temporal fluidity during war time, the temporal boundaries of war, levels of analysis, heterotemporal difference, and the collective performance of war in its present.

Temporal Malleability and the Dynamism of War’s Present When viewed from the perspective of the present, politics appears much more malleable than when viewed through the lens of history. There is an ever-present potential for discontinuity; a heterogeneous intersection of pasts, presents, and futures; and the creative possibility of emergent events, actors, and apparatuses. Given its competitive nature, the peculiarity of violence itself, and the countless interactions that must be made to cohere in collective imaginaries, war might be even more malleable than the politics of peacetime. For scholars, practitioners, and other observers, war is constantly evolving and facing new innovations, giving it a constantly changing nature. Yet, war itself is often articulated as something beyond argument or debate – we know it when we see it. It is transhistorical, something practically intrinsic to humanity. Despite its liminality, many scholars and practitioners seek to identify its characteristics or type – levels of insurgent participation, civilmilitary conflicts, technological innovations, economic and humanitarian impacts, or its “Changing Character”30 – rather than articulating the manner in which this temporal phenomenon’s ontology is produced and constructed.31 Few would dispute the time of World War I as a war, for example, rendering its existence as a war nearly “timeless.” Accepting this, however, does a great deal of analytical work that leaves war’s temporal variability aside. Ideas of acceptable violence or even what is or is not violent vary over time and are central to the analytical category’s existence but flattened out by its invocation. Once a time of violence is decided to be a war – rather than genocide, civil conflict, repression, colonial administration, or domestic violence, 30

31

Most famously embodied in the “Changing Character of War” project at Oxford, see e.g., Strachan and Scheipers 2011. Barkawi and Brighton 2011, Nordin and Oberg 2015.

152

The Time of Global Politics

for example – it enters a conceptual linking it to all other wars. With further typology, questions of appropriate comparisons are made, but again, this leaves the initial question of war’s ontology answered through implicit and untheorized conventions that often reflect the interests of the actors we study. This also raises the issue of what violence is understood as “war” rather than “crimes” like terrorism, mass killing, or genocide.32 To understand these phenomena as divergent requires a backdrop where these differences can be visible. This backdrop – particularly within Euro-American IR – is produced by a “Eurocentric thinking” where “real war is interstate war between nation-states, fought between regular armed forces” where “all other conflicts are considered derivative.”33 Much as whiteness is politically reproduced as “racially neutral” or “colorblind” in American politics and theory, war operates as the backdrop within IR and security studies by which other forms of political violence are understood and categorized.34 Yet, as Barkawi points out, the collective imaginaries that dominate within contemporary war discourse – like those regarding “World War I and II” – erase their colonialist periodizations, motivations, and typology.35 Similarly, global conflicts like “the Seven Years War and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars” are excluded by a Eurocentric notion of war that is silently positioned as globally and temporally universal.36 Treating European ideas as universal reifies a European narrative of the past as the global understanding of war, placing them as seemingly neutral starting points beyond the reach of theorization and/or change. It also universalizes binaries between war and peace as well as those between international and civil conflicts.37 This narrative – and the concept of war it supports – becomes determinative of what purportedly global notions of war are and always have been. Consequently, World War II is indisputably a war, whereas the violence experienced in the home, by displaced persons, under colonial administration, or by those living in poverty, is seen as something else entirely.38

32 33 34 35 37

Cronin 2002, Jackson 2007, Blakely 2007, Devega 2021, Hoffman 2011. Barkawi 2016, 1–2. Anievas, Manchanda and Shilliam 2014, Vitalis 2015. 36 Paine 2012, 3; Barkawi 2016, 26. Barkawi 2016, 26. 38 Barkawi 2016, 3. Johnson 2008, Pain 2014, New York Times 2016.

The Time of War

153

Despite its supposedly transhistorical role in human history, war is not a stable concept. It is often times a conflict about the present itself – what constitutes its past and what should be its future – not just a set of events located there. It can also represent a contest to universalize the present such that the war becomes something to which others must respond and position themselves – even if that relationship is one of denial or diminishment. Beyond the move to universalize the present – particularly in wars between sovereign actors seeking control of territory and addressing an articulated existential threat – it is often an attempt to control that present’s dynamics, norms, and materiality. Asymmetric warfare, for instance, can perhaps also be understood as a means of war that attempts to engage in conflict with the worldpolitical present by those who are positioned as outside of it. Thus, their means, existence, and goals are necessarily oblique, distinct, and difficult to ascertain by those who want to continue to universalize that present of politics – and its wars – even as they claim to be in a “superior” position with respect to military power. While this discussion of war has been conceptual, the implications are not merely esoteric or imagined. The contemporary US war on terrorism – what the Costs of War project refers to as the “US counterterror wars” – now traverses almost twenty years and involves US military forces in 39% of countries around the globe.39 Yet, the temporal expansiveness of the war is similarly consequential. The 2003 Iraq War is often treated as distinct from US actions in Afghanistan and separate still from American operations in northern Iraq and Syria to address ISIS and other security concerns, despite utilizing a similar legal basis.40 What is more controversial is how to count ongoing drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia.41 Are these part of the 2001 war or a separate conflict begun against actors who were not even around when the war started? Similarly, it is not clear how to classify the US strikes on Syria in 2017 and 2018 in response to chemical weapon use or the 2021 strike against Iranbacked fighters within their territory.42 The largest question here is whether these are separate conflicts with their own histories or if they are all part of one overall US war on terrorism. In some ways, this cannot be answered in advance as it will only be finally resolved by 39 41

40 Savell 2018. Bradley and Goldsmith 2004, 2076. 42 Cronin 2014, Byrne 2016, and Nylen 2020. Blake 2021.

154

The Time of Global Politics

whatever future pasts and presents end up dominating global discourse. However, one can imagine a future where these conflicts are recategorized as shared elements of a single global imperial conflict reflecting an American desire for control and power. This is why typologies originating from marginalized political presents are so valuable. Apart from the normative reasons to value these perspectives in terms of amplifying the voices of those marginalized by these actions, it could also provide better analytical purchase for those solely invested in answering these questions on their own narrow terms.

Temporal Boundaries as Constitutive Elements of War: Conditional Generalizability If war contains an ontologically emergent character and necessitates the construction of pasts and futures to even “make sense” as war, then generalizability becomes more complicated. This is not to deny the importance of making claims about politics – most analytical approaches engage in this process even as the definition or understanding of what that means shifts. Claims – even predictive claims and statements about more or less likely futures – are still assessable from this temporal perspective, but they can no longer assert continuity across time without showing some sort of warrant or continuing narrative/discourse that enables this to be thinkable. For example, Morgenthau and Walt both linked the dominance of positivist approaches in theoretical work to the international practice of politics at the global level.43 For each of them, the world’s stability and apparent fixity enabled an approach that sought timeless claims and globally generalizable ideas because the Cold War was seen as structuring the entirety of international politics across the globe.44 As an alternative, to use a simple example, boundary conditions could be attached to claims that limit theoretical claims to specific temporal contexts rather than being forced to choose between “thick description of specific cases” and generalizable, “usable knowledge,” similar to the “contingent generalizations” already offered by some constructivists.45 Boundary conditions would not be tied to specific dates, but rather to specific imaginaries and presents. If the Cold War did indeed constitute 43 45

44 Morgenthau 1972, Walt 1991. Morgenthau 1972, Walt 1991. Finnemore and Sikkink 2001, 394; Pierson 2004.

The Time of War

155

an ongoing present, for instance, then one can assert claims that hold so long as that structure remains dominant. Doing so is a necessarily contingent claim, as should be obvious – a present generally is not thought of as extending over decades. It can but only through a political process that articulates the status quo as unchanging and unyielding, and that process is inevitably incomplete due to its heterotemporality. This necessitates a theory from elsewhere in order to show what apparatuses and processes are occurring to maintain this status quo and how it might fail as a theoretical architecture. All this requires us to ask how the temporal emergence and discontinuity of war are covered over and managed by dominant actors. Narratives are spun to connect past and future in ways that enable the present to be part of a practice that is continually unfolding.46 Sovereignty’s role in this connectivity and apparent cross-temporal similarity is highly important here – the privileging of actors, conceptions of conflict, and what is and is not war is indelibly marked by the discourse and power of sovereignty.47 One need only look at how war is normalized, while other forms of political violence are understood as deviant via juxtaposition with state-centric “war” as the normal form of political violence. The implication of rethinking generalizability is that by linking specific claims to specific pasts, presents, and futures, we can simultaneously affirm them as contingent. Their coherence is certainly meaningful, which is why some theory can work on its own terms, but that coherence is a product of managing other presents in a way that makes it appear to cohere – not because we have derived some ultimate reality. This necessitates a much more humble approach toward claim-making when it comes to war and one that perhaps logically more closely resembles the constant revision, innovation, and surprises that constitute warfare itself – and its history. One other implication this would have is that it might require greater skepticism of claims regarding foreign policy that traverse major historical “breaks” or benchmark dates without an identifiable present that attaches or informs the “world” in which the claims are advanced. This could better enable the possibility of accounting for the structural and intersubjective shifts that might dramatically impact supposedly static notions like the anarchy assumption, the existence/nonexistence of “norms,” or even the liberal postwar order. The election of Trump 46

Edkins 2003, Krebs 2015, Subotic 2016.

47

Hom 2010, Lundborg 2015.

156

The Time of Global Politics

in 2016 along with the Brexit vote in England and electoral gains by far-right groups in Europe may represent an important shift or “changepoint” in Euro-American IR that needs accounting for in terms of worldview, not simply predicted outcomes.48 Waiting for enough history to accumulate to justify shifting course has benefits in terms of “rigor,” but equally so, there are costs. Finally, this conception of the present could usefully enable reformulations of war as a politics of the present – temporally, but also in terms of contests over the lines demarcating the present’s boundaries.49 Conceptions of the present are not uniform, natural, or simply discovered but products of power and political formations themselves.50 They have political implications significant enough that many see them as worth violently contesting. Contestation over war meaning – what is and is not a war and who gets to decide – is a large part what defines the supposed boundaries of politics, especially in the wake of the unending American war on terrorism and its emphasis on terrorists being “from another time.”51 The war on terrorism is in many ways a war to eradicate terrorism from the present of American politics – however and whenever defined. Similarly, the war on drugs and the abortive move toward a war on COVID also adopted this position. Wars over nationalist recognition are often about bringing a nationalist past into the political present, so that recognition and political power must inevitably follow. Violence is everywhere in political presents to varying degrees, at once agential and structural, yet only certain instantiations of that violence get understood and accepted as “war.”52 That acceptance comes with a normative assignation of 48 49

50 51

52

Park 2010. Given the emphasis on war as occurring in the periphery in the contemporary moment, conceptualizing the time-space of IR as the constructed political present shows how even temporal boundary construction creates zones of peace and war, See Bialasiewicz et al 2007. Hutchings 2008. Schmitt implicitly makes this point in The Concept of the Political and more explicitly in War/Non-War: A Dilemma. Foucault’s inversion of Clausewitz’s dictum regarding war and politics in Society Must Be Defended makes a similar move and identifies the breadth of the stakes involved in conceptual understandings of war and politics. Foucault 2003, Schmitt 2004, Schmitt 2008, and Bashir 2016. Gendered analyses of IR have proved extraordinarily insightful on the politics of this particular issue, Sjoberg’s work on war identifies the stakes and positions in this debate artfully; see Sjoberg 2013.

The Time of War

157

importance and a set of obvious analogies. Racialized policing, global economic inequalities, humanitarian “interventions,” violence in the home, and weapon “testing” on indigenous lands are all acts of violence producing and reproducing political configurations and boundaries of who counts as politically “present,” yet in the dominant “world-political present,” they do not constitute war.53 War sets these boundaries in terms of what is and is not acceptable to fight and die over and what should and should not orient our lives as political subjects of the state.54 Recognizing that this is a function of shared understandings of a present constantly producing and reproducing itself in spite of inevitable indeterminacy is a powerful and important political claim.55

The Heterotemporal Present: Theorizing Difference at War Heterotemporality argues that there are multiple pasts and futures operating simultaneously within what we consider to be the worldpolitical present. This also applies to the past – or more specifically the presents of the past that we study. One of the key insights of taking the present seriously is that it is generative and polytemporal.56 Declaring a set of violent practices as war asserts that the event in question possesses parallels with all wars past and future because war is a recurring phenomenon endemic to political societies. Comparing wars across time – even those well established as wars like the Pelopennesian War and World War II – may in actuality be comparing apples and oranges. Instead of lamenting this or throwing up our hands in frustration, theorization should focus on the remainder, those slippages and moments of rupture to the conventional wisdom regarding war itself. What wars or instances of political violence are left out? In the American context, this could take the form of accounting for the “American Indian Wars,” legacies of police brutality, federal repression of left-wing activism, or the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in Africa, North America, and the Caribbean.57 In some ways, the present at the discipline’s founding still appears to dominate – European land wars remain the stable center by which 53 54

55 57

Hutchings 2008, Pain 2014, Grove 2020. To use Hedges’ famous formulation, “War is a force that gives us meaning”; Hedges 2002. 56 Little 2014. Fioretos 2019. See e.g., Barkawi and Laffey 2002, Crawford 2020, and Szarejeko 2020.

158

The Time of Global Politics

we understand and theorize war and violence. Yet, even that present is incomplete – Vitalis shows how race organized international thought at the time, as do Owens and others who show how socialist organizing or other areas of women’s international thought were equally relevant to international politics but underemphasized in our understanding of presents past.58 Asserting the existence of “the” present, in other words, becomes an untenable concept that necessitates exploration and reflexivity. Any political present is only ever sociopolitically constituted and therefore has boundaries and other presents with which it overlaps, connects, or otherwise disengages/engages.59 As such, for claims to be meaningful, they must speak to sufficiently similar presents and include a reflexive critique that recognizes that time itself – and the realities understood in relation to it – is potentially discontinuous and constituted by change.60 Whether taking a historical or scientific approach, continuity from the past to the future cannot be assumed simply because of the “passage of time.” It must instead be identified through scholarly work, rather than operating as the presumed basis. Beyond its utility in analytical frames, the present is a crucial site of actual political power. As the site of conflict, it also creates the stakes. Who gets to define the present? And for whom is that present defined? The relative absence of past and present African conflict within the canonical understandings of war in Euro-American IR, along with the emphasis on “great powers” as an analytical convention, demonstrates how this operates. European and American pasts are positioned as the most analogous for a world that is supposedly dominated by European and American great powers. War is only a violent means to resolve a conflict – resolving that conflict requires a temporal stickiness to attach. For instance, a territorial conflict is ultimately an exercise in controlling a population and maintaining its independence from outside invasion or interference. Without acquiescence to the new political authority in the present and an expectation that that present creates a universal future where this situation can continue, then the war is likely to continue because it is unresolved. As actors become more complex and more nontraditional, this becomes even more complicated. 58 60

59 Owens 2007, Vitalis 2015, and Owens 2018. Hutchings 2008. Presuming physical time exists beyond its presence as a social practice – my claim here is explicitly not endorsing this split, but rather uses it heuristically given the dominance of this understanding socially and politically.

The Time of War

159

From a strictly analytical perspective, two other areas of work could be beneficial. One is adopting a form of heterotemporal boundary construction that goes beyond “periodization.” Political practice and its meaning do not always track to the calendar, nor do they necessarily operate in a unitary manner, as the Battle of New Orleans and other skirmishes and battles after the war had “concluded” amply demonstrate. As analysts, we are most interested in what the past can do for us in terms of knowledge generation. Ordering it via calendars may be useful, but it also follows a sovereign way of knowing the world that may replicate some of the very practices that we seek to better understand.61 Conventions regarding decades or even centuries may obscure more than they reveal. Moving toward timing international political life via explicitly social ideas – such as a particular generation, the emergence of a social formation, shared understandings of touchstone issues, for example, a specific vision of world order, or the existence of specific actors – is one way of doing this. And while it may appear different, much of IR already does this, beginning history with the emergence of the modern state via the 1648 Treat of Westphalia. Finally, locating “the past” as beginning with the end of World War II or the Treaty of Westphalia is not solely an analytical move – it replicates a settler colonialist and Eurocentric means of knowing the past, present, and future. It is unsurprising that IR theory is deeply shaped by both these structural dynamics, but efforts to undo that will require a rethinking of how we describe, value, and utilize the past. Similarly, where and when does the recent past or even the wellunderstood past become untenable or unusable? What parts disappear? What parts do not? Instead of trying to answer questions like these in some sort of timeless, existential way, these are questions that can be limited to contexts – for example, what is the meaningful past for Chinese foreign policymakers during the Cold War or Nigerian national security imaginaries in the present?

Levels of Analysis as a Temporal Phenomenon The levels of analysis are an idea traditionally taught within IR theory but are also intuitive to anyone analyzing or practicing politics. Domestic actors can be opposed to particular actions at the 61

Hom 2017.

160

The Time of Global Politics

international level, creating two-level games that complicate the ability to conclude things like international agreements.62 Or alternatively, the idiosyncrasies of a leader can result in state behavior that runs contra to expectations given their state position in the international structure. Yet, this can also operate at the temporal level, where temporal dynamics at the level of one present – for example, domestic political discourse – can interact with the world-political present in a way that complicates efforts to understand based solely on one or the other. System-state temporalities can align or diverge, resulting in distinct predictions, expectations, and likely occurrences depending on temporal context. Theories of decision-making and behavior are ultimately attempting to discover patterns and regularities among decision-making entities who are operating in distinct times and places.63 If the present is the place where that takes place, then the past and future of those particular presents will differ from those of the scholar and any theory developed. This complicates the classical distinction between theories of foreign policy and theories of IR. As the case of the Trump administration demonstrates, temporal dynamics within foreign policy are crucial to understanding state behavior. Looking at issues like leadership studies, or other forms of theorizing at multiple levels, offers one way of doing this, provided the temporal dimension is foregrounded. Taking temporal levels of analysis seriously means addressing the distinctions between system and state temporalities, but it also requires looking at the everyday practices of war from a theoretical perspective – some of which will be state-centric, while many others will not. What is the difference in temporality between generals on the ground and those who are actually “in the trenches”? How does the timing of the war on the “homefront” differ from that within the battlespace itself – and importantly, how do those distinctions shape and constrain the practice of war? These questions need to move into thinking different times as well as different spaces. One way of thinking about this is a turn back to “peace” as a way of making political violence more visible and thinkable. Temporal borders are always already drawn in representations of war, the war front, the battlefield, the 62

63

Putnam 1988, more recently see e.g., Da Conceicao-Heldt 2013 and Bjola and Manor 2018. See e.g., Hom and Beasley 2021.

The Time of War

161

home front, and so on. How does the existence of different temporalities impact our picture of war itself – and thus how we theorize its causes and consequences? One way this is occurring is through a more thorough incorporation of time horizons within the study of war. These time horizons matter more than even the particular leaders’ conceptions of them because “the temporal pressures affecting grand strategies exert themselves primarily on states regardless of who their particular leaders are at any given time.”64 While ideas like time horizons are a valuable starting point, this leads toward two further areas for research. One area would perform similar analysis of temporal framing, but instead utilizing a conception of time that is sociopolitical, rather than a universal constant where horizons are different lengths of time and qualities beyond duration would matter. Second is that there is a wealth of other ways in which levels of analysis can be included in such thinking and impact behavior. How do different time horizons within individual foreign policy apparatuses or among subnational actors shape behavior? What about the temporality of great power? The concept of great power requires a temporality to attach where the great power has been “great” for a suitable part of the past such that they are recognized in a present as a “great power.” How long does that take? What occurs in the interim where a great power is not-yet or no-longer? The differing temporalities involved in “power transitions” have already been shown to be impacted by recognition and status as well as lags in perception on the part of actors or the wider world.65 The ways in which those temporalities combine and shift impact the shape of those transitions, whether or not they are conflictual or cooperative, but also the contours and implications beyond the specific powers involved. A fully robust theory of war requires temporal analysis, particularly if the understanding of it as the production of agential interactions continues. In other words, if it is an activity decided upon and conducted by actors existing within the confines of a present conditioned by structural factors, then there are influential temporal presents before and after – along with their attendant pasts and temporal dynamics – that are crucial to understand. An example of this is the concept of directionality in war, particularly the idea that wars have a directional 64

Edelstein 2017, 10.

65

Murray 2018.

162

The Time of Global Politics

focus that orients itself toward victory.66 While this certainly can be the case, they can also have a distinct directionality where they are focused on alternatives within the present – political consolidation, preservation of wartime economies, tactical victories – that do not fit the overall narrative of a singular actor pursuing a campaign that eventually congeals into a beginning, middle, and end. Equally important, the temporality of the scholar or analyst, who looks back knowing whether those efforts were successful, may lead them to assert causalities and motivations that could only become sensible after the fact. A failed attempt at using war for power consolidation that results in a shift in regional power dynamics may appear to be structurally shaped when in fact it is a failed attempt at something else that now appears oblique, but was central to the present where it was practiced. Different temporalities may result in different expectations and distinct actions, but equally so, those different temporalities are always already interacting within war itself. To bring in temporalities of the present means accounting for the multiple levels at which temporality operates and, equally important, how those temporalities can differ. A focus on individuals, for instance, enables an understanding of the pasts and futures that make an assumed future of conflict acceptable or even desirable for individual decision-makers. What this also calls for is a greater appreciation of generational analysis within and across states as well as within IR scholarship itself.67 The ways that generations inform each other provide a sort of temporal layering within any present that is important, particularly given the role of analogies in foreign policy decision-making. Generational differences in what is perceived as relevant and/or ruling anologies can lead to vastly different conclusions – a generation shaped by the American experience of Vietnam may bring a very different set of priors to decisions regarding military intervention from those whose political consciousness was formed via the inaction in Rwanda. Given the concentration of foreign policy decision-making in many states, generational differences are already seen as relevant in institutional discourse.68 Connecting this through the present is one way of bringing this into greater conversation with IR theory. 66 68

67 Hom 2018b. Seabrooke 2011, Steele and Acuff 2012, Luecke 2016. Something national security education initiatives take into explicit account, at times orienting themselves toward developing a “new generation” of leaders in foreign policy, King 2015, 94–95.

The Time of War

163

Centering the present as experienced by different levels of society also provides insights into warfighting itself. To return to the US war(s) on terrorism, one could separate experiences of political elites, American citizens, and individuals inhabiting the areas subjected to American violence. At the level of elites, the present might have lengthy time horizons for parts of the political class or relatively compressed ones given the recurrence of elections. American citizens, alternatively, might occupy a present that is highly heterotemporal based on their social proximity to deployed military, differences in the perceived acceleration and contraction of events as consumers of political media, and collective memories that vary by generation. One’s understanding of the war on terror likely varies with an individual’s age, but coheres with an understanding of it as continuous since 2001. For those subjected to American violence, on the other hand, their temporal experience could be extraordinarily rapid, immediate, and with a different perception of the war’s duration and its relationship to their past and future. Those acting under threat of death at any moment, as is the case with those living under drone surveillance, experience a literal sword of Damocles with all the attendant emotional and mental effects one would expect.69 Temporally, this type of experience could compress one’s experience where there is little consideration of past or future, or alternatively, it might create an excessive focus on a past or future where this bodily subjugation is no more. Regardless, their experience is likely very different than the American citizen living in rural Pennsylvania or the career State Department employee in Washington, each of whose experiences constitutes the American time of war. Ultimately, the point is that these questions cannot be answered in advance or assumed to be the same simply because everyone occupies the same “time of war.”

Emergence, Newness, and War as a Collective Performance: Theorizing Apparent Coherence War poses a puzzle from the perspective of the present. It is a powerful means of ordering past and future into coherent narratives accepted by millions of people, but the violence that defines it makes a time of war 69

International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic and Global Justice Clinic 2012.

164

The Time of Global Politics

appear disordered and beyond the normal means of ordering political life. Yet, what is truly puzzling about war is not the obvious and apparent disorder but its coherence. War is the product of thousands of individuals, institutions, nonhuman entities, and structures interacting. Despite this overwhelming complexity, war appears as something sensible, intelligible, accessible, and meaningful. What needs a better explanation is how this intrinsically productive, unanticipatable, and creative, violent activity can also appear to be such a stable concept that scholars, practitioners, and others have no need to inquire into its foundational qualities or taxonomy. Part of this complication comes from the fact that it is a learned, selfaware, and competitive experience. Decision-makers believe that there is a shared history of warfare and strategy from which to draw, creating opportunities for deviations from the expected in ways that are strategically beneficial. In other words, doing the “wrong” or “unexpected” thing at the right time could achieve an outcome otherwise unexpected by previous “theory.” This competitive element collectively incentivizes creativity – on top of the emergent aspects of politics amplified by the “peculiar temporality” of violence. Often times, though, that creativity is not truly novel in the sense that there is no recorded parallel in recorded history but a twist of something that has come before that operates as an emergent occurrence in a new present. The history of American warfare post World War II bears this out as creative measures to address the United States’ military supposed overwhelming military advantage were often successful, precisely because they questioned the supposedly shared concept of warfare and did something that was unexpected based upon settled strategy. In other words, adversaries from the Viet Cong to Al Qaeda to the Taleban drew upon a different past and articulated a different present to upset American attempts at imposing its will and universalizing its narrative of what constitutes past, present, and future military success. A narrative, it must be emphasized, that supposedly allowed the United States to assert full military dominance over the globe so long as it remained in place. Returning to the war/terrorism analogy, war might be a lot more like terrorism than many within IR already accept, particularly if we take the frame and performativity seriously. Terrorism becomes visible as a meaningful political phenomenon even as it varies socioculturally and across history because it is juxtaposed with an essentialist and

The Time of War

165

“timeless” belief about what constitutes war that mirrors biological understandings of sex as settled and gender as culturally varied. Performativity demonstrates how as relationships like these take hold socially, it makes it difficult to recognize the practices that this binary purports to convey. This is particularly the case for practices that operate at the interstices and whose very existence shows that the entire framework is fundamentally misrepresentative, dangerous, and violent. War may be viewed in an essentialist manner, but it varies with its temporal location. Yet, that variance may not always operate in linear ways. It may be the case that wars of the recent past are more useful than ancient wars for theorizing the wars of the present and near future, but it also might be the opposite. Wars in the distant past may not necessarily be less applicable, but in certain times and space, they may be. Conventional thinking typically articulates itself as though its ideas will extend indefinitely so long as things remain largely the same, tracking to linear, continuous notions of time. The military emphasis on fighting the last war may not be a quirk of military culture but a reflection of the ontological understanding of time itself. War is a collective event dependent upon collective participation. The emergent quality of sociality that is predicated upon interaction – whether individual–collective, human–human, or human–nonhuman – is important to remember in the context of war. That said, war’s emergent qualities are often times what military culture and militarized discourse are designed to anticipate and eliminate. This can be a layered process, where one temporal reality is dominant, allowing a political-military present to expand, yet never finally eliminating the emergent layers underneath. Security discourse is precisely about this flattening of reality into something recognizable and intelligible as recurring and anticipatable phenomena so that measures can be developed to address the threat in advance, rather than on the fly.70 For instance, from the security perspective, the end of the Cold War was an impossibility, with the nuclear weapons, interests, military capacity, alliances, and resources all representing a supposedly selfperpetuating cycle. From an economic perspective, however, the end was much less unimaginable, and from some political perspectives,

70

Walt 1991.

166

The Time of Global Politics

even less so. Revolutions and rapid change are always possible – something Russian history itself demonstrates, yet this was largely ignored until the unthinkable became inarguable. This flattening of temporal reality into something recurring and continuous coincides – not surprisingly – with the methods and epistemology of security and its study. Seeking timeless causal mechanisms or articulating stable claims of anticipatable futures based on relationships observed in the past and assuming they will recur is useful, to be sure, but misapprehends a crucial part of sociality. This is particularly the case for war. Emergence is ever-present, but negotiated in ways such that powerful actors can make it appear absent. Attending to the manner by which this occurs, rather than replicating its operation in practice by denying its existence, is one way to insure a better understanding of precisely those scenarios we are most concerned with – the ones that appear to come out of nowhere and break from established understandings of politics. Taking performativity seriously is one way to do this. If we position war as performative, constituted through relationality and representation, then the performativity underlying social ontology carries with it the potential of emergence and newness. Much like sovereignty is always encountering its limits and articulating itself through reproduction, war operates in a similar manner.71 Centering our temporal frame on the present would articulate the importance of these divergences and the ways they are negotiated when examining and predicting future political figurations.72 Where this assists theory is that wars often emerge or end in ways that appear incongruent to both practitioners and scholars. Rather than focusing on these as aberrations, an alternative approach would see this as a baseline element of the emergent political present. As well, while strategists consistently speak of the “fog of war,” this can also be understood as a condition of the political present – constantly emerging, new, and in some ways not anticipatable. From a strategic perspective – and for IR scholars seeking to understand the behavior of these actors in conflict – taking the “fog of war” seriously becomes about embracing the unknown and the unanticipated, rather than relying on old narratives that try and fit what has happened before ever more precisely to the past. From this perspective, much like Clausewitz, war and its study displace the 71

Weber 1998, Jabri 2007.

72

Tillman 1970, Sawyer 2005.

The Time of War

167

dichotomy of art and science, anticipating, if not ever fully realizing, something else entirely.73

Conclusion War is an explicitly temporal phenomenon that arises through collective interaction. In some ways, adopting an explicitly temporal approach to theorizing war and its practice appears both obvious and impossible. “Wartime” is a ripe target for a lens that centers the present rather than the past and emphasizes its emergent, discontinuous, and heterogeneous aspects. At the same time, war is also – and with good reason – articulated as a phenomenon that is nearly timeless and transhistorical. This is despite the fact that they confront each other with military power literally unimaginable thousands of years ago. An explicitly presentist approach to war – as a move toward embracing this frame within IR more broadly – is not one that rejects these comparisons outright. Instead, it resists these comparisons absent some sort of theorization for how analogies and comparisons operate across time and space. Opening the door to these theorizations better enables research into war’s ontology itself, with all the attendant benefits that promise. Ontologies of war vary with temporal location. Those variances have effects, and those effects need to be better explained and understood. The apparent coherence of war across time is part and parcel of what makes war, war. While presentism shows this is not inevitable or a product of war itself, it does acknowledge that – in certain presents – it is a real phenomenon that from the presentist perspective is puzzling. Regardless, war is but one of many phenomena in IR that appear simultaneously impossible to address from a presentist perspective, yet also only comprehensible by foregrounding temporality. As a central concern of IR, war provides ample demonstration of the utility of the present for conceptual analysis. 73

This was in fact emphasized by Clausewitz himself, a fact lost on many following in his intellectual wake and ostensibly informed by “Clausewitzian logic.”

|

6

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

Make AMERICA Great Again . . . KEEP AMERICA GREAT! —President Trump, 2019

Introduction Throughout his time in office and particularly around the 2020 election campaign, President Trump employed the frame of “Make America Great Again” as the overarching narrative for his politics.1 “Make America Great Again” was embroidered on the signature red hats that littered his rallies, and it served as a cheer to punctuate anything and everything Trump. Online, it operated as a clearinghouse for Trumpist ideology and news via the hashtag “#MAGA.” The frame it invoked was an umbrella for white nationalism(s), espoused an explicitly America First foreign policy, and positioned Trump and his supporters as aggrieved subjects opposed and marginalized by broader powers that prevented his – and their – project from full realization, regardless of what that project was imagined to be.2 Any opponent of Trump was supposedly restraining American greatness and actively working to deny American exceptionalism and the fulfillment of its rightful role as leader of the free world. Make America Great Again evoked a powerful nostalgia for a past that may or may not have ever existed. Despite the continued use of this campaign slogan throughout Trump’s time in office and his re-election campaign, Make America Great Again constituted a backward-facing worldview, “rooted in a temporal logic that uses an imagined history as evidence of contemporary self-victimisation.”3 It articulated an ever-present, imminent crisis where foreign and domestic forces threatened America’s – and its supporters’ – past “greatness” at every turn. By “imagining a past in 1 3

McMillan 2017, Hagström 2021. Al-Ghazzi 2021, 46.

168

2

Johnson 2017, 11–13.

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

169

which ‘we’ were not victims,” it “fuels the affective power of feeling like a victim today,” creating a “power” that “populist leaders” like Trump “could exploit.”4 While understandable for a candidate seeking office, for a head of state seeking re-election, this was a singularly odd position, particularly for someone who declared that only he could “fix” it. If America was not great under Trump, then whose fault was that? Some of this tension was ameliorated through the slogan initially registered for his re-election campaign, “Keep America Great.”5 Yet, “Keep America Great” could never finally displace the initial frame of MAGA and failed to assume political power. What was even more odd from a temporal perspective was that these sentiments existed side-byside, sometimes simultaneously, despite the fact that they were explicitly contradictory. If America already was great – as one would expect a head of state with a record that spanned multiple years to argue – then it need not be made great again. But if it needed to be made great again even after years of his leadership, then what argument was there to re-elect him as head of state?6 This temporal contradiction was no mere rhetorical quirk of electoral politics. Like all administrations or heads of state, the Trump administration produced, reproduced, and negotiated its own politics of time. By politics of time, I mean a politics of the present, and not the politics of time reconstituted through historical narration or scholarly explanation. Temporal dynamics mattered throughout the Trump administration and impacted its conduct of foreign policy – all of which shaped and constrained the behavior of the United States in global politics. During the administration – within the time of its understood present – the tempo of politics accelerated; past, present, and future collapsed into a seemingly indefinite present; and the relationship between present and past was shaped in a way that enabled Trumpist political frames to dominate American political action, both domestically and in foreign policy. When combined with the three separate yet overlapping crises of 2020 – the antidemocratic measures 4 6

5 Al Ghazzi 2021, 47. Gilmore et al 2020, 566. Al Ghazzi explains this through invoking Lacanian notions of desire, identifying a “zigzag” pattern of history that populist leaders like Trump and Erdogan create which positions a historically victimized people at a temporal juncture where the countries’ future will only either ascend or regress. For Al Ghazzi, this contradiction is productive and politically valuable, albeit logically inconsistent. Al Ghazzi 2021.

170

The Time of Global Politics

and violence related to the 2020 presidential election, public demonstrations against racist policing, and the ongoing global pandemic – the temporal dimensions of this political present demand attention. To understand foreign policy decision-making and the international behavior of the United States in these moments requires an account of the temporal dynamics shaping and constraining the limits of the possible and conceivable. The lens of the present provides one way of illuminating temporal dynamics directly, illustrating the ways in which these dynamics can shape political outcomes and state behavior as they happen, rather than focusing only on antecedents as potential causes. While President Trump was legally the American head of state for only four years, those four years were highly consequential for the international system, interstate relations, and American foreign policy. While the previous two chapters addressed the systemic and interstate levels, this chapter turns to the unit level and utilizes a presentist approach to analyze one particular time and place of foreign policy and international behavior – the United States during the Trump administration.7 Doing this with the tools and concepts of a presentist perspective adds to our understanding of its contextual characteristics and the American foreign policy that was – and is – likely to result. Through a focus on emergence and change as ontological constants, as well as the use of heterotemporal analysis centering discontinuity, we can better identify the temporal dynamics that have characterized the Trump administration’s – and thus America’s – recent foreign policy. This chapter first turns to the scholarly value of analyzing the contemporary/immediate past of American foreign policy for IR. Studying what was only recently considered the “present” allows some of the temporal dynamics to better resonate when contrasted with the more established approach that waits for time to pass to attempt to contextualize the present of the recent past. It then identifies four temporal dynamics that characterized the Trump administration – temporal othering, the production of simultaneity in a heterotemporal 7

I am deliberately refraining from invoking a periodization tied to the calendar year. I make this choice partially following Hom’s moves toward advancing alternative ways of “timing” politics and resisting the hegemony of sovereign ways of marking time. In this case, it is especially apt, as the boundaries of the “Trump administration” and the effect of Trump’s politics on foreign policy both predate his time in office – his campaign shaped action – and postdate Biden’s inauguration. Hom 2020 and Hom 2017.

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

171

political environment, the accelerated pace and tempo of political action, and the (re)production of an indefinite present. Together, these dynamics encouraged three outcomes for American foreign policy – a self-professedly unconstrained foreign policy, transactionalism, and policy decisions dictated by personalist motivation. Moving into more clearly substantive questions illustrates the value for those invested in the more “traditional” areas of concern for IR scholars and practitioners.8 In short, this chapter shows how presentism is more than a conceptual and theoretical apparatus but a framework for theorizing recognizable outcomes in foreign policy.

Why Study Trump and Trumpism? Turning to a case of contemporary foreign policy – rather than a historical event – is a challenge but when successful confirms the value of the present. Taking on an example that is not yet recognized as history illustrates how a presentist approach can effectively assess contemporary politics – particularly those cases that appear to be both a continuation of and divergent from the past – without losing analytical rigor or theoretical literacy. There are good normative reasons to utilize the wealth of information, knowledge, theory, and conceptual architectures developed within IR to better assess the political formations directly contributing to the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of people at this time. More prosaically, it also offers a proof of concept, demonstrating that a presentist approach has specific and consequential insights it can generate for one of the central concerns of those interested in international politics – foreign policy. While this chapter focuses on American foreign policy from 2016 to 2020, the form it takes can be adopted for other spaces in other times – Brazilian foreign policy under Bolsonaro, Nigerian foreign policy in the 1950s, UNSC actions during the Cold War, or Chinese actions

8

“Traditional” is in quotes, because, as should be clear, this is a position and characterization that is meaningful, but not quite in the way that many accept. “Tradition” operates as a way of continually insisting upon one’s past, present, and future as universal for a field, abrogating the responsibility one has to a particular present. In other words, each of us participate in the maintenance of these fictions by accepting the idea of what is – or is not – traditional. One lesson of presentism is that it could be otherwise.

172

The Time of Global Politics

during the Qing dynasty.9 Future work could identify recurring temporal dynamics within other foreign policy presents and create frameworks, tools, and/or architectures that can then be applied elsewhere but in a temporally sophisticated manner, rather than only seeking generalizability.10 There is a second reason to study the Trump administration and its temporal politics for those interested in IR. While President Trump may disappear from meaningful international politics, the politics and ideologies employed are less likely to recede from view.11 Trumpism in American politics – including foreign policy – is alive and well. Equally important, while the implications of his four years of foreign policy were not much in the “long sweep of history,” they were “long enough to change things irreversibly.”12 The explicitly racist nationalism, personalist corruption, and acceptance of antidemocratic practices to achieve these goals did not originate with Trump, nor was it limited to him personally. Similar movements have sprung up in England, France, Germany, Hungary, Brazil, and the Philippines, as well as having a lengthy history within the United States’ past and present.13 As groups like these have taken power in their current form, they often create a distinct set of “conservative” foreign policy principles that vary in their extremism depending on which countries they are engaging.14 Identifying the temporal dynamics that matter for the American case enables similar attention to be paid elsewhere. Intentionally or not, the Trump administration laid out a blueprint for autocratic corruption in a supposed democracy – others who are more ruthless and/or more competent are likely to adopt elements of it in the future. Trumpism remains a viable political movement within the United States. While the social media megaphone he successfully used to build political power has been removed, as a long-time celebrity and now one of a handful of people with presidential experience, he retains 9

10 11 12 14

One could also imagine ways of delimiting these topics not linked to state and recognized time period – perhaps, indigenous actors during the nuclear era, migrants during rising carbon dioxide levels, or nonhuman animals in the Anthropocene. The limits chosen can vary nearly endlessly. See e.g., Hom and Beasley 2021. Haass 2020, 33–34 and Moynihan and Roberts 2021, 154–155. 13 Haass 2020, 33. Inglehart and Norris 2018. Guimaraes and Silva 2021.

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

173

similar – albeit lessened – powers in terms of shaping political discourse.15 He has declared his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election. Independent of the whims of this one man, the ideologies of white nationalism and autocracy are only becoming increasingly persuasive and desirable.16 Others could capitalize on the opportunity to mobilize this sentiment for political gain – it is already happening within the US context.17 Whether these ideologies retain significant power or recede into the past remains to be seen, but it is likely to remain a conceivable way of ordering politics for the near future. It is therefore worthy of consideration, given the potentially revolutionary implications it may have had – and still could have – on America’s role in the world as well as the impact it could have on other countries and their foreign policy around the globe. This final issue looms large in any analysis of the Trump administration and its foreign policy. For many within traditional sites of foreign policy analysis – American government, think tanks, journalists – those four years were catastrophic and potentially the beginning of a global transformation.”18 It represented an entirely different and distinct foreign policy that broke with recent traditions, threw out consensuses decades in the making, and engaged in a transactional approach that ignored past efforts or future consequences. Many articulated this as something entirely new and distinct, and a dramatic break with the long sweep of American history. Others, particularly those who reside outside the American foreign policy establishment and thus operate with very different pasts and presents, argued that it was more or less identical to the actions of America’s past. Even if limited only to the US presidency, Trump’s “imperial audacity” has “more than two hundred years” of “predecessors among American policymakers and leaders.”19 The primary shift Trump represented 15 16

17

18

19

Hook 2021, Bump 2021. For a comparison of the United States to other countries experiencing democratic backsliding beyond the whims of Trump, see Haggard and Kaufmann 2016. It’s already being used for profit and personal gain, as the most successful TV host on American cable news – Tucker Carlson – spent a week broadcasting from Hungary, lauding the country and its autocratic leader as a model America should follow, Hoare 2021. Ashbee and Hurst 2020, 5, Haass 2020, and for a Chinese perspective, see Chen and Zhang 2020. Pruessen 2019.

174

The Time of Global Politics

was a rejection of the thin veil of rhetoric that enabled Americandominated institutions to operate “neutrally” over top of a material structure that was settler colonialist, militaristic, imperial, and economically exploitive in ways consistent with centuries of United States practices. The tepid response to Biden’s claims that his administration is restoring America’s position to those post-Trump provides ample evidence of this. Regardless of where one comes down on these questions, even as they address present developments, they shift the focus away from the political dynamics of the present to the past. The political dynamics that actually constituted the present of the Trump administration become prompts for historical comparison and evaluation, rather than dynamics to study in and of themselves. What it also does is presume that the question of historical novelty can be resolved with some sort of universal finality. In order for that to happen, we must presume the existence of a universally shared temporal position and ignore the ways that these political dynamics are also constitutive of the temporality that makes them so hard to understand. A focus on the temporal dynamics of the Trump administration’s present illuminates the extreme political choices the administration made, how they became reasonable, and why it was so difficult for actors who opposed the administration’s foreign policy to successfully prevent action. They enable actions motivated by personal gain and power consolidation and make political violence likely. These politics are neither wholly new nor entirely subsumed by the past that precedes it, and they come at a significant cost. More worryingly, the temporal dynamics that characterize the Trump administration are not necessarily intentional or the result of unique political acumen. What this means is that other foreign policy actors – in either the United States or elsewhere – could deliberately adopt aspects of it in increasingly effective ways, magnifying the risks already incurred by four years of American foreign actions. The rest of this chapter outlines how an apparently chaotic approach to politics, media, and public communication all (intentionally or not) benefitted the presidential administration and the pursuit of their interests (both personal and political). For example, norms rely upon duration as part of their power. The Trump administration largely collapsed the importance of past precedent and future implications, removing the source of much of the power that exists for international

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

175

norms. While norms have been violated as long as they have existed, where Trumpism differs is in the wholesale rejection of their existence and value – his actions at times constituted “norm sabotage,” rather than inevitable “norm resistance.”20 Answering the question of whether the United States should torture terrorists with “they deserve it” and “it works” is a very different position than painstakingly drafting memos to provide elaborate justifications for “enhanced interrogation” techniques and extraordinary renditions – even if the material outcome is similar.21 What a presentist approach can do is show the intextricability of temporal dynamics in these foreign policy actions and the ways in which temporality influences and constitutes political action.

Temporal Dynamics in the Trump Administration A focus on the present in international politics emphasizes its distinguishing characteristics using heterotemporality, ontological change, emergence, and discontinuity as starting points for analysis. In this section, I utilize each to show how the Trump administration engaged in temporal dynamics that were constitutive of its political present and the attendant pasts and futures.

Simultaneity and the Production of a Universal Time Because political presents are inevitably heterogeneous, the production of simultaneity operates as a meaningful source of power. Simultaneous action divides attention, which in the contemporary political economy can be critical for disabling resistance to excessive policy actions. So for political leaders – and in the context of US foreign policy, the president – the ability to act simultaneously along multiple fronts is an important tool for political consolidation because there is a “zero-sum” relationship when it comes to the public’s attention that is amplified when it comes to social media.22 This is amplified further when events in one area threaten political capacity in another. The Trump administration’s temporal politics emphasized this simultaneity by using a rapid tempo with constant and unpredictable, 20 22

21 Schneiker 2021. Johnson 2015. Jang and Park 2017, 4001–4002 and 4011.

176

The Time of Global Politics

“seemingly spontaneous” political action.23 The administration deliberately engaged in major initiatives in multiple different areas as a means to obfuscate and confuse public actors but also as a means to “control the agenda” through “disproportionate free airtime.”24 At one point, the United States was supposedly conducting a pullout of troops in Syria but was actually offering a series of conflicting announcements and contradictory actions, upending regional expectations and subjecting Kurdish allies to violence at the hands of the Turkish government.25 That instance of troop withdrawals was ordered via tweet while the House of Representatives was conducting its impeachment investigations into the withholding of foreign assistance to Ukraine in exchange for evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, the now president’s son.26 The announcement that the United States would withdraw its forces effective immediately would be replicated at various points involving Syria, Afghanistan, and other countries like Somalia, but at each point, the announcement was the focus – the actual enactment of the policy remained a different matter entirely.27 Another example is the response to Hurricane Maria which rivaled the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina in its abject failure. After the hurricane hit Puerto Rico in 2017, it took nearly a year for power to be restored to some parts of the island.28 There were constant public fights between the mayor of San Juan and the administration, and the explicit racism justifying the nonresponse was just as direct (if not more so) as that which took place in New Orleans.29 Even so, this Katrina-sized disaster largely disappeared from federal concern as the focus was quickly and effectively shifted to other matters. Every time there was bad news, the administration almost always precipitated another crisis or escalated its actions in another area to overwhelm and divert coverage.30 The same thing happened with the assassination of the head of Iran’s Quds Force, Qassam Soleimani, which multiple reports indicated was impacted by the looming impeachment hearings.31 Prior to the midterm elections in 2018, the administration again – along with Trump supporting media outlets – fabricated a series of crises at the border.32 A supposed migrant 23 25 27 30

24 Jamieson and Taussig 2017, 621. Jamieson and Taussig 2017, 622. 26 Barnes and Schmitt 2019. Sommerlad and Riotta 2019. 28 29 McCausland 2020. Campbell 2018. Garcia-Lopez 2018. 31 32 Gabbatt 2017. Ward 2020. Scott 2018.

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

177

caravan threatened the United States and therefore necessitated the (re) deployment of military forces to the border.33 Similarly, trade measures that were articulated as a hardline stance on China or even the summit with North Korea all provided a reorientation of political discourse in a way that left Trump at the center, yet they simultaneously distracted from the cycle of corruption and criminal charges against Trump loyalists from the campaign and/or government.34 Trump insiders like former National Security Adviser John Bolton even claimed that the robust defense of Saudi Arabia’s brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi was devised as a way to divert attention from revelations that Ivanka Trump had been caught doing what Trump repeatedly stated warranted imprisonment for his electoral opponent, Hillary Clinton – using a private server for official emails.35 In some ways, what distinguished the COVID crisis during the Trump administration was that it was so comprehensive a challenge it could not be successfully diminished via distraction. There are long-term impacts to this dynamic. First and foremost, it makes it difficult for political actors domestically and internationally to maintain their temporal orientation. The relationship between past and future becomes much less clear when events occur so rapidly that it detracts from the ability to design and implement policy. Second, given the emergent is inevitable in politics – and that any political present is heterotemporal – no matter what appears to dominate the political present at any particular moment, the Trump administration always had the opportunity to obscure it via a new or emergent issue. Whether a particular administration chooses to seize upon a series of new events or elevates presents that are not seen as relevant at the time for the dominant political discourse – for example, the ongoing Syria conflict during impeachment, trade relations with China during Puerto Rico – the president and their administration will always possess an ongoing series of opportunities for manipulating and accelerating the political time of their present. An administration can do this by identifying pasts, presents, and futures that are not already positioned as universal and then using the bully pulpit and other political instruments of the American presidency to elevate them into the ongoing national 33 34 35

Youssef and Caldwell 2018. Hohman and Alfaro 2020, Gabbatt 2017, Yglesias 2016. Hohman and Alfaro 2020.

178

The Time of Global Politics

narrative of politics.36 This is particularly the case for American foreign policy because the Congress has allowed the contemporary executive branch an enormous amount of power to conduct policy and enact change.37 More prosaically, the president also has the opportunity to create simultaneous distractions through their ability to intervene in the legislative process. For example, when Trump abruptly reversed course on COVID relief, calling for $2000 to be distributed to each and every person in the United States, rather than the legislatively agreed upon $600, he was simultaneously pardoning war criminals and loyalists charged with covering up crimes committed either by the administration or as part of its campaign.38 Equally important, this means that nothing – not even devastatingly bad news for a presidential administration – ever constitutes the totality of politics. This ongoing set of opportunities in the global arena acts as a crucial resource for an administration committed to providing narratives for like-minded media outlets like Fox News to trumpet.39 Future presidents will likely be able to do the same thing barring a significant technological shift, reorientation of the American media landscape, or reassertion of Congressional control over foreign policy instruments. While the so-called wag the dog scenario of a president starting wars to distract from domestic concerns remains unlikely, what do occur are foreign policy actions and measures involving force short of war designed as distractions, for example, Clinton’s bombing of Sudan during the Lewinsky scandal, Trump’s bellicosity vis-à-vis Iran in the lead up to impeachment, or the continual turn toward lobbing cruise missiles or alternately announcing troop withdrawals whenever faced with political difficulties.40 The opportunities provided by the political configuration of the present moment enable the administration to conduct a strategy of attrition, weakening those who oppose its policies, particularly when it comes to public interest and attention. Anecdotally, many citizens claim that they have been turned off by politics, which, if it spreads widely, could remove whatever ability the public as a whole has to act as a deterrent against governmental abuses and excessive military action.41 36 39 40

41

37 38 Krebs 2015. Hendrickson 2017. Collinson 2020. Grossman and Hopkins 2019. Baker and Oneal 2001, Baum 2002, Boddery and Klein 2021, and Haworth, Sagan, and Valentino 2019. Khalid, Gonyea, and Fadel 2019.

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

179

There is also a separate advantage to these types of actions for a president. The deployment of simultaneous action demonstrates that the government can engage in equal and opposite actions at the same time, reproducing a form of authoritarian power. Wedeen argues that legitimacy is actually not particularly relevant for power consolidation by nondemocratic governments or autocratic-leaning leaders in democratic contexts.42 What matters is that the public accepts that their assertions of power is how politics now operates. Claiming that something false is, in fact, indisputably true, and that anyone who disagrees is producing propaganda, is intellectually indefensible. But when backed by the irresistible force of government power – when it is functionally indisputable – it conveys the message that this government is in command more effectively than if the initial claim was actually true. For an administration whose very first act was to insist that large numbers of people were at the inauguration, despite photographic, video, and eyewitness evidence showing otherwise, it is unsurprising that this was a consistent trope throughout the Trump administration’s time in office.43 Providing a suitable coda to this, the Trump administration continually asserted claims of election fraud and sought to overturn the 2020 election, advancing conspiracy theories that gained traction among his supporters at least partially because it confirmed the white nationalist ideology they perpetuated – the areas responsible for swinging the election were largely composed of Black voters whose totals only emerged after rural white areas had already been counted and certified.44 Part of what enabled this simultaneous action was an accelerated tempo in the rate of political action.45 The Trump administration largely ignored the typical governmental processes of study, consultation, engagement, and internal debate prior to announcing and enacting major policy initiatives. Major actions in the foreign policy space occurred without internal government input (e.g., the National Security Council, State Department, and Ambassadors), let alone international consultation.46 Announcements on banning transgender troops from serving openly, publicly discussing measures to dismantle NATO, as well as troop withdrawals from numerous states all

42 45

Wedeen 2015. Solomon 2019b.

43

44 Swaine 2018. Atkins 2021. Bentley and David 2021 and Turner and Kaarbo 2021.

46

180

The Time of Global Politics

occurred with little to no preparation.47 The hack of US agencies by Russia revealed after the election was met with silence.48 One need only look at the constant surprise among members of the administration themselves when policy changed.49 Combined with the rapid turnover of officials and deliberate reliance on acting heads of departments who could be fired at any moment, there was a rejection of institutional and bureaucratic memory that amplified the appearance of rapidity and chaos in political decision-making – even for those who approved of the decisions themselves.50

Temporal Othering and Temporal Borders In politics, past, present, and future are representational concepts. They are contested, constructed, and constituted through relationality and discourse as well as shaped by materiality. Part of their representation requires the production and reproduction of borders, and how the lines between temporal spaces are drawn and maintained can vary in countless ways. One element worth paying attention to, however, is the way in which those borders are used as points of difference. What makes the past distinct from the future? How do we know that the present is the line mediating that distinction? What characteristics do we associate with each? And how does one relate to the others? During the political present of the Trump administration, they framed past, present, and future through a politics of temporal othering.51 The temporal frames adopted by the Trump administration deliberately positioned the politics of each moment as a threat to the glorious past – that is, the way things “should” be. Typically, temporal othering in state politics others a past self in order to promote a new identity that actively resists returning to that past.52 The past self exists as an existential threat that the present must be constructed to guard against. Both Germany and Japan exemplify this relationship.53 Their shared imperial past of aggression and war is positioned as something to be avoided through securing a new self. Specific politics and policies follow, for example, debates over rituals and cultural memory, 47 49 51

52

48 Borger and Chulov 2018, Bergengruen 2018. BBC News 2021. 50 Prescott 2019, Finer 2017. Finer 2017. On temporal othering’s impact on security policy, see e.g., Gustafsson 2020 and for the use of temporal othering and nostalgia, see Benabdallah 2021. 53 Hom and Steele 2020. Hagström and Isaksson 2019.

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

181

education (e.g., history textbooks), constitutional prohibitions on militarism, and popular resistance to nationalist appeals.54 In cases like these, the past operates as the temporal other that the political present seeks to secure itself against.55 In the case of the Trump administration, the situation is flipped. America’s “past” is threatened by the present. The state of contemporary politics and society challenges the ability to realize the past in the present. “Make America Great Again” was an orienting frame that neatly summarized the temporal directionality of this politics. America is currently failing, but can be restored to its imagined past glory if the Trump vision could manifest in US politics. By portraying it as an expression of the people’s will, it appears populist and inclusive, rather than chauvinist and exclusionary. This provides a cover for the white nationalism, racial resentment, and hegemonic masculinity that the administration projects and cultivates among its followers.56 More directly, it allows the president to position virtually any crisis as a confirmation of this narrative. Emergent trouble positioned as exceptional becomes the distinguishing feature of a present that cannot access past glory. As well, this focus on the past and present, combined with a widespread dismissal of the future, means that the meaningful site of debate becomes about the relative value of the present/past, rather than how one can transform the present into a viable and desirable future. The pandemic made this temporal orientation clear. Lockdowns, mask mandates, contact tracing, testing, and other elements of a successful approach all required an orientation toward the future at odds with the administration’s political frame. It required a willingness to make concessions in the present that could only pay off in the future. In some ways, this is why the move toward declaring a “war on COVID” and the initial moves to position Trump as a “wartime president” failed.57 Declaring it a war required a future orientation and established a directionality that was concrete, but at odds with a heavy emphasis on a past threatened by the present. What was less recognized was that by maintaining the pandemic as in an indefinite 54 56 57

55 Hagström and Isaksson 2019. Prozorov 2011. Bonikowski 2017, Oliver and Rahn 2016. It also failed because of the constant flip-flopping between dismissing the pandemic and declaring it a war that he was winning, Smith 2020 and Chapman and Miller 2020.

182

The Time of Global Politics

state of crisis, it allowed the existing frame to remain intact and recognizable political lines to be drawn. While the pandemic impacts the United States deeply, even in the worst-case scenarios, an overwhelming majority of individuals would neither get the disease nor have a significantly negative outcome if they did. And from a narrow political perspective, this ambivalent stance toward COVID worked. Nearly 75 million people voted to re-elect the incumbent even as it presided over hundreds of thousands of deaths, economic catastrophe, and indefinite disruptions to previous life.58 All of these could have been avoided had there been a national strategy from the outset that took the future seriously – as countless other countries demonstrate, for example, Germany, Vietnam, Taiwan, or New Zealand.59 This specific type of temporal othering creates a dangerous situation for domestic politics, but it is even worse for foreign policy and those who reside outside the United States. Under this frame, the material outcome of Trump administration policies is ultimately irrelevant. What matters is that Trump maintains and consolidates power and that the overall directionality of his efforts is to preserve America’s past “greatness.” In the context of foreign policy, this carries with it significant potential dangers. For this specific administration, this dynamic was muted because it preferred to pursue restraint and “cooperation” in the form of “dealmaking.”60 In the future, however, a more chaotically inclined and interventionist leader could do significant damage via a more aggressive and directly violent foreign policy. This is not to say that the damage created by the Trump administration was somehow normatively preferable. Rather it is to say that much – albeit not all – of the destruction occurred without resorting to violent expansionism or overt military aggression. Pulling out of the World Health Organization, the Iran nuclear deal, and multiple arm control agreements (Open Skies, INF) as well as ignoring the climate crisis by pulling out of the Paris accords is disastrous, but one could imagine a similarly positioned president of the future utilizing their position to do all of that and engage in direct military aggression and/or actions designed to encourage conflict between actors.61 Iran very nearly became the realization of this fear, but outright war was avoided, even after the highlevel assassination, at least partially due to American desires for de-

58

Bryant 2020.

59

Beaubein 2021.

60

Krieg 2018.

61

Myrick 2021.

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

183

escalation.62 The most aggressive actions taken by this administration – the Soleimani assassination, strikes on airfields in Syria in response to chemical weapons use, the heightened usage of drone strikes – were fairly restrained by historic standards.63 That restraint, however, was the product of idiosyncratic factors particular to Trump, as aggressive behavior would have been entirely in line with the frame of temporal othering were someone so inclined. If the present is the threat, then political initiatives enacted in that present are always enacted under duress. If the measure succeeds, then the leadership engaged can simply claim credit and use it for political gain. If it fails, the administration can raise the tempo to divert attention and weaken the public focus on their failings, or muddy the waters so that like-minded actors in media or politics can make their case on the administration’s behalf. It can then characterize these objective failures as further proof that the present is the threat, thus reinforcing the framing of politics his supporters find appealing. This is why the president can release back-to-back tweets that are literally contradictory: “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” and “KEEP AMERICA GREAT!”64 One question this framing raises regards whose past this frame claims was “great.” The present and its frames are constituted by a heterogeneity of political and temporal experiences. Yet, it is also true that the United States possesses a narrative that politically coheres across time – it is what allows the United States to continue to exist as an institution.65 What the Trumpist formulation of the present as temporal other does is produce a cipher for a singular past that can be filled in as each individual sees fit, while also affirming that each individual’s vision is a reflection of the way the past actually was – implicitly affirming the idea that there is one past for America and those who do not agree with one’s individual vision of it are wrong about America itself. This allows the Trump administration to reproduce a nationalist politics centered on white racial resentments without 62

63

64 65

Trump himself arguably blinked first by using a televised address to call for an end to action, Berenson 2020. Certainly the Trump administration used force willingly, but there was no apparent desire for anything involving occupation or risked real cost to the United States homeland. @realDonaldTrump 2019. Subotic 2016, Steele 2008, Campbell 1998a, Krebs 2015.

184

The Time of Global Politics

explicitly endorsing these ideologies – they are simply “returning America to greatness.”66 There is a sort of nostalgia at work here, but instead of a nostalgia for the past, it is a nostalgia for a hopeful view of the future no longer realizable in this present. In this way, the administration has also – perhaps unintentionally – collapsed visions of the past and future into a present dominated by the administration. Foreign policy crises can act in service of this nostalgia. North Korea represented a crisis largely of the president’s making and was similarly “resolved” through the president’s personal doing. The supposed resolution betrayed a lack of knowledge regarding basic terms used for agreements in the past and conferred legitimacy upon the North Korean regime in a way that other presidents and world leaders had assiduously avoided.67 Temporally speaking, the apparent resolution had the timing and rhythm of a television episode, timed in such a way that there was a crisis, action, and apparent resolution all within a compressed period of time. Similar to an episode of many television series, however, it was not immediately clear whether, or even if, this would relate to previous occurrences or those that would come after. The assassination of Soleimani and the ensuing crisis that resulted in the mistaken downing of a civilian airliner – causing hundreds of deaths – and an Iranian missile strike on American installations in Iraq represented an equally compressed set of actions that did not immediately relate to that which had come before or after.68 There was no overarching ideology or continuous narrative beyond the selfcontained episode and the narrow past and future it tentatively gestured toward. What this emphasizes is that future orientation and temporal directionality were absent from this political discourse, which left the othering of the past and threat of the future intact as an orienting frame. Much of the president’s efforts were really about framing the past (and the future realization of that past) as currently under threat, as opposed to something approximating a series of steps toward the material realization of a white ethnostate. The Muslim ban, abuses of migrants, bullying of politicians of color, explicit identification with law enforcement during episodes of violent and racist policing, and a constant resistance to “political correctness,” for example, NFL players protesting the national anthem, all reinforced this narrative.69 66

Bonikowski 2017.

67

Lewis 2018.

68

Ward 2020.

69

Giroux 2017.

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

185

In the process, these actions also center the debate on what “the” past actually was, rather than acknowledging that there are many pasts – for example, the constructed past of white evangelical Trump supporters is vastly different from that of many persons of color. While these actions can have devastating material effects, these material effects are ultimately less important for the administration’s purposes than the racial cues it taps into.70 So long as this temporal frame governs US actions, this source of political power remains intact.

Indefinite Present A separate temporal frame also governed the Trump administration and its policies – the creation and maintenance of an ongoing indefinite present. Temporal othering intersects with this in multiple ways. On the one hand, the manner in which past and present were dichotomized – combined with the exclusion of the future – framed politics in a way such that there was little that could disconfirm the worldview of adherents and supporters of the Trump administration. On the other, one of the ways it achieves this is through the unification of past, present, and future into one singular lived experience. Stasis codes as continuation of the same, while crisis, apparently disruptive, actually supports this positionality through shrinking time horizons, but simultaneously expanding the issues of the near past, present, and near future so that they constitute the totality of concern.71 The final year of Trump’s first term was characterized by a variety of trends, but three broad narratives – separate, yet intersecting – seemed to dominate its politics. First and foremost, one narrative obviously centered on the ongoing pandemic, while another centered on the 2020 presidential election, where the stakes were understood as existential. Trump and the Republican party’s antidemocratic moves were seen as a clear and present danger to American democracy itself by many, a set of stakes that went well beyond typical electoral debates about representative officials and the head of state. Throughout the Spring and Summer, however, the movement for Black lives, as well as other groups, engaged in protest and direct action within the United 70 71

Luttig et al 2017. Hutchings (2008) discusses this in the context of chronotic versus kairotic time, and Connolly (2021) labels it “eventual time.”

186

The Time of Global Politics

States against white supremacy, systemic racism, and police violence.72 Protests occurred nationwide with millions more providing financial and political support, even as institutional forces at the city, state, and federal levels engaged in increasingly violent and repressive measures to silence them.73 The murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police which kicked off the campaigns was neither singular nor particularly different from attacks on Tamir Rice, Breonna Stewart, Sandra Bland, Freddy Gray, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Arbery, or many others. However, the video of his killing, along with COVID’s impact on marginalized communities generally – indigenous and Black communities in particular – amplified support for this movement. As the movement for Black lives spreads awareness through its protests and other actions, there is a sense that the present of “America” as portrayed by dominant political discourse is very different from the present experienced by marginalized populations such as the Black, Latinx, or indigenous communities within the United States.74 The upshot of all of this is that these developments have dramatically impacted all politics in the United States, including foreign policy, and created an implicit recognition of the value of heterotemporal thinking. But it has also demonstrated that efforts to create coherence and universalize the past, present, and future are effective means of consolidating power. For instance, attitudes toward policing shifted enormously, which was partly based on an awareness of the actual history and past role of policing in this country, particularly given the experiences of the Black community.75 That past had been effectively silenced and excluded from the past that dominant political presents considered relevant when engaging in policy reform. By revealing the heterogeneity in pasts – for instance, the difference between assuming that police have always existed as a benign institution and having a history in slavery and systemic racism – the inevitability of policing as currently formulated no longer was sustainable, radically opening the space for political action up to and including abolition.76

72

73 75

According to some metrics, these constituted the largest set of protests in American history, and spread globally as a result. Buchanan et al 2020 and Westerman, Bank, and Greene 2020. 74 Woodly 2020. Sharpe 2016 and Anderson et al 2020. 76 Mullinex et al 2021. Spruill 2016 and Lepore 2020.

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

187

Asserting the universality of a past that inevitably ends in the present political configuration is one means to silence alternative formulations that challenge the status quo. Making the present the totality of politics to the exclusion of past and future has a similar effect. The Trump administration’s politics collapsed the past and future, leaving only an indefinite present where the administration collectively leveraged Donald Trump’s attributes – for example, his decades-long existence in the public consciousness and relationship with American media – along with the tools of the office, to dominate political discourse. Whether we focus on the areas laid out prior such as the heterogeneity of temporal experience, temporal borders, or the reproduction of continuity, this is one of the central ways that the Trump administration’s politics of time impact their agenda. Even the facts of the past largely operated as a nonfactor for the Trump administration – everything was either “absolutely unprecedented” or the “best ever.” His visit to Japan was supposedly their “biggest event . . . in over 200 years.”77 When confronted with facts that disputed his characterization, they were dismissed and denied. It created a self-reinforcing cycle where the future increasingly appeared consonant with the past. The longer the Trump administration could prevent the actions of the past from acting as a constraint on the political present, the less relevant the present and any of its potential future repercussions appeared. This is because the present we are fighting over, for example, what the other “big” events are that occurred in Japan in the last century, is already destined to become a future past whose meaning – and very existence – is also going to be determined by the Trump administration. From this perspective, it begins to look as if any resistance and/or opposition never actually existed or could even impact future narrations of the past creating a sense of inevitability. In the case of foreign policy, this means that widely held assumptions about American foreign policy that could potentially serve as resources for those seeking to restrain American aggression – for example, the value of alliances, international law, or norms against violent conflict resolution – disappear. Reasonable people can disagree about the past effectiveness of these elements as resources for restraining American action. Yet, if they disappear or lose all meaning, it allows an administration like Trump’s – either now or in 77

Crowley 2019.

188

The Time of Global Politics

the future – to normalize behavior previously considered unimaginable by the American foreign policy establishment and more importantly, the world. The summit and agreement on nuclear weapons with North Korea is one example of this dynamics of making the future a fait accompli. The administration ratcheted up tensions, declared all previous efforts and their underlying frameworks as failures, risked an actual shooting war on the peninsula, and only then proceeded to negotiate a “deal.”78 It declared the agreement a success and continued to make this claim even as North Korea returned to its preagreement status quo of weapon testing.79 What it also did, however, was construct a future that rapidly became a self-serving past. This is not to say that moves like these were intentional, the product of significant planning, or fourdimensional chess.80 When the ultimate result of political contestation, however, is the (re)production of an indefinite present, it denies the ability of opponents to martial the lessons of the past, point out hypocrisies (actions contradictory with the past), or imagine an alternative future, each of which is a critical element of opposition.81 Successfully maintaining an indefinite present crowds out the space necessary for an alternative narrative that the public and/or political elites can draw from to combat policy or even imagine a different future.

International Behavior: Characteristics of American Foreign Policy Resulting from The Temporal Dynamics of the Trump Administration While the Trump administration did not have an identifiable political ideology, these temporal dynamics offered opportunities and encouraged a particular type of foreign policy with identifiable characteristics. One of these was that the foreign policy lacked any relationship with 78 80

81

79 Chubb and Yeo 2019. Ward 2018. This became a running meme among Trump’s supporters used to explain seemingly inexplicable decisions by Trump – a former aide was quoted as saying that he’s not being strategic, he’s just “munching on the chess pieces,” Parker 2020. Funnily enough, the aide who made the comment – Anthony Scaramucci – lasted such a short time in his position that his tenure became a unit of time around Washington; e.g., someone only lasted “two Scaramuccis.” Petrova 2016.

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

189

the past, which removed previously constructed norms that operated as precedents for restraint. Equally important, foreign policy was animated by a transactionalism with short time horizons that privileged immediate interests over institution building. Finally, this was combined with an idiosyncratic set of motivations for foreign policy that rarely even pretended to reflect a conception of the national interest, creating space instead for policies motivated by personal gain.

Foreign Policy without Constraints Part of the power of norms and other social forms of restraint lies in the representation of the past and its impact upon the present. Prohibitive norms typically coalesce around restraint, for example, the nuclear taboo, and are reinforced by a narrative of the past with two characteristics.82 One is that the past (in)actions operate as an ever-expanding precedent that is expected to continue into the indefinite future. In other words, barring an intervening variable, the norm possesses “stickiness” and durational consistency.83 The second is that the present is indisputably a continuation of that past and these constraints will continue to extend through that present and into the conceivable future. For example, punishment via torture – rather than the instrumental use of it in exceptional circumstances to extract intelligence – was relatively normal and well established in parts of the past.84 Those times, however, are no longer a meaningful part of the past, much less a past that extends this permissibility into the contemporary moment.85 Norms may not operate as an exact science, but they do provide a means of constraining excessive behaviors and are a potential resource available to actors who seek to resist extreme violence in foreign policy – for example, war, military strikes, economic sanctions. The refusal to abide by previously held norms and frames of conceivable action contributed to the disruptive tenor of administration actions.86 One key area where we can expect a continuation and expansion of this type of behavior is in terms of long-term commitments to allies and institutions.87 NATO continuously came under 82 83 84 87

Steele 2019. Drezner 2021, 34, Deitelhoff and Zimmermann 2019, 13 and Wendt 1999, 134. 85 86 Linklater 2007. Schmidt and Sikkink 2019. Graham 2018. Patrick 2017.

190

The Time of Global Politics

vocal challenge during the Trump administration, particularly regarding supposed burden-sharing shortfalls – much of which was based on false claims.88 The US–China economic relationship was historically upended through trade measures previously seen as highly unlikely.89 Ties with Central American countries like Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador radically shifted as foreign assistance was threatened in response to the supposed caravan of migrants that episodically approached the US southern border.90 South Korean interests were barely considered in preparing for the US–NK summits, and key administration positions responsible for the area were filled sporadically.91 These disruptions not just were to formal commitments to allies but also include the very idea of international agreements themselves. The US pulled out of the multilateral deal that froze the Iranian nuclear program, the Paris accord on Climate change, and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty (INF), among others. Each of these moves was enacted without plans to implement an alternative, underlining this administration’s goal to reverse American commitments to international law.92 Given the willingness of the administration’s leadership to enact policy via tweet – creating a direct link between the president’s momentary whims and any US commitment – any action left up to the authority of the executive branch was subject to dissolution at any moment.93 On top of this, the president declared an open hostility to deals he had not personally negotiated and publicly prided himself on his ability to act in opposition to expert opinion.94 As the administration hollowed out bureaucratic institutions, refusing to appoint key leaders, cutting budgets, and ignoring their recommendations, they created a spiral effect where a handful of individuals increasingly determined US foreign policy.95 Regardless of whether countries and institutions found these individuals’ views beneficial to their interests, it made American policy unreliable, subject to radical change, and most worryingly unrestrained by past agreements. Even as the Biden administration has repeatedly claimed that America is “back,” countries around the world experienced a powerful demonstration of how thin and reversible those constraints depend upon who holds the office of 88 90 93 95

89 Sperling and Webber 2019. Guo et al 2018. 91 Sheridan and Sieff 2019. Bennett and Berenson 2018. 94 Drezner 2019. Drezner 2019, 727–729. Hudson et al 2019 and Ioffe 2017.

92

Koh 2017.

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

191

the president.96 And though the new administration insists that the United States has returned to its pre-Trump status quo, in terms of immigration and China policy, among others, it has continued many of the seemingly unthinkable policies advanced by the Trump administration.97 One of the most significant areas these dynamics have impacted are perceptions of American restraint and its commitment to nonaggression – such as they were.98 Since the end of World War II, there has been a dominant narrative within US foreign policy and some parts of the globe that US actions are part of a long tradition responsible for a more peaceful and liberal world.99 Emphasizing the rule of law, democratization, and human rights, as well as the expansion of economic trade and financial markets, the preservation and expansion of this American-led world order have been seen as critical to preventing a renewal of the global conflicts of the early twentieth century. Whether that narrative still retains validity after the Trump administration is an open question, but it is the case that if this narrative were to disappear entirely – through either administration choices or international perceptions or both – one can imagine an even more unrestrained American foreign policy.100 If the temporal dynamics isolated here were to continue into the future – or worse, another administration comes to power that intentionally employs and amplifies these dynamics – the United States is likely to deviate from its own (supposed) script in increasingly violent ways. For instance, the United States privileged relationships with autocrats – for example, Russia, Turkey, the Philippines – over commitments to democratic allies during the Trump administration.101 Human rights were completely discarded at the level of policy and strategy.102 US strategic and economic interests with Saudi Arabia, for example, were visibly privileged over holding their government accountable for serious human rights violations, something Trump himself admitted explicitly.103 The lack of interest in the near genocide in Yemen and the refusal to confront the government over the torture and murder of Jamal

96 100

101

97 98 99 Myrick 2021. Beauchamp 2021. Steele 2019. Nye 2017. As should be clear from previous chapters, it also presumes that this order existed and existed in this manner, which invokes a past that is definitionally contestable. 102 103 Kagan 2019. Koh 2017. Fernandez-Campbell 2018.

192

The Time of Global Politics

Khashoggi for fear of jeopardizing economic gains from arms sales provide clear and gruesome evidence of this. To be clear, the argument here is not meant to assert that a full restoration of the narrative of order is on balance beneficial, nor is it to make a claim about the benevolence of American power. Adopting a heterotemporal perspective reveals that to be an impossibly reductive claim given that the narrative it proposes of a “long peace” is a past that privileges certain experiences while ignoring much of the violence that characterized – and continues to characterize – the time. Instead, the claim is that whatever violence already exists as a result of the United States’ actions in the world has the potential to get worse, particularly wherever these dynamics take place. The US government has always violated and circumvented its commitments to international law, human rights, and the use of force, but since their establishment, it has been loathe to reject these principles entirely or declare them meaningless.104 When these temporal dynamics emerge, we can expect the willingness to follow international norms to radically shift. After some consideration, the Trump administration pardoned members of the military already convicted of war crimes as well as members of Blackwater responsible for massacring Iraqi civilians.105 One individual pardoned of killing civilians was so brazen in his actions that his own troops sabotaged his weaponry to prevent the perpetrator from continuing.106 Support for “unleashing” the military was both rhetoric and reality for the Trump administration, something that resulted in heightened civilian deaths and drone strikes compared to previous administrations, as well as a refusal to disclose official estimates of civilians killed in US operations.107 Military personnel were repurposed for domestic political gain. Thousands of troops were deployed to the southern border to address a supposed military threat of migrant “invasion” that never materialized.108 Finally, the president explicitly inquired into nuclear weapons as a military option and prior to becoming president spoke often of their importance as a foreign policy tool, emphasizing his unique expertise on the topic and his resistance to past American restraint regarding their use.109 Each of these things has no 104 107 109

105 106 Steele 2019. Al-Taie 2020. Bebernes 2019. 108 McKelvey 2019. Cooper and Edmondson 2019. Zurcher 2017.

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

193

doubt happened in the past – for example, the US is the only country to use nuclear weapons during wartime – but the danger here is that whatever American proclivity for policies like these will be amplified and unrestrained when these dynamics are present.

Transactionalism and Personal Interest in Security Affairs In temporal terms, the Trump administration produced a politics that privileged short-term time horizons and quick actions with maximum flexibility. These elements reproduced a transactionalism in foreign policy that undermined the importance of developing relationships, institutions, actors, or anything else that could not be exchanged or quantified in material terms.110 The key feature of Trump’s transactional approach is that it “approaches policy issues on a case-by-case basis very much like a business transaction” (Hadar, 2017). In other words, Trump believes that his personal qualities, especially in combination with America’s economic importance and strategic might, will allow him to negotiate bilateral deals that have eluded other presidents, especially Obama. In this context, Trump “sees military and security commitments as part of a connected set of issues that can be used as bargaining chips in a broad-ranging negotiation.” (Rachman, 2017, p. xvii)111

This transactional attitude toward foreign policy made personal and/or financial interest central to US decision making. While this attitude was amplified by Trump’s background and personal characteristics, the temporal frames at play provided an opportunity that could also exist for future leaders who are similarly inclined. Where these dynamics intersect with political will, we can expect to see a deepening of personalist motivations – both political and financial – when it comes to deciding US foreign policy. For example, throughout the Trump administration, there was a focus on maintaining strong ties with Russia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, each of which has economic and financial interests in Trump-owned businesses.112 At a more micro level, early on in the administration, China made trademark concessions that would directly benefit Trump family interests immediately 110

111

Beeson 2020, and to be more precise, those terms that the Trump administration understood as material and “real.” 112 Beeson 2020, 2. Bryan 2018, Hjelmgaard 2018.

194

The Time of Global Politics

prior to American commitments to assist Chinese businesses.113 Similarly, Saudi Arabia purchased substantial amounts of services at Trump’s DC hotel – both of which operated as clear quid pro quo relationships.114 Finally, the withholding of Ukrainian military assistance in exchange for investigating the son of former Vice President Joe Biden is perfect evidence of elevating short-term interest and pursuing a personally motivated quid pro quo in foreign policy decision-making. The administration’s politics of time have created a blueprint where such public acts of corruption are now possible, thinkable, and roadtested, providing ample opportunity for others to follow suit, should they so choose. The production of an indefinite present played an important role in this dynamic. As the Trump administration expanded the temporal boundaries of the present and obscured the political potential of past and future, there was a continuation and expansion of foreign policy by exception. Foreign policy was conducted with a crisis mentality where only the immediate effects and impact were considered – and often the primary impacts considered were domestic power consolidation and not international effect. In the American context, times that are articulated as exceptional enable centralized decision-making authority because it supposedly enhances the speed and rapidity of response.115 Whether the issue is nuclear use, indefinite detention, extrajudicial executions, or the rapid deployment of troops, this type of foreign policy action has two defining characteristics. One is that it concentrates decision-making authority within the executive branch, and the other is a belief that the immediacy of the problem warrants a response that democratic contestation precludes. These ideas were deployed with increased regularity throughout the administration; for example, when the administration wanted to deploy military troops to the border, a migrant crisis was manufactured and securitized through baselessly claiming that Middle Eastern terrorists were using it as a 113 115

114 Wee 2018. Helmore 2018, Bryan 2018. This is not to say that executive decision-making comes without contestation, but that the institution is designed to enable rapid response in times of emergency by centralizing decisions in the executive/presidency; e.g., Article II, the War Powers Act, etc. Similarly, emergency operates as a discursive frame that makes resistance more difficult, albeit not impossible. Part of the Trump phenomenon is the ability to generate resistance and (eventual) acquiescence in equal measures, something that the House pursuit of impeachment, despite there being little likelihood of removal, amply demonstrates.

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

195

cover to cross the border and enter the country.116 More prosaically, when Congress opposed a substantial arm sale to Saudi Arabia, the executive simply declared it an “emergency” and did it without oversight.117 Similarly, the administration continually used the conflict in Syria to deflect from its troubles at home. Finally, the threat of military force was floated as a means of overturning the election by close advisers, which constitutes precisely the type of tyranny warned about by theorists of exception.118 In the foreign policy realm, this type of behavior could continue. Where there is no willingness to even consider the lessons of the past and little concern about future costs and time horizons are compressed, then foreign policy will be a transactional, episodic, and opportunistic endeavor subject to the personal whims of the head of state.119 There is also likely to be a form of mirror imaging in the guise of US policymakers presuming that other countries will behave similarly. When the US enacts policy without consideration of past and/or future, it becomes easy to misread other actors’ responses as similarly driven, rather than as part of a pattern or long-term strategy. This happened in the Trump administration most directly through the delegation of strike authority to theater level military commanders in the war on terrorism.120 As a consequence, the number of drone strikes and military attacks went up significantly – even over the Obama administration – and civilian casualties expanded greatly, with decisions regarding who and when to strike made by those whose interests were more aligned with tactical success than strategic success.121 Without focusing on strategic interest, even an elementary strategy on the part of adversaries is likely to succeed provided it has a longer time horizon.122 The upshot of this was that the US lurched from operation to operation, killing even more of those it deemed dangerous without much concern for actually ending the war or achieving its objective. Finally, in these circumstances, long-term challenges like climate change are unlikely to be addressed. Climate change poses a unique problem from a temporal perspective as it operates as both a cataclysmic future that haunts our present and a process responsible for

116 119 122

Vazquez 2018. Ikenberry 2017, 4. Cronin 2013.

117

Spindel 2019. Tankel 2018.

120

118

Brooks 2021. McKelvey 2019.

121

196

The Time of Global Politics

disastrous changes in the contemporary environment.123 This duality ultimately works against action as the contemporary manifestations of climate change appear insufficient to warrant appropriate action while the not-yet of future scenarios is twisted into evidence that climate change is not even occurring. Any American administration will have difficulty addressing climate change due to these temporal dynamics, but an administration committed to the present and a politics of time that is constantly changing the subject of that present renders effective action impossible.124

Conclusion Scholars and political observers have noted how the Trump administration manipulated time and politics such that the rate of significant events and crises always appeared to be accelerating at an unmanageable and irresistible pace.125 The ultimate effect of this was to reinforce the centralized authority of the administration and remove – many, albeit not all – democratic barriers to enacting their agenda. By using the lens of the present as a concept, method, and area of theoretical inquiry, the temporal assumptions and “timing mechanisms” at work become more visible, particularly within US foreign and security policy. Once visible, we can better understand the implications of these developments on foreign policy and thus state behavior in global politics.126 The temporal orientation and dynamics of the Trump administration may or may not be unique, but viewing them with a temporal perspective reveals dynamics that might otherwise be missed. Orienting their focus – intentionally or not – toward crafting an indefinite present benefitted those in power but came at a cost to everyone else. Resistance and contestation – whether democratic, radical, or institutional – always provides a crucial tool for dampening and restraining any administration or political leadership, but these efforts were undermined by the temporalities that were dominating at the time. This is not all that this lens reveals, however, as the Trump administration’s

123

124

Amoureux and Reddy 2021, Agathangelou and Killian 2021, Canefe 2021, and Neimanis and Walker 2014. 125 126 Waldman 2019. Pels 2017. Hom 2018b.

Making America Great Again, Again, and Again

197

agenda of personal gain and the acceptance of violence in pursuit of its goal was not just a product of this specific history. The Trump administration was a manifestation of a specific – and replicable – politics of time. Becoming aware of how the Trump administration could so successfully profit and abuse a system originally designed to prevent precisely such corruption is important because it illustrates a dangerous situation that can be repeated again and again. Similar dynamics may have happened in presidential administrations past, but the Trump administration’s politics of time reveals possibilities that will remain a part of American politics and foreign policy going forward. From a global perspective, it also has the potential to be exported to any country with a similar governance structure and a head of state similarly empowered. Those who oppose the violence this enables and the institutional corrosion that accompanies it have ever more incentive to use whatever lens they can to better understand these dynamics.

|

7

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction Alternative Futures

Introduction Positivist social science places a great deal of emphasis on prediction, and it is an inextricably temporal concept. It is so important that when IR misses something or gets it wrong, we find ourselves in crisis. Gaddis’ existential worry about missing the end of the Cold War was ultimately a failure of prediction. In IR, prediction is about identifying what is next, anticipating trends and specifying phenomena before they happen. It searches the past for patterns and regularities, so we can make ever more accurate claims about the future. Foreign Affairs pithily captured this in an ad campaign: “Learn about the past. Understand the present. Predict the future.”1 For mainstream scholarship – particularly scholarship that imagines itself as positivist – prediction remains a vital goal and epistemological standard delineating what counts as valuable work. “Good theory” – particularly, explanatory theory – comes with the potential for predictions, following assumptions that portray ideal social scientific theory as presenting “falsifiable, predictable, observation-based regularities or generalisations.”2 While fairly anodyne, this particular “empiricist conception of causation is ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically restrictive” and must be addressed in order for “IR theorists to start talking to, rather than past each other.”3 In meaningful ways, prediction dictates what questions can be asked and how they can be answered, and limits the possible answers we could find. Prediction is a central element of causal inquiry, where debates between scientific realists and empiricists are not about competing schools of thought but “whether causal inquiry must be organized around a focus on regularities (or patterns of cross-case covariation) observable in the world around us . . . in everyday world politics.”4 1 3

Foreign Affairs 2016, @foreignaffairs, June 16, 2016. 4 Kurki 2006, 215. Humphreys 2019, 3.

198

2

Kurki 2006, 193.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

199

Ward argues that “prediction is deeply embedded in the philosophy of science” and its absence is used as a basis for rejecting reflectivist work, a catch-all term that has been used since Keohane to question the value of critical, constructivist, and even some qualitative work.5 For those squarely within the mainstream, the absence of predictive claims for these approaches means that the work “is better at describing the past than anticipating the future” and “intellectually weak,” thus providing an account for why it is “not well entrenched in North America, the homeland of the mainstream of the discipline.”6 Prediction is indelibly linked to the production of the type of crosstemporal regularities that are supposed to be the bread and butter of positivist theory. These regularities need not apply across all of time and space to be meaningful, but they must possess some temporal depth and duration; otherwise, they would not be patterns. Yet, there is no expectation that claims apply across all of time as in physics, and indeed scholars regularly do admit that seemingly static phenomena like the democratic peace do possess “variance over time.”7 Even with this grudging acceptance of theory’s limitations and the potential importance of sequencing and order, mainstream work still privileges those regularities that appear to apply throughout the timeline. This is somewhat quizzical, temporally speaking, because even while they orient their claims by their future applicability, “all quantitative and qualitative investigations are limited to information about the past” where the claims explaining the most of the past are expected to apply best to the near future.8 This chapter argues that this understanding of prediction, as Kurki, Humphreys, and many others have pointed out, is the product of a particular intellectual history and is informed by context-specific epistemological and disciplinary commitments to represent only one of all the possible ways we could imagine “prediction” to function. For instance, from a scientific realist perspective, “prediction, if it has a role, cannot be given the same status accorded to it in the natural sciences” at least partially because these predictions are in conversation with “social systems” that are “open.”9 Ultimately, “much depends on how tightly prediction is defined,” as we could imagine a set of theoretical claims that positions “causal laws . . . as tendencies” which 5 7

6 Keohane 1989, 8. Ward 2016, 80 and Smith 2000a, 385 and 387. 8 9 Gleditsch and Ward 2000. Ward 2016, 87. Wight 2016, 48.

200

The Time of Global Politics

would still maintain a scientific orientation as “the natural sciences already have embraced such an approach.”10 International relations, while a recognized field, does not – and cannot – represent the totality of scholarly knowledge regarding the world and its politics. Yet, it does cohere as a recognizable discipline with conceptual limitations and scholarly expectations. Weber characterizes this practical coherence amid constant contestation as “‘Disciplinary IR’ – which aspires to be but is not equivalent to the discipline of IR as a whole,” where its coherence “is, of course, as imagined as it is enacted, and it changes as social, cultural, economic, and political forces change. Yet, at any particular historical moment, IR scholars have a working knowledge of Disciplinary IR because it embodies the general commitments and standards that regulate, manage, and normalize ‘the conduct of conduct’ (Foucault, 1994: 237) regarding IR publishing, funding, hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions.”11 Prediction is a similar concept – no discipline’s conceptual apparatus could ever represent the totality of all the different ways one could make predictions, yet it coheres as a concept with identifiable, albeit contested, boundaries. Because of this inevitable slippage between conceptual possibility and its practice within the discipline, as one of the “commitments and standards that regulate . . . the ‘conduct of conduct’,” I similarly refer to IR’s peculiar conception of prediction as “Disciplinary Prediction.” Once removed from IR’s particular understanding of philosophy of science, which is deeply influenced by its temporal imaginary, there are other forms of knowledge production oriented toward the future beyond a narrow conception of prediction. Attention to temporal imaginaries and the broader question of how we can best imagine and encounter the future from the present provides us with the tools to identify how we could think otherwise. The argument of this chapter is that by viewing the past and future as products of a political present that is heterotemporal, contingent, and emergent, we can expand IR’s conception of prediction and develop theoretical tools for better encountering the future. This is not to argue that prediction as a concept is irrelevant. Much the opposite, as “each of us is constantly making decisions with future consequences and trying to determine the best strategy for achieving 10

Wight 2016, 48.

11

Weber 2015, 29.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

201

desired goals. Simply put, we are trying to predict the future. But because many aspects of the future are unknown, we must rely on theories to predict what is likely to happen if we choose one strategy over another.”12 While this chapter does adopt a critical stance toward IR’s current thinking on prediction in order to open space for alternative conceptual apparatuses, this does not constitute a rejection of the idea entirely. Rather, it is an attempt to reclaim the ability to make statements about the future without turning exclusively to Disciplinary Prediction. In the first section, this chapter addresses the dominant sense of prediction within IR, its linkages to scientific notions of “explanation,” and the constitutive relationship it has with the current temporal imaginary. It juxtaposes “Disciplinary Prediction” with an understanding of prediction that is more inclusive and heterotemporal, shifting the central question of prediction away from assessing continuities and adjudicating which one is most likely to correspond with the universal future. Instead, it centers the exceptionality of stability and continuity, the ongoing inevitability of emergent events, and explores how best to incorporate the radical contingency of the heterogeneous present into statements about the future. The second section offers up four conceptual apparatuses for approaching the future that constitute a form of prediction but goes beyond the existing lines of demarcation that define Disciplinary Prediction. They include contingent prediction, alternative timing orders, predictions in overlapping presents, and predictions regarding stability, rather than change. It outlines these conceptual components for approaching the future and shows how they enable better analytical purchase on the ongoing and incomplete nature of the political present. The third section shows how a presentbased perspective calls the unidirectionality of time into question – where only the past can shape the present and future – shifting the arrows of what we can and/or should seek to predict. Moving beyond a directional conception of time better enables two tools that can be used for engaging the future – alternative temporal positions and new social science, for example, quantum social theory and/or complexity models. In sum, these conceptual apparatuses and shifts in ontological assumptions present a more nuanced and effective way to address some of the questions that Disciplinary Prediction either ignores or 12

Mearsheimer and Walt 2013, 436.

202

The Time of Global Politics

has difficulty engaging. Much like Chapter 4, this chapter reformulates the notion of time that underlies our existing conception of prediction and shows how that adds theoretical tools to our “toolkit” that we can use to better theorize and explain global politics in the future.

Disciplinary Prediction and the Heterotemporal Present Part of the appeal of hypothesis testing – as well as quantitative work more broadly – is that it enables the development of “timeless” predictions that can be constantly refined through further work. For mainstream social science work, “in this system – although well intentioned – scholars are motivated to discover universal truths that govern all of IR wherever it may be practiced.”13 While “well intentioned,” this is one of the reasons why other modes of theorizing have been unable to “box out the paradigmatic dominance of IR” because existing claims are “assumed to be universal and valid across time and space (Shilliam 2011, 13).”14 For example, in disciplinary IR, if rigorous testing shows that the success rate for insurgent groups in attrition campaigns nears zero, it implicitly creates a predictive claim – whenever and wherever groups pursue these tactics, they will fail, regardless of temporal or spatial context. This same way of knowing operates in political practice – the scholarly approach replicates policy analysis in that it evaluates and assesses the possible future outcomes of a particular policy choice. This is why theory matters; it “enables prediction, which is essential for the conduct of our daily lives, for policymaking, and for advancing social science.”15 It is also one of the reasons policy relevance emphasizes prediction. The assumption is that “theory is essential for diagnosing policy problems and making policy decisions. Government officials often claim that theory is an academic concern and irrelevant for policymaking, but this view is mistaken. In fact, policymakers have to rely on theory because they are trying to shape the future, which means that they are making decisions they hope will lead to some desired outcome.”16 Regardless of form, prediction remains a central point of departure and developing useful prediction remains one of the primary

13 15

14 Sitaraman 2016. Sitaraman 2016, 243 and 256. 16 Mearsheimer and Walt 2013, 436. Mearsheimer and Walt 2013, 436.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

203

motivations for theory development, almost regardless of how one orients oneself theoretically. Gaddis asserts that theories should highlight patterns from the past in a way that makes them useful guides to the future.7 Hans Morgenthau argued that “realism” would allow analysts not only to foresee but also to influence the future. No less an authority on science than Stephen Hawking declares that “a good theory must make definitive predictions about the results of future observations.” Similarly, Robert Keohane in his essay on “Theory of World Politics” emphasizes that foreknowledge is one of the most important products of good theory.17

Gaddis was writing in the context of what he viewed as a massive disciplinary failure the inability of IR to predict the end of the Cold War. He argued, “My point, then, is that the major theoretical approaches that have shaped the discipline of international relations since Morgenthau have all had in common, as one of their principal objectives, the anticipation of the future. Whether in science or politics, whether by the tough standards of prediction or the more relaxed ones of forecasting, the role of theory has always been not just to account for the past or to explain the present but to provide at least a preview of what is to come.”18 The linkage of explanation to prediction marks certain theories as “scientific” and thus indisputably part of the discipline. Prediction, then, has a very specific role and reified definition within IR that tracks to the social scientific traditions within the American academy. It is for this reason that “Middle-range theorizing, at least in this idiom, is alive and kicking. It constitutes the vast majority of the ‘empirical’ scholarship that gets published in top-ranked American journals such as International Organization, the American Political Science Review, and International Studies Quarterly.”19 However, the understanding of prediction informing this type of work is but one of many different types of prediction(s) one could employ. For Disciplinary Prediction, as Jackson writes,“ . . . notions of causation largely equate explanation and prediction, inasmuch as to explain an outcome is to bring it under a law-like generalization linking an antecedent and a consequent, and to predict an outcome is to use a law-like generalization to project a consequent outcome given an 17 19

Ray and Russett 1996, 442–443. Jackson and Nexon 2013, 548.

18

Gaddis 1992, 10.

204

The Time of Global Politics

antecedent . . . successful explanation implies successful prediction.”20 He juxtaposes this approach with critical theoretical claims – specifically critical realism – “where the open system of the actual world guarantees that prediction is impossible and that explanation is, at best, an account of what did happen . . . hitherto unrealized potential might be disclosed but this is not ‘prediction’ in the same sense.”21 This is because “saying that something could happen is not the same as saying something will happen, and critical realism . . . stands firmly on the side of the former.”22 There is, however, a lot of daylight between “could” and “will.”23 Jackson’s analysis of the role of prediction is particularly revealing regarding the temporal assumptions that underpin these approaches. On the one hand, the more self-professedly scientific approaches “virtually equate” prediction and explanation. Whenever an antecedent precedes a possible outcome, that outcome “will” happen. This is regardless of its location on the timeline and renders it, in a sense, “timeless.”24 Conversely, critical and constructivist work, with their resistance to science and normative orientation toward unveiling power dynamics, uses the past as a means to better think the present. This is because explanation is “at best, an account of what did happen” and any potential predictions – in the non-Disciplinary sense – are about what could happen. This provides the basis for a view of hypotheses and their attendant predictions as “timeless and ahistorical” where “IR theory reflects or represents an ‘outside’ world in relation to thought that is self-evident, natural, and not subject to a necessary problematization of truth claims. Big questions fail to emerge because such an image of thinking seals itself off from them, even if this is not the theorist’s specific intention.”25 The temporal imaginary that enables the orientation toward “timeless” claims reifies the imagined present as is, universalizing it so that there can be one specific future we are now capable of predicting. Jackson’s characterization nicely captures the binary relationship between time and temporality in the context of prediction. Either we believe that we can make timeless predictive claims because time is empty, natural, and devoid of meaning or this is an impossible task due to temporal context. If human experience and sociality are irreducibly 20 23

21 22 Jackson 2010, 111. Jackson 2010, 111. Jackson 2010, 111. 24 25 Hom 2017. McIntosh 2015. Levine and Barder 2014, 807.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

205

temporal, then any claims about the future must be indeterminate from the universalist shared point of “now” because of heterogeneity. Critical theorists also implicitly accept the universal temporal positioning of “now,” probably because it is at once intuitive and difficult to displace. This is despite the fact that the idea of a universally shared temporal present is precisely the type of supposedly universal concept that critical theory is most attuned to problematizing.26 This is what Levine and Barder – along with Lundborg’s critique of the grounding of the present – argue is precisely the problem. It is not only that hypothesis testing and its attendant emphasis on “timeless, ahistorical claims” are a problem for what we can discover about global politics but also that it shapes the way we imagine global politics to be.27 For those who operate within critical IR, these objections run deep enough to warrant explicit rejection of Disciplinary Prediction on normative and empirical grounds, as part of the broader “resistance to theory.” Thus, the call for liberation from modern orthodoxy goes hand in hand with, second, the call to resist and reject abstract representations of the world for analytical purposes in order to keep an open mind. Its proponents are convinced of the impossibility of grand theory (Behnke, 2001) and ask us to ‘forget IR theory’ (Bleiker, 1997). Rather than creating or buying into abstract representations, it seeks to show what is left out and brushed over in modern designs by retrieving silences and embracing aporia through historical genealogies and by tracing subaltern realities through ethnography and more playful methods such as poetry (Bleiker, 1997, 2009) or collage (Sylvester, 2009). In short, it seeks out a contingent, complex, and incoherent reality unvarnished by theory.28

While the description of the state of the field is accurate, there is nothing intrinsic to these analytical priors and philosophical starting points that necessitates an oppositional, rejectionist stance toward all prediction(s).29 One could reject the specific intellectual form of prediction at work in IR, while still trying to anticipate possible futures. Put differently, if critique is action, then we must also reflexively 26

27 29

The intersection of temporality, governmentality, and labor – particularly through the concept of duration and task-oriented temporalities – relies on and reproduces the concept of “abstract, homogenous time,” see e.g., Binkley 2009, 72–73. 28 Levine and Barder 2014. Berenskoetter 2017, 8 Berenskoetter 2017, 8.

206

The Time of Global Politics

critique the implications of a politics that adopts a universal opposition to prediction. Orienting one’s temporal imaginary toward the present necessitates an accounting of how one imagines the past, to be sure, but also what future(s) are created in the process as those futures play a significant role in informing critical action in any particular present. No one can claim a monopoly on the future, nor can they deny their role in its realization.

The Limits of “Implicit Generalizability”: Mainstream Social Science and Hypothesis Testing Methods that fall under this umbrella vary significantly – survey experiments, agent-based models, regression analysis, Bayesian computation – but they all presume that there is a relationship between regularity and prediction. Barring some intervening variable or context, discovered regularities will recur in a predictable manner. As anyone who has ever made a wager on any game of chance knows, regularities are deeply distinct from specific predictions. Faster horses regularly beat slower horses, but knowing that information does not enable one to regularly pick the winner of the Kentucky Derby. Similarly, democracies may not fight each other, but that statement does not create a similarly accurate corresponding prediction about how the next crisis between two democratic countries is necessarily going to play out.30 Nor does it tell us anything about how long any resulting disruption to the peace would continue. Theorizing the temporal assumptions of regularities illustrates how extant imaginaries simplify their temporal outlook in order to enable predictive claims. First, the “timeless” assumption informing discovered “regularities” denies time’s sociality and emergent characteristics and instead relies upon a materialist notion of time as purely physical, making its passage devoid of meaning. It is typically only once these predictive claims are explicitly shown to not be timeless that “time” is added back in. To be sure, claims are often temporally limited – for example, post-Westphalia, post–World War II – but this is typically through periodizations that reify conceptions of time based on sovereign understandings of it – “by choosing the anniversaries of internationally important events, especially round anniversaries (tenth, 30

Lipson 2013.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

207

twenty-fifth, fiftieth, centenary), even the staunchest critics of the state and the international system affirm state-centric timing orders by rendering particular happenings as ‘historical events’ and imbuing them with cosmopolitical value.”31 Anniversaries and national holidays, to use the most obvious examples, are only one way to temporally demarcate the past and emerge out of political and social orders, reproducing the power relations that constitute them as such. So, for example, in American discourse, periodizations linked to the Civil War (i.e., antebellum) or World Wars I and II (the interwar period) dominate in security scholarship. The result is to effectively de-emphasize other forms of violence, such as American colonization – for example, the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico – or the wars of eradication and displacement conducted against indigenous groups within US borders. Fundamentally, predictive claims in IR possess what I term an “implicit generalizability.” In other words, predictive claims will work, right up until the point they do not. There are limits on generalizable claims, but implied in any predictive claim is the idea that but for the intervening variables identified, the claim will apply any time within its set boundaries. These treatments of time simply “add time and stir.” They do not recognize that the understanding of time they employ is precisely what should be under investigation.32 Merely adding time after the fact leaves extant assumptions in place to inform temporal understandings at multiple levels of the discipline. Equally important, leaving these assumptions intact shapes the role of temporal dynamics like duration, tempo, and rhythm and ultimately undermines much of their value. This temporal imaginary is also inherently conservative when it comes to predictive claims – this is true both substantively and methodologically. New relationships, events, dynamics, or even causal relationships are not accepted as valid until they have happened often enough in the past to become known as “regular” in a present. For the positivist, unless proven otherwise, history – like time – is assumed to move at the same rate because time is neutral and universal.33 A radical change or shift in relations over the past five years is unlikely to displace 31 33

32 Hom 2017, 443. See e.g., Kinsella 2003 and Cohn and Gibbings 2004. Of course, there are historical institutionalists who are positivist, but the idea of history accelerating or decelerating, for instance, is still read against a backdrop of empty time, enabling the claims advanced to be something more than a narrative of a particular event that cannot be perfectly replicated. History

208

The Time of Global Politics

conclusions based on the previous 200 years simply because it does not possess enough temporal heft to displace what we “already know.” There are obvious exceptions, but those are not established scientifically until we have progressed far enough into the future to see that point as constituting rupture or systemic change, rather than a momentary divergence or exception. It reinforces a backward facing view of the dynamics of political life.34 While there are occasional ruptures or divergences that disrupt the structure of international politics that is not the same thing as systemic, ontological change, nor does it require us to radically refigure our existing knowledge regarding how great powers interact or how states are likely to cooperate under conditions of anarchy. This is something Waltzian’s particularly emphasize, the recurrent effect of systemic features even as international structures change. It is also why they warn that “the conflation of peace and stability is all too common. The occurrence of major wars is often identified with a system’s instability. Yet, systems that survive major wars thereby demonstrate [emphasis added] their stability.”35 Assumptions, agents, and systems remain constant even as structures radically change shape and the events that most concern us – wars, crises, ecological change – remain underexplained.

Grand Theories, Schools of Thought, and the “Ism’s” Grand theory, despite its self-professedly scientific leanings, was not necessarily particularly good at specific predictions, even though part of the argument for the value of grand theory is precisely because it can predict. Mearsheimer and Walt argue that “well-developed theories are falsifiable and offer non-trivial explanations . . . such theories yield unambiguous predictions and specify their boundary conditions” because the “key criterion is whether the theory has explanatory power.”36 That power, it must be said, arises from the ability to explain large swaths of the past, which positions it to best explain the future. This is part of the reason Mearsheimer famously made specific, falsifiable predictions about significant world developments based on realist theory – for example, that NATO would fall apart

34 36

becomes subordinate to time, rather than each being a constitutive element of sociopolitical practice. 35 Spirling 2007 and Park 2010. Waltz 1993, 45. Mearsheimer and Walt 2013.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

209

after the Cold War or Ukraine would refuse to give up the nuclear weapons it “inherited” after the breakup of the Soviet Union.37 Realist theory uses this articulated predictive quality to emphasize its superiority to constructivist/critical work, tracking to the causal/constitutive dichotomy and the distinction between “explaining” and “understanding” that characterized these debates among “isms.”38 Grand theories are increasingly less prominent as points of debate, and the rise in “non-paradigmatic research” – research positioned orthogonally to grand theory – is significant over time and evidenced by TRIP survey data.39 In some ways, this demonstrates the increasing disutility of grand theory for the “conduct of conduct” that constitutes contemporary scholarship. It is also no coincidence that this tracks to the increasing – albeit largely implicit – recognition of the importance of temporality that arises in concert with the heightened focus on processual ontologies and becoming. Circulation, relationality, assemblages, and practices all share a theoretical commitment to process and nonsubstantialist ontologies and implicitly require a different approach toward time in order to work. Somewhat obviously, grand theories initially set aside temporal complexity. The models/theories smooth out context to make broader claims that are “timeless” in the scientific sense in that they conceivably apply across time and space, but a second casualty of that loss of detail is the inability to make specific predictions at a more granular level. Much of the motivation for theorizing things like great powers comes from present-day concerns, but even when this motivation is acknowledged, most theory cannot produce any such prediction because of assumptions about the ephemerality of the present. Both Waltz and Mearsheimer, for instance, initially claimed that the war on terrorism was not relevant for serious IR scholars because terrorism was meaningless from the perspective of great powers. Waltz declared them irrelevant “to the security of a state” and merely “bothersome,” while

37

38 39

It is also revealing that nearly all of his specific claims about international relations have been wrong or relied on expanding the temporal boundaries of what can constitute being proven correct. Mearsheimer 1990 and Mearsheimer 1993, 58. Wendt 1998, 101–102. Maliniak et al 2011, 439 and Maliniak et al 2018.

210

The Time of Global Politics

Mearsheimer flat out stated that there was “no place” in realism for “non-state actors.”40 IR theories generally, but grand theory in particular, possess an ontological rigidity and epistemological conservatism that hinder judgments and predictions about the contemporary moment. The end of the Cold War was missed by nearly everyone in IR.41 Similarly, realist theory missed the mark on the American occupation of Iraq – the theoretical implications were devastating enough that some adherents wrote book length responses articulating the singularity of the case in the hopes of rescuing their preferred intellectual edifice.42 In effect, despite the last two decades calling into question realist ideas regarding risk aversion, state rationality, the presumed irrelevancy of nonstate groups, and the centrality of military power to state security, the US invasion of Iraq was positioned as a one-off case that did not disrupt the broader theoretical claims that were well established in the past. As Lacy puts it, “One explanation for the focus on the Israel lobby is that the contemporary realist desire for an elegant model of international relations is simply not that suited to analyse the complex formation of interests in foreign policy.”43 While prediction is often identified as a theoretical shortcoming of the social and practice turn, this line of argument was, at best, a stand-in for privileging one specific understanding of explanation unique to IR. It was neither an actual distinguishing characteristic nor an accurate depiction of grand theory’s capacity to accurately predict the future.

Taking Prediction beyond “Disciplinary Prediction” Actors – scholars, practitioners, individuals – generally would prefer more, rather than less, knowledge about the potential consequences of their actions. Disciplinary prediction is one way of accomplishing this but not the only way to encounter the future or even to make “predictions.” We do this all the time as individuals, but equally so, collectives “theorize” their respective futures. A radical movement that bails out individuals languishing in prison due to cash-bail laws is just as interested in knowing what futures their actions will create as the UN Security Council is when they authorize expanded sanctions against 40 42

41 Waltz 2002, Mearsheimer 2006, 234. Gaddis 1992/1993, Hopf 1998. 43 Mearsheimer and Walt 2007. Lacy 2008, 103.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

211

North Korea.44 Each might go about this process with radically different methodologies and epistemologies – UN reports are different than internal discussions among activist leaders – but there are likely to be unanticipated parallels that will only emerge with attention to temporal construction and differing perspectives because there is no single meaning of prediction. Some might argue that prediction is such a dangerous and tainted endeavor that it should be resisted at every opportunity, but there are advantages to the concept, even if we discard the discipline’s specific conception of it.45 Realistically, the status quo has significant inertia in IR scholarship and practice – it is, to use the language of institutionalists, “sticky.”46 The narratives that knit past, present, and future together in a way that centers political institutions are a significant source of state power and interlinked with ontological elements of state security as well as neoliberal capitalist structures.47 The scholarly adoption of them analytically reifies a category of practice into our epistemological commitments, but this also means that traditional social science will be hard to displace in one fell swoop, precisely because our concepts and approaches are shaped by extant power structures. Second, traditional social science does retain some liberatory potential, even if much of its potential has been left behind in scholarly practice. The critiques of positivism, objectivist approaches, scientism, and historical/qualitative approaches are valid and important as well as starting points for this project. That said, it is important to remember that the methods informing social scientific scholarship can be used to assert, articulate, and defend collectively held truth claims that counter the discourses enabling sites of power. Social science, for instance, can firmly establish structural effects that powerful structures try to make invisible, for example, racism in policing or the link between intimate partner violence and mass shootings. Some of those 44 45

46

47

http://southernersonnewground.org. Wendt argues that constructivists who endorse scientific realism fit in the category of post-positivist – for those who take this position, the overlap between post-positivist work and rejection of prediction is not one-to-one. See Wendt 1998 and Berenskötter 2018. This is particularly the case for changes that are normative, rather than incentive-laden. Hopf argues it is even more so when the normative change is function of “habit.” See Checkel 2005, 813 and Hopf 2010, 550. Hom 2010 and Solomon 2014.

212

The Time of Global Politics

who spoke the loudest in opposition to the Iraq War were committed to mainstream social science.48 Focusing on macrostructures and collectives is a problem when it comes at the expense of micropolitical instantiations of power or when it normalizes macrostructures as inevitable, but marginalized communities, for instance, have important reasons to examine and understand macroconfigurations of power. Individual testimony, narrative, and reflexive autoethnography are extraordinarily important scholarly tools, but as they become increasingly accepted, they present tempting sites for cooption by more powerful entities.49 Data collection, rigorous inquiry, and other means of knowledge generation in service of these projects – combined with deprivileging their assumed validity and established centrality in IR knowledge generation – can be a means of enhancing their acceptance and power while simultaneously provincializing their status within the discipline. Doing so requires a move away from the binary of traditional social science and so-called new political science, something that will require a different way of imagining time.50 Third, and somewhat counterintuitively, if we take a presentcentered temporal imaginary seriously, one cannot from this moment assert that these approaches lack political value and will remain without political value. Something similar is already happening with the moves toward revaluing materiality following the social turn. These moves are not warmed over behavioral-materialist positions from the 1980s and 1990s but efforts in conversation with the social and critical turn, drawing largely from its insights and seeking to further these projects.51 In the future, one can imagine scenarios where macroaggregations of observations may be increasingly necessary for understanding political structures, power dissemination, and control, particularly for those interested in resisting these sites of power. This could particularly be the case as information operations, algorithms, and “big data” become ever more central to social and political life.52 48

49 50

51

It is telling, however, that they felt the need to do so in a way that was clearly positioned as something other than scholarship or theory. Schmidt and Williams 2008. Brigg and Bleiker 2010 and Naumes 2015. A self-consciously capacious term that is less in vogue as of late, but captures the idea of critiquing behavioralism and assumptions about value-free social science. See Barrow 2008. 52 MacGinty 2017. Aradau and Blanke 2017.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

213

In short, we do not necessarily know, nor can we fully predict, what will or will not emerge as valuable, subversive, or effective in another present.

Prediction Reimagined: A Research Agenda for Nondisciplinary Prediction Reimagining prediction opens the potential for alternative ways of formulating the concept, rather than simply articulating deviance from an assumed indefinite status quo. For example, by treating stability as exceptional, rather than the baseline, we can engage self-reproducing and dominant power structures, while resisting their continued existence as evidence of inevitability. Studying the status quo in the same way that we study major shifts or disruptions is one way of utilizing prediction in a way that is more useful. To use social science terms, we could treat continued inaction or continuity as a predictive claim in order to develop predictions about ontological stability and crisis avoidance – for example, when are crises or ruptures not likely to emerge? Doing this is one way to get better analytical purchase on those times when instability and crisis are likely to occur. This would not be about studying times when stability or crisis de-escalation occurred against a backdrop of potential conflict but more about those times that are precisely not puzzling or counterintuitive, so as to make those elements of global politics that are taken-for-granted strange by treating them as divergent and in need of prediction. Along these lines, as concepts like “resilience” begin to spread and inform security practice, one can imagine “predictions” that resist “Disciplinary Prediction” by making arguments that rely upon intersecting processes and relations rather than isolating specific causal dynamics that take us from point A to point B.53 This reflects a shift in governance structures – especially in the UK – toward managing uncertainty rather than identifying and eliminating threats before they happen.54 As security practices of prediction change, they may make apparent divergences between IR’s conception of prediction and those already in practice that could be productive. This is not to advocate directly imitating state resilience practices but rather the observation 53 54

Brassett et al 2013, 223. Anderson 2010, Duffield 2012, and Brassett et al 2013, 223.

214

The Time of Global Politics

that as these shifts occur, it will expose the reification of IR’s conception of prediction and its relationship to the state actors it is supposedly separate from. One way of doing this is thinking about prediction more along the lines of quantum social theory, where it becomes less about specific outcomes and more about what potential exists and where the boundaries are for that potential. Potential may be infinite, but the potential outcomes from any one point in space and time are not the totality of possibility. Some in quantum social theory illustrate this via the number of fractions that could be chosen at random between two integers – an infinite number of possible outcomes exist, but the infinite potential for fractions between 1 and 2 is different than those between 2 and 3.55 Beyond the theoretical shifts that would take place at the epistemological, ontological, and substantive levels, there are examples of potential projects that emerge when taking the present seriously. While there could be others, I wish to sketch out here four ways in which prediction could be different under a presentist temporal imaginary.

Stability as the Momentary Product of Process The present is generative, relationally constituted, and heterogeneous. Stability, then, is not what happens when there are no political changes but a specific set of relations that negotiate the present in such a way as to be consistent with the past and the assumed future. Put differently, stability is a subset of all the ways political relations could conceivably be ordered and thus is definitionally exceptional. When is stability likely to continue and what processes need to be in place for that articulated continuity to cohere? One way of theorizing this is through sets of contingent, granular predictions that treat stability as exceptional, a research agenda that would constitute the somewhat counterintuitive idea of “status quo studies.” By remaining agnostic toward methodology or epistemology, it could provide a site for critical approaches that develop bounded predictions. For example, one could develop granular predictions regarding ontological processes and their durational strength – how long they are likely to continue. Alternatively, research could isolate conditions under which exceptionality may occur and when apparently stable processes will follow 55

Murphy 2021.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

215

historical patterns without specifying particular outcomes. This would mean studying what processes make those things that appear everpresent ever-present.56 Eventually, this would enable IR to theorize and predict change with a better sense of those forces that undergird what we see as “normal,” potentially providing insight into the roots and/or circumstances that are likely to create the “impossible” outcomes that characterize the world-historic events shaping global politics. The ability to anticipate “unknown unknowns” to use Donald Rumsfeld’s unfortunate phrasing and so-called black swan events might paradoxically be best approached via a better understanding of why what we consider normal appears to take up so much temporal space.57 One other advantage of this approach is the possibility of addressing the change/constant problem – the idea that “you can’t explain change with a constant.”58 Given dominant assumptions about time and causation, if a causal dynamic is operating constantly, it cannot be the reason things are suddenly different. In other words, if something truly was the cause of an outcome, for example, an outbreak of war or migration flow, then it should have happened in the past when the causal dynamic was also operating. Ultimately, this is a temporal claim – if cause x exists at times 1–5 and the change only occurs at time 5, then the lack of change at times 1, 2, 3, and 4 empirically disprove the claim. Yet, this happens all the time. A tree that is leaning over a house succumbs to gravity, or a river finally breaks through a natural dam. One reason why things like this can happen is that life is rarely fully static. The tree or the river, even when stationary, is constantly in motion, just at timescales that appear oblique to human eyes. The continued existence of nearly everything biological, social, or material engages emergent elements of the present.59 These moments possess potential because if they are not already predetermined, then things could be different. To understand and predict the abnormal – whether it is the outbreak of a war or the abrogation of an agreement – logically requires the ability to predict the normal.

56 57

58

Brassett and Vaughn Williams 2015. It was turned into a poem, famously, and arguably captured the turn toward uncertainty that characterized the middle and contemporary stages of the US war on terrorism. See Daase and Kessler 2007, 411–412. 59 Caverley 2018, 307. Barad 2007.

216

The Time of Global Politics

Alternative Timing Orders Temporal frames, periodizations, and timescales are a crucial – if often unspecified – aspect of any statement advanced about the future, especially predictions. Treating the state as “sovereign,” for instance, only makes sense within a given time frame, but states are by no means unique. IR is constantly advancing representations of collectives, structures, entities, and relationalities – how those representations are framed is a crucial element of political practice.60 It is therefore subject to statements about the future that could fall under this expanded idea of prediction. One way predictions about the future could be reimagined is through a more textured view of the future that moves beyond attaching border conditions based on dates – “North Korea is likely to invade South Korea in the next five years” – toward alternative timing orders.61 These timing orders would be based not on calendrical time or universal time but alternative ways of marking time like the turnover in executive administrations, generations, demographic shifts, or even ecological conditions. So, we could move toward “North Korea is likely to invade South Korea provided the current generation remains in power” or “North Korea is unlikely to invade South Korea until there is a shift in executive administration within the United States.” In some ways, this is intuitive as public intellectuals and policy observers make these claims all the time, but they remain somewhat resisted in scholarship. Alternative timing orders can be more complex as well. The recent work contesting the “emergence of IR” in the nineteenth century or “benchmark” dates like 1648 as part of an “orthodox set” that may be more appropriately understood as a “local European event” rather than “world-historic” offers an insightful view of the potential liminality of pasts when viewed – or framed – by a particular present.62 In other words, rather than stating predictions identifying at what point in time something will happen, these predictions would operate as statements about what becomes more or less likely given a specific set of articulated relationships between past, present, and future. Postcoloniality and decolonial perspectives contest the supposed 60 62

61 Brown 2017, Campbell 1998a, Weber 1999. Hom 2018b, Hom 2020. Buzan and Lawson 2013, 439–440, Buzan and Lawson 2013, and Musgrave and Nexon 2013.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

217

singular through-line of history, and Hutchings’ use of “heterotemporality,” for instance, relies on Chakrabarty’s move toward “provincializing” historical pasts.63 Taken into the future, research on imperial war could incorporate predictions – statements about the future – centered not on spatial interactions and instead reliant on how given entities relate and/or narrate their past(s) and future(s).64 A discursive rendering of a nation-state or empire as historically inevitable – articulating a continuity, inevitability, and “timelessness” to its existence – may correspond to imperial expansion and military force abroad.65 Equally so, it can create a discourse of inevitability in practice that gets adopted analytically – either predictions about specific instances of imperial violence are seen as obvious because imperial actors always engage in imperialism or they become seen as apologies for imperial behavior, seeking to find the cases where “it’s not so bad.” In this way, even postpositivist work on imperialism and colonialism can walk right up to the edge of Jackson’s border of “could” and “will” by asserting that imperialism “will” – colloquially, if not in the scientific sense of “will/will not” – result in violent relations with the periphery. As should be clear, these types of statements about the future already exist, but IR does not respect them as “predictions.” Instead, they are treated more as a continuation or rerealization of the past in the present. Bringing these into conversation with extant prediction offers a way to insure a potential combination of critical and scientific insights but more importantly destabilizes the monopoly that scientific realists have in terms of addressing the future.

Contingent Prediction(s) Predictions are statements that should incorporate some hesitation – the future, under most understandings, is radically unknowable. While this is not true in the classic, scientific sense, the positivist emphasis on empirical works, along with scholarly humility when advancing claims about sociality, means that in practice, even scientific predictions about sociopolitical relationships retain a kind of ontological contingency. Within disciplinary IR, this is smoothed out via rhetorical convention – for example, democracies do not fight each other or overlapping 63 64

Hutchings 2008, Chakrabarty 2009. Barkawi 2016 is excellent on this point.

65

See e.g., Wimmer 2012.

218

The Time of Global Politics

bargaining space enables negotiation – but its shadow still remains, typically brought out only once one is defending one’s theoretical claims. For the presentist, however, contingency remains an inevitable part of the present and, given the future’s construction, the future as well. From this perspective, the ideal causal relationship of A resulting in B as an ideal to aspire toward disappears because it simply cannot function given the understanding of social practices. Prediction could place contingencies in the foreground, rather than bringing them in later as a means of explaining a model’s “oversights.” In practice, this might constitute a move toward combining insights from forecasting with prediction. The contingency here, however, lies deeper than mere probabilism about the future. It is instead ontologically based in the understanding of present reality, rather than only an effect of the future’s unknowability. Building contingency into every model as the ideal type – rather than a begrudgingly acknowledged reality of the limits of our work – refashions claims about the future and in the process better enables nonscientific “predictions” to sit alongside and inform scholarly and practical knowledge. In other words, a claim that explicitly cannot be spatially or temporally universal and denies the representational capture and violence of strict causality will more effectively link itself with narrated futures, micropolitical observations, autoethnographic work, and/or statements about structural dynamics involving power, otherness, and resistance. In future studies, there is already work that seeks to reclaim the “criticality” and “emancipatory dimensions” of future-oriented thinking by enabling critical theoretic work to engage the future without adopting the norms of the “corporate” and “policy” settings that currently dominate.66 This can be done through methods like “future-oriented dialectics” and the construction of “socio-economic imaginaries and futures,” each of which potentially offers room for IR to think about the future in ways that “predict” without recreating the dangers of disciplinary prediction.67 By identifying the possible, rather than solely focusing on adjudicating which specific outcome is more or less likely, we may paradoxically arrive at a better understanding of how the future relates to the presents that constitute IR – eventually

66

Ahlqvist and Rhisiart 2015, 103.

67

Ahlqvist and Rhisiart 2015, 97–102.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

219

enabling a better ability to assess an outcome relative likelihood in the process.

Multiple Overlapping Presents Predictions presume a unified position – if I say that the United States is likely to spark a great power war with Russia or China in the near future, I am speaking from a single, universally shared position about a future that will occur for everyone in the world. Yet, just as “presents” can vary and are always already conditioned by particularity and social context, the futures that are imagined and/or anticipated similarly have the potential to vary. Prediction as currently imagined enables its anticipation of the future by eliminating the idea of variable temporal positionality. Treating the present as both an analytical category and area of inquiry undermines the potentiality of universal predictions – in either time or space.68 Foregrounding the present as temporal imaginary and analytical category forces us to make predictions about the future that begin with the incompleteness of any such claim and the temporal contingency constituting it. Just as is the case with any political act, the future is neither promised nor inevitable, and theorizing that contingency is critical toward generating a more productive and generative attitude toward prediction. Continuing to treat the future as calculable, however, is not value-neutral and often times reflects sovereign practices of security: Contingency itself becomes a novel domain of calculability through which the taming of chance is integrally involved in a new game with time, since it is time itself, freed from transcendental goals and laws, that is the root cause of the contingent in the modern age. Thus, it may appear that, in taming chance, you may tame time. Moreover, tame time and you may tame the future. Tame the future and you may, finally, secure a being – human being – whose very existence is temporal.69

While contingency can become a “novel domain of calculability,” the ontological contingency of the present, as well as time itself, provides a valuable resource by which we can resist this desire to “tame” the future through accurate, universal predictions.70 68 70

Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013, 796. Dillon 2007.

69

Dillon 2008, 313.

220

The Time of Global Politics

Articulating the multiplicity of the present does risk that existing sites of power will coopt this move, positioning it as yet another source of risk and danger to justify the state’s efforts at control. It also carries the potential that powerful entities will declare certain societies as somehow “behind the times” and create a hierarchical ordering of political presents to reinforce their power. While this is certainly a concern, it is not the only possible outcome. Decentering the ontological universality of the present undermines any binary between those who are supposedly “in time” and those who are “behind” because there is no universal time or benchmark by which to make that assessment.71 Any such claim would be contextual, part and parcel of a specific present, not the reflection of some supposedly universal timekeeper. Temporal hierarchies always already exist but are rendered invisible by the existing imaginaries of time and temporality. Acknowledging the existence of these arrangements and foregrounding them as political practices provide a better environment for successfully resisting these moves. Just as presents can vary, diverge, and overlap, so can futures, and the concept of prediction can be reformulated to speak to and inform particular presents. For instance, a predictive claim about the “United States” may operate with contradictory temporal assumptions when compared to predictive claims about the international politics of urban spaces or indigenous communities within the United States.72 For example, temporality matters deeply for theorizing urban politics as “the framing of space and time in the city has important, if unpredictable, implications for policy and politics.”73 This framing is likely to create temporal contexts for politics between and among urban areas that differ dramatically from those that operate at the level of the state.74 The example of state-indigenous relationships also shows how temporal dynamics differ from interstate relationships. Presuming that 71

72 74

Usually cast as the “direction” of time, I use relationality here to mark the radically open potential of relating presents to each other once liberated from extant directionalities of time. 73 Rifkin 2017. McCann 2003, 160. Which is not to assert that the historical markers like “the beginning” of colonialism or settlement mark the end of indigenous temporalities, but rather to affirm their continuities and the value of engaging these ideas through “provincializing” European temporal orders, see e.g., Donaldson 1996.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

221

indigenous communities are “coeval” with European/settler presents does little to displace the simultaneity of universal time as produced by European state and capitalist structures. But articulating their presents as separate without eliminating a commitment to time’s directionality risks a narrative of “development” that assesses who is or is not further along the “natural progression” of history.75 The idea of “multiple, overlapping” presents advanced here is meant to emphasize an idea of presents as constantly in states of production and reproduction whose borders interrupt and overlap. What this literature reveals, at a minimum, is that IR’s consideration of temporality, sovereignty, and the relationship between bounded presents relies on a number of unstated, historically produced assumptions that are replicated via our knowledge production. Consciously theorizing the limits of predictions and other interventions regarding futures is a vital and inevitable consequence of decentering IR’s temporal imaginary, but this may not require a complete denial of extant knowledge. The possibility exists that for narrow concerns like decisions in trade fora or ballistic missile development, bracketing certain questions may be possible, particularly for those seeking traditional predictions about the future. Even in that case, however, there would need to be a recognition that this temporal dominance or practiced universality is a scholarly choice. It is never truly universal, complete, or inevitable because the temporal dimensions of political life are subject to the same dynamics of hybridity and multiplicity that attach to other political constructs. This “temporality of hybridity” is one way to resist falling back into yet another form of “syncretism” because it refuses the “fixture of representation.”76 The presents of the dominant sites of power could conceivably reflect their own representational practices, but we cannot bracket these questions without justification. Advocates of Disciplinary Prediction might contend that when representing something as complicated as international and global political relationships, oversimplification is inevitable and necessary for meaningful statements about the complexities of future global politics. Even by the narrow epistemological standards of disciplinary IR, however, there are countless examples of predictions that could be made better. Chapter 6 showed how a different temporal imaginary 75

Donaldson 1996, Rifkin 2017.

76

Drichel 2008, 589.

222

The Time of Global Politics

makes visible a better understanding of the political dynamics that enabled the policy actions of the Trump administration. As well, it assists in theorizing how the Trump administration could come to power and what the long-term effects on US foreign policy will be. In short, attention to the politics of time might have made predicting the conduct of American politics and foreign policy during the Trump administration easier. For instance, the racism of the Trump administration’s foreign policy and their advancement of white supremacy in international politics appeared to be an important and new development to some. For those working in noncanonical spaces who link race and IR, however, it was much more anticipatable, continuous, and predictable even in the classical sense of the term. White nationalism and ethnic pandering to white European voters were more visible for those working in race and international politics because there is already a set of tools, ideas, and histories that differ from disciplinary IR.77 The idea of international politics as a politics of racism – for example, referring to African countries with vulgar epithets, excluding Muslims from the country, declaring the pandemic the “Chinese virus,” and centering Europe – is largely absent in IR’s current mainstream but alive and well in other spaces, particularly the ones attuned to race and coloniality. These can be usefully drawn from in ways that Disciplinary IR typically does not because of the racism of the discipline’s past.78 77

78

Vitalis 2015, Vucetic 2011, Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam 2014, and Doty 1993. This was something anthropologists explicitly pointed out after the election of Trump in 2016, calling for anthropology to rethink its discipline’s role in normalizing these acts such that the election could be seen as an anomaly. But not everyone interpreted the election as surprising or novel. Indeed, Trump’s victory unfolded in an era when anti-Black violence had gone “viral,” when videos of police brutality and civilian hate crimes appeared to be playing on a loop, when Native American activists were being hosed down in frigid temperatures for protecting their land and water, and when ritual miscarriages of justice – the George Zimmerman not-guilty verdict following the killing of Trayvon Martin, the Darren Wilson nonindictment following the killing of Michael Brown, the Baltimore mistrials and acquittals following Freddie Gray’s death while in police custody, etc. – made it difficult for many to believe in the “safeguards” of the US democratic system. This is not to say that the news is met with numbness, but rather that for many, the election was felt not as a punch in the gut but as a forceful, sequential blow to an already-bruised political body. Rosa and Bonilla 2017 (np).

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

223

Similarly, queer theorists and those working in global queer studies recognized and anticipated the widespread use of pinkwashing well before Clinton and Obama were utilizing it in their calls for military force against ISIS.79 Few theorists offered predictions per se, but one could have based useful predictions regarding humanitarian military action from these perspectives. As well, nonmainstream presents might be better equipped at addressing the future and predicting it – for example, offering alternative perspectives as a means of undermining state-centric notions of control, resilience, or adaptation in security. Even for the strictly American case, it is worth remembering that the scientifically “rigorous” approach that appears as hegemonic arises from a divergence with the historical tradition of Britain and consequent turn to economic and rational choice approaches.80 New interdisciplinary approaches provide useful means of approaching the future precisely because they do not engage in predictions as typically understood. Instead, they offer alternatives that address the future through differing orientations or alternative temporal imaginaries that reformulate the question of the future.

Decentering Temporal Directionality: New Science, Alternate Scholarly Positions, and Backward Causation For the simplest of causal predictions, there is a necessary temporal logic – if A causes B, then A has to precede B. While not all predictions are causal, this temporal relationship lurks behind most understandings of what it means to “predict” something. It is a future-oriented claim articulating a relationship between precedent and antecedent and is therefore reliant on “time-ordering.”81 Beyond this critical assumption, however, is another necessary component. Time must connect and/or flow from past to present to future. Without temporal connectivity, the relationships that enable a prediction to take place – for 79

80

81

Clinton most famously made this move after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando (Washington Post 2016). See also, Mikdashi and Puar 2016, 217. While Hafner-Burton et al argue a new “behavioral revolution” is taking place within IR via psychological insights and survey experiments, I am referring to the original turn on the 1950s/1960s which by 1969 had prominent political science figures declaring a “post-behavioral” revolution already underway. See Easton 1969 and Hafner-Burton et al 2017. Montgomery 2016.

224

The Time of Global Politics

example, if Trump wins the election, the US will pull out of the Paris Accord – disappear. For this type of prediction to work, there must be continuity between the present of Trump’s victory and the eventual future where the US withdraws from the Accord. There also must be directionality – the past impacts the present, which implicates the future. The directionality of time is something that many of us assume is just a material fact, but it is also the product of a shared set of meanings. If we recognize the present as interpenetrated by past and future and the past and future are constructs of particular presents, then the arrow of time (and therefore history) becomes something that must be actively theorized and considered rather than assumed into existence. What this means for the concept of prediction is that its core components can be better informed by areas of thought that accept the possibility of emergence, backward causation, and entanglement. Each of these ideas is physicalist in some ways, but as is the case with other scientific metaphors at play in IR, they can be employed in a manner that expands our thinking, while remaining agnostic about their validity.82

New Social Science and IR’s “Deep Newtonian Slumber” The importance of entanglement, emergence, and complexity thinking, for instance, has already made inroads into IR, but the discipline has yet to wake up from its ‘deep Newtonian slumber’ and continues to answer the “wrong questions . . . [which] enacts a theater of validity to generate explanations far more coherent than the turbulent realities of global life.”83 One central issue contributing to this “Newtonian slumber” is that IR’s acceptance of a Newtonian view of time makes it difficult to incorporate the temporal entanglement and complexity of these approaches.84 The prevailing view is that approaches like these are best at describing relationships and potential outcomes but poor at identifying predictive claims because “complexity means that causality itself – its presence, intensity, direction – is not stable over time, or even within parts of the same system.”85 Disrupting the temporal 82 84

85

83 Wendt 2015 and Montgomery 2016. Kavalski 2015, 194. For examples of complexity based approaches, see Cederman 1997, Kavalski 2007, Bousquet and Curtis, 2011, Little 2014, Kavalski 2015, and Wight 2015. Earnest 2015, 46.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

225

assumption of unidirectionality and temporal consistency could better enable complexity theory to inform and reshape our ideas of prediction and causation rather than acting as a barrier toward intellectual evolution. Encouraging these moves is useful for two reasons. First, as quantum approaches are increasingly being utilized at the level of human interaction, there are insights being developed that simply cannot be accounted for otherwise. As noted earlier, there are predictive claims being developed by adopting a quantum perspective that, in some areas, better capture behavior than those based on a classical perspective.86 These are only beginning, but they focus on foundational questions like the prisoner’s dilemma and how we understand individual psychology within sociality as a driver of behavior. Beyond decision models, the understanding of time that attaches to quantum approaches better enables theorizing the potential micro- and macroscopic effects of theory on the events, actors, and institutions that we inquire about. Quantum theorizing at the social level denies decoherence – the idea that quantum effects wash out at levels above the subatomic because “although quantum mechanics subsumes classical physics, its practical applicability is generally thought to be confined to sub-atomic particles. Above that level, it has long been assumed that quantum effects wash out statistically, leaving the decohered world described by classical physics as an adequate approximation of reality.”87 As Montgomery, Murphy, Wendt, Zanotti, and others argue, albeit for differing reasons, we are in fact looking at a quantum phenomenon when we assess global and international politics.88 Wendt does this by advancing the argument that human consciousness is a “quantum phenomenon” because “all intentional phenomena are quantum mechanical,” but others use quantum thinking as an alternative orienting metaphor for thinking “scientifically” about sociality and politics, just as Newtonian metaphors influence work throughout the field.89 86 87 88 89

Pothos and Busemeyer 2009, Pothos and Busemeyer 2013. Wendt 2015, 3. Wendt 2005, Wendt 2015, Montgomery 2016, and Zanotti 2019. Wendt 2015, 149; Wendt only defends this explicitly in the conclusion, but it orients his thinking throughout the book because as a scientific realist, he argues that if human consciousness is quantum than quantum social science is not merely another “tool” for social scientists to employ, but a reorientation of our

226

The Time of Global Politics

There are other reasons to resist the idea of decoherence. When looked at from the perspective of the entire globe and its “politics,” often times the things we are most interested in are those things that are microscopic when compared to the total picture. Take the example of a potential miscalculated war between the US, South Korea, and North Korea. A decision – however authorized – by one individual to fire a volley of missiles into a suspected North Korean nuclear test facility could precipitate a regional conflagration impacting millions of people within a very short period of time. When viewed in comparison to the billions of decisions, choices, interactions, actors, and structures that constitute global politics, we are often looking to explain behavior that is almost literally subatomic in nature. A decision by one person at one moment in the context of two countries interacting provides a fairly good parallel to subatomic behavior between two macroscopic entities, however defined.

The Potential of Alternative Scholarly Positions In physics and philosophy of science, some theorize that the present and future can implicate the past, not just in terms of memory but also in terms of the ontological past.90 While perhaps counterintuitive, entertaining the idea in the IR merits consideration. In the context of security, as Stockdale and Fisher write, backward causation occurs all the time, although this rhetoric is rarely used.91 Taking the lead of the United States, security is increasingly about “preempting” or “anticipating” threats – articulating a particular notion of the future against which the present enacts its defenses or manages potential “uncertainty.”92 The contemporary manifestation of security places risk, uncertainty, and future actions front and center. By orienting itself toward the future, actors decide upon measures in the present to prevent and/or prepare for futures to come. In other words, the entire

90 92

understanding of materiality – necessitating all scientific realists and critical theorists to alter their approach. This book makes a similar argument by showing how even for physicalists – philosophers of time and physicists – there is enough of a debate about IR’s understanding of temporality and continuity that adopting the present as an orienting frame is no mere metaphor, but potentially a material and physical “truth,” necessitating a reordering of work across the field. Wendt 2015, 3–4. 91 Price 1997 and Weberman 1997. Fisher 2013 and Stockdale 2013. Aradau and Van Munster 2007 and Anderson 2010.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

227

concept of security relies upon an articulated future that is employed to alter and/or change the present in some way.93 Russia is a threat, so the United States chooses a policy to modernize its nuclear weapons to prevent a future situation where the United States cannot respond appropriately to Russian conventional or nuclear aggression. How the future is constructed by a particular political present largely determines the actions taken. In practice, it is never quite that simple. The present is continually updated and shifting, as well as encountering alternative presents – even those presents that are actively silenced by more powerful presents. A nuclear modernization program in the context of US nuclear politics takes time and unfolds through a series of actions and decisions, each of which is understood in the context of a potential future it is designed to change or manage. Just as the present of IR constantly articulates its meaningful past through history and collective memory, futures are equally articulated as a way of causing change in the present. When the narratives that constitute that future change, so does the present. Understanding one’s temporal position as heterotemporal opens up alternative temporal positions for the scholar to adopt. For instance, IR could better incorporate emergence and theorize continuity by placing themselves in the future rather than the present. Imagining alternative futures that may appear unlikely from this present creates a point of difference where we can better understand the underlying dynamics and processes that make the continuous, stable aspects of present life appear inevitable.94 This has the potential to provide analytical purchase on precisely those things that appear dramatic and unanticipatable. In 1984, Alker and Biersteker wrote “notes for a future archaeologist” of international relations, which purported to provide the “real differences in world understanding” and “common or convergent themes” that would allow a future “Foucaltian archaeologist” to know “how the different tribes on our planet came to understand each other.”95 While their project was squarely one of the present, it was oriented for a future scholar. Theoretically, one could also adopt the position of a future archaeologist who seeks to understand the world in light of the future present – and its attendant past(s) – they occupy. 93 95

De Goede 2008 and Van Munster and Aradau 2011. Alker and Biersteker 1984, 121–122.

94

Klosterman 2017.

228

The Time of Global Politics

Take the 2013 special issue of the European Journal of International Relations that asked, have we reached the “end of IR?”96 While undeniably valuable, an additional line of inquiry emerges with a shift in temporal perspective. Rather than debate whether we have reached the end – effectively asking us to place the discipline in progressive time – what if we imagined what the end of IR might look like from a future where IR had already ended? Would IR become seen as phrenology? Would it be seen as an ideological apparatus used to justify imperialist governance? Let us say that the postpositivists “win” and positivist approaches die out on both sides of the Atlantic. Does IR become “global studies?”97 What about Weber’s assessment of Queer IR and its relationship to Global Queer Studies?98 Could the queering of IR result in its death? Would this be an undesirable outcome? Might it already have happened? Answering why we think such an outcome is impossible – if we do – would require us to actively theorize the processes that enable Disciplinary IR to appear to be so enduring.99 This could then be used to outline potential futures for the field and advance provisional predictions about how that future present might change or shift based on actions in the contemporary political present. One thing it could reveal is that the seeming durability of IR is less an innate quality and more about the ubiquity of the nation-state as the central site of politics or a shared resistance toward viewing global concerns as international politics, that is, climate change, migration, or violent governance practices at the “domestic” level. Similarly, theorizing from a “future” position might allow IR to better incorporate timescales into predictions. By timescale, I mean both the perspective a scholar chooses to adopt and the limits of the meaningful past, present, and future for a particular political present.100 Take, for example, the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001 – its meaning now is very different than it was 10 years ago. Yet, it still remains the orienting force behind the 96

97 98

99

“Special Issue: The End of International Relations Theory?” European Journal of International Relations 2013. Acharya 2016. I’m thinking particularly of her assessment of the manner in which Disciplinary IR “gentrifies” ideas that do not match up to its analysis of “high” politics with extant methodologies and the implicit worry on the part of Disciplinary IR that to accept these ideas on equal terms displaces the factors that enable Disciplinary IR to be intelligible as a discipline. Weber 2015, see esp. 34, 40–45. 100 Grove 2020. Weber 2015.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

229

ongoing war on terrorism. Time spaces or chronoscapes – including a collective’s notion of the present – vary based on perceptions of timescales and understandings of the past.101 These are constantly shifting even as political practice continues. As the event recedes into the past, how we perceive the event itself – and thus the timing regime it constitutes – shifts and changes with each new present and the shifting timescales we adopt in relation to it. This is slightly different than the idea of “time-horizons” or “generational analysis” which is usually limited to individual leaders or publics.102 Presents come into being through relations with the past and future – discursively, materially, historically, or otherwise. Theorizing what constitutes the meaningful past or identifying which pasts are likely to implicate the present or future goes beyond arbitrarily placing boundary conditions on history. It requires identifying what is meaningful and what is not for a particular present. The Art of War, for instance, remains relevant to contemporary security policy, yet medieval texts do not. This is because it is part of the imagined past of contemporary military-security discourse, but that past is never truly universal or continuous – there are likely to be past presents where The Art of War did not occupy the position of prominence we now imagine it did. Attending to these discontinuities necessitates thinking the overlapping relationships and the unanticipated practices these processes can produce even as they result in the appearance of a classic book that has been continuously dominant since its initial appearance.103 Time scales need not only be limited to the past. To use an extreme example, adopting geological time scales allows one to imagine looking back from the “next” era – for example, after the Anthropocene – in which case, the 2001 terrorist attacks do not exist as anything more than a momentary speck.104 But when those attacks are framed by the temporal perspective of the current US government, it constitutes something massive. Yet, even that varies across time. While it may have constituted a turning point and rupture of the post-Cold War “peace” for the Bush and Obama administrations, it 101 103

104

102 Stevens 2015. See e.g, Luecke 2016 and Edelstein 2017. Something international historians are wrestling with as the turn to collective memory challenges some long held assumptions about how international history operates. See e.g., Langenbacher and Shain 2010, Finney 2014, and Gustafsson 2014. Burke et al 2016 and Youatt 2014.

230

The Time of Global Politics

was something much less meaningful during the Trump administration. If we widen our temporal aperture even more, the Anthropocene itself occupies multiple positions depending on time scales. This has a devastating political effect as “a second, related problem for IR . . . mass extinction – via its monumental and miniscule temporal and spatial scales – is foreign to human agency. The timeframe of the Anthropocene is indeed nothing more than a blink in geologic time, but trying to construct a political response for a cumulative series of events over the course of a century, let alone a millennia, is a tall task indeed.”105 Another advantage to expanding and contracting our time scale or altering our temporal position is that it can demonstrate the contingency of events currently seen as indisputably central. It can also expose how these time scales operate in practice and show why it is the case that certain events and actions are seen as central. Collective perception of time’s scale plays a dramatic role in how one imagines meaningful events and meaningful time. At the microlevel, for American citizens, many have commented on the way in which Trump’s election seemed to condense one’s sense of time, particularly in terms of collective memory. It became difficult to remember what happened weeks prior, let alone call on a past without Trump as President.106 Alternative positionalities also enable us to look at ontological inevitabilities differently. Take two of the primary ontological commitments within IR – the dominance of the state and the canonical understanding of war as the “defining limit of security.”107 By placing oneself in a future where the state is no longer centered, it forces us to imagine – to predict – how that could be plausible. Social movements might become central – whether institutionalized, deinstitutionalized, hybrids, or something else entirely.108 Flat networked collectives organizing around particular issues – anticorporatism, welfare provision, social justice concerns – could become accepted as the central “actors” in global politics. Currently, many, if not most, IR scholars would resist such claims because fully accepting the implications of these ideas requires a radical ontological reorientation for the 105 107 108

106 Harrington 2016, 495. Pickles and Robbins 2018. Lipschutz 1995, 4. “Terrorist” organizations like the Islamic State are already being thought in this way, see Englund and Stohl 2016.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

231

field. Imagining a future where this position becomes centered opens up a different perspective from which we can see how the past and present could relate to the future. Similar questions can be asked about war: in an alternative future where war is no longer the primary concern of international politics or the sole province of sovereign states, how would that reformulate IR? IR might instead center information operations, surveillance, terrorism, “asymmetric warfare,” cyberoperations, or lethal autonomous weapons systems, but these are by no means the only possibilities. IR might shift its focus away from war as the primary manifestation of political violence and toward apparently “peripheral” issues like gun violence, gendered violence, ecological disruption, systemic racism, and migration politics – each of which impacts lives to a similar or even greater degree than state–state politics. To a scholar in the 1950s, the idea that small groups of individuals attacking public places with improvised devices would dominate the Euro-American security agenda might appear preposterous. On the other hand, by interrogating the “present” this imagined scholar positions themselves within, we can see how it might also appear perfectly normal, given the way colonialism, race, imperial dominance, and civil conflicts/terrorism all similarly existed at the time. Resolving an issue like this is ultimately impossible, but theorizing it would benefit IR as a whole. Beyond the narrow question of IR’s current concerns, there also lies a normative argument for exploring the nature of prediction from future perspectives. How would the present look from a future where scholars of gender, race, class, and other axes of difference dominate Disciplinary IR? How very different would that present look? ReusSmit and Dunne do this from present to past with their critical rereading of Bull and Watson’s Expansion of International Society, but there is no unique reason why we necessarily have to wait until it has already happened to gain useful perspective.109 IR is important, to be sure, but for whom? If future IR looks very different from our collective present, will future scholars look at contemporary IR scholars more as early astronomers or as “mere” astrologists?110 Each has been central to 109 110

Reus-Smit and Dunne 2017. I use this example deliberately, as “mere astrology” has had enormous social impact over centuries and continues to this day. This is at least partially due to its positionality as an explicitly non-scientific way of knowing the world which questions our understanding of prediction. Practically speaking, astrologers

232

The Time of Global Politics

“policymaking” at various times in history, and yet, we know that the former was highly limited and the latter remains a scientifically dubious practice. Taking on this perspective in IR could be particularly revealing, not as some nihilistic vision of scholarship but rather as a means of decentering those already understood and accepted reasons why IR “works” and is “valuable.” In opening the door to these questions, however, we must be prepared for answers that may prove troublesome. Scholars of the future may perhaps look at the entire enterprise of IR as normatively suspect. Asking questions like these is one way of getting our arms around critical issues regarding what IR does, who it is for, and why it endures in the manner that it does.

Conclusion Prediction is about the future. It invokes a host of assumptions about the directionality of time, how temporal dimensions are linked, and the manner by which one frames a temporal “space.” And while IR does concern itself with “time,” the broader question of what prediction is temporally, and what it could be if we intellectually accepted temporal heterogeneity, remains unasked and unanswered. Prediction is an implicit part of IR from its earliest days. It arose as a normatively motivated discipline seeking to lessen the likelihood of future world (European) wars.111 One can therefore anticipate concerns that without a universally shared temporal position, prediction disappears, along with our ability to positively intervene in the world. Yet, IR is already taking on a more temporally nuanced and open perspective. Concept analysis, quantum theory, ecological approaches, ideas of the assemblage, and network theory all include temporalities that

111

were consulted by generals prior to battles about everything from timing to strategy and not just in ancient/medieval times. World War I and II Europe was particularly preoccupied with astrology as a means of predicting the outcome of battles and the endpoint of the war, see Davies 2018, 223–230. It is not my contention that IR emerged as some sort of cosmopolitan, humanitarian measure – rather, it emerged from a narrow outlook that saw war in Europe as global and normatively something worth studying in order to prevent it from happening again. This humanitarian impulse obviously came with an imperial and colonialist discourse that was deeply opposed to this more laudable idea, but it is something worth considering and amplifying even if it must radically be transformed to fit with our contemporary awareness and understanding of the danger inherent to such moves.

Beyond Disciplinary Prediction

233

complicate received notions of scientific time. To that end, any perspective centered on the present must recognize moves already transpiring in the contemporary moment. The shift toward practices and relationalism as the “new constructivism” along with the emphasis on advancing radical critiques of international politics from a variety of unanticipated and marginalized perspectives already demonstrates the value of rethinking extant understandings of IR. Pushing toward a new temporal imaginary allows for current disciplinary boundaries – for example, prediction – to be better negotiated, ultimately allowing our engagements with the future to be fully informed by developments throughout the discipline, rather than only those in the scientific arena.

|

8

Theorizing Responsibly Temporality, Positionality, and Difference

Introduction While historians may disagree, IR is always already about the presentday conception of international politics. While some worry that the discipline is in “crisis” or approaching its “end,” that only makes sense if we presume a single, shared past and a directionality to intellectual history incommensurate with a temporal lens.1 IR is neither in crisis nor facing its end, any more than the end of the Cold War brought about the “end of history” or World War I was the war that “ended all wars.”2 IR is a field constantly negotiating its present and attendant pasts. In other words, there never was “an IR” in the ontologically real past that is only now reaching its end.3 IR is – and has always been – a discipline producing and reproducing a particular “past” as a means of creating and maintaining the discipline through specific presents. While it may be the case that from this particular present IR’s past looks discontinuous, choppy, and ill-fitting, that does not represent the only way the discipline has been understood, nor does it predetermine how we act going forward. Robert Cox rather famously observed that “theory is always for someone and for some purpose.”4 Somewhat less famous is what Cox says afterward – “all theories have a perspective . . . [which] derive from a position in time and space, specifically social 1

2 4

Powel characterizes this as the “paradox of IR” where the “more IR is grounded on relational ongoing multiplicity (as it should be), the less distinctive the international – and therefore IR’s unique selling point – becomes.” This at least partially accounts for the resistance to interdisciplinarity, but could provide a point of orientation that allows IR to continue to cohere without seeking to maintain it as a bounded, historically exclusive, and conceptually limited academic endeavor, Powel 2020b, 557. 3 Fukuyama 1992. Kristensen 2016. Cox 1981, 128. Critical Terrorism Studies scholars built upon this to argue that it also comes from “somewhere,” emphasizing the importance of locating the works in terms of its origin and impact. Gunning et al 2008, 89.

234

Theorizing Responsibly

235

and political time and space [emphasis added].”5 They carry with it “a sense of . . . past experience, and of hopes and expectations for the future. [emphasis added].”6 Cox’s observation captures the positionality and ethos of much postpositivist work in IR, but foregrounding the temporal component of this work emphasizes two ideas. One is that the knowledge produced about global politics – whether by IR scholars, practitioners, media pundits, or everyday persons – is always conditioned by the past, present, and future. The other is that present is never truly the present – it is neither universally occupied nor universally accessible. What this means, then, is that even scholarship that actively theorizes its own limits is always already limited and exclusionary due to the temporal limits of their present(s).7 While this may represent a “failure,” strictly speaking, failure can be a generative process – failures often provide the space and time for reflection and change.8 Most postpositivists share a view of the world as constituted by difference, which inevitably challenges any statements or theories meant to literally represent global dynamics. In some ways, this is why a question like “what’s the point of IR?” can haunt the discipline.9 For positivists, as the previous chapter indicated, one answer is prediction, but for many postpositivists, this is unsatisfying. One point of distinction between positivist and postpositivist IR, by contrast, is that while positivist IR largely ignores the present, postpositivist IR treats it as an area of inquiry. For instance, theorizing scholarly positionality implicitly addresses the social, that is, temporal, context of the scholar. As well, Hutchings’ echo of Jameson’s call to “think the present” rings true here – much work begins by identifying present configurations and evaluating the historical/material/discursive conditions that constitute it as such. Ultimately, the critical approach to think the present tends to focus on the past, but that work has led us to this moment. It is no accident that much of the temporality literature in IR comes out of postpositivist approaches. This chapter attempts to frame a postpositivist approach that centers the present and temporality. What questions arise? What insights can we develop? One example is that this would allow us to reconceptualize the ever present question of IR’s “end” as both endpoint and 5 7 8 9

6 Cox 1981, 128. Cox 1981, 128. Sjoberg 2019, see also Fisher and McIntosh 2021. Halberstam 2011, Fisher and McIntosh 2021. Dyvik, Selby, and Wilkinson 2017.

236

The Time of Global Politics

beginning.10 Concerns about IR’s “collapse” and apparent “divergence” from previous intellectual trajectories are only a problem if we believe that IR can produce something timeless to begin with. IR is not astronomy or physics, nor should it try to be. While IR may indeed address “enduring questions,” given a long enough timeline, nearly all of them are overtaken by events.11 If political reality is constituted by emergence, novelty, and change, those relationships, issues, concerns, and ideas must shift, making the knowledge produced from any present inevitably incomplete. This is not to say that there will be no future utility for knowledge produced in this present, but if we take the present seriously as a concept, then we have to accept that it might not – or more likely that we cannot know with any finality what will be relevant in the future. Terrorism emerged as a canonical security issue in the space of a decade, knocking off concerns about great power rivalry and nuclear exchange. It might similarly be eclipsed by another issue such as global public health, migration, climate change, or economic inequality, perhaps with a similarly compressed timeline.12 A humility regarding the “enduring” qualities of our work is warranted. This chapter first addresses the positionality of scholars and scholarship, identifying the core elements that follow from emphasis on the present and temporality. The second section explores the normative implications of a presentist perspective – particularly in terms of responsibility, using a relational model of responsibility unfolding in time to think carefully about to what and to whom IR imagines itself responding. The following section examines these issues in light of heterotemporal difference – if we are necessarily offering knowledge from a specific present, then that perspective is inevitably limited and exclusionary. As an inextricable feature of scholarship, the question 10 11

12

Or additionally, as the status quo of any endeavor beholden to political change. And even these supposedly “time-less” endeavors are increasingly reckoning with similar realizations regarding the temporal limits of questions that initially appeared universal across time and space. As those investigating neo-positivist approaches point out, IR’s understanding of scientific approaches and principles do not even line up precisely with these scientific disciplines reflexive, selfconceptualizations. Climate change and/or cybersecurity both appear poised to take precedence, if such a shift occurs. Prior to 2001, terrorism studies was considered the province of comparativists, criminologists, specialists, area studies experts, and historians. See e.g., Jenkins, Crenshaw, and Hoffman 2016.

Theorizing Responsibly

237

then becomes how do we negotiate this responsibly, and how can we do that while respecting difference? Here, I argue that an attention to temporality requires foregrounding difference and that as a result, gender, race, coloniality, indigeneity, and ecology must be centered because they all constitute core elements of the discipline. The fourth section lays out some implications for how we position our work with respect to contemporary politics, arguing for a shift away from conceptual frames that artificially limit the scope of politics and are anathema to linking postpositivist theorizing to practice. I argue for a move away from concepts like “policy relevance” and toward something I call “present relevance.” Making this move forces us to think about how our work impacts the political present – rather than only those implications, structures, or actors we already consider political. It also emphasizes intentionality regarding the choice of which present we actually intervene into as well as reflexivity regarding the form of that intervention. In the final section, I lay out some of the implications that fully embracing temporal nonfixity means for theory, focusing particularly on the way in which it changes the idea that resolving debates is desirable or even possible.

The Positionality of the Scholar: Placing Reflexive Analysis in Time Temporality is a crucial axis of identity and subjectivity, particularly given how ideas of identity are tied to processes of becoming.13 Like identity, scholarship may initially appear to be timeless, but that is largely conditioned by our own sense of bodily temporality. One reason “enduring” answers are privileged within academic scholarship is the temporal dimension – to endure means to continue on, ideally beyond one’s lifespan. While the goal that one’s work can resonate throughout multiple generations appears banal and even obvious, it is not the only way one can conceptualize the relationship between knowledge and politics. The desire for enduring answers to “time-less” questions parallels a similar desire for subjective immortality, albeit many would deny this. The emphasis on endurance reflects a desire that many argue arises from inhabiting a body that is inevitably doomed to death.14 13

Solomon 2014.

14

Bauman 1992.

238

The Time of Global Politics

Regardless of whether a specific scholar wishes to see their work matter long after they are gone, the idea that this would be a good thing operates as a central element of the field epistemologically.15 The notion of impact, lasting influence, “enduring questions,” and mechanistic claims of truth all reflect the valuing of transcending time in some way. It is worth asking why it is that this type of knowledge – timeless, undying, enduring – is privileged by scholars and not others. Even if there is a human tendency toward a future orientation, human temporality is not the only, much less the most important, temporality in IR. Bodily temporality is important but only one way of temporal ordering.16 States, international institutions, and nonstate actors are all equally ideas as much as time-transcendent physical entities with their own attendant discourses. Someday, we may look upon our obsession with lasting claims as a reflection of the political power concepts like stability and security have in the political spaces we focus upon, for example, sovereign states. Being for the future is not the only way entities operate – especially in sectors like economics, the environment, and cyberspace, which are all areas that are seen as central to international political analysis.17 Actors that are nonhuman can operate with temporalities produced and reproduced through their constitutive existences in relational presents.18 New materialist approaches, for instance, argue for the agential properties of nonhuman entities, and as such, temporalities attach, which are also distinctly nonhuman.19 Even as some inextricable aspects of humanity encourage a push toward valuing those things with an indefinite existence, equally so are those that push us away from the immortal and toward a revaluing of the new and ephemeral. The shared experience of the emergence of life and inevitability of death forces us to consider the newness of our own work as well as the actions involved in IR itself. Arendt’s understanding of the relationships between humans and processes offers insight here, namely, that the position of a scholar as a human and political actor engaged in the present can inform and support the presentist

15 16

17 19

Stockdale 2015. I don’t mean to infer that only humans have bodies and Stevens productively captures the interlinkages among ecological temporalities and non-human temporal relationships, Stevens 2015. 18 Barad 2007, Stevens 2015. See Stevens 2015, among others. Connolly 2013.

Theorizing Responsibly

239

move. Human life, as she puts it, is the product of a series of miracles precisely because it is not finally determined by structure. Every act, seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a “miracle” – that is, something which could not be expected. If it is true that action and beginning are essentially the same, it follows that a capacity for performing miracles must like-wise be within the range of human faculties. This sounds stranger than it actually is. It is in the very nature of every new beginning that it breaks into the world as an “infinite improbability,” and yet it is precisely this infinitely improbably which actually constitutes the very texture of everything we call real. Our whole existence rests, after all, on a chain of miracles, as it were . . . 20

Arendt makes two observations here that are valuable for a reflexive perspective. First, politics is conducted in the space of the new and the emergent – the miraculous present, as it were – and is the space of the most interesting and valuable moments of political action because these are moments that are ultimately “undecidable” both in advance and in the moment.21 It is the unanticipated that makes politics politics. This does not require positioning scholars as “prophets,” but rather that scholars need to recognize the radical potentiality in the continuing, status quo processes under investigation.22 Things always could be otherwise – but that otherwise could also be worse. Understanding politics as possessing this characteristic, this “miracle” as it were, requires a slight reconsideration of the positionality of the scholar. It positions the scholar as a purveyor of “miracles” where scholarly intervention operates as a moment of newness and beginning, with all the attendant potential for change – as well as continuity. She writes, “no doubt human life, placed on Earth, is surrounded by automatic processes . . . Our political life, moreover, despite its being the realm of action, also takes place in the midst of processes which we call historical and which tend to become as automatic as natural or cosmic processes, although they were started by men.”23 While the processes of politics contain this automatism, these processes can always be disrupted, particularly through reflexive action. Importantly, as well, these processes she refers to as “natural,” “cosmic,” and “political” all possess temporalities that may vary or converge, overlap, or 20 22

21 Arendt 2006, 169. Campbell 1998b. Butler 2004, Hutchings 2008, Butler 2009.

23

Arendt 2006.

240

The Time of Global Politics

separate.24 Attending to them and the implications they have on scholars themselves is of critical importance not only for accurate theorizing but also for recognizing and harnessing their political potential. Given this emergent element of politics, “we have to think of theorizing not as producing cookbooks, but instead as writing unfinished dictionaries, inside which a growing number of terms are in need of being continuously updated, in themselves and in their relation to each other.”25 This positions the scholar not as a developer of ex ante theory or merely reflecting “practical knowledge” but as someone who is acting as a translator and creator, where language is ongoing and unfolding in a present. This “updating” is always already taking place regarding meanings and how they “relate to each other” in the present. Meanings are marked down in dictionaries so that future presents can investigate and utilize them as a means of creating emergent meaning in that new present.26 Reflexively inquiring into the frame of bodily temporality that silently informs our work also raises useful questions regarding to whom we are speaking – which bodies do we value when we imagine our audience and which do we not?27 Ancient societies would speak through the dead, using graves as sites for important political and social ritual, in effect bringing the past into the present as a means of social action, orientation, and thought.28 Obviously, this is something that continues to this day, yet secular democratic societies see themselves as well past the time of oracles and conducting sacrifices to those who have come before.29 The conceptual apparatus of bodies – living, dead, or yet to be created – provides one way of framing the question: to whom is IR responsible? The easy answer most of us would give is to privilege the living, yet when one examines the temporal imaginary of IR, the answer appears muddled. For IR scholarship, future lives appear to take precedence over those of the present because we seek knowledge that will serve some sort of timeless purpose. Knowledge becomes useful in and of itself and in a seemingly self-apparent manner – timeless truths have no temporal limitations. Maintaining the current orientation toward the future and the past devalues the bodies of the present. This is not to say that all of IR is 24 27 29

25 26 Stevens 2015. Guzzini 2013, 523. Berenskoetter 2016. 28 Auchter 2016, Purnell 2020. Morris 1992. Recent work on necropolitics in global politics/international relations underline this point. See e.g., Auchter 2014 and Alphin and Debrix 2019.

Theorizing Responsibly

241

simply looking out over the cemeteries of the soldiers fallen and conducting rituals for the benefit of generations to come, but there are parallels that should give us pause. If the dead could speak, IR scholars would find it enormously helpful, even more so than the living. To be clear, this would be useful, but the question that arises is “helpful for whom?” IR scholarship – including postpositivist scholarship – is often formulated as a conversation among scholars, progressing forward in the pursuit of better and more useful knowledge. In its current temporal formulation, however, the bodies of the present are left behind even as we attempt to act in their name and share their temporal position. As we interrogate the bodies of the past to create knowledge useful for the bodies of the future, our own bodies and those bodies present need to be pulled back into the frame.

Intellectual Responsibility and the Call of the Present Positivist scholars believe that by developing insights and identifying empirical regularities, knowledge will accumulate, but postpositivist scholarship relies on this assumption as well. There remains an assumption that because critique is valuable, more critique is necessarily good because it becomes part of a broader conversation among those seeking to improve the world.30 Yet, this belief in accumulation mimics a progressive scientific ethos that understands IR’s intellectual history as constituting a trajectory that is increasingly able to understand and theorize the world.31 Studying the past is normatively valuable because it allows us to shape an open future. This tracks directly to the gradualist understanding of reality or growing block theory of the universe – scholars stand either on the edge of the accumulation of reality or somewhere outside it, observing and offering insights. These insights coalesce into theories that increasingly close in on the reality of the world’s recurring mechanisms and regularities. At a minimum, these interventions advance knowledge. Even though most would formally resist this claim, it remains true for postpositivist scholars as well. They expect that their insights, frames, and discursive interventions offer some sort of “lasting” contribution that enables better insights and approaches to international politics in the future. This holds true regardless of what particular form the contribution takes. 30

Fisher and McIntosh 2021.

31

Popper 1979, Bird 2008 and Popper 2014.

242

The Time of Global Politics

At a minimum, the disciplinary incentives regarding scholarship encourage this approach regardless of one’s scientific pretensions – or lack thereof. Foregrounding temporality better supports an idea of responsibility as something that can never be finally discharged. Responsibility becomes a concept with duration, open to the future, and a way of being in the world that is indefinite in its application. Yet, it also resists universalistic ideas of what is or is not the responsible way of enacting work.32 Scholars can identify some of the ways in which responsibility unfolds over time and the ways it may be temporally disparate depending on the relationships constitutive of a particular moment. The Levinasian idea that responsibility is infinite is particularly valuable here. This quality of being infinite is not only in terms of the size of the commitment to the other and their difference but infinite in that it is temporally inescapable – all actions carry an ethicopolitical valence, particularly those articulated as valuable by their mere existence, like the knowledge production positioned as critique.33 Scholarship – whatever its normative value – needs to take into account its temporal positioning and its own inevitably processual nature. The progressive view of intellectual activity as accumulative reflects an understanding of time and temporality that is neither natural nor inevitable.34 While most would accept this as so true as to be banal, fully accepting the implication of this means that one cannot simply rely upon the hope and/or expectation that some moment in the future will reveal the value of one’s critical intervention because we cannot assume that the passage of time is progressive or cumulative. In other words, one’s intervention always has the potential to operate as a step backward.35 All theory – including critical theory – is dangerous, and temporal humility is one way of being responsible to this reality. Historians wrestle with this question quite deliberately, and historiographical analysis examines it directly. For some, the value of presentism lies in the ability to take the understood past and strategically employ its analysis for purposes relevant to present configurations of 32 34 35

33 Spivak 1994, Campbell 1999, Doty 2006. Campbell 1999, Young 2003. Popper 2014. Thus illustrating the danger of the assumption of progress lies not in its optimism, but in the idea that scholarship has a path and/or direction that operates beyond the reach of individual scholars themselves.

Theorizing Responsibly

243

society and/or politics. Doing so simultaneously leaves the possibility that this articulated “past” is liminal and not a mimetic representation of actions as they really occurred. A strategic use of presentism in historiography would frame a study of phrenology in the context of the current mania about mental measurement 3. With this strategy, it would become possible to examine why phrenology might be regarded as an important or interesting thing to study just now. Such an approach to inquiry also puts an ethical/political burden on the historian. Strategic presentism means that historiographical methodology must include careful consideration of the politics of historical writing that influence the choice of subject, the construction of the reader, the rhetorical form of the argument and the authority of the historian.36

A presentist temporal imaginary, historians remind us, necessitates an ethicopolitical theorization of one’s scholarship. Historicizing phrenology, for example – a largely dead and discredited ideology – in the present moment is not a value-neutral move but one to which normative implications attach. With the presumption that generating knowledge is useful in and of itself removed, the burden now shifts back to the scholar. Scholars must address why they cover the subject, who will be reading their work, what the choice of medium means for its reception, and how it will be received. This must be done intentionally and explicitly. When the present is centered, the value of any scholarship must be justified as an intervention into the present on its own terms, rather than as an intervention into a timeless space of expanding knowledge. In terms of scientific validity, IR may be more like phrenology than we care to admit, but that does not deny its meaning as a scholarly practice in the present provided we are willing to accept the possibility that this discipline is equally dangerous. Doing this takes seriously the idea that the primary responsibility one has to the present and remains open to being responsible for the harms it may do to the world. This combination of theorizing responsibility as an action unfolding over time does not reify commitments to one’s particular social location but rather enhances the necessity of engaging difference through theorizing the normative implications of the work in the present. It recasts questions less as what is or is not responsible but when is it 36

Fendler 2008, 678–679.

244

The Time of Global Politics

responsible to think or act in a certain manner. The advantage of this formulation for IR is that it leaves open the possibility of contradictory, context-specific answers. The ways we relate to the questions we address can be unanticipatable from the present occupied by the scholar or scholarship itself. This creates a more flexible understanding of intellectual responsibility tied to the realities of the present, rather than displacing that responsibility and placing it in a temporal space somewhere removed from the practices which animate it.37 Consequently, scholars and the work they produce – just as is the case with any author of any medium – need to ask to which present their scholarship is responding and what the value is of that knowledge for that particular present. The existence of presents beyond either the one under analysis or the one occupied by the scholar raises questions of how scholarly action implicates those other presents as well. One way to illustrate this issue is via the question of pedagogy and whether political science programs should teach undergraduates the “canon” – for example, the “ism’s.”38 What about graduate students? Who is present in this canon and who is not? What are the dangers that exist in learning to articulate oneself in this language?39 Does getting better and better at articulating the dangers of drone strikes in the language of national security effectively address the political present one is trying to intervene into? Or does it reinforce the validity of the discourses that make assassinating individuals thinkable in the first place? What about the discursive traps that may exist in adopting “technostrategic discourse”?40 Does studying a realist framework normalize the inevitability of interstate war and make it more likely? Answers may vary, but this is a question that arises whether one is engaging drone strikes, sex trafficking, international responses to climate change, bilateral trade agreements, or violence in the home. Each action intervenes into a particular political present, the boundaries of which can be usefully theorized and explored. To intervene is to displace and to disrupt, and one is always responsible for those effects.

37

38

39

Or provides the call to which we respond, to use the Levinasian formulation, Spivak 1994, Campbell 1999, Doty 2006. ISQ Symposium, www.isanet.org/Publications/ISQ/Posts/ID/5023/Where-IsInternational-Relations-Going-Evidence-from-Graduate-Training. 40 Cohn 1987. Cohn 1987.

Theorizing Responsibly

245

Respecting Difference through Heterotemporality For Cox, “sophisticated” theory is “never just the expression of a perspective. The more sophisticated a theory is, the more it reflects upon and transcends its own perspective.” Put in more contemporary terms, sophisticated theory requires an ability to critique the limits of its own perspective. This is because “there is . . . no such thing as theory in itself, divorced from a standpoint in time and space. When any theory so represents itself, it is the more important to examine it as ideology and to lay bare its concealed perspective.”41 A presentist temporal imaginary centers questions of the ethics of knowledge production reproduced within scholarship. Questions of who scholarship is for are important – for example, state actors, activists, etc. – but similarly so are questions of where this scholarship comes from and which histories, actors, and discourses it draws from and implicitly values. As a Eurocentric discipline that is increasingly questioning the differences that are erased by its dominant discursive formations – race, ethnicity, colonialism, gender, sexual identity, environment, indigeneity, disability/ability, and class, among others – IR builds upon discourses that employ techniques and insights from different approaches and understandings of the world. It is worth recognizing, however, that part and parcel of what allows IR to exist in the first place is a willful erasure of some elements of social and political experience. The discipline only exists because it emphasizes certain aspects of global politics to the exclusion of others. While this is inevitable, we should at worst seek a “reflexive unreflexivity” in these moments that is temporary, incomplete, and always subject to reflective analysis because these erasures are inextricably constitutive of the discipline itself.42 The idea of temporality offers a way of metaphorically theorizing these cross-cutting aspects of difference in a way that could resist some of the traps that a spatialized view of identity encourages. Thinking of the boundaries of discourses and overlapping knowledge in terms of presents with adjacent and/or overlapping temporal borders might provide a flexibility that can match up best with the contemporary focus on intersectional theory and recognizing the radical complexities of difference rather than blindly accepting its selective erasure. In writing about war’s relationship to sexual politics, for 41

Cox 1981, 128.

42

Ezrahi 2016.

246

The Time of Global Politics

instance, Butler identifies the value of thinking of identity in terms of multiple temporalities, stating: To say that one would like to consider sexual politics during this time raises an immediate problem, since it seems clear that one cannot reference “this time” without knowing which time is being referred to, where that time takes hold, and for whom a certain consensus might emerge on the issue of what time this is. If the problem is not just a matter of different interpretations of what time it is, then it would seem that we already have more than one time at work in this time, and that the problem of time will afflict any effort I might make to consider such issues now . . . 43

The idea of “this time” as the present – whether it is gendered spaces in rural America or the Security Council at the United Nations – is important to theorize. Embedded within the dominant present of political thinking, she argues, is a progressive ethos where the expectation is that as time unfolds freedom will spread to those currently lacking it and therefore the job of political actors and scholars is to accelerate that trend.44 Notably, her point is not limited to a specific research agenda but relates to political action itself – including selfconsciously critical politics. This may or may not be true – the political present she is speaking of may indeed have this temporal relationship structuring the narrative itself, but by denaturalizing time’s apparent unity into specific presents with differing temporal borders, we can better appreciate the differences within apparently similar cases. There may indeed be a progressive teleology to freedom in a political context because of the narrative explicitly endorsed or silently left in place. If we understand the contemporary narration of political freedom as having temporal borders that recede deep into the past and continue well into the future, then our notion of freedom will be limited. That said, however, she reminds us that it is not simply a matter of adding temporality and stirring: the problem is not that there are different temporalities in different cultural locations – so that, accordingly, we simply need to broaden our cultural frameworks to become more internally complicated and capacious . . . the problem, rather, is that certain notions of relevant geopolitical space – including the spatial boundedness of minority communities – are 43 44

Butler 2009, 101. Here she is speaking to sexual politics, but her point is not specific only to those specific political formations.

Theorizing Responsibly

247

circumscribed by this story of a progressive modernity; certain notions of what “this time” can and must be are similarly construed on the basis of circumscribing the “where” of its happening . . . My claim will be that thinking through the problem of temporality and politics in this way may open up a different approach to cultural difference, one that eludes the claims of pluralism and intersectionality alike.45

For Butler, “time is in constant movement making it impossible for gender to become a temporally-fixed totality. The temporality of this kind of gender is necessarily very far away from developmental progressivity, despite incorporating elements of a temporal process.”46 This lack of fixity contains the potential for a shift in the approach to difference that is more effective at incorporating it without reducing it to extant cultural frameworks or merely adding new categories. One way to do this is by focusing on the temporal borders of what we consider the international sphere to be. Where and when these borders arise, who is policing them, and the means by which they are crossed provide a way of getting into these issues of difference without reinforcing a fixed binary regarding political categorization at odds with the process itself. In other words, “the point is rather to show that our understanding of what is happening ‘now’ is bound up with a certain geopolitical restriction on imagining the relevant borders of the world and even a refusal to understand what happens to our notion of time if we take the problem of the border (what crosses the border and what does not, and the means and mechanisms of that crossing or impasse) to be central to any understanding of contemporary political life.”47 Resisting this move by merely developing regularities or presuming a unitary present we can critically theorize relies upon a temporal imaginary that replicates what anthropologists have identified as the “ethnographic present.” Fabian characterizes it in the following manner: “the ethnographic present is the practice of giving accounts of other cultures and societies in the present tense . . . but without qualifying or quantifying modifiers (‘most X’ or ‘70 percent of all questioned’), the present unduly magnifies the claim of a statement to 45 46

47

Butler 2009, 103. Honkanen 2007, 4, and for an analysis of how this operates within the context of collective politics and assemblages, see Söderbäck 2018. Butler 2009, 103–104.

248

The Time of Global Politics

general validity.”48 While this critique was initially leveled at anthropology of the mid to late twentieth century, it captures a means of thinking about the scholarly relationship to international politics when seeking to develop these “regularities.” The substantive claims may differ as our questions are not about whether “the X are matrilineal,” but assertions like “humanitarian interventions are imperialist” can be similar if their limitations – including temporal – are not acknowledged clearly and intentionally.49 Regardless of topic, claims like these still fall prey to the concerns regarding the linguistic conventions he sees in anthropology’s “ethnographic present,” namely, that “the use of the present tense in anthropological discourse not only marks a literary genre (ethnography) through the locutionary attitude of discourse/commentary; it also reveals a specific cognitive stance toward its object . . . It presupposes the givenness of the object of anthropology as something to be observed.”50 “This corresponds to a theory of knowledge” where “we must attempt to discover the deeper connections between a certain type of political cosmology (defining relations with the Other in temporal terms) and a certain type of epistemology (conceiving of knowledge as the reproduction of an observed world).”51 This is what much of IR seeks to do, examine the past so as to identify claims that are true within the “ethnographic present” – claims that possess general validity now and across time, even as those claims are informed by an exclusive focus on the past. This is what enables the commentator to make a “commentary on the world,” the world of the present and future, because if accounts remain in the past tense – “arms races did result in accidental conflicts” – then it would “prima facie situate a text in the category of history or story, indicating perhaps a humanistic rather than scientific intent on the part of the writer.”52 This distinction is critical to IR’s self-conceptualization as distinct from history. Somewhat ironically, in its move to distance itself from humanistic expression experienced in the present, IR’s present becomes separated from the present of politics and operates on an entirely separate plane. Paradoxically, the analogous employment of anthropology’s “ethnographic present” creates a world where even critical

48 51

Fabian 1983, 80. Fabian 1983, 87.

49 52

Fabian 1983, 80. Fabian 1983, 83.

50

Fabian 1983, 87.

Theorizing Responsibly

249

scholarship can operate almost entirely out of time, even as it asserts its applicability to the present as its reason for being.

From Policy Relevance to Present Relevance53 For many, making IR a discipline that is more policy-relevant would be a good outcome – provided that it remained rigorous and academic. While a fairly innocuous claim for some, this idea turns on a number of contestable issues. Issues like what we think is theoretical work, how and whether we can separate this from the actual practice of politics, and by what standards we can know that academic work are different than policy advocacy. From a temporal perspective, precisely because scholarly and political practices can occupy a shared present, the relationships between the present(s) of scholarship and the present(s) of international politics become an important part of our analysis. This is regardless of how we resolve questions regarding the context of our work itself, meaning that whether we see them as separate, overlapping, bounded, or unbounded, the present from which, and within which, our work intervenes is part and parcel of what the work actually says.54 Positioning political and scholarly practice as coconstituted by the present eliminates the possibility of placing oneself in a space outside of history and the past.55 Returning to a previous example, the contemporary focus on terrorism offers a useful illustration. At its core, the study of terrorism as a discrete phenomenon of political violence exposes the liminality of key IR concepts and how the social and political boundaries framing events and actions become reified as objects of study.56 Even as the category remains a matter of dispute because of the countless definitions of terrorism, it has been normalized enough to be subjected to countless rationalist and quantitative explorations – as well as exist unproblematically as a concept, albeit one with a contested definition. Despite methodologically advanced approaches to its study, terrorism and terrorist violence remain uniquely bound to context in a way

53 55

56

54 McIntosh 2022. Hutchings 2008. Except as a heuristic or intellectual device, which this chapter explores as a method in later sections. Jarvis 2009b and Jackson 2010.

250

The Time of Global Politics

apparently different from other forms of political violence.57 It is an act of violence that is interpretive, rather than strictly material or instrumental.58 As an interpretive act of violence – more precisely, an act of violence that is politically understood in its present moment as a performance meant to be interpreted – it illustrates the temporal dynamics involved in all acts of political violence.59 Audiences matter because political violence is a rarely absent collective meaning and those meanings have to be attached to materiality, rather than emerging ex ante from a series of actions. Terrorism, however, is by no means unique. What terrorism as a political phenomenon reveals is that even the supposedly central concepts that orient an entire field are conditioned by, and constructs of, a particular time – a specific present. We must recognize that “terrorism is intended to be a matter of perception and is thus seen differently by different observers and at different points in history. It is a term like war or sovereignty that will never be defined in words that achieve full international consensus.”60 This requires a greater theorization of the ways in which scholars and scholarship are embedded within the temporal relationships that enable the “objects” of inquiry to exist. Having seen too many issues of “present” concern get lost in binary debates about theory and practice, materiality/sociality, and questions regarding the ontological existence of states, many have taken on an agnostic approach where the answer to questions like these is left up to the preferences of each individual scholar. Much of the discipline is currently understood as operating in terms of an “adhocracy” where hypothesis testing, “critical” approaches (however conceived), and a pluralist acceptance of the individual’s position on the role of theory is the norm, even as this work increasingly speaks only to each other.61 While acceptance of this work has shifted, the underlying desirability or establishment of it as a coequal research approach alongside quantitative, rationalist, or qualitative historical work has not.62 As a result, 57

58 61 62

I argue, following a presentist approach, that this is not so unique a facet of this form of political violence, but something that is constitutive of all violence understood and produced as political, see Lundborg 2012, Grove 2019. 59 60 Juergensmeyer 2003. Juergensmeyer 2003. Cronin 2009, 7. Oren 2016. For most IR programs, comprehensive exams require demonstrating mastery of these debates, even as many scholars and programs are increasingly moving away from their existence. As well, the TRIP surveys for most influential

Theorizing Responsibly

251

the discipline is still forced to address questions regarding the relationship between the scholar and the practices under observation. In what ways do we position scholarship’s relationship to the practices under investigation temporally speaking. The extant narratives from which actors and audience draw is how those actions considered terrorist even exist in the collective imagination as terrorist attacks in the first place.63 Understanding the present as a place of constant emergence via the interaction of new perspectives enables a simultaneous embrace of the contextuality of terrorist violence as something inextricably linked to the present but also as a product of a shared past that matters in the present. Attacks must be collectively understood as “terrorist attacks” to constitute themselves, which turns on the contemporary understanding of the history of those events. A recent study demonstrated that mainstream terrorism studies were quite poor at forecasting future trends and actions, at least partially due to an apparent focus on a narrowly conceptualized understanding of “the present” and the privileging of its boundaries for what constitutes terrorist violence.64 Terrorism demonstrates that for international political actors, as well as its analysts, political violence necessitates a reflexive employment of the imagined and shared past of a specific temporal context.

Beyond Policy Relevance The question of “whither the gap” or how “we should link theory to practice” is the type of reflexive question that will endure as long as IR remains an academic discipline. As is the case with most reflexive questions, however, it is best approached in a temporally limited, rather than timeless, manner. The question is not whether the “gap” can finally be traversed or eliminated but rather how is the gap produced and reproduced in the scholarly present? And separately, why does this frame continue to persist? Temporality is not the only means of opening oneself to these questions. Many critical theorists are already moving away from theory construction and the academic

63

64

scholars remain dominated by the leading figures in these debates of the recent past. This is a factor not limited to terrorism as a political phenomenon, but matters throughout national security policy. Krebs 2015, Subotic 2013, Subotic 2016. Bakker 2012, 10.

252

The Time of Global Politics

strictures of what constitutes knowledge and adopting approaches that yield useful knowledge in novel ways and consciously seek to intervene into the present – Der Derian’s call to engage the “now” captures this nicely.65 Thinkers engaging the Anthropocene, for example, offer insights calling for different ways of being in the world, necessitating that scholars position themselves differently, as the absence of political intervention is an act of worldmaking in and of itself.66 Debates over activism’s role in academia have renewed, particularly regarding issues like climate change and climate justice that impact everyone’s lives.67 Der Derian himself offers a model for taking a different approach and utilizing different mediums – visual and otherwise – as a means of “doing IR,” as do other prominent scholars like Campbell and Weber who have each turned to the production of video and visual media as a means of exploring and practicing global politics.68 Some of this draws upon the utility of art and esthetic practices as a means of creating new space for scholars to offer scholarly interventions into a political present, but also there is a turn scholars are making toward polymathic work – incorporating popular culture, music, video games, sports, and techniques from literary and film criticism.69 Even as IR theory has difficulty engaging the present, IR theorists themselves have increasingly used the tools of the moment in an attempt to “bridge the gap.”70 Outlets for engaging contemporary politics are mushrooming compared to even a decade ago – social networks, blogs, internet spaces, and popular press websites – creating the opportunity for scholars to become increasingly tied into policy/ political analysis.71 These are still considered “nontraditional” activities and rarely considered a means of professional advancement for those lucky enough to be on the tenure track. Yet, it is also the case that 65 67

68 69

70

71

66 Der derian 2016. Fishel et al 2016 and Kolia 2021. For a conversation on how Weber’s visual work fits in with IR see, Dixit 2015. See also Campbell 2007 and Kirkpatrick 2015. Der Derian 2010. Bleiker 1997, Caso and Hamilton 2015, Drezner 2015, Shapiro 2015, Shapiro 2016. For example, see the “Bridging the Gap Project,” http://bridgingthegapproject .org and the “Rigor, Relevance and Responsibility” center at the Unviersity of Denver. See e.g., the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage www.washingtonpost.com/ monkey-cage/, Duck of Minerva www.duckofminerva.com, and The Disorder of Things https://thedisorderofthings.com.

Theorizing Responsibly

253

many of those who take advantage of these opportunities are seeing some professional benefit only in terms of visibility and the creation of a public identity. Similarly, the increased emphasis on hypothesis testing, for instance, appears well suited to the current media and institutional environment as it develops apparently rigorous claims about political phenomena that can inform policymaking irrespective of how these claims fit into a broader worldview. Theoretical claims like these appear to lack an ideology or set of priors. Combined with an increasing societal acceptance of data-driven analysis as “fact,” this creates a feedback loop regarding what is considered politically relevant scholarship that leaves postpositivist scholarship in an awkward relationship with contemporary political life.72 If the present is the “locus of reality,” then leaning in to the narrowness and contingency of the claims one can produce with that positionality could allow more flexible scholarship. All scholarship is tied to particular presents, and thus, we cannot selectively devalue some work because it lacks an “enduring” quality. The means by which we measure what “endures” is an epistemological question that turns on a claim’s durational qualities – a quality whose usefulness depends on temporal context. Theorizing from the present means that claims can still be made but must be limited by the ways that presents differ. There may be significant variations in the tempo of actions and behavior, the imagined time horizons of the actors, or shifts in the duration of actors or even the present itself. It will always remain an open question, however, which is the more valuable intervention, but that is a question that should always exist for the type of “sophisticated” theory Cox urged us to pursue.73 Rejecting a prediction or claim that selfconsciously limits itself to a temporal horizon of ten years because it does not constitute a “lasting” contribution can no longer be unproblematically asserted without justification. Lasting contributions have value, but so do ones that are more ephemeral. There is no specific territorial space where scholarship is – no ivory tower, as it were – or a single site where policymaking lives. Politics is not only located in political institutions or any other area where scholars already imagine politics as occurring. Consequential actions happen in places well beyond these already established constructs.74 72 74

73 Appelgren et al 2019. Cox 1981. For example, Blanchard 2003, Tickner 2003, Tickner and Sjoberg 2013.

254

The Time of Global Politics

This is not to say that the ideas of the scholarly community are initially segregated from the world as if they were a virus in a lab.75 The example of US foreign policy in the Trump administration demonstrates that ideas which originate within scholarly communities – for example, the idea that military interventions provide a means of shoring up public support for presidents – can influence the minds of leaders and elites but not through simple adoption. Sometimes they can have the opposite impact. The literature that examines the link between foreign military intervention and domestic support is inconclusive and ambivalent – evidence indicates that for American presidents, diversionary conflict in order to make the public “rally around the flag” is sometimes successful and sometimes not.76 Yet, because the idea is out there in political discourse, Trump acted in a way that followed the logic – foreign military action helps a leader’s domestic political standing – even though it inverted the actual claim. Paradoxically, its lack of confirmation by scholarly standards likely demonstrates its meaningfulness for the contemporary political present. Trump, for instance, has acted in equal and opposite ways, yet both sets of decisions appear driven by a belief that it would improve his domestic position.

Scholars and Scholarship in the Present Tense Certainly, IR scholars are able to address the present; they do it all the time. What is also true, however, is that it is rarely done through the type of scholarship that the discipline universally accepts as valuable. Something always has to give: in the words of one scholar, one has to “take off their scholarly hat” and metaphorically assume a different identity before they can intervene in politics itself.77 Thus, the gap is a sort of intellectual firebreak that divides good analytical scholarship from the mixed motivations and instrumentality of political advocacy. And while this binary – as is the case with most binaries – makes too neat an analytical cut and is in reality much more complicated, this rough framing is recognizable as a structuring heuristic for IR 75

76 77

An analogy Paul Musgrave (2021) uses to theorize intellectual responsibility – as should be clear, it is not a view that this book shares. Sobek 2007, 31–32. John Mearsheimer has utilized this expression in speaking engagements.

Theorizing Responsibly

255

scholarship itself. IR scholarship is distinctly not punditry, policy analysis, or propagandistic defenses of particular political positions. The contemporary assumption is that scholarship should refuse to engage in political action for fear that underlying ideologies will somehow shape the analysis or take away from its objectivity.78 Yet, scholars are expected to do that all the time, whether it is in adding policy recommendations to a journal article or simply the disciplinary capital one receives by establishing a public persona. While apparently anodyne, policy-relevant claims and analysis leave the place of extant political elites and power configurations unquestioned; otherwise, the recommendations or ideas might be speaking to a present which neither the scholar nor the audience occupies.79 As a result, there is a danger that any engagement in politics leaves in place the configurations of power that make intellectual work on politics subservient to these structures. It evacuates one of the primary responsibilities of the politically minded academic – showing how this world could be otherwise.80 This is an important point, albeit can be formulated more as a caution than an absolute admonition, as “engaging politics” is not the same thing as making policy recommendations.81 The present, I argue, represents one such way of formulating this concept – policy relevance may indeed be a goal worth avoiding, but exploring how our work engages the “present” offers more opportunity and flexibility for relating scholarly practice to contemporary politics. Orienting work toward the present – however defined, bounded, or practiced – is especially important at this point in contemporary politics because positioning oneself as apolitical is a deeply political act.82 Put differently, accepting the boundaries of the political present as they are portrayed by mainstream elements of the discipline limits the

78

79 81 82

This is a broad claim and I do not mean to ignore the important work done by IR scholars in the political sphere – however formulated – as well as the deliberate creation of spaces for scholars to articulate views on contemporary political issues. Epistemologically and professionally, however, while policy recommendations are occasionally included, political analysis itself is devalued and seen as something extra-scholarly, rather than scholarship itself. 80 Elkus 2015, Nexon 2015, Jahn 2016. Elkus 2015. Chenoweth 2016. As should be clear, my position is that whatever urgency exists now regarding political intervention is a matter of degree – scholarship is always political and should act accordingly.

256

The Time of Global Politics

imaginary of politics. It leaves the important questions of politics to the practitioners while we as scholars willfully remain outside the frame.83 As the rise of Trump to the White House, the BREXIT vote, and democratic backsliding throughout Europe tangibly demonstrate, the belief that politics is a subsection of life that remains causal, rational, and nonemotional is incommensurate with contemporary political experience. This is particularly so for the spaces that IR has historically given prominence to – Europe and the United States – when developing its theories of the globe.84 Models that rely on these assumptions may increasingly be at odds with contemporary politics as well. Returning to the terrorism example is instructive here.85 Terrorism as an object of inquiry is understood as a type of violence that transcends political structures and crosses space and time. Positioning it as a recurring phenomenon explicitly denies the idea that this representation is ontologically connected to present political structures. Treating terrorism research as an “a-political” endeavor leaves in place extant ideas about terrorism that are central to the field and mutually constitutive of political discourse, political action, and counterterrorism policy. In short, it is a deeply political move. As “critical terrorism studies” and other similar scholarship point out, this now central aspect of modern security studies is unavoidably in conversation with the political present and the scholars who study it have a substantive impact on what its actual definition is.86 Terrorism experts have been consulted by governments and had a political influence on the conception of terrorism at play in politics – they are anything but neutral observers finally separated from their area of expertise.87 This is not a new phenomenon. Cold War thinkers like George Kennan and Thomas Schelling shaped both what we understand security problems to be and the solutions available, impacting the practices they claimed to objectively investigate.88 The discursive construction of threats is an ongoing, unfolding process of which scholars are inevitably a part.89

83

84 87 89

Or in the case of the Trump administration – to actual TV pundits, like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, whose influence on the president’s thinking and agenda is well documented and direct. 85 86 Powel 2020a. Stampnitzky 2013. Jackson 2015. 88 Blakely 2007, 229–231. Haukkala 2013. Cox 1981, Trachtenberg 2012.

Theorizing Responsibly

257

As laid out in Chapter 3, however, the temporal assumptions that shape the field encourage “time-less” claims that remain relatively silent about the conduct and practices of current politics. Many of the tropes involved in the argument that IR scholarship lacks the capacity to guide or inform contemporary politics are distinctly temporal in nature. For instance, one of the top arguments against the relevance of contemporary IR scholarship revolves around questions of time.90 Theoretical claims supposedly operate on too broad a timescale to be applied to a particular scenario. Knowing that a country that develops one type of weapon will be invaded seven out of ten times might be useful but does not say anything definitive about whether a particular state should or should not pursue such a program. Theory is also usually silent about the boundaries of its timescales, which can create ambiguities even in some of the most clear situations. For instance, claims that NATO would collapse after the Cold War can be read either as inaccurate, because NATO alliances still exist, or accurate, because NATO is in the process of falling apart; it is just not there yet.91 Whether one sees these claims as mechanistic and timeless truths largely turns on how one relates time to the present and how much time can pass before a causal relationship is no longer at work. Similarly, because many claims in IR are not time-bound, the role of leaders and individual decisions are typically given short shrift because it remains hard to generate generalizable (timeless) claims regarding characteristics and likely behavior or to apply those claims to specific questions in the “moment.”92 Contingency is an inextricable part of the present of politics – whether the US should or should not engage ISIS with ground forces is an enormously complicated question necessitating the assessment of countless variables, issues, and concerns.93 While questions like this are unavoidable, they cannot be answered with finality because conflict itself is always contingent. Even if IR seeks only to act as a “guide” for decisionmaking, even that concept is deeply underspecified and varies widely in usage and meaning. 90 92

93

91 Avey et al 2022. McFaul 2014, Mearsheimer 2014. Although a great deal of new work on leaders and their role in international politics has emerged in the last decade, see e.g., Horowitz, Stam, and Ellis 2015. Of course, it also might be a fairly simple question if one takes the claims of pacifists seriously.

258

The Time of Global Politics

Moving Past the Desire to Resolve Debates: Temporality and Nonfixity as Means of Engaging the Present Presentism is typically juxtaposed (negatively) with “historicism,” but despite what historians may claim, a presentist approach offers distinct tools for interpreting the past.94 It emphasizes the creativity of scholarship over discovery. For example, in literary theory, presentism can take the position of attempting to read media – literature, art, etc. – through the lens of the present, rather than seeking to understand its meaning at the moment in time it was created. Shakespeare studies, for instance, given the relatively unchanging nature of the texts they engage, wrestle with this question explicitly. Scholars wonder whether works like Othello can and/or should be adapted into works that explore contemporary race relations in America, an issue that could not have been anticipated in Shakespearean times, much less by Shakespeare himself.95 In some ways, IR is facing a similar question when confronting the past. If IR is at least partially about interacting with the creations of past scholars and/or scholars’ creations of the past – the history of international events – then we quickly find ourselves in similar situations. Touchstone authors like Morgenthau and Waltz are unproblematically adapted to present times, without acknowledgement that the scholars themselves might have different theories if the events of their future were available to them when formulating their ideas.96 In IR, history carries with it the imprimatur of reality – this is what actually happened – and often times the actors being theorized benefit from this attitude. Positioning “history” as dispositive often times centers the constructions of the past that come from the entities we actively theorize – for example, states, international institutions – unwittingly creates an echo chamber. Loosening our commitment to this framing of the past allows us to think more creatively about our own interpretive value because the temporal basis of authority – this is what really happened – has been removed. This is especially important for the political history that undergirds IR’s theories because it removes the credibility a specific history draws from simply by the sheer number of years it has been the dominant understanding. This equation of durational excess with scholarly credibility functions similarly in the intellectual history of 94

Hartog 2015.

95

Gajowski 2010.

96

LaRoche and Pratt 2018.

Theorizing Responsibly

259

the discipline. Ideas that have dominated the field do not have to continue to do so simply because we construct them as having a long tail into the past. So, for instance, Waltz’ Theory of International Politics may indeed still be resonant and meaningful, but only because it is seen as having been central to the discipline and/or international political thought for decades.97 These ideas may ultimately be “Tips from our IR Dads.”98 Relevant they may be, but neither are they inevitably so, nor are they unerring merely because they previously occupied a dominant position in the past. What this points to is that the historian’s dismissive view of presentism as “Whig history” or “triumphalism” is always already occurring.99 We are always reading the past through the lens of the present, and the assumption of universal time is what allows us to position these pasts as universal, even if we sometimes deny this claim when pressed. A hypothetical best explains this – if a year from now extraterrestrial entities were to arrive and set up a world state as part of an intergalactic government, contemporary IR lessons would no longer be relevant. At a minimum, they would no longer apply in the way we currently understand them.100 Anarchy, as we understand it, will have been eliminated, states would cease to be the primary authority in politics, and power would be radically reconfigured and understood. While this is admittedly a hypothetical that borders on the absurd – albeit not one unknown to contemporary international politics or its scholarship – part of the insight of presentism is that this deus ex machina is not a binary.101 It is not as if so long as there is no alien invasion, global politics remain perfectly consistent. There are constant changes, shifts, and discontinuities separating our present from the past and future in divergent and potentially radical ways – particularly in the realm of material and ecological politics. In other words, events 97 98

99 100

101

LaRoche and Pratt 2018. This is not to say that one should ignore their parents – but rather the multitude of positions that individuals can take in response to parental advice should be replicated in our positioning with respect to representations of the past, see Weber 1998. Oreskes 2013. Although it’s reasonable to assume that realist theorists – especially structural realists – would argue their theories travel across time and space, literally, provided there is an anarchic environment. Also see Wendt and Duvall 2008. Ronald Reagan famously used this as a thought experiment in a speech before the UN while US president.

260

The Time of Global Politics

short of alien invasion could require reconsidering IR’s prior assumptions about the world.102 For instance, most accept the end of the Cold War as a radical shift, but events well short of the “end of the Cold War” might also implicate the foundations of IR. Similar questions have been raised by the 2001 attacks on the United States, the Arab Spring, or, further back, the Haitian revolution.103 For those who recognize the importance of sociality to an endeavor like international politics, these relational changes and emergences change not only what is taking place in the world but also what the world of IR actually is. Focusing on understanding how the present is constructed potentially enables us to better explain the divergences – war, violence, power shifts – that most motivate our work. It also brings political theory back in by forcing us to consider the impact scholarly actions have on the present as well as the future and to potentially adopt temporary measures that comment directly on political practice. Temporal understandings based in the reality of the present are one way to maintain the power of the “reflexive turn” while resisting the binary of either only turning theory back upon itself or unproblematically accepting the world as represented. As previously mentioned, this also requires a “reflexive unreflexivity” where there is a “considered decision to temporarily treat some aspects of experience, or of the observed world of subjects and objects, as unproblematic pregivens in order to enable the behavior that advances some goals.”104 This form of temporal bracketing illustrates how the commitment to timelessness pushes a desire for a fixed answer to questions, rather than allowing seemingly inconsistent approaches to operate at different times. The key lies in the willingness to think in temporally circumscribed ways. A temporal imaginary informed by the multiple, overlapping presents of what we understand as the global or international present better enables these commitments to flourish. This is because “presentism as part of the logic of democratic politics, as the politics of 102

103

It also must be stated that the idea of an alien invasion – the imaginary that dominates what it might be like is itself a trope with very specific boundaries limited by human imagination. There are billions of ways humans can imagine – and countless more we cannot – an alien invasion that do not involve alien crafts landing on the planet all at once. Many of them might provide similar challenges facing IR due to their temporal dimension, in short, that foundational change is, or has already, happened, but theory has yet to catch up. 104 Lundborg 2012 and Hom 2016. Ezrahi 2016, 258.

Theorizing Responsibly

261

the living, is in some respects a double embodiment of both constructive and disruptive reflexivity in public affairs,” which creates a “combined role of reflexive and unreflexive orientations in the construction, transformation, and stabilization of political systems.”105 Temporally complicating our practices in a manner that responds to – rather than uncritically reflects – the configurations of power in the present (or presents) offers a way of harnessing the contestation intrinsic to politics for good. It can become a means of understanding and producing ideas that are both revolutionary and reformative, recognizing that each may be valuable at different times for different subject positions, depending on the manner in which polities structure temporal relationships between pasts, presents, and futures.106 A presentist approach enables us to retain the value of fixing things temporarily – no matter how seemingly indefinite that fixing may appear to some – without reifying ideas or practices (scholarly or otherwise) as fixed. In rejecting this fixed/fluid dichotomy in favor of a relational understanding, movement and process become central elements to be identified, rather than assumed.107 The importance of rhythms in ontological security, for instance, provides evidence that apparently equal interventions into processes – scholarly or political – at different times can have radically different impacts depending on the rhythms of these processes.108 A well-timed rest in a piece of music can feel life-changing. Similarly, a micropolitical move – a single individual lighting themselves on fire or crying out “liar” in the midst of a dictator’s address – can resonate well beyond the material or social conditions of the moment.109 These resonances are as much a function of time as they are of space. Similarly, work from previous eras may resonate distinctly differently. For instance, Tickner’s identification of the gendered dynamics of IR in 1990 along the lines of man/woman felt revolutionary and opened space for all sorts of efforts to address difference but does not always resonate similarly with those occupying different temporal

105 107

108

106 Ezrahi 2016, 258–259. Ezrahi 2016, 258. This is a central point in queer global studies and queer theoretical engagements with IR as a discipline, although it is rarely articulated in distinctly temporal terms. See e.g., Weber 2014, Picq and Thiel 2015, Weber 2015, Weber 2016a, and Weber 2016b. 109 Solomon 2019b. Solomon and Steele 2017.

262

The Time of Global Politics

locations.110 To those in 2023, it can feel dated and contra dominant modes of feminist analysis, undermining the very projects that the original work enabled in the first place.111 Similarly, a color-blind approach to race in legal matters may have been revolutionary in the United States in the 1960s but represents nearly the opposite when advanced in contemporary American politics.112 The point here is that embracing the present as a scholarly orientation allows approaches that are self-consciously limited to the present – however constructed or delimited – and not necessarily seeking to remain a final word on a topic for decades to come. It also makes critique and conversation less about adjudicating which approach continues to work best over long periods of time, focusing instead on how they interact with the present from which it arises and/or it is directed.

Conclusion A presentist temporal imaginary provides a better foundation for reflexive, “sophisticated” theory to flourish. It does this by simultaneously removing the apparently natural basis for unreflexive approaches and establishing a nonfixed platform for reflexive thinking that does not automatically replicate the problems it seeks to address. It normalizes reflexive insights and reflexivity across the discipline, incorporates a temporal lens into thought, and destabilizes the current ground from which scholarship resists these questions. In colloquial understandings of time, the present is always escaping our grasp, yet it also provides the foundation from which all of us operate. If we embrace this in-betweenness and locate ourselves in the in-between space of the present, paradoxically, we can better establish research that can speak to recurring issues and even long-term concerns. Reflexivity is not merely a choice but an inevitable function of existing as a temporal being in a present. 110

111 112

See for instance Tickner’s own work, Tickner 1992, Gal-Or 2009, and Tickner and Sjoberg 2013, 225–229. Shepherd 2009. For an application of color-blindness and whiteness in IR, see Vitalis 2015; as well as Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam 2014.

|

Conclusion Toward an Intellectual Ethos for Time Scholarship in Global Politics

Introduction This book began by taking seriously the idea that time is a social construct.1 The clock and the calendar appear to be natural, inevitable means of marking time but are very much a product of specific configurations of social and political power. To say it “really is 2023” or “7:08 PM” is no more accurate or true than to assert that states are only material instantiations of power. Each employs a series of epistemological, ontological, and substantive discourses and representations that privilege certain ideas over others for that particular truth claim to be valid. The notion of clock-time, much like other discursively powerful structures, obscures its own sociality through an insistence on reflecting a physical inevitability.2 International relations and social theory have accepted that other supposedly essential, scientific concepts – for example, race, gender, and nearly all other forms of identity – are products of particular configurations of power and subjectivity, and not mere reflections of the way the world naturally is. Time is no different. Time, temporality, and contemporary politics are all becoming increasingly recognized as central concerns in international politics. Even those who most stubbornly resist advocating specific political actions are turning their focus toward contemporary politics and the present.3 Recent issues of major publications have focused on the 1

2 3

Once again, to be clear, the notion of social here – and within Mead – is explicitly not meant to be anthropocentric. Sociality includes the non-human, see e.g., Joas 1997. Hom 2018b. Recently, there has become increasing interest in what some are calling “postcritical IR” as a way of moving past IR’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” and toward a means of thinking directly about what constitutes change and positive interventions in the world. In other words, critical theory – like most IR scholarship – is ultimately an altruistic discipline that seeks to build up

263

264

Conclusion

discipline’s responsibilities to present-day political concerns from both a critical and positivist perspective, forcing us to ask the question of what and who IR is for. While these are difficult questions, addressing them requires us to develop an approach that “holds new potentials” and “lays out a form of intervention relevant to IR that does not rely on delegating ethical or political choices to outsiders.”4 Despite concerns about disciplinary splintering, one way that IR appears to cohere – conceptually, if not in practice – is through the recognition that global political issues like climate change, neoliberal governance, imperialism, war, and structural violence demand a more immediate response then currently provided by the slow march of history – or theory. Moving IR toward a better study of the present represents one way of adopting a more intentional approach to temporality and its related issues. With this perspective, issues of difference, process, relationality, reflexivity, and change emerge as vital and non-negotiable. It provides an intellectual agenda capacious enough to allow mainstream and critical work to engage the other, while centering transformative insights already accepted by other areas of social inquiry. It affirms a temporal humility about knowledge creation that resists the implicit – and understandable – desire of scholars to have a long-lasting legacy. All scholarship comes from somewhere and some time and intervenes into some present. Pretending otherwise adopts a conservative ethos and status quo bias that remains influential even as it is directly challenged by critical inquiry but never finally displaced. For the presentist, the present constitutes “the locus of reality.”5 It possesses attributes that allow it to differ from past and future as well as contingency, emergence, and the radical potential of the “new.”6

4

knowledge and engage in critique that benefits the world, particularly those marginalized by difference. Those who are invested in this project describe it as follows: “post-critical approaches to the social science have multiplied in arguably more positive directions. This includes efforts to shift the critical ethos to ‘creation’ and ‘composition’ as opposed to deconstruction, denunciation, and opposition; efforts to re-engage critical scholarly participation with global publics in various ways, efforts to engage ‘non-judgemental’ modes of critique; and beyond.” In other words, “Post-Critical approaches to the social sciences involve displacing the traditional modes, moods, methods, and theories through which we critically inquire into social and political phenomena,” from postcriticalir. wordpress.com. 5 6 Austin 2019b, 22. Mead 2002. Murphy 2002, 28.

The Time of Global Politics

265

International relations has a historical tendency to center itself on the past in the hope that it can generate knowledge that travels across time, mimicking the scientific laws that supposedly unlock the secrets of the universe. Against this perspective, critical IR has pushed back by articulating the importance of context and indeterminacy in political life, in the process creating a recognition that, in politics, all is not as it seems. Whether self-professedly critical or otherwise, there is a long history of heterodox positions within IR that seek to emphasize the singularity of events, the discontinuities that exist across history, and the nonuniformity of IR’s arrow of history.7 International relations currently finds itself in an ambivalent relationship with the present. On the one hand, scholars rightfully wish to create daylight between their work and the political assertions of their time. On the other hand, IR is explicitly motivated, influenced, and limited by the contemporary moment of politics.8 Success rates for archers on foot versus horseback are no longer a question of interest. Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination cannot be stopped. No one can prevent the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Leaving aside the narrow conception of policy relevance, there is a widely held assumption that the discipline should be politically relevant – or, as one scholar termed it, “polity relevant.”9 From this perspective, the pasts we study are made meaningful mostly by their potential to shape future politics. This emphasis on the future obscures the ways in which the current present shapes our work and our ability to even imagine what the future may look like. It also obscures the normative obligations we have toward those who share our contemporary moment – especially those made precarious by its political formations. In short, IR has always been about the study of the present – what this book does is make that claim explicit and available as a site for theoretical inquiry. Scholars increasingly recognize this fact. Blogs, internet outlets, personal websites, and social media are all areas we find work produced by scholars that engages the contemporary moment, seeks to 7

8

9

Shannon 2005, Jervis 2009, Jervis 2009, Park 2010, Lundborg 2012, and King and Zheng 2018. Even realists who strictly separate normative and analytical claims attempt to argue for a personal motivation to their work rooted in concern for their present, Desch 2003. Pratt 2017.

266

Conclusion

intervene in politics, and theorizes the impact these interventions can have on politics and scholarship.10 What much of this thinking and work evidences is a sensibility that scholarship and scholarly interventions into politics should inform and interrupt each other.11 From a strict disciplinary perspective, this knowledge is contingent and indeterminate and lacks the enduring qualities of traditional scholarship because it is less rigorous, lacks peer review, is not subjected to the gatekeepers of journals or academic presses, and provides no opportunity for rebuttal post publication. That said, they remain important in terms of their potential political influence and implications for the thinking of fellow scholars.12 And it is increasingly so for emerging generations who will be producing the “enduring” knowledge that will shape the discursive shape of the field to come. Not every reader is going to be persuaded that the temporal imaginary outlined here is worth pursuing. Yet, even if one rejects this particular temporal imaginary, acknowledging its existence represents an important theoretical move that cannot be undone. If the temporal imaginary of IR is just that – “a” temporal imaginary, rather than “the” temporal imaginary – then it implies the existence of alternatives and confirms that the current one is not actually natural, universal, or inevitable. One vital contribution of the so-called “temporal turn” is its implicit first move – that we must recognize our temporal commitments are a choice. We must inquire and reflexively examine them just as we do the other commitments that govern the conduct of our conduct.13 Berenskoetter observes that “shifting attention to the politics of identity formation in time, with particular consideration of the politics of the future, will open a new chapter in the success story of constructivism,”14 Accepting clock-time as universal and its 10

11

12 13

14

See e.g., Duck of Minerva, Monkey Cage, and Political Violence at a Glance, in addition to commentators/scholars like Dan Drezner and Erica Chenoweth. On top of that, it’s become nearly a professional requirement for emerging scholars to possess a professional social media presence, particularly for those without connections to extant media outlets. Or more accurately, there is a heightened willingness to admit that this is the case and act more intentionally regarding this inevitability. Avey and Desch 2014, Peterson 2014, and Desch 2015. For a critical view of this characterization – the “temporal turn” – see Berenskoetter 2011, Chamon 2018 and “the conduct of our conduct” is an application of Foucault’s famous statement about the function of disciplines. Berenskoetter 2011 and Hom 2018a.

The Time of Global Politics

267

accompanying temporal imaginary is a choice, not an inevitability. Remaining silent is not an option because these assumptions represent powerful political commitments, and not value-neutral statements about a physical constant. If such a turn or revolution is in process, then it warrants outlining its contours. This conclusion uses the idea of the present as a lens to outline an intellectual ethos for these nascent movements within IR. What, then, does it mean to think about temporality throughout the broader discipline? First and most obviously, it means that we should foreground it, along with time and timing in our analysis and stop treating it as derivative of other issues like history or methodology. Temporality constitutes power structures, subjects, and their political relationships – it is something we can use as a starting point and frame for analysis.15 Second, we must center difference. Denying the universality of time is a normative move, as much as it is analytical. It destabilizes existing relationships and representations in the hopes that individuals, groups, and entities currently marginalized by dominant power structures will experience a politics that better respects and engages these differences.16 Scholarship on coloniality, race, gender, queerness, indigeneity, and ecology all currently lead the way in foregrounding temporality and time. Focusing on temporality in politics requires altering extant theoretical claims and assumptions to reflect these approaches as central to the discipline, rather than only the concerns of “dissident” scholars.17 Third, reflexivity is not an option but critical to analytical validity. One’s temporal position cannot be assumed into existence or considered apolitical. All work originates from some temporal position and engages others – we are responsible for how we position ourselves, our work, and the timing and manner in which we choose to intervene. Finally, the present matters. Its politics and its bodies, along with the suffering and joy contained within it, represent much of what should motivate IR. International relations should seek to positively intervene and engage politics in 15 16

17

Sjoberg 2013. Bleiker makes this point explicitly in his analysis of Judith Butler’s positions on the importance of utilizing contingent foundations and destabilization as scholarly practice, applying it to security studies – “To scrutinize dominant strategic approaches for war, for instance, is to disclose the possibilities they exclude.” Bleiker 1998, 491. Ashley and Walker 1990.

268

Conclusion

whatever way scholars, individuals, and collectives see as appropriate. This is not a call for policy relevance; it is a call for present relevance.18 This chapter has three sections. The first reaffirms the importance of centering time and temporality in the theory and practice of politics, independent of whether one finds a temporal imaginary of the present persuasive. The ways we time politics represent a powerful force and given the centrality of power to international politics, ignoring its role in political practice is not an option. The second section articulates the value of the present as an “orienting frame” for scholarship.19 To do so, it isolates a number of aspects of this scholarly commitment, such as the centrality of change and emergence to all aspects of global politics. Adopting this orienting frame also calls on us to think about the normative commitments and implications that arise from the temporal commitments we adopt. As an “orienting frame,” the present requires a commitment to openness and reckoning with the ways our temporal commitments exclude peoples, groups, ideas, and entities. The third section argues that the present can operate as a shared intellectual ethos that resists the fixed borders and gatekeeping of disciplinary politics. In other words, adopting the present as temporal imaginary provides a shared space for both parallel and divergent intellectual approaches to engage and inform each other. The silo effect that has emerged as a legacy of past debates means that many scholars investigating similar areas with divergent methods rarely engage and inform each other’s work; for example, concept analyses of war rarely

18

19

A present that is heterogeneous and multiple – i.e., heterotemporal – and potentially possessing many different understandings of what pasts, presents, and futures matter most within each. Some presents may value the past over the present and future, and vice versa, but beginning by questioning which present is relevant allows us to have the temporal flexibility to address that question within context and with mutuality, rather than via ex ante debates about philosophy of science or critical distance, many of which center Euro-American approaches to questions of global concern and impact. By example, in laying out their understanding of “intersectionality” and its value, Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall, argue “political intersectionality reflects a dual concern for resisting the systemic forces that significantly shape the differential life chances of intersectionality’s subjects and for reshaping modes of resistance beyond allegedly universal, single-axis approaches.” It does this by “offering a framework for contesting power and thereby linking theory to existing and emergent social and political struggles.” Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013, 800.

The Time of Global Politics

269

inform data-driven work on insurgent campaigns.20 Sharing an intellectual approach rooted in the present as an area of analysis and conceptual apparatus could better orient work around the political issues motivating the questions rather than focusing on the methods used to answer them. This book has sketched a number of means by which one could move forward under this intellectual agenda. Whether it is by rethinking the value of prediction, reflexive inquiry regarding temporal positionality, reassessing the concept of war, or simply taking the idea of radical contingency seriously, the idea of the present is both radically different and already appreciably available.21 It needs amplification, not invention. An agenda that begins by taking the present seriously is distinctly open, ontologically inclusive, and characterized by potential. Not coincidentally, this represents a fairly comprehensive reflection of IR today – vibrant, distinct, and innovative. Centering ourselves as theorists and intellectuals of the present unifies much of what already exists under the creaky edifice of IR and frees it to fully engage the concerns that drive the field in the first place.

Temporality Matters: Understanding IR as an Interim Project22 In many ways, scholars and their scholarship operate during the interim between past and future – the area where social and political life is made intelligible. An interim is “Temporary. Stopgap. Provisional.” and “Makeshift” yet “contains within itself the promise of another time that is not in between, temporary, provisional, a time of something other than what exists now. A time to come.”23 Doty reads such a position as containing the “possibility of translating the ‘theoretical radicality of deconstruction’ into a ‘radical political’ practice.”24 From a temporal perspective, IR itself – politically, epistemologically, and ontologically – represents an interim perspective on the 20

21

22 23

See Jackson and Nexon 2013, 555 for their taxonomy of the field as currently constituted and their designation of significant cleavages. Recent work by Read and MacGinty (2017) on the conflict in Darfur offers one example of how turning to time as the object of study within armed conflict can better inform extant analysis – even while maintaining mainstream social science methodologies. This subheading is an allusion to Abbott’s (2001) Time Matters. 24 Doty 2006, 54. Doty 2006, 54–55; see also Spivak 1994.

270

Conclusion

presents within which we intervene. Our pronouncements can never fully capture the world as it is, not least because it is always still unfolding. While one can debate the importance of the present in constituting life and experience, it need not be a space between one single clearly defined past and one universally shared future. For some in IR, this rings as obviously true, while for others, going down this path appears both substantively and methodologically impossible. Regardless of where one locates oneself between these two poles, two implications warrant emphasizing. First, the mere process of constructing relationships – in theory or practice – inevitably brings into being a temporal relationship. At its core, IR is theory in time because articulating a relationship instantiates a temporality. Answering the question of “what is the state of the relationship between the United States and Russia?” requires a past and future by which one can make comparisons. Lines of temporal difference are articulated – explicitly or implicitly – whenever we speak about or observe a relationship. Whether theorizing the relationship between two great powers, identifying everyday representations of security logic in pop culture, or theorizing the success of collective groups enacting nonviolent resistance, a theory of time – however implicit – is required to make these projects intelligible.25 These projects are always marked by the limits of what is considered present and meaningful.26 Scholarship reproduces certain pasts and futures, while de-emphasizing others, but this is equally true of the phenomena we explore in global politics. A power transition, actions in a war, and postconflict reconstruction all occur in the space between what has already happened and that which is still to come.27 Temporal contingency is central to understanding political practice, its representation, and even political power itself.28 Those acting in the moment are in a very different temporal environment than those analyzing it after the fact.29 25

26

27 29

Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009, Dittmer and Gray 2010, Chenoweth and Stpehan 2011, Chenoweth and Cunningham 2013, Goddard and Nexon 2016, Legro 2016, and Chenoweth and Ulfelder 2017. Something feminist IR particularly continues to reinforce and embrace, see e.g., Ackerly and True 2008, Sylvester 2013, and Harman 2018. 28 Hodge 2007, Hoy 2012. Katzenstein and Seybert 2018. Bourdieu 1977. This is something our approaches can better engage through techniques like concept analysis, see Berenskoetter 2016.

The Time of Global Politics

271

Second, by focusing on the past in order to understand the future, the present disappears from view.30 At the level of theory, hypothesis testing and critical inquiry alike have difficulty bringing their insights into conversation with the contemporary moment. The focus on terrorism in security studies post 2001, the turn toward sociality after the end of the Cold War, and the increased focus on civil conflict after the American-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan (among others) were not coincidences. This linkage is something to be acknowledged, theorized, and embraced. Normatively, there is a strong argument for IR to orient its theoretical center toward contemporary concerns and those bodies which precariously coexist alongside our own.31 What an interim understanding does is bring its temporal and ontological imaginary in line with a stated concern for those existing in the present. What this suggests is that in order to move forward, we need to think carefully about alternatives, what they might look like, and how they could be operationalized. Much of the work on temporality and IR to this point has emphasized its role in substantive areas and usefully employed it as a means of better enabling critical thought and inquiry into issues as diverse as American subjectivity, climate change, cybersecurity, Brexit, diplomacy, sovereignty, counterterrorism, and preemption.32 Defending a temporal imaginary centered on the present, rather than the past, is the intellectual choice made here, but it is merely a first step toward developing other alternatives to contemporary ways of knowing time. Critiques of IR and global politics centered on time will remain crucial and need further development to be sure, but to fully move forward requires a move toward contingent and imperfect representations of time and temporality.

The Present as an Orienting Frame The shift toward ontologies of becoming happening in other fields is slowly taking hold within IR.33 As it does, however, understandings of the political world that center on static ontologies no longer seem 30 31 32

33

Wendt 2001, Berenskoetter 2011. Butler 2012, 147 and for a somewhat divergent perspective, see Auchter 2016. Jarvis 2008, Hom 2010, Solomon 2015, Stevens 2015, Stockdale 2016, Beaumont 2018, Rothe 2020, and Svendsen 2020. In Connolly’s (2013, 399) elucidation of the “New Materialism” he emphasizes a “philosophy of becoming” as one of the assumptions that animates the many

272

Conclusion

adequate. A guiding frame for how we “see” the world – particularly in the case of contemporary violence and economics – spatiality no longer appears central, and as a result, approaches that foreground temporality have (re)new(ed) resonance.34 In large part, what we “see” as constituting IR depends upon temporal assumptions and which political presents we privilege. Levels of analysis may differ, varying from the individual to the international system, but equally so, they vary dramatically at the temporal level.35 Processes and relations in motion only become something “thing-like” once we settle on a temporal frame and positionality.36 The centrality of the state and its apparent continuity only emerges once we adopt a large enough view that the countless relationships that need to be reproduced from moment to moment for it to appear as an inevitability are obscured. Microlevel interactions at the department of motor vehicles or actions that occur “within the private households of male soldiers” are as much an instantiation of state sovereignty as the architectural marvel of a legislative chamber or the sailing of an aircraft carrier into disputed waters.37 They are part of the “ideas, rituals, players, structures and formal policies whose interactions made and remade international politics.”38 In order to function, even apparently static and fixed relationships require a series of potentially variable temporal assumptions and ideas to remain constant. Recognizing that this apparent consistency is a product of ongoing processes is a powerful move which the discipline itself has increasingly recognized.39 Shifting the temporal assumptions toward an imaginary of the present amplifies and encourages this move. Second, the idea of the present developed here is constituted by change, emergence, nonfixity, and heterotemporality. Each of these concepts is simple, yet powerful, and will only become increasingly so as ideas like New Materialism, quantum mechanics, complexity

34 35

36 37 38 39

movements both within and outside of IR that are coming together under this designation. Holmqvist 2012, see also Der Derian 1990. Obviously a turn toward a presentist ontology would see these levels of analysis in a more complicated and less universal way than typically depicted in IR’s canonical formulation of man, the state, and the international system. Abbott 2001a. Enloe 2011, 448, Crane-Seeber 2017, and Guillaume Huysmans 2019. Enloe 2011, 448. See e.g., Campbell 1998a, Weber 1998, and Weber 2016a.

The Time of Global Politics

273

theory, visuality, and “international political design” become more robust and widely accepted.40 Rather than continue to work with a conception of history informed by a past that is continuous and unfolding, or a sense of mechanistic interactions that exist regardless of where on the timeline they occur, change and emergence should be positioned as constitutive aspects of the political present. In hindsight, the end of the Cold War, the outbreak of World War II, the 2001 attacks on the United States, and the Arab Spring(s) appear potentially predictable and part of a continuous narrative that incorporates respective pasts and presents.41 This apparent continuity has occurred despite the “shocking” nature of each occurrence and their apparent unpredictability at the time of their occurrence. What makes them “unpredictable” is their apparent deviation from the established status quo trajectory of history. Once looked at from a different temporal angle – as events that have transpired within a shared past, rather than constituting a confusing, kaleidoscopic present – they appear quite different and altogether less strange. Were Arab regimes immune to revolution? Could the United States, despite its countless military interventions abroad and self-proclaimed role as enforcer of international norms, completely escape the political violence it imposed elsewhere?42 When looked at from this temporal perspective, looking backward, what was at one moment unimaginable may still appear unlikely but not impossible. This is not to say that everything can be known and futures are always anticipatable – taking the present seriously as a concept precludes precisely that idea. But if we remain interested in engaging the future and imagining new presents that actually come to fruition, adopting a perspective that enables greater variability in our conceptions of past, present, and future would be a logical place to start. Political actors and analysts alike seem to have little luck when it comes to explaining the things that are currently positioned as most important to our discipline. Events like humaninduced climate change, the fall of the American-led world order, and the so-called rise of China all represent world-historic shifts in global politics and central concerns of the field. If similar issues are going to continue to orient our scholarship in the future, then allowing their

40 42

41 Austin 2019a, Austin 2019b, Austin 2021. See e.g., Edkins 2003. Many radical theorists had made precisely this point, see e.g., Johnson 2000.

274

Conclusion

political discontinuity and temporal peculiarity to shape our epistemological, ontological, and substantive commitments seems wise. Third, making this move brings the present back into the analytical frame. In clock-time, the present is seen as a moment – a vanishing, unapproachable limit against which we orient ourselves. Like a line, the present is quite literally absent because it is merely a point between past and future. Despite this absence, it indelibly marks our work, our interests, and our commitments. Embracing its role in political life and scholarship better enables examination of IR’s scholarly perspective and orientation by bringing a critical dimension to our social and political location. Bringing the present back in also incorporates the temporal experience and dimension of actors in precisely the moments which we are most interested in explaining and understanding. Whether individuals or collectives, human or nonhuman, the temporal dimension structures perspective and orientation and is what allows for a “temporality of emergence” to exist.43 Emphasizing this concept of the present also eliminates the singular reliance on enduring claims as the ideal type of scholarly and political relevance. Some of the most meaningful actions and interventions in politics are almost entirely due to their particular timing.44 While actions like these could conceivably occur at multiple points on a timeline, they likely would not have had a similar influence or impact if timed differently. Timing, in short, matters, and the emphasis on enduring claims as some sort of unavoidable and unquestionable standard against which we should evaluate all work is overly simplistic.45 When the present is understood as heterogeneous and the site where the past and future are constantly in a process of production and reproduction, epistemological standards that only emphasize the importance of “enduring” claims become unsustainable. Finally, using the present as our orienting frame better enables the inclusivity of different perspectives, approaches, experiences, and histories without reifying current imaginaries. It does this because it “provincializes” the present of Europe and America, removing its ability to represent the present of “global” politics.46 By articulating the present as something that is sociopolitically constituted, we enter a 43 45 46

44 Marcus and Saka 2006, 104. Solomon and Steele 2017, 281–284. Hom 2018b. Chakrabarty 2009, Wemheuer-Vogelaar et al 2016, Maliniak et al 2018.

The Time of Global Politics

275

position where the seeming neutral hegemony of “the present” no longer holds, much like what happens when we question the idea of “the international community.” In other words, taking the present as an orienting frame requires accepting that there is never any one present so long as multiple actors are at play. Therefore, claims regarding IR as irreducibly state-centric cannot unproblematically be asserted as a means of devaluing micropolitical actions, urban political formations, nonviolent movements, or security concerns that do not map onto existing national security narratives.47 Destabilizing the hegemony of the world political present, for instance, is one way of undermining the mapping and spatiality of IR’s imaginary where everything and everyone is participating in a single game or process.48 Some may share the Euro-American space, some may not, and some may have a liminal presence depending on the moment, but taking the present as an orienting frame demonstrates how the perspective one has is inevitably incomplete. One is always already leaving out perspectives and ideas that constitute others’ present – it is a normative and analytic responsibility to negotiate that in an ethical manner.49

The Present as Shared Intellectual Ethos: Present Studies In their analysis of intersectionality as a project beyond feminist theory, Cho, McCall, and Crenshaw characterize intersectionality as operating at multiple levels. It can operate as an “analytical sensibility” for theorizing politics as well as a basis for “political interventions.”50 Patricia Hill Collins similarly characterizes it as a metaphor for thinking and a heuristic or “rule of thumb” that creates paradigmatic shifts in how we think about “power” and “inequality.”51 The present similarly operates as a space that is intellectually open and oriented toward engaging difference, but with a temporally variant series of shared ideas, conventions, categories, and orientations that can be continually challenged, articulated, and rearticulated through reflexive critique and analysis. The previous section articulates the value of the present as a theoretical orientation for IR, while this section offers a sketch of what it would mean as an agenda for scholarly practice. 47 48 50

Chenoweth and Stephan 2011, Solomon and Steele 2017. 49 Hutchings 2008. Sjoberg 2019. 51 Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall, 2013, 785. Hill Collins 2019, 23–24.

276

Conclusion

In particular, what could we highlight as elements of a shared intellectual agenda, while simultaneously resisting the imposition of one present as dominant? International Relations has reached the point where debating “isms” and grand theory is no longer seen as relevant or desirable, which raises the question of what issues, if any, still link IR together as a field.52 Previous chapters have spoken of the binary between scientific and critical approaches currently manifesting largely as positivist versus postpositivist scholarship, for example, hypothesis testing versus critical inquiry.53 Yet, this does not capture the totality of what constitutes – or more appropriately what could and should constitute – inquiry into international and global politics in the contemporary moment. The success of various strands of social and critical theory has impacted nearly all work, yet the result has been that scholars largely break off into groups by area and/or methodology in an ad hoc manner.54 Theories of postcoloniality and race as well as Global Queer Studies, for instance, demand engagement given the contemporary moment, yet much of IR resists these moves unless the area of inquiry directly overlaps – Weber partially blames this on disciplinary “gentrification” which a more fluid understanding of the present would better disable.55 She goes on to articulate the ways in which various global studies examine the same topics that define IR yet are completely excluded due to the idea that this work does not constitute “IR” work, per se.56 The idea of the present as an orienting frame positions the production of knowledge in IR as bounded, yes, but actively questions, critiques, and transgresses these boundaries. Consequently, it offers the potential for a shared intellectual agenda that is intrinsically open and defined by impermanence and incompleteness, existing in a state of constant revision. Just as constructivism and critical theory became increasingly tied together as the importance of sociality took hold, temporality and the present can operate as a similar point of connection to resist asserting universality or doctrinal hegemony, substantively or methodologically speaking. Beyond intellectual orientation, following intersectionality, two points of a shared ethos that arise from the present are the present as an analytical category and the present as an analytical convention. 52 55

53 54 Jackson and Nexon 2013. Oren 2016. Maliniak 2011. 56 Weber 2015. Weber 2015, also Weber 2016b.

The Time of Global Politics

277

Each of these serves as an organizing principle for future research. As an analytical convention, the focus would be on the present as a discursive construction and therefore to treat both the past and future as emerging out of the present. As an analytical category, it operates as a way of potentially organizing scholarship – for example, what present does a particular work engage? Where does it intervene? What assumptions does it make about who and what share that present? Equally important, taking seriously the radical implications of a “heterotemporal” present requires a turn to empirical, theoretical, and conceptual work engaging the existence of a world political present, the structures that produce and reproduce it, and recentering those presents that are considered absent. Acharya’s call for a “global IR” represents a profound challenge to existing IR practice where “the study of IR should also strive for greater respect for diversity in our knowledge sources and claims, historical experiences, and approaches about world order.”57 This is important “not just to make the study of IR ‘safe’ for diversity but also be enriched by that diversity.”58 Affirming an alternative temporal imaginary offers one way to help this project resist the temporal commitments that enable ethnocentric, masculinist, and colonial discourses to continue to inform IR. Along these lines, this agenda would diverge from the sole focus on spatiality to one that elevates temporality, following Der Derian’s observation nearly three decades ago that new practices of war were “chronopolitical in the sense that they elevate chronology over geography, pace over space,” constituting a new form of power and force that “elude[s] the traditional and re-formed delimitations of the international relations field.”59 Currently, IR presumes a centrality of spatial metaphors.60 When we assess the scope of theories, we first think of where, not necessarily when, they apply. When we ask who or what is being explained, we again use spatial metaphors, all while remaining silent regarding our temporal imaginary. Ideas on exclusion and inclusion, for instance, predominantly operate through representations of spatiality, remaining relatively silent on the way difference is produced via the temporal dimension. Some of this is inevitable because most human notions of temporality treat space and time as constitutive, so fully escaping those metaphors and linguistic figures is 57 59

Acharya 2014, 656. Der Derian 1990, 297.

58

Acharya 2014, 656–657. For an alternative account, see Lefebvre 2004.

60

278

Conclusion

impossible. This is not a call to eliminate all mention of space but instead to revalue the temporal aspects that have been deprivileged, marginalized, and silenced by an intellectual trajectory that overemphasized spatiality. The ultimate goal is asking questions about when certain ideas, actors, or concerns are present in our analysis. And similarly, if not more importantly, when are they absent or occupying the blank spaces we inevitably produce when writing international politics and security?61 When does the present end and/or begin is another way of formulating these questions – or to be more precise, where and how are these borders politically articulated even as they remain liminal, processual, and marked by pasts and futures. This takes seriously Giddens’ observation regarding social analysis that “to differ is also to defer, and time is inseparable from signification. The sliding of presence into absence is the very medium of understanding temporality.”62 None of this is meant to operate to the exclusion of spatiality, to be sure, but rather to correct the way spatialization in IR effectively precludes temporal inquiry.63 The present offers other ways to imagine a shared intellectual agenda. There are many overlaps between scientific approaches and critical theoretical approaches emerging today. Most quantum approaches to social phenomena, for instance, share an emphasis on processual ontologies and the role of the observer/subject in constituting their object of analysis and emphasize the fundamental importance of relationality in a manner resonant with thinkers who are already central to critical theoretical work in IR.64 Yet, there remains resistance to engaging scientific approaches for fear of replicating the problems of positivist IR that continue today.65 The research agenda proposed here offers a place for intellectual coherence without being dominated by a particular school of thought or even any particular claims about world politics. Disciplinary power will never be absent, but this could enable cross-discipline conversations that are currently lacking because all claims are necessarily interim and incomplete.66 61 63 64

65 66

62 Derrida 1991, Campbell 1998b. Giddens 1987, 96. Amoureux 2020. Connolly (2013) draws this linkage in laying out his “tenets of the New Materialism.” Barad 2007. Sjoberg 2020. While this book argues these moves are valuable, they are obviously not a panacea – disciplinary politics and power will not evaporate with this single set

The Time of Global Politics

279

Building off the temporal imaginary articulated in this book, one could imagine a movement toward “Present Studies.” Such a movement would have overlapping commitments substantively, normatively, reflexively, ontologically, methodologically, and epistemologically. It would substantively follow previous work of IR by beginning with an emphasis on power and authority in global/international political presents. Ontologically, an agenda of Present Studies in IR would assume a world composed of agents, structures, and events constituted by relational processes that structure, constitute, shape, and constrain international political practice. Reflexive criticism would constitute IR in all its sites, both current – media, scholarship, traditional political practice – and whatever follows. Normatively, there would be a commitment informing this work that attends to the meaning of these actions and interventions in the/a present – as well as other presents – and a refusal to universalize or naturalize those presents we imagine, construct, and reproduce. Finally, epistemologically, those subscribing to such an approach would foreground temporality and the present, centering ideas of change, emergence, nonfixity, and heterotemporality in all areas of inquiry and practice. The upshot of this is a movement that has the potential to generatively link trends already occurring in the discipline, offer a site of cooperative learning, and deprivilege extant forms of knowledge by rearticulating them as irreducibly temporary. Knowing why particular epistemologies and ontologies appear to work at this moment in time is critical, but it is also important to imagine politics anew – doing that requires work that moves away from reflecting the status quo. Regardless of whether a move toward Present Studies finds support, centering the present allows us to orient our intellectual commitments temporally. Foregrounding time – thinking it, debating it, and engaging it – is a way of pushing IR forward without losing the valuable elements that have been developed to this point. Shared temporal imaginaries like the one offered here provide a site of intellectual convergence independent of a specific methodology or substantive focus. It is an intellectual shortcut regarding what is emphasized – dynamism, change, emergence, processes, relationality – without overemphasizing a single set of claims of shifts, but this orientation provides potential for destabilizing some of the conservative elements of IR that enable marginal positions to remain deemphasized and powerful actors to retain their position.

280

Conclusion

or philosophical position. It does not offer a competing alternative to the English School, for example, but it does provide a unifying position around which (many of ) those engaged in the different types of IR can position themselves.67

Conclusion Answering the question of what time “is” with any finality remains well beyond the scope of this or any book. Yet, IR asks and answers this question all the time. Whenever IR uncritically invokes ideas of linear clock time, cyclicality, or bases its assumptions regarding continuity on classical models of time, it implicitly asserts a conceptual understanding of temporality and time. Regardless of how one proceeds in IR, the lesson of this book is that “time matters” and it matters deeply in social and political life.68 An affirmative approach toward time centered on the present is one way of foregrounding temporality and forces us to think critically about the manner in which we construct temporal relationships within IR and beyond. For the most part, approaches that refuse universal and natural claims have gained significant ground in IR – ontologically, epistemologically, and philosophically – but the one area that still remains largely untouched is time. Even those who emphasize the discursive nature of reality and the political importance of representations – for the most part – leave time outside the boundaries of this line of inquiry.69 As a result, the apparent naturalness and inevitability of clock-time and the calendar inform the conceptions of time and temporal relationships that undergird international politics as well as the scholarship that seeks to make sense of it. Leaving time and temporality apart from comprehensive inquiry enables IR’s temporal imaginary to remain unexamined. The resulting implications go well beyond philosophical questions of time or the reality of the past. They effectively decide disciplinary commitments regarding ontology, methodology, and epistemology as well as the substantive areas of focus and normative commitments that guide our work. Regardless of whether the particular view of time here is persuasive, the ultimate lesson of this book is one that requires adopting an ethos 67 69

For example, Reus-Smit and Dunne 2017. Hom 2018a.

68

Abbott 2001b.

The Time of Global Politics

281

of temporal humility. Just as David Campbell called for students of security to embody an “ethos of political criticism,” a temporal orientation adopting an ethos of humility possesses valuable potential.70 Intellectual and ethical humility is warranted for an endeavor like IR that seeks to synthesize, impact, and speak intelligently about an astronomically large number of actors, structures, entities, and ideas. The apparently simple observation that “the United States is currently at peace” or alternatively “the United States is in a state of war” reproduces innumerable implicit assumptions and relies on countless contestable conclusions about the world that are necessarily incomplete and much more complicated than these statements indicate. Change, discontinuity, and emergence are inextricable features of temporally bounded life – politically, socially, and otherwise. Time may be beyond our comprehension, but the manner in which we claim to comprehend it is very much fair game. Approaching such complications in light of the precarity that attaches wherever we articulate “the present” necessitates a realistic humility that acknowledges and recognizes the inevitable incompleteness of any representation. The mystery of the present provides a suitable point of departure for addressing the similarly inescapable, invaluable, and ultimately undecidable politics of the globe. 70

Campbell 1998a, 226.

References

Abbott, Andrew. 1992. “From Causes to Events: Notes on Narrative Positivism.” Sociological Methods & Research 20(5): 428–455. 2001a. “Things of Boundaries.” Social Research 62(4): 857–882. 2001b. Time Matters: On Theory and Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2001c. Time Matters: On Theory and Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Acharya, Amitav. 2014. “Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds.” International Studies Quarterly 58(4): 647–659. 2016. “Advancing Global IR: Challenges, Contentions, and Contributions.” International Studies Review 18(1): 4–15. Ackerly, Brooke, and Jacqui True. 2008. “Reflexivity in Practice: Power and Ethics in Feminist Research on International Relations.” International Studies Review 10(4): 693–707. Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis. 2014. “Assemblage Thinking and International Relations.” In Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis, eds., Reassembling International Theory. London: Palgrave, 1–15. Adam, Barbara. 1990. Time and Social Theory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1995. Time-Watch: A Social Analysis of Time. Cambridge: Polity. Adey, Peter, and Ben Anderson. 2010. “Anticipation, Materiality, Event: The Icelandic Ash Cloud Disruption and the Security of Mobility.” Mobilities 6(1): 11–20. Adler, Emanuel. 2013. “Constructivism in International Relations: Sources, Contributions, and Debates.” In Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth Simmons, eds., Handbook of International Relations. Los Angeles: Sage, 112–144. Agathangelou, Anna, and Kyle Killian, eds. 2016. Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations:(De)fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives. New York: Routledge. Agathangelou, Anna, and Kyle Killian. 2021. “About Time: Climate Change and Inventions of the Decolonial, Planetarity and Radical Existence.” Globalizations 18(6): 821–838.

282

References

283

Ahlqvist, Toni, and Martin Rhisiart. 2015. “Emerging Pathways for Critical Futures Research: Changing Contexts and Impacts of Social Theory.” Futures 71: 91–104. Al-Ghazzi, Omar. 2021. “We Will Be Great Again: Historical Victimhood in Populist Discourse.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 24(1): 45–59. Alker, Hayward. 1984. “Historical Argumentation and Statistical Inference: Towards More Appropriate Logic for Historical Research.” Historical Methods 17(3): 164–173. Alker, Hayward, and Thomas Biersteker. 1984. “The Dialectics of World Order: Notes for a Future Aracheologist of International Savoir Faire.” International Studies Quarterly 28(2): 121–142. Allison, Graham. 2017. Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap? New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Alphin, Caroline, and Francois Debrix, eds. 2019. Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations. New York: Routledge. Altmann, Jurgen, and Frank Sauer. 2017. “Autonomous Weapons Systems and Strategic Stability.” Survival 59(5): 117–142. Amoore, Louise. 2007. “Vigilant Visualities: The Watchful Politics of the War on Terror.” Security Dialogue 38(2): 215–232. 2013. The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security beyond Probability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Amoureux, Jack, and Varun Reddy. 2021. “Multiple Anthropocenes: Pluralizing Space–Time as a Response to ‘the Anthropocene.’” Globalizations 18(6): 929–946. Anderson, Ben. 2010. “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography 34(6): 777–798. Anderson, Ben, Kevin Grove, Laura Rickards, and Matthew Kearnes. 2020. “Slow Emergencies: Temporality and the Racialized Biopolitics of Emergency Governance.” Progress in Human Geography 44(4): 621–639. Anievas, Alexander, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam. 2014. Race and Racism in International Relations. London: Routledge. Appelgren, Ester, Carl-Gustav Lindén, and Arjen van Dalen. 2019. “Data Journalism Research: Studying a Maturing Field across Journalistic Cultures, Media Markets and Political Environments.” Digital Journalism 7(9): 1191–1199. Aradau, Claudia, and Rens Van Munster. 2007. “Governing Terrorism through Risk: Taking Precautions, (Un)Knowing the Future.” European Journal of International Relations 13(1): 89–115.

284

References

Aradau, Claudia, and Tobias Blanke. 2017. “Politics of Prediction: Security and the Time/Space of Governmentality in the Age of Big Data.” European Journal of Social Theory 20(3): 373–391. Arendt, Hannah. 2006. On Revolution. Penguin. 2006. Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin. Ashbee, Edward, and Steven Hurst. 2020. “The Trump Foreign Policy Record and the Concept of Transformational Change.” Global Affairs 6(1): 5–19. Ashley, Richard K. 1986. “The Poverty of Neorealism.” In Robert Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics. New York: Columbia University Press, 255–300. Ashley, Richard K., and Rob Walker. 1990. “Introduction: Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissident Thought in International Studies.” International Studies Quarterly 34(3): 259–268. Athanasiou, Athena, and Judith Butler. 2013. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge: Polity. Atkins, Kimberly. 2021. “Trump’s Big Lie about Voter Fraud Was Based on Little Lies the GOP Has Told for Years. It’s Time to Call Them Out.” Boston Globe, January 25. Auchter, Jessica. 2014. The Politics of Haunting and MemoryiIn International Relations. New York: Routledge. 2016. “Paying Attention to Dead Bodies: The Future of Security Studies?” Journal of Global Security Studies 1(1): 36–50. Augustine (of Hippo). 1993. Confessions. New York: Penguin, translation and introduction by R.S. Pine-Coffin. Austin, Jonathan Luke. 2019a. “A Parasitic Critique for International Relations.” International Political Sociology 13(2): 215–231. Austin, Jonathan Luke. 2019b. “Towards an International Political Ergonomics.” European Journal of International Relations 25(4): 979–1006. Austin, Jonathan Luke, and Anna Leander. 2021. “Designing-with/in World Politics: Manifestos for an International Political Design.” Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS) 2(2): 83–154. Avey, Paul C., and Michael C. Desch. 2014. “What Do Policymakers Want from Us? Results of a Survey of Current and Former Senior National Security Decision Makers.” International Studies Quarterly 58(2): 227–246. Avey, Paul C., Michael C. Desch, Eric Parajon, Susan Peterson, Ryan Powers, and Michael J. Tierney. 2022. “Does Social Science Inform Foreign Policy? Evidence from a Survey of US National Security, Trade, and Development Officials.” International Studies Quarterly 66(1):

References

285

Axelrod, Robert, and Robert O. Keohane. 1985. “Achieving Cooperation under Anarchy: Strategies and Institutions.” World Politics 38(1): 226–254. Baccini, Leonardo. 2014. “Cheap Talk: Transaction Costs, Quality of Institutions, and Trade Agreements.” European Journal of International Relations 20(1): 80–117. Bain, William. 2007. “Are There Any Lessons of History? The English School and the Activity of Being an Historian.” International Politics 44(5): 513–530. Baker, William, and John Oneal. 2001. “Patriotism or Opinion Leadership? The Nature and Origins of the ‘Rally Round the Flag’ Effect.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 45(5): 661–687. Bakker, Edwin. 2012. “Forecasting Terrorism: The Need for a More Systematic Approach.” Journal of Strategic Security 5(4): 69–84. Banta, Benjamin. 2013. “Analysing Discourse as a Causal Mechanism.” European Journal of International Relations 19(2): 379–402. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Method. Durham: Duke University Press. Barcham, Manuhuia. 2000. “(De)Constructing the Politics of Indigeneity.” In Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders, eds., Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 137–150. Barkawi, Tarak. 2016. “Decolonising War.” European Journal of International Security 1(2): 199–214. Barkawi, Tarak, and Mark Laffey. 2002. “Retrieving the Imperial: Empire and International Relations.” Millennium 31(1): 109–127. Barkawi, Tarak, and Shane Brighton. 2011. “Powers of War: Fighting, Knowledge, Critique.” International Political Sociology, 5(2): 126–143. Barnes, Julian, and Eric Schmitt. 2019. “Trump Orders Withdrawal of Military Troops from Northern Syria.” The New York Times, 13 October. Barnett, Michael. 1997. “Bringing in the New World Order: Liberalism, Legitimacy, and the United Nations.” World Politics 49(4): 526–551. Barrow, Clyde W. 2008. “The Intellectual Origins of New Political Science.” New Political Science 30(2): 215–244. Bashir, Shahzad. 2016. “Islam and the Politics of Temporality: The Case of ISIS.” In Andrew Hom, Chris McIntosh, Alasdair McKay, Liam Stockdale, eds., Time, Temporality and Global Politics. Bristol: EInternational Relations: 134–149. Baum, Matthew. 2002. “The Constituent Foundations of the Rally-RoundThe-Flag Phenomenon.” International Studies Quarterly 46(2): 263–298.

286

References

Bauman, Zygmunt. 1992. Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies. Stanford: Stanford University Press. BBC News. 2021. “US Imposes Sanctions on Russia Over Cyber-Attacks.” April 16, www.bbc.com/news/technology-56755484. Beaubein, Jason. 2021. “Some Countries Have Brought Their COVID Cases to Nearly Zero. How Did They Do It?” NPR, May 27 www.cnn.com/ 2018/01/18/politics/donald-trump-the-dealmaker-under-pressure/index .html. Beauchamp, Zach. 2021. “Biden’s America First Hangover.” Vox.com, May 1 www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22408089/biden-trump-amer ica-first-policy-immigration-vaccines. Beaumont, Paul. 2018. “Brexit, Retrotopia, and the Perils of Post-Colonial Delusions.” Global Affairs 3(4–5): 379–390. Bebernes, Mike. 2019. “War Criminals and Trump’s Pardon Power.” Yahoo News, May 29 www.yahoo.com/now/war-criminals-and-trumpspardon-power-222215390.html. Becker, Carl. 1955. “What Are Historical Facts?” The Western Political Science Quarterly 8(3): 327–340. Beeson, Mark. 2020. “Donald Trump and Post-Pivot Asia: The Implications of a ‘Transactional’ Approach to Foreign Policy.” Asian Studies Review 44(1): 10–27. Behnke, Andreas. 2001. “Grand Theory in the Age of Its Impossibility: Contemplations on Alexander Wendt.” Cooperation and Conflict 36 (1): 121–134. Bell, Duncan. 2003. “History and Globalization: Reflections on Temporality.” International Affairs 79(4): 801–814. 2006. “Beware of False Prophets: Biology, Human Nature and the Future of International Relations Theory.” International Affairs 82(3): 493–510. 2014. “Before the Democratic Peace: Racial Utopianism, Empire and the Abolition of War.” European Journal of International Relations 20(3): 647–670. Benabdallah, Lina. 2021. “Spanning Thousands of Miles and Years: Political Nostalgia and China’s Revival of the Silk Road.” International Studies Quarterly 65(2): 294–305. Bennett, Andrew. 2013. “The Mother of All Isms: Causal Mechanisms and Structured Pluralisin International Relations Theory.” European Journal of International Relations 19(3): 459–481. Bennett, Brian, and Tessa Berenson. 2018. “President Trump ‘Doesn’t Think He Needs’ to Prepare Much for His Meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.” Time, 16 May https://time.com/5279914/donald-trumpnorth-korea-summit-preparation/.

References

287

Bentley, Michelle, and Maxine David. 2021. “Unpredictability as Doctrine: Reconceptualizing Foreign Policy Strategy in the Trump Era.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 34(3): 383–406. Berenskoetter, Felix. 2011. “Reclaiming the Vision Thing: Constructivists as Students of the Future.” International Studies Quarterly 55(3): 647–668. 2016. Concepts in World Politics. Sage Publications. 2017. “Approaches to Concept Analysis.” Millennium 45(2): 151–173. 2018. “Deep Theorizing in International Relations.” European Journal of International Relations 24(4): 814–840. 2009. Aesthetics and World Politics. Palgrave. Berenson, Tessa. 2020. “‘Iran Appears to be Standing Down’. President Trump De-escalates Tension with Iran in Televised Address.” Time, January 8 https://time.com/5761407/president-trump-iran-soleimani-address/. Bergengruen, Vera. 2018. “New Emails Show Confusion at the Pentagon after Trump’s Transgender Tweets.” Buzzfeed News, September 21. Berger, Thomas U. 1997. “The Past in the Present: Historical Memory and German National Security Policy.” German Politics 6(1): 39–59. Bernstein, Steven, Richard Ned Lebow, Janice Gross Stein, and Steven Weber. 2000. “God Gave Physics the Easy Problems: Adapting Social Science to an Unpredictable World.” European Journal of International Relations 6(1): 43–76. Bialasiewicz, Luiza, David Campbell, Stuart Elden, Stephen Graham, Alex Jeffrey, and Alison J. Williams. 2007. “Performing Security: The Imaginative Geographies of Current US Strategy.” Political Geography 26(4): 405–422. Biden Joseph, 2021, Interim National Security Guidance, Washington, DC: GPO. Binkley, Sam. 2009. “The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality: Temporality and Ethical Substance in the Tale of Two Dads.” Foucault Studies 6: 60–78, (esp. 72–73). Bird, Alexander. 2008. “Scientific Progress as Accumulation of Knowledge: A Reply to Rowbottom.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39(2): 279–281. Biscop, Sven. 2020. “Weaker Together or Weaker Apart? Great Power Relations After the Coronavirus.” Asia Europe Journal 18: 231–234. Bjola, Corneliu, and Ilan Manor. 2018. “Revisiting Putnam’s Two-Level Game Theory in the Digital Age: Domestic Digital Diplomacy and the Iran Nuclear Deal.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 31(1): 3–32. Bjornerud, Marcia. 2018. Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Blair, Bruce. 1993. The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War. Washington, DC.: Brookings.

288

References

Blake, Aaron. 2021. “How Consistent Is Biden’s Syria Strike with His Team’s Criticism of Trump?” Washington Post, February 26 www .washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/26/how-consistent-is-bidens-syriastrike-with-his-teams-criticism-trump/. Blakely, Ruth. 2007. “Bringing the State Back in to Terrorism Studies.” European Political Science 6(3): 228–235. Blanchard, Eric M. 2003. “Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(4): 1289–1312. 1997. “Forget IR Theory.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 22(1): 57–85. 1998. “Retracing and Redrawing the Boundaries of Events: Postmodern Interferences with International Theory.” Alternatives 23(4): 471–497. Bleiker, Roland. 1997. “Forget IR Theory.” Alternatives 22(1): 57–85. Boddery, Scott, and Graig Klein. 2021. “Presidential Use of Diversionary Drone Force and Public Support.” Research & Politics 8(2): 1–7. Boldizzoni, Francesco. 2015. “On History and Policy: Time in the Age of Neoliberalism.” Journal of the Philosophy of History 9: 4–17. Bonikowski, Bruce. 2017. “Ethno-Nationalist Populism and the Mobilization of Collective Resentment.” The British Journal of Sociology 68(S1): S181–S213. Borger, Julian, and Chulov, Martin. 2018. “Trump Shocks Allies and Advisers in Plan to Pull US Troops out of Syria.” The Guardian, December 19 www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/19/us-troopssyria-withdrawal-trump. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bousquet, Antoine, and Simon Curtis. 2011. “Beyond Models and Metaphors: Complexity Theory, Systems Thinking and International Relations.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 24(1): 43–62. Bradley, Curtis, and Jack Goldsmith. 2004. “Congressional Authorization and The War on Terrorism.” Harvard Law Review 118: 2047–2133. Brassett, James, Stuart Croft, and Nick Vaughan-Williams. 2013 “Introduction: An Agenda for Resilience Research in Politics and International Relations.” Politics 33(4): 221–228. Brassett, James, and Nick Vaughan-Williams. 2015. “Security and the Performative Politics of Resilience: Critical Infrastructure Protection and Humanitarian Emergency Preparedness.” Security Dialogue 46(1): 32–50. Brigg, Morgan, and Roland Bleiker. 2010. “Autoethnographic International Relations: Exploring the Self as a Source of Knowledge.” Review of International Studies 36(3): 779–798.

References

289

Brioschi, Maria Regina. 2013. “How Novelty Arises from Fields of Experience.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 1: 1–20. Broad, and David Sanger. 2016. “As US Modernizes Nuclear Weapons, ‘Smaller’ Leaves Some Uneasy.” The New York Times, January 11. www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/science/as-us-modernizes-nuclearweapons-smaller-leaves-some-uneasy.html. Brooks, Risa. 2021. “Through the Looking Glass: Trump-Era Civil-Military Relations in Comparative Perspective.” Strategic Studies Quarterly 15 (2): 69–98. Brown, Wendy. 2017. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Cambridge: MIT Press. Brubaker, Rogers. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and Nationalism in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bryan, Bob. 2018. “Trump Has Said He Has No Financial Interests in Saudi Arabia: But His Businesses Have Made Millions from the Saudi Government, and the Crown Prince Gave His New York City Hotel a Huge Boost.” Business Insider, 21 November www.businessinsider .com/trump-saudi-arabia-financial-interests-ties-hotel-bookings-sales2018-10. Bryant, Nick. 2020. “US Election 2020: Why Trump Lost.” BBC News, November 7 www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54788636. Buchanan, Larry et al. 2020. “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History.” July 3 www.nytimes.com/interactive/ 2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html. Bucher, Bernd, and Ursula Jasper. 2017. “Revisiting ‘Identity’ in International Relations: From Identity as Substance to Identifications in Action.” European Journal of International Relations 23 (2): 391–415. Bueger, Christian, and Frank Gadinger. 2015. “The Play of International Practice.” International Studies Quarterly 59(3): 449–460. Bump, Philip. 2021. “Trump’s Diminished Power Is Showing at a Very Bad Time.” Washington Post, July 29 www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ 2021/07/29/trump-diminished-power/. Burke, Anthony, Stefanie Fishel, Audra Mitchell, Simon Dalby, and Daniel J. Levine. 2016. “Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR.” Millennium 44(3): 499–523. Busby, Josh. 2019. “Climate Change as Anarchy: The Need for a New Structural Theory of IR.” Duck of Minerva April 1 https:// duckofminerva.com/2019/04/climate-change-as-anarchy-the-need-fora-new-structural-theory-of-ir.html

290

References

Büthe, Tim. 2002. “Taking Temporality Seriously: Modeling History and the Use of Narratives as Evidence.” American Political Science Review 96(3): 481–493. Butler, Judith. 2004 Precarious Life. New York: Verso. 2009. Frames of War. New York: Verso. 2012. “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26(2): 134–151. Butterworth, Michael. 2012. “Nate Silver and campaign 2012: Sport, the Statistical Frame, and the Rhetoric of Electoral Forecasting.” Journal of Communication 64(5): 895–914. Buzan Barry, and George Lawson. 2012. “The Global Transformation: The Nineteenth Century and the Making of Modern International Relations.” International Studies Quarterly 57(3): 620–634. 2013. “The Global Transformation: The Nineteenth Century and the Making of Modern International Relations.” International Studies Quarterly 57(3): 620–634. 2014. “Rethinking Benchmark Dates in International Relations.” European Journal of International Relations 20(2): 439–440. Buzan, Barry, Ole Waever, and Jaap De Wilde. 1998. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. London: Lynne Reinner. Byrne, Max. 2016. “Consent and the Use of Force: An Examination of ‘Intervention by Invitation’ as a Basis for US Drone Strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.” Journal on the Use of Force and International Law 3(1): 97–125. Campbell, Alexia Fernandez. 2018. “It Took 11 Months to Restore Power to Puerto Rico After Hurricane Maria. A Similar Crisis Could Happen Again.” Vox.com, August 15 www.vox.com/identities/2018/8/15/ 17692414/puerto-rico-power-electricity-restored-hurricane-maria. Campbell, David. 1998a. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1998b. “Why Fight: Humanitarianism, Principles, and Post-Structuralism.” Millennium - Journal of International Studies 27(3): 497–521. 1999. “The Deterritorialization of Responsibility.” In David Campbell and Michael Shapiro, eds., Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 29–58. 2001. “Time Is Broken: The Return of the Past in the Response to September 11.” Theory & Event, 5(4). 2007. “Geopolitics and Visuality: Sighting the Darfur Conflict.” Political Geography 26(4): 357–382. Canefe, Nergis. 2021. “‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’: The Anthropocene and the Cyclical Time of Human Suffering.” Globalizations 18(6): 1058–1061.

References

291

Carr, Andrew. 2021. “It’s about Time: Strategy and Temporal Phenomena.” Journal of Strategic Studies 44(3): 303–324. Carr, James A. 1979. “The Battle of New Orleans and the Treaty of Ghent.” Diplomatic History 3(3): 273–283. Carroll, Sean. 2010. From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. London: Penguin. Caso, Federica, and Caitlin Hamilton, eds. 2015. Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies. Bristol: E-International Relations Publishing. Cassano, Jay. 2017. “Defense Department: The War on Terror Has Cost $250 Million a Day for 16 Years.” International Business Times, October 31. Caverley, Jonathan. 2018. “The Economics of War and Peace.” In Alexandra Gheciu and William Wohlforth, eds., Oxford Handbook of International Security. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cederman, Lars-Erik. 1997. Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and Nations Develop and Dissolve. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2001. “Back to Kant: Reinterpreting the Democratic Peace as a Macrohistorical Learning Process.” American Political Science Review 95(1): 15–32. 2002. “Endogenizing Geopolitical Boundaries with Agent-Based Modeling.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 99(3):7296–7303. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chakrabarty , Stacie E., and Daniel H. Nexon. 2016. “The Dynamics of Global Power Politics: A Framework for Analysis.” 1(1): 4–18. Chamon, Paulo. 2018. “Turning Temporal: A Discourse of Time in IR.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 46(3): 396–420. Chan, Steve, Weixin Hu, and Kai He. 2019. “Discerning States’ Revisionist and Status-Quo Orientations: Comparing China and the US.” European Journal of International Relations 25(2): 613–640. Chapman, Conor, and DeMond Miller. 2020. “From Metaphor to Militarized Response: The Social Implications of ‘We Are at War with COVID-19’ – Crisis, Disasters, and Pandemics Yet to Come.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 40(9/10): 1107–1124. Checkel, Jeffrey T. 2005. “International Institutions and Socialization in Europe: Introduction and Framework.” International Organization 59 (4): 801–826. Checkel, Jeffrey. 2015. “Mechanisms, Process, and the Study of International Institutions.” In Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey Checkel, eds., Process Tracing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 74–79. Chen, Zhimin, and Xueying Zhang. 2020. “Chinese Conception of the World Order in a Turbulent Trump Era.” The Pacific Review 33(3–4): 438–468.

292

References

Chenoweth, Erica. 2016. “From Occupy to Black Lives Matter: How Nonviolent Resistance Is Shaping the 2016 Election.” Vox.com, April 18 www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11450126/nonviolence-2016-elections. Chenoweth, Erica, and Jay Ulfelder. 2017. “Can Structural Conditions Explain the Onset of Nonviolent Uprisings?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 61(2): 298–324. Chenoweth, Erica, and Kathleen G. Cunningham. 2013. “Understanding Nonviolent Resistance: An Introduction.” Journal of Peace Research 50(3): 271–276. Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. 2011. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press. Cho, Sumi, Kimberly Crenshaw, and Leslie Mccall. 2013. “Toward a Theory of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38(4): 785–810. Chubb, Danielle, and Andrew Yeo. 2019. “Human Rights, Nuclear Security, and the Question of Cooperation with North Korea.” Australian Journal of International Affairs 73(3): 227–233. Claude, Inis. 1966. “Collective Legitimization as a Political Function of The United Nations.” International Organization 20(3): 367–379. Clausewitz, Carl. 2003. On War. Penguin UK. Clausewitz, Karl. 1976. On War. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, eds., Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohen, Elizabeth. 2018. The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohn, Carol. 1987. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12(4): 687–718. Cohn, Carol, Helen Kinsella, and Sheri Gibbings. 2004. “Women, Peace and Security Resolution 1325.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6 (1): 130–140. Cohn, Nate. 2017. “How Trump Can Improve the Messy US-Chinese Economic Relationship.” New York Times, April 6 www.nytimes .com/2017/04/06/upshot/how-trump-can-improve-the-messy-us-chi nese-economic-relationship.html. Colgan, J. D. 2016. “Where Is International Relations Going? Evidence from Graduate Training.” International Studies Quarterly 60(3): 486–498. Collinson, Stephen. 2020. “Trump Goes on Rampage with Pardons, Veto Threats, and Covid Denial.” CNN.com, December 23 www.cnn.com/ 2020/12/23/politics/donald-trump-pardons-stimulus/index.html. Connolly, William. 1993. The Terms of Political Discourse. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

References

293

2011. A World of Becoming. Durham: Duke University Press. Connolly, William E. 2013. “The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41(3): 399–412. Cooper, Helene, and Catie Edmondson. 2019. “Thousands More Troops Heading to Border as Defense Department Officials Defend Deployments.” New York Times, 29 January www.nytimes.com/ 2019/01/29/us/politics/border-troops-pentagon.html. Cox, Robert. 1981. “Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory.” Millenium 10(2): 126–155. Crane-Seeber, Jesse Paul. 2017. “Everyday Life, Participant Observation, and the Bodies Caught between Wars on Terror and Drugs.” Critical Studies on Security 5(2): 198–202. Crawford, Neta. 2020. “Native Americans and the Making of International Society.” In Tim Dunne and Christian Reus-Smit, eds., The Globalization of International Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croft, Stuart, and Nick Vaughan-Williams. 2017. “Fit for Purpose? Fitting Ontological Security Studies ‘into’ the Discipline of International Relations: Towards a Vernacular Turn.” Cooperation and Conflict 52 (1): 12–30. Cronin, Audrey Kurth. 2002. “Rethinking Sovereignty: American Strategy in the Age of Terrorism.” Survival 44(2): 119–139. 2009. How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2013. “Why Drones Fail: When Tactics Drive Strategy.” Foreign Affairs 92(4): 44–54. 2014. “The ‘War on Terrorism’: What Does It Mean to Win?” Journal of Strategic Studies 37(2): 174–197. Crowley, Michael. 2019. “Absolutely Unprecedented: Why Japan’s Leader Tries so Hard to Court Trump.” Politico, 24 May www.politico.com/ magazine/story/2019/05/24/shinzo-abe-trump-japan-226985. Curtis, S., and M. Koivisto. 2010. “Towards a Second ‘Second Debate’? Rethinking the Relationship between Science and History in International Theory.” International Relations 24(4): 433–455. Da Conceicao-Heldt, Eugenia. 2013. “Two-Level Games and Trade Cooperation: What Do We Now Know?.” International Politics 50 (4): 579–599. Daase, Christopher, and Oliver Kessler. 2007. “Knowns and Unknowns in the ‘War on Terror’: Uncertainty and the Political Construction of Danger.” Security Dialogue 38(4): 411–434. Dallmayr, Fred. 2017. Democracy to Come: Politics as Relational Praxis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

294

References

Davids, Keith, Duarte Araujo, and Rick Shuttleworth. 2005 “Applications of Dynamical Systems Theory to Football.” In Thomas Reilly, Jan Cabria, and Duarte Araujo, eds., Science and Football V. London: Routledge. Davies, Owen. 2018. A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination, and Faith in World War I. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Carvalho, Benjamin, Halvard Leira, and John Hobson. 2011. “The Big Bangs of IR: The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648 and 1919.” Millennium 39(3): 735–758. De Goede, Marieke. 2008. “The Politics of Preemption and the War on Terror in Europe.” European Journal of International Relations 14(1): 161–185. De Sá Guimarães, Feliciano, and Irma Dutra De Oliveira E. Silva. 2021. “Far-Right Populism and Foreign Policy Identity: Jair Bolsonaro’s Ultra-conservatism and the New Politics of Alignment.” International Affairs 97(2): 345–363. Debrix, François. 2015. “Katechontic Sovereignty: Security Politics and the Overcoming of Time.” International Political Sociology 9(2): 143–157. Debs, Alexandre, and Nuno Monteiro. 2014. “The Strategic Logic of Nuclear Proliferation.” International Security 39(2): 7–51. 2017. Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of Proliferation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deitelhoff, Nicole, and Zimmermann, Laura. 2019. “Norms under Challenge: Unpacking the Dynamics of Norm Robustness.” Journal of Global Security Studies 4(1): 2–17. DeLisle, 2011. “9/11 and US-China Relations.” FPRI E-Notes, September 3 www.fpri.org/article/2011/09/911-and-u-s-china-relations/. Der Derian, James. 1990. “The (S) Pace of International Relations: Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed.” International Studies 34(3): 295–310. 2010. “Now We Are All Avatars.” Millennium 39(1): 181–186. 2016. “Interview–James Der Derian,” e-IR, August 5 www.e-ir.info/2016/ 08/05/interview-james-der-derian/. Derrida, Jacques. 1991. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. New York: Columbia University Press. Desch, Michael C. 2003. “It Is Kind to Be Cruel: The Humanity of American Realism.” Review of International Studies 29(3): 415–426. Desch, Michael. 2015. “Technique Trumps Relevance: The Professionalization of Political Science and the Marginalization of Security Studies.” Perspectives on Politics 13(2): 377–393. Devega, Chauncey. 2021. “Trump’s Coup Came So Close to Working: Do the American People Even Care?,” Salon, August 4 www.salon .com/2021/08/04/trumps-coup-same-so-close-to-working–do-the-ameri can-people-even-care/.

References

295

Dillon, Michael. 2007. “Governing Terror: The State of Emergency of Biopolitical Emergence.” International Political Sociology 1(1): 7–28. 2008. “Underwriting Security.” Security Dialogue 39(2–3): 309–332. Dimock, Wai-chee. 2002. “Non-Newtonian Time: Robert Lowell, Roman History, Vietnam War.” American Literature 74(4): 911–931. Dittmer, Jason, and Nicholas Gray. 2010. “Popular Geopolitics 2.0: Towards New Methodologies of the Everyday.” Geography Compass 4(11): 1664–1677. Dixit, Priya. 2015. “Visualizing Others: A Conversation with Cynthia Weber on Films and Visuality in the ‘War on Terror’.” In Priya Dixit and Jacob Stump, eds., Critical Methods in Terrorism Studies. New York: Routledge, 165–176. Donaldson, Mike. 1996. “The End of Time? Aboriginal Temporality and the British Invasion of Australia.” Time & Society 5(2): 187–207. Donovan, Outi. 2018. “Changing Ideas, Changing Norms: The Case of ‘The Responsibility to Rebuild’.” Cooperation and Conflict 53(3): 392–410. Doshi, Rush. 2021. The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order. New York: Oxford University Press. Doty, Roxanne. 1993. “The Bounds of Race in International Relations.” Millennium 22(3): 443–461. Doty, Roxanne Lynn. 2006. “Fronteras Compasivas and the Ethics of Unconditional Hospitality.” Millennium - Journal of International Studies 35(1): 53–74. Doyle, Timothy. 2010. “Reviving Nuclear Ethics.” Ethics and International Affairs 24(3): 287–308. Drezner, Daniel W. 2015. Theories of International Politics and Zombies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, revised edition. Drezner, Daniel. 2019. “Present at the Destruction: The Trump Administration and the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy.” Journal of Politics 81(2): 723–730. 2021. “Power and International Relations: A Temporal View.” European Journal of International Relations 27(1): 29–52. Drichel, Simone. 2008. “The Time of Hybridity.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 34(6): 587–615. Dudziak, Mary. 2012. War-Time: An Idea, Its History, and Its Consequences. New York: Oxford University Press. Duffield, Mark. 2012. “Challenging Environments: Danger, Resilience and the Aid Industry.” Security Dialogue 43(5): 475–492. Dunlap, Riley, and Aaron M. McCright. 2011. “Organized Climate Change Denial.” The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 144–160.

296

References

Dunne, Tim, Lene Hansen, and Colin Wight. 2013. “The End of International Relations Theory?” European Journal of International Relations 19(3): 405–425. Dyvik, Synne L., Jan Selby, and Rorden Wilkinson, eds. 2017. What’s the Point of International Relations? New York: Routledge. Earnest, David. 2015. “The Gardener and the Craftsman: Four Types of Complexity in Global Life.” In Emilian Kavalskieds, eds., World Politics at the Edge of Chaos. Albany: SUNY Press, 31–52. Easton, David. 1969. “The New Revolution in Political Science.” American Political Science Review 63(4): 1051–1061. Edelstein, David. 2017. Over the Horizon: Time, Uncertainty, and the Rise of Great Powers. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2020. “Time and the Rise of China.” The Chinese Journal of International Politics 13(3): 387–417. Edkins, Jenny. 2003. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elkus, Adam. 2015. “The Problem of Bridging the Gap.” Medium.com, September 5 https://medium.com/@Aelkus/the-problem-of-bridgingthe-gap-5498d5f25581\. Ellis, George. 2007. “Physics in the Real Universe: Time and Space-Time.” In Vesselin Petkov, ed., Relativity and the Dimensionality of the World. Dordrecht: Springer, 49–79. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1998. New Wine and Old Bottles: International Politics and Ethical Discourse. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press. Englund, Scott, and Michael Stohl. 2016. “Violent Political Movements: Comparing the Shining Path to the Islamic State.” Perspectives on Terrorism 10(4): online. Enloe, Cynthia. 2011. “The Mundane Matters.” International Political Sociology 5(4): 447–450. 2014. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of Global Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2nd edition. Eviatar, Daphne. 2016. “When Did the War with Al Qaeda Start?” JustSecurity, February 12 www.justsecurity.org/29280/war-al-qaedastart/. Ezrahi, Yaron. 2016. “The Latent Effects of Democratic Reflexvity in Contemporary Democracies.” In T. M. S. Terry Evens, Don Handelman, and Christopher Roberts, eds., Reflecting on Reflexivity: The Human Condition as an Ontological Surprise. New York: Berghahn Books. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Faisal, Tanisha. 2011. State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

References

297

Fearon, James D. 1998. “Bargaining, Enforcement, and International Cooperation.” International Organization 52(2): 269–305. Fendler, Lynn. 2008. “The Upside of Presentism.” Paedagogica Historica 44 (6): 677–690. Fernandez-Campbell, Alexia. 2018. “Trump Says Selling Weapons to Saudi Arabia will Create a Lot of Jobs: That’s Not True.” Vox.com, November 20 www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/17/17967510/ trump-saudi-arabia-arms-sales-khashoggi. Fihn, Beatrice. 2017. “The Logic of Banning Nuclear Weapons.” Survival 59 (1): 43–50. Finer, Jon. 2017. “Trump Is Already Damaging the Ability of the State Department to Function.” Foreign Policy, January 27 https:// foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/27/trump-is-already-mismanaging-the-statedepartment/. Finnemore, Martha. 1996. National Interests in International Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Finnemore, Martha, and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change.” International Organization 52(4): 887–917. Finnemore, Martha, and Kathryn Sikkink. 2001. “Taking Stock: The Constructivist Research Program in International Relations and Comparative Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science 4(1): 391–416. Finney, Patrick. 2014. “The Ubiquitous Presence of the Past? Collective Memory and International History.” The International History Review 36(3): 443–472. Fioretos, Orfeo. 2011. “Historical Institutionalism in International Relations.” International Organization 65(2): 367–399. Fioretos, Orfeo, ed. 2017. International Politics and Institutions in Time. New York: Oxford University Press. Fioretos, Orfeo. 2019. “The Syncopated History of the Liberal International Order.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 21 (1): 20–28. Fishel, Stefanie, Burke Anthony, Audra Mitchell, Simon Dalby, and Daniel J. Levine. 2016. “Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR.” Millennium 44(3): 499–523. Fisher, Kathryn Marie. 2013. “Exploring the Temporality in/of British Counterterrorism Law and Law Making.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 6(1): 50–72. Fisher, Kathryn, and Christopher McIntosh. 2021. “Failing Isn’t an Option, It’s the Only Option: Critical Politics as a Time of Contradiction and Failure.” International Studies Review 23(4): 1727–1750.

298

References

Flaherty, Michael. 1999. A Watched Pot: How We Experience Time. New York: NYU Press. 2003. “‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976.” Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, eds., New York: Picador. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Press. Fougner, Tore. 2008. “Neoliberal Governance of States: The Role of Competitiveness Indexing and Country Benchmarking.” Millennium 37 (2): 303–326. Fravel, M. Taylor. 2010. “Explaining Stability in the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands Dispute.” Getting the Triangle Straight: Managing ChinaJapan-US Relations 144–164. Friedberg, Aaron. 2000. “Will Europe’s Past Be Asia’s Future.” Survival 42 (3): 147–159. Fritsch, Matthias. 2002. “Derrida’s Democracy to Come.” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 9(4): 574–597. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. 1995. “Reflections on the End of History, Five Years Later.” History and Theory 34(2): 27–43. Gabbatt, Adam. 2017. “No, Over There: Our Case by Case Guide to the Trump Distraction Technique.” The Guardian, March 21 www .theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/21/donald-trump-distraction-tech nique-media. Gaddis, John Lewis. 1992/1993. “International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War.” International Security 17(3): 5–58. Gajowski, Evelyn. 2010. “Beyond Historicism: Presentism, Subjectivity, Politics.” Literature Compass 7(8): 674–691. Gal-or, Noemi. 2009. “Revisiting Ann Tickner.” Journal of Human Security 5(2): 83–93. Garcia-Lopez, Gustavo. 2018. “The Multiple Layers of Environmental Injustice in Contexts of (Un) natural Disasters: The Case of Puerto Rico Post-Hurricane Maria.” Environmental Justice 11(3): 101–108. Gartzke, Erik, and Jon Lindsay. 2020. “The Influence of Sea Power on Politics: Domain- and Platform Specific Attributes of Material Capabilities.” Security Studies 29(4): 601–636.

References

299

Gartzke, Erik, and Alex Weisiger. 2013. “Permanent Friends? Dynamic Difference and the Democratic Peace.” International Studies Quarterly 57(1): 171–185. Gasper, Des. 2005. “Securing Humanity-Situating ‘Human Security’ as Concept and Discourse.” Journal of Human Development 6(2): 221–245. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1987. Social Theory and Modern Sociology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gilmore, Jason, Charles Rowling, Jason Edwards, and Nicole Allen. 2020. “Exceptional ‘We’ or Exceptional ‘Me’? Donald Trump, American Exceptionalism, and the Remaking of the Modern Jeremiad.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 50(3): 539–567. Giroux, Henry. 2017. “White Nationalism, Armed Culture and State Violence in the Age of Donald Trump.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 43(9): 887–910. Glaser, Charles L. 1997. “The Security Dilemma Revisited.” World Politics 50(1): 171–201. 2010. Rational Theory of International Politics: The Logic of Competition and Cooperation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gleditsch, Kristian, and Michael Ward. 2000. “War and Peace in Space and Time: The Role of Democratization.” International Studies Quarterly 44(1): 1–29. Gleditsch, Nils Petter, and Nicole Janz. 2016. “Replication in International Relations.” International Studies Perspectives 17(4): 361–366. Glencross, Andrew. 2015. “From ‘Doing History’ to Thinking Historically: Historical Consciousness across History and International Relations.” International Relations 29(4): 413–433. Go, Julia, and John Hobson, eds. 2017. Global Historical Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006. “The Dynamics of Global Power Politics: A Framework for Analysis.” Journal of Global Security Studies 1(1): 4–18. Goddard, Stacie E., and Daniel H. Nexon. 2006. “The Dynamics of Global Power Politics: A Framework for Analysis.” Journal of Global Security Studies 1(1): 4–18. Goldgeier, James. 2019. “NATO at 70: Is the USA Still in It for the Long Haul?” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 17(2): 255–267. Goldsmith, Jack. 2013. “How Cyber Changes the Laws of War.” European Journal of International Law 24(1): 129–138.

300

References

Goodwin, Matthew, and Oliver Heath. 2016. “The 2016 Referendum, Brexit and The Left Behind: An Aggregate-Level Analysis of The Result.” The Political Quarterly 87(3): 323–332. Graham, David. 2018. “The Strangest Thing about Trump’s View of Presidential Power.” The Atlantic, June 7 www.theatlantic.com/politics/ archive/2018/06/the-strangest-thing-about-trumps-approach-to-presiden tial-power/562271/. 2021. “The Insurrection Was Just Part of the Plot.” The Atlantic, July 30 www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/leave-rest-me/619621/. Grayson, Kyle, Martin Coward, and Robert Oprisko. 2016. “Resurrecting IR Theory: Editors’ Introduction to a Special Section.” Politics, Special Issue 383–384. Griffiths, Mark. 2017. “From Heterogeneous Worlds: Western Privilege, Class and Positionality in the South.” Area 49(1): 2–8. Grayson, Kyle, Matt Davies, and Simon Philpott. 2009. “Pop Goes IR? Researching the Popular Culture–World Politics Continuum.” Politics 29(3): 155–163. Grossman, Matt, and David Hopkins. 2019. “From Fox News to Viral Views: The Influence of Ideological Media in the 2018 Elections.” The Forum 16(4): 551–572. Grove, Jairus. 2019. Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World. Durham: Duke University Press. 2020. “Bringing the World Back In: Revolutions and Relations before and after the Quantum Event.” Security Dialogue 51(5): 414–433. Grut, Chantal. 2013. “The Challenge of Autonomous Lethal Robotics to International Humanitarian Law.” Journal of Conflict and Security Law 18(1): 5–23. Guilhot, Nicolas. 2015. “Portrait of the Realist as a Historian: On AntiWhiggism in the History of International Relations.” European Journal of International Relations 21(1): 3–26. Guillaume, Xavier, and Jeff Huysmans. 2019. “The Concept of ‘The Everyday’: Ephemeral Politics and the Abundance of Life.” Cooperation and Conflict 54(2): 278–296. Gunning, Jeroen, Richard Jackson, George Kassimeris, Piers Robinson, and Mary Smyth. 2008. “Critical Terrorism Studies–an Introduction.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1(1): 1–4. Guo, Meixin et al. 2018. “The Day after Tomorrow: Evaluating the Burden of Trump’s Trade War.” Asian Economic Papers 17(1): 101–120. 2014. “Memory Politics and Ontological Security in Sino-Japanese Relations.” Asian Studies Review 38(1): 71–86.

References

301

Gustafsson, Karl. 2020. “Temporal Othering, De-securitisation and Apologies: Understanding Japanese Security Policy Change.” Journal of International Relations and Development 23(3): 511–534. Gusterson, Hugh. 1999. “Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination.” Cultural Anthropology 14(1): 111–143. Guzzini, Stefano. 2000. “A Reconstruction of Constructivism in International Relations.” European Journal of International Relations 6 (2): 147–182. Guzzini, Stefano. 2013. “The Ends of International Relations Theory: Stages of Reflexivity and Modes of Theorizing.” European Journal of International Relations 19(3): 521–541. 2020. “Embrace IR Anxieties (or, Morgenthau’s Approach to Power, and the Challenge of Combining the Three Domains of IR Theorizing).” International Studies Review 22(2): 268–288. Haass, Richard. 2020. “Present at The Disruption: How Trump Unmade US Foreign Policy.” Foreign Affairs 99(5) :24–34. Hafner-Burton, Emilie, Stephan Haggard, David Lake, and David Victor. 2017. “The Behavioral Revolution and International Relations.” International Organization 71(S1): S1–S31. Haggard, Stephan, and Robert R. Kaufman. 2016. Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites, and Regime Change. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hagström, Linus. 2021. “Great Power Narcissism and Ontological (In) Security: The Narrative Mediation of Greatness and Weakness in International Politics.” International Studies Quarterly 65(2): 331–342. Halberstam, Judith. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press. Halliday, Fred. 1994. Rethinking International Relations. London: MacMillan. Handel, Michael. 2001. Masters of War. Portland: Frank Cass. 2005. Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought. New York: Routledge. Harman, Sophie. 2018. “Making the Invisible Visible in International Relations: Film, Co-produced Research and Transnational Feminism.” European Journal of International Relations 24(4): 791–813. Harrington, Cameron. 2016. “The Ends of the World: International Relations and the Anthropocene.” Millennium 44(3): 478–498. Hartog, François. 2015. Regimes of History: Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, trans. Saskia Brown. Hassan, Robert. 2003. “Network Time and the New Knowledge Epoch.” Time & Society 12(2): 225–241. Hassid, Jonathan, and Bartholomew Watson. 2014. “State of Mind: Power, Time Zones and Symbolic State Centralization.” Time & Society 23(2): 167–194.

302

References

Haukkala, Hiski. 2013. “Timing Is Everything: The Time, Space, and Strategies for Scholarly Analysis in the Making of Foreign Policy.” International Studies Perspectives 14: 221–233. Haworth, Alida, Scott Sagan, and Benjamin Valentino. 2019. “What Do Americans Really Think about Conflict with Nuclear North Korea? The Answer Is Both Reassuring and Disturbing.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 75(4): 179–186. Hayes, Jarrod. 2012. “The Democratic Peace and the New Evolution of an Old Idea.” European Journal of International Relations 18(4): 767–791. Hedges, Christopher. 2002. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Anchor. Hee Park, Jong. 2010. “Structural Change in US Presidents’ Use of Force.” American Journal of Political Science 54(3): 766–782. Helmore, Edward. 2018. “Ivanka Trump Won China Trademarks Days before her Father’s Reversal on ZTE.” The Guardian, 28 May www .theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/28/ivanka-trump-won-china-trade marks-donald-trump-zte-reversal. Hendrickson, Ryan. 2017. Obama at War: Congress and the Imperial Presidency. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Hendrix, Cullen, and Jon Vreede. 2019. “US Dominance in International Relations and Security Scholarship in Leading Journals.” Journal of Global Security Studies 4(3): 310–320. Hickey, Donald. 2016. “What We Know That Ain’t So: Myths of the War of 1812.” In Laura McLemore, ed., The Battle of New Orleans in History and Memory. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 10–27. Hill Collins, Patricia. 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham: Duke University Press. Hjelmgaard, Kim. 2018. “Trump Business Ties to Russia Stretch Back More than 30 Years, from Big Building Projects to Beauty Pageants.” USA Today, November 30 www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/11/30/ trumps-russia-ties-new-scrutiny-amid-michael-cohen-plea/2149518002/. Hoare, Liam. 2021. “Tucker Carlson’s Hungarian Rhapsody.” Slate, August 5 https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/tucker-carlsonhungary-viktor-orban.html. Hobbs, Stuart. 1997. The End of the American Avant Garde. New York: NYU Press. Hobson, John M. 2002. “What’s at Stake in Bringing Historical Sociology Back into International Relations? Transcending ‘Chronofetishism’ and ‘Tempocentrism’ in International Relations.” In Stephen Hobden and John Hobson, eds., Historical Sociology of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–41.

References

303

Hodge, Joanna. 2007. Derrida in Time. New York: Routledge. Hodges, Matt. 2008. “Rethinking Time’s Arrow: Bergson, Deleuze and the Anthropology of Time.” 8(4): 399–429. Hoffman, Bruce. 2011. “The Rationality of Terrorism and Other Forms of Political Violence: Lessons from the Jewish Campaign in Palestine 1939–1947.” Small Wars and Insurgencies 22(2): 258–272. Hohman, James, and Mariana Alfaro. 2020. “The Daily 202: ‘This Will Divert from Ivanka’: John Bolton’s Book Reveals Trump’s Impulse to Distract.” Washington Post, June 18 www.washingtonpost.com/news/ powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2020/06/18/daily-202-this-will-divertfrom-ivanka-john-bolton-s-book-reveals-trump-s-impulse-to-distract/ 5eeb08e688e0fa32f823d66c/. Holmqvist, Caroline. 2013b. “Undoing War: War Ontologies and the Materiality of Drone Warfare.” Millennium 41(3): 535–552. Hom, Andrew R. 2010. “Hegemonic Metronome: The Ascendancy of Western Standard Time.” Review of International Studies 36(4): 1145–1170. 2016. “Angst Springs Eternal: Dangerous Times and the Dangers of Timing the ‘Arab Spring.’” Security Dialogue 47(2): 165–183. Hom, Andrew. 2017. “Patriots All Around: Inter/National Timing, Round Numbers, and the Politics of Commemorative Critique.” Australian Journal of Politics & History 63(3): 443–456. 2018a. “Silent Order: The Temporal Turn in Critical International Relations.” Millennium 46(3): 303–330. Hom, Andrew R. 2018b. “Timing Is Everything: Toward a Better Understanding of Time and International Politics.” International Studies Quarterly 62(1): 69–79. Hom, Andrew. 2020. International Relations and the Problem of Time. London: Oxford University Press. Hom, Andrew R., and Brent J. Steele. 2016. “Child’s Play: Temporal Discourse, Counterpower, and Environmental Politics.” In Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations. New York: Routledge, 189–204. Hom, Andrew, and Brent Steele. 2020. “Anxiety, Time, and Ontological Security’s Third-Image Potential.” International Theory 12(2): 322–336. Hom, Andrew, Cian O’Driscoll, and Kurt Mills. 2017. “Conclusion: The Normative, Political, and Temporal Dimensions of Moral Victories.” In Andrew Hom, Cian O’Driscoll, and Kurt Mills, eds., Moral Victories: The Ethics of Winning Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 231–242. Hom, Andrew, and Richard Beasley. 2021. “Constructing Time in Foreign Policy-Making: Brexit’s Timing Entrepreneurs, Malcontemps and Apparatchiks.” International Affairs 97(2): 267–285.

304

References

Honkanen, Kattis. 2007. “Aion, Kronos and Kairos: On Judith Butler’s Temporality.” SQS – Suomen Queer-tutkimuksen Seuran lehti 2(1): 3–14. Hoogensen, Gunhild, and Kirsti Stuvøy. 2006. “Gender, Resistance and Human Security.” Security Dialogue 37(2): 207–228. Hoogland-Noon, David. 2004. “Operation Enduring Analogy: World War II, the War on Terror, and the Uses of Historical Memory.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7(3): 339–364. Hook, Janet. 2021. “Mar-a-lago Primary: Trump Wields Power with Endorsements but Some in GOP Fear Midterm Damage.” Los Angeles Times, www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-07-25/mar-a-lago-primarytrump-wields-power-with-endorsements-but-some-fear-damage-to-gop. Hopf, Ted. 1998. “The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory.” International Security 23(1): 171–200. 2010. “The Logic of Habit in International Relations.” European Journal of International Relations 16(4): 539–561. 2012. “War/Space: Shifting Spatialities and the Absence of Politics in Contemporary Accounts of War.” Global Crime 13(4): 219–234. Horowitz, Michael, Allan Stam, and Cali Ellis. 2015. Why Leaders Fight. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horowitz, Michael, and Matthew Fuhrmann. 2018. “Studying Leaders and Military Conflict: Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 62(10): 2072–2086. Howell, Allison, and Melanie Richter-Montpetit. 2019. “Racism and Foucauldian Security Studies: Biopolitics, Liberal War, and the Whitewashing of Colonial and Racial Violence.” International Political Sociology 13(2):2–19. Hoy, David Couzens. 2012. The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality. Cambridge: MIT Press. Huang, Wei-hao, Donald Lien, and Jun Xiang. 2020. “The Power Transition and The US Response to China’s Expanded Soft Power.” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 20(3): 383–410. Hudson, John et al. 2019. “Trump, Frustrated by Advisers, Is Not Convinced the Time Is Right to Attack Iran.” Washington Post, 15 May www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-frus trated-by-advisers-is-not-convinced-the-time-is-right-to-attack-iran/ 2019/05/15/bbf5835e-1fbf-4035-a744-12799213e824_story.html. Humphreys, Adam R. C. 2010. “The Heuristic Application of Explanatory Theories in International Relations.” European Journal of International Relations 17(2): 257–277. Humphreys, Adam. 2013. “Waltz and the World: Neorealism as International Political Theory?” International Politics 50(6): 863–879.

References

305

2019. “Realism, Empiricism and Causal Inquiry in International Relations: What Is at Stake?” European Journal of International Relations 25(2): 562–587. Hurrell, Andrew. 2007. On Global Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutchings, Kimberly. 2007. “Happy Anniversary! Time and Critique in International Relations Theory.” Review of International Studies 33 (S1): 71–89. 2008. Time and World Politics: Thinking the Present. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2011. “What Is Orientation in Thinking? On the Question of Time and Timeliness in Cosmopolitical Thought.” Constellations 18(2): 190–204. 2016. “Time Creators and Time Creatures in the Ethics of World Politics.” E-International Relations, July 24 www.e-ir.info/2016/07/24/ time-creators-and-time-creatures-in-the-ethics-of-world-politics/. 2018. “Time and the Study of World Politics.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 46(3): 253–258. Ikenberry, John. 2018. “The End of Liberal International Order?” International Affairs 94(1): 7–23. 2017. “The Plot against American Foreign Policy: Can the Liberal Order Survive?” Foreign Affairs 96: 2–9. Inglehart, Ronald, and Pippa Norris. 2018. Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Authoritarian Populism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Inoguchi, Takashi, and Edward Newman. 2002. “Towards an East Asian IR Community?” Journal of East Asian Studies 2(1): 11–20. International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and Global Justice Clinic (NYU School of Law). 2012. Living under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan. Ioffe, Julia. 2017. “The State of Trump’s State Department.” The Atlantic, March 1 www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/03/statedepartment-trump/517965/. Ish-Shalom, Piki. 2003. Democratic Peace: A Political Biography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jabri, Vivienne. 2007. War and the Transformation of Global Politics. Basingstroke: Palgrave. Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus, and Daniel Nexon. 1999. “Relations before States: Substance, Process, and the Study of World Politics.” European Journal of International Relations 5(3): 291–332. Jackson, Patrick, and Daniel Nexon. 2013. “International Theory in a PostParadigmatic Era: From Substantive Wagers to Scientific Ontologies.” European Journal of International Relations 19(3): 543–565.

306

References

Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus. 2010. The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics. London: Routledge. 2011. The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics. New York: Routledge. Jackson, Richard. 2007. “The Core Commitments of Critical Terrorism Studies.” European Political Science 6(3): 244–251. 2015. “The Epistemological Crisis of Counterterrorism.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 8(1): 33–54. Jackson, Van. 2017. “Tactics of Strategic Competition: Gray Zones, Redlines, and Conflicts before War.” Naval War College Review 70 (3): 39–61. Jaeger, Hans-Martin. 2017. “Revisiting Constructional Defects of Constructivism in IR.” ERIS–European Review of International Studies 3(3): 14–26. Jahn, Beate. 2016. The Cultural Construction of International Relations: The Invention of the State of Nature. London: Palgrave. Jameson, Frederic. 1991. Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. 2003. “The End of Temporality.” Critical Inquiry 29(4): 695–718. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, and Doron Taussig. 2017. “Disruption, Demonization, Deliverance, and Norm Destruction: The Rhetorical Signature of Donald J. Trump.” Political Science Quarterly 132(4): 619–650. Jang, S. Mo, and Yong Jin Park. 2017. “Redirecting the Focus of the Agenda: Testing the Zero- Sum Dynamics of Media Attention in News and UserGenerated Media.” International Journal of Communication 11: 3998–4017. Jarvinen, Margaratha. 2004. “Life Histories and the Perspective of the Present.” Narrative Inquiry 14(1): 45–68. Jarvis, Lee. 2008. “Times of Terror: Writing Temporality into the War on Terror.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1(2): 245–262. 2009a. “The Spaces and Faces of Critical Terrorism Studies.” Security Dialogue 40(1): 5–27. 2009b. Times of Terror: Discourse, Temporality and the War on Terror. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jenkins, Brian Michael, Martha Crenshaw, and Bruce Hoffman. 2016. “How Much Really Changed about Terrorism on 9/11?” The Atlantic. September 11 www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/ 2016/09/jenkins-hoffman-crenshaw-september-11-al-qaeda/499334/. Jervis, Robert. 2009. “Black Swans in Politics.” Critical Review 21(4): 475–489.

References

307

Joas, Hans. 1997. G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Reexamination of His Thought. Cambridge: MIT Press. Johnson, Chalmers. 2000. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New York: Metropolitan Books. Johnson, Jenna. 2015. “Donald Trump on Waterboarding: ‘If It ‘Doesn’t Work’ They Deserve It Anyways’.” Washington Post, November 23 www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/11/23/donaldtrump-on-waterboarding-if-it-doesnt-work-they-deserve-it-anyway/. Johnson, Michael P. 2008. A Typology of Domestic Violence: Intimate Terrorism, Violent Resistance and Situational Couples Violence. Lebanon: Northeastern University Press. Johnson, Nuala. 2001. “From Time Immemorial: Narratives of Nationhood and the Making of National Space.” In John May and Nigel Thrift, eds., TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality. London: Routledge, 89–105. Johnson, Paul Elliott. 2017. “The Art of Masculine Victimhood: Donald Trump’s Demagoguery.” Women’s Studies in Communication 40(3): 229–250. Johnston, Alastair. 2003. “Is China a Status Quo Power?” International Security 27(4): 5–56. 2019. “China in a World of Orders: Rethinking Compliance and Challenge in Beijing’s International Relations.” International Security 44(2): 9–60. 2012. “What (if anything) Does East Asia Tell Us about International Relations Theory?” Annual Review of Political Science 15: 53–78. Juergensmeyer, Mark. 2003. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 3rd edition. Junio, Timothy. 2013. “How Probable Is Cyber War: Bringing IR Theory Back into the Debate.” Journal of Strategic Studies 36(1): 125–133. Jupille, Joseph, D. W. Mattli, and Duncan Snidal. 2017. “Dynamics of Institutional Choice.” In Orfeo Fioretos, ed., International Politics and Institutions in Time, New York: Oxford University Press, 117–143. Kagan, Robert. 2019. “The Strongmen Strike Back,” March 14, www .washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2019/03/14/feature/the-strong men-strike-back/ Kahl, Colin. 1998. “Constructing a Separate Peace: Constructivism, Collective Liberal Identity, and Democratic Peace.” Security Studies 8 (2–3): 94–144. Kang, David. 2013. “International Relations Theory and East Asian History: An Overview.” Journal of East Asian Studies 13(2): 181–205. Katzenstein, Peter, ed. 1996. The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics. New York: Columbia.

308

References

Katzenstein, Peter J., and Lucia A. Seybert. 2018. “Protean Power and Uncertainty: Exploring the Unexpected in World Politics.” International Studies Quarterly 62(1): 80–93. Katzenstein, Peter, and Lucia Seibert. 2018. “Protean Power and Control Power: A Conceptual Analysis.” In Peter Katzenstein and Lucia Seibert, eds., Protean Power: Exploring the Uncertain and Unexpected in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–26. Kavalski, Emilian. 2007. “The Fifth Debate and the Emergence of Complex International Relations Theory: Notes on the Application of Complexity Theory to the Study of International Life.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 20(3): 435–454. 2015. “Complexifying IR: Disturbing the ‘Deep Newtonian Slumber’ of the Mainstream.” In Emilian Kavalski, ed., World Politics at the Edge of Chaos: Reflections on Complexity and Global life. Albany: SUNY Press, 253–272. Keck, Margaret, and Katherine Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Keohane, Robert. 1989. International Institutions and State Power: Essays in International Relations Theory. Boulder: Westview Press. Keohane, Robert, and Orfeo Fioretos. 2017. “Observations on the Promise and Pitfalls of Historical Institutionalism in International Relations.” International Politics and Institutions in Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keohane, Robert, and Lisa Martin. 1995. “The Promise of Institutionalist Theory.” International Security 20(1): 39–51. Khalid, Asma, Don Gonyea, and Leila Fadel. 2019. “On the Sidelines of Democracy: Why So Many Americans Don’t Vote.” National Public Radio, September 10. www.npr.org/2018/09/10/645223716/on-thesidelines-of-democracy-exploring-why-so-many-americans-dont-vote. Khalilzad, Zalmay, et al. 1998. The United States and a Rising China: Strategic and Military Implications. Santa Monica: RAND. Kim, Woosong, and Steve Gates. 2015. “Power Transition Theory and the Rise of China.” International Area Studies Review 18(3): 219–226. King, Charles. 2015. "The Decline of International Studies: Why Flying Blind Is Dangerous." Foreign Affairs 94(4): 88–98. King, Gary, and Langche Zeng. 2018. “Explaining Rare Events in International Relations.” International Organization 55(3): 693–715. 2001. “Logistic Regression in Rare Events Data.” Political Analysis 9(2): 137–163. Kinsella, Helen. 2003. “For a Careful Reading: The Conservativism of Gender Constructivism.” International Studies Review 5 (2): 287–302.

References

309

Kirkpatrick, Erika. 2015. “Visuality, Photography, and Media in International Relations Theory: A Review.” Media, War and Conflict 8(2): 199–212. Klosterman, Chuck. 2017. But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past. New York: Penguin. Knopf, Jeffrey W. 2003. “The Importance of International Learning.” Review of International Studies 29(2): 185–207. Koh, Harold. 2017. “The Trump Administration and International Law.” Faculty Scholarship Series: 5213. Kolia, Zahir. 2021. “Beyond the Secular Anthropocene: Locke’s SelfOwning Body, Protestant Translations of Indigenous World-Making, and the Settler-Colonial Plantation Economy.” Globalizations 18(6): 864–879. Koremenos, Barbara. 2012. “Institutionalism and International Law.” In Jeffrey Dunoff and Bruce Pollack, eds., Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Law and International Relations: The State of the Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 59–82. Kratochwil, Friedrich. 2006. “History, Action and Identity: Revisiting the ‘Second’ Great Debate and Assessing Its Importance for Social Theory.” European Journal of International Relations 12(1): 5–29. Krebs, Ronald. 2015. Narrative and the Making of US National Security. New York: Cambridge University Press. Krieg, Gregory. 2018. “Donald Trump’s Dealmaking Mythology Meets DC Reality. Again.” CNN.com, January 18. www.cnn.com/2018/01/18/ politics/donald-trump-the-dealmaker-under-pressure/index.html. Kristensen, Peter Marcus. 2015. “Revisiting the “American Social Science”– Mapping the Geography of International Relations.” International Studies Perspectives 16(3): 246–269. Kristensen, Peter. 2016. “Discipline Admonished: On International Relations Fragmentation and the Disciplinary Politics of Stocktaking.” European Journal of International Relations. 22(2): 243–267. Kristof, Nicholas. 1993. “The Rise of China.” Foreign Affairs. 72(5): 59–74. Krolikowski, Alanna. “State Personhood in Ontological Security Theories of International Relations and Chinese Nationalism: A Sceptical View.” Chinese Journal of International Politics 2(1): 109–133. Kurki, Milja. 2006. “Causes of a Divided Discipline: Rethinking the Concept of Cause in International Relations Theory.” Review of International Studies 32(2): 189–216. Lacy, Mark J. 2008. “A History of Violence: Mearsheimer and Walt’s Writings from ‘An Unnecessary War’ to the ‘Israel Lobby’ Controversy.” Geopolitics 13(1): 100–119.

310

References

Lai, David. 2011. The United States and China in Power Transition. Carlisle: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. Langenbacher, Eric. 2010. “Collective Memory as a Factor in Political Culture and International Relations.” In Eric Langenbacher and Yossi Shain, eds., Power and the Past: Collective Memory and International Relations. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 13–50. Langenbacher, Eric, and Yossi Shain, eds. 2010. Power and the Past: Collective Memory and International Relations. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. LaRoche, Christopher David, and Simon Frankel Pratt. 2018. “Kenneth Waltz Is Not a Neorealist (and Why That Matters).” European Journal of International Relations 24(1): 153–176. Lebow, Richard, and Benjamin Valentino. 2009. “Lost in Transition: A Critical Analysis of Power Transition Theory.” International Relations, 23(3): 389–410. Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. New York: Continuum. Leffler, Melvyn. 1999. “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know’?” American Historical Review 104(2): 501–524. Legro, Jeffrey W. 2016. Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lenz, Tobias, and Lora Anne Viola. 2017. “Legitimacy and Institutional Change in International Organisations: A Cognitive Approach.” Review of International Studies 43(5): 939–961. Lepore, Jill. 2020. “The Invention of the Police.” The New Yorker, July 13 www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-invention-of-the-police. Levine, Daniel, and Alexander Barder. 2014. “The Closing of the American Mind: ‘American School’ International Relations and the State of Grand Theory.” European Journal of International Relations 20(4): 863–888. Lewis, Jeffrey. 2018. “The Word That Could Help the World Avoid Nuclear War.” New York Times, April 4 www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/opin ion/avoid-nuclear-war-denuclearization.html. Lind, Jennifer M. 2004. “Pacifism or Passing the Buck? Testing Theories of Japanese Security Policy.” International Security 29(1): 92–121. Lind, Jennifer. 2008. Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Linklater, Andrew. 2007. “Torture and Civilisation.” International Relations 21(1): 111–118. Lipschutz, Ronnie. 1995. On Security. New York: Columbia University Press. Lipson, Charles. 2013. Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a Separate Peace. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

References

311

Little, Adrian. 2014. Enduring Conflict: Challenging the Signature of Democracy. London: Bloomsbury. Lomas, Peter. “Anthropomorphism, Personification and Ethics: A Reply to Alexander Wendt.” Review of International Studies 31(2): 349–355. Lorusso, Nicholas. 2019. “The Battle of New Orleans: Joint Strategic and Operational Planning Lessons Learned.” Small Wars Journal, June 24 https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/battle-new-orleans-joint-strategicand-operational-planning-lessons-learned. Luecke, Tim. 2016. “The Epistemological Consequences of Taking Time Seriously and the Value of Generational Analysis in IR.” In Andrew Hom, Christopher McIntosh, Alasdair McKay, and Liam Stockdale, eds., Time, Temporality and Global Politics. Bristol: e-International Relations, 47–58. Lundborg, Tom. 2012. Politics of the Event: Time, Movement, Becoming. London: Routledge. 2015. “The Life and Death of the International.” Paper presented at the International Studies Association Annual Conference. 2016. “The Limits of Historical Sociology: Temporal Borders and the Reproduction of the ‘Modern’ Political Present.” European Journal of International Relations 22(1): 99–121. Lustick, Ian. 1996. “History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and the Problem of Selection Bias.” American Political Science Review 90(3): 605–618. Luttig, Matthew et al. 2017. “Supporters and Opponents of Donald Trump Respond Differently to Racial Cues: An Experimental Analysis.” Research & Politics 4(4): 1–8. Lynch, Cecilia. 2019. “The Moral Aporia of Race in International Relations.” International Relations 33(2): 267–285. Lyre, Holger. 2008. “Time in Philosophy of Physics: The Central Issues.” Physics and Philosophy 1: 1–23. MacGinty, Roger. 2017. “A Material Turn in International Relations: The 4x4, Intervention and Resistance.” Review of International Studies 43 (5): 855–874. 2021. “Temporality and Contextualisation in Peace and Conflict Studies: The Forgotten Value of War Memoirs and Personal Diaries.” Cooperation and Conflict (preprint). Mackay, Fiona, Meryl Kenny, and Louise Chappell. 2010. “New Institutionalism through a Gender Lens: Towards a Feminist Institutionalism?” International Political Science Review 31(5): 573–588. Madhani, Aamer. 2021. “Biden Declares ‘America Is Back’ in Welcome Words to Allies.” AP News, February 19 https://apnews.com/article/biden-foreignpolicy-g7-summit-munich-cc10859afd0f542fd268c0a7ddcd9bb6.

312

References

Maliniak, Daniel, Amy Oakes, Susan Peterson, and Michael J. Tierney. 2011. “International Relations in the US Academy.” International Studies Quarterly 55(2): 437–464. Maliniak, Daniel, Susan Peterson, Ryan Powers, and Michael J. Tierney. 2018. “Is International Relations a Global Discipline? Hegemony, Insularity, and Diversity in the Field.” Security Studies 27(3): 448–484. Mälksoo, Maria. 2012. “The Challenge of Liminality for International Relations Theory.” Review of International Studies 38(2): 481–494. Manyin, Mark et al. 2012. Pivot to the Pacific? The Obama Administration’s ‘Rebalancing’ Toward Asia. Washington: Congressional Research Service. Marchart, Oliver. 2006. “Time for a New Beginning, Arendt, Benjamin, and the Messianic Conception of Political Temporality.” Redescriptions: Yearbook of Political Thought and Conceptual History 10: 134–149. Marcus, George E., and Erkan Saka. 2006. “Assemblage.” Theory, Culture and Society 23(2–3): 101–106. Marks, John. 1998. Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity. London: Pluto Press. Marquardt, Jens, and Laurence Delina. 2021. “Making Time, Making Politics: Problematizing Temporality in Energy and Climate Studies.” Energy Research & Social Science 76: 102073. May, John, and Nigel Thrift, eds. 2003. TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality. London: Routledge. McCann, Eugene J. 2003. “Framing Space and Time in the City: Urban Policy and the Politics of Spatial and Temporal Scale.” Journal of Urban Affairs 25(2): 159–178. McCauliffe, Padraig. 2021. “Transtional Justice, Institutions, and Temporality: Towards a Dynamic Understanding.” International Criminal Law Review 21: 817–847. McCausland, Jeff. 2020. “Trump’s Twitter Promises to Bring US Troops Home Make Headlines. Has He Kept Them?” NBCNews.com, October 25 www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-twitter-promises-bring-us-troops-home-make-ncna1244572. McCourt, David. 2016. “Practice Theory and Relationalism as the New Constructivism.” International Studies Quarterly 60(3): 475–485. 2021. “Framing China’s Rise in the United States, Australia, and United Kingdom.” International Affairs 97(3): 643–665. McDonald, Matt. 2008. “The Copenhagen School and the Construction of Security.” European Journal of International Relations 14(4): 563–587. McFaul, Michael. 2014. “Moscow’s Choice.” Foreign Affairs 93(6): 167–171.

References

313

McGarry, Tim, David I. Anderson, Stephen A. Wallace, Mike D. Hughes, and Ian M. Franks. 2002. “Sport Competition as a Dynamical SelfOrganizing System.” Journal of Sports Sciences 20(10): 771–781. McIntosh, Chris. 2020. “The Trump Administration’s Politics of Time: The Temporal Dynamics That Allows Trump’s Interests to Determine American Foreign Policy.” Time and Society 26(2): 362–391. McIntosh, Christopher. 2015. “Theory across Time: The Privileging of Time-Less Theory in International Relations.” International Theory 7 (3): 464–500. 2019. “Theorizing the Temporal Exception: The Importance of the Present for the Study of War.” Journal of Global Security Studies 5 (4): 543–558. 2022. “From Policy Relevance to Present Relevance: Entanglement, Scholarly Responsibility, and the Ethics of Quantum Social Theory.” Global Studies Quarterly 2(3): 1–12. McKelvey, Tara. 2019. “Trump Revokes Obama Rule on Reporting Drone Deaths.” BBC News, March 7 www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada47480207. McLeod, Laura. 2013. “Back to the Future: Temporality and Gender Security Narratives in Serbia.” Security Dialogue 44(2): 165–181. McMillan, Chris. 2017. “Make America Great Again: Ideological Fallacy, American Exceptionalism, and Donald Trump.” Subjectivities 10(2): 204–224. Mead, George Herbert. 2002 (1932). The Philosophy of the Present. New York: Prometheus. Ed. Arthur Murphy, preface by John Dewey. Mearsheimer, John. 1990 “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War.” International Security 15(1): 5–56. 1993. “The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent.” Foreign Affairs 72 (3): 50–66. 1995 “The False Promise of International Institutions.” International Security 19(3): 5–4. 2001. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: Norton. 2006. “Conversations in International Relations: Interview with John J. Mearsheimer (part I).” International Relations 20(1): 105–123. Mearsheimer, John J. 2014. “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin.” Foreign Affairs 93(5): 77–89. Mearsheimer, John, and Stephen Walt. 2007. The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. New York: Macmillan. 2013. “Leaving Theory Behind: Why Simplistic Hypothesis Testing Is Bad for International Relations.” European Journal of International Relations 19(3): 427–457.

314

References

Mikdashi, Maya, and Jasbir K. Puar. 2016. “Queer Theory and Permanent War.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22(2): 215–222. Miller, Kristie. 2013. “Presentism, Eternalism, and the Growing Block.” In Heather Dyke and A. Adrian Bardon, eds., A Companion to the Philosophy of Time. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 345–364. Mitzen, Jennifer. 2006. “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma.” European Journal of International Relations 12(3): 341–370. Molloy, Sean. 2006. The Hidden History of Realism: A Geneaology of Power Politics. New York: Palgrave. 2020. “Realism and Reflexivity: Morgenthau, Academic Freedom, and Dissent.” European Journal of International Relations 26(2): 321–343. Montgomery, Alexander H. 2016. “Quantum Mechanisms: Expanding the Boundaries of Power, Space, and Time in Global Security Studies.” Journal of Global Security Studies 1(1): 102–106. Moran, Chuk. 2013. “Time as a Social Practice.” Time & Society 24(3): 283–303. 2015. “Time as a Social Practice.” Time & Society 24(3): 283–303. Moravcsik, Andrew. 1999. “A New Statecraft? Supranational Entrepreneurs and International Cooperation.” International Organization 53(2): 267–306. Morgenthau, Hans. 1972. “Remarks on the Validity of Historical Analogies.” Social Research 39(2): 360–364. Morris, Ian. 1992. Death Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moynihan, Donald, and Alasdair Roberts. 2021. “Dysfunction by Design: Trumpism as Administrative Doctrine.” Public Administration Review, 81 (1): 152–156. Mueller, John. 2021. The Stupidity of War: American Foreign Policy and the Case for Complacency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Muller-Hirth, Natascha, and Sandra Rios Oloya, eds. 2018. Time and Temporality in Transitional and Post-Conflict Societies. Abingdon: Routledge. Mullinix, Kevin, Toby Bolsen, and Robert Norris. 2021. “The Feedback Effects of Controversial Police Use of Force.” Political Behavior 43(2): 881–898. Munck, Gerardo, and Richard Snyder. 2007. “Debating the Direction of Comparative Politics an Analysis of Leading Journals.” Comparative Political Studies 40(1): 5–31. Murphy, Michael. 2021. Quantum Social Theory for Critical International Relations Scholars: Quantizing Critique. London: Palgrave.

References

315

2018. The Struggle for Recognition in International Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Musgrave, Paul, and Daniel Nexon. 2013. “Singularity or Aberration? A Response to Buzan and Lawson.” International Studies Quarterly 57(3): 637–639. Musgrave, Paul. 2021. “Political Science Has Its Own Lab Leaks.” Foreign Policy, July 3 https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/03/political-sciencedangerous-lab-leaks/. Myrick, Rachel. 2021. “America Is Back—But for How Long?” Foreign Affairs, June 14 www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2021-06-14/ america-back-how-long. Narozhna, Tanya. 2022. “The Lived Body, Everyday and Generative Powers of War: Toward an Embodied Ontology of War as Experience.” International Theory 14(2): 210–232. Naumes, Sarah. 2015. “Is all ‘I’IR?” Millennium 43(3): 820–832. Neimanis, Astrida, and Rachel Walker (2014). “Weathering: Climate Change and the ‘Thick Time’ of Transcorporeality.” Hypatia 29(3): 558–575. Neumann, Iver. 2018. “Halting Time: Monuments to Alterity.” Millennium 46(3): 331–351. Nexon, Daniel. 2012. “Historical Institutionalism and International Relations.” E-International Relations 16, April www.e-ir.info/2012/ 04/16/historical-institutionalism-and-international-relations/. 2015. “Against Policy Relevance: A Polemic.” Duck of Minerva, September 6 https://duckofminerva.com/2015/09/against-policy-rele vance-a-polemic.html. Nieman, Mark David. 2015. “Moments in Time: Temporal Patterns in the Effect of Democracy and Trade on Conflict.” Conflict Management and Peace Science 33(3): 273–293. Nordin, Astrid, and Dan Oberg. 2015. “Targeting the Ontology of War: From Clausewitz to Baudrillard.” Millennium 43(2): 392–410. Nye, Joseph. 1997. “China’s Re-emergence and the Future of the AsiaPacific.” Survival 39(4): 65–79. 2017. “Will the Liberal Order Survive? The History of an Idea.” Foreign Affairs 96(1): 10–16. 2020. “The Rise of China.” In Leah Bitounis and Jonathon Price, eds., The Struggle for Power: US-China Relations in the Twenty First Century. Aspen: Aspen Institute, 133–138. Nylen, Alexandria. 2020. “Frontier Justice: International Law and ‘Lawless’ Spaces in the “War on Terror.” European Journal of International Relations 26(3): 627–659.

316

References

Oaklander, L. Nathan. 1996. “McTaggart’s Paradox and Smith’s Tensed Theory of Time.” Synthese 107(2): 205–221. Obama, Barack. 2013. “Remarks by the President at National Defense University,” May 23 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-pressoffice/2013/05/23/remarks-president-national-defense-university. Oliver, J. Eric, and Wendt Rahn, W. 2016. “Rise of the Trumpenvolk: Populism in the 2016 Election.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 667(1): 189–206. Onuf, Nicholas. 2013. Making Sense, Making Worlds: Constructivism in Social Theory and International Relations. London: Routledge. Oren, Ido. 2016. “A Sociological Analysis of the Decline of American IR Theory.” International Studies Review 18(4): 571–596. 2021. “The Leakage between Political Science and Policy Goes Both Ways.” Duck of Minerva, September 1 www.duckofminerva.com/2021/09/theleakage-between-political-science-and-policy-goes-both-ways.html. Oreskes, Naomi. 2013. “Why I Am a Presentist.” Science in Context 26(4): 595–609. Osiander, Andreas. 2001. “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth.” International Organization 55(2): 251–287. Owen, John. 1994. “How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace.” International Security 19(2): 87–125. Owens, Patricia. 2007. Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2018. “Women and the History of International Thought.” International Studies Quarterly 62(3): 467–481. Pain, Rachel. 2014. “Everyday Terrorism: Connecting Domestic Violence and Global Terrorism.” Progress in Human Geography 38(4): 531–550. Paine, S. C. M. 2012. The Wars for Asia: 1911–1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Park, Jong Hee. 2010. “Structural Change in US Presidents’ Use of Force.” American Journal of Political Science 54(3): 766–782. Parker, Ashley. 2020. “The Ending of Trump’s Presidency Echoes the Beginning–With a Lie.” Washington Post, November 15 www .washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-crowd-false/2020/11/15/ 42dd9c2a-275f-11eb-92b7-6ef17b3fe3b4_story.html. Patrick, Stewart. 2017. “Trump and World Order: The Return of SelfHelp.” Foreign Affairs 96: 52–59. Pels, Dick. 2017. ”Lies Are Fast, Truth Is Slow: The Importance of Mastering The Rhythms of Academic Life And Work.” Impact of Social Sciences Blog, March 14 https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocials ciences/2017/03/14/lies-are-fast-truth-is-slow-the-importance-of-masteringthe-rhythms-of-academic-life-and-work/.

References

317

Peltner, Anne. 2017. “Competing Norms and Foreign Policy Change: Humanitarian Intervention and British Foreign Policy.” International Politics 54(6): 745–759. Persico, Joseph. 2007. Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918 World War I and Its Violent Climax. New York: Random House. Peterson, Sarah. 2014. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want: What Policymakers Learn from IR Scholars.” International Studies Quarterly: Symposium August 8, www.isanet.org/Publications/ISQ/Posts/ ID/1420/You-Cant-Always-Get-What-You-Want-What-PolicymakersLearn-From-International-Relations-Scholars Petrova, Margarita. 2016. “Rhetorical Entrapment and Normative Enticement: How the United Kingdom Turned from Spoiler into Champion of the Cluster Munition Ban.” International Studies Quarterly 60(3): 387–399. Pickles, Anthony, and Joel Robbins. 2018. “Trump Wins by Accelerating Time: Fight Back by Slowing Down.” The Conversation, February 13 http://theconversation.com/trump-wins-by-accelerating-time-fightback-by-slowing-down-72455. Picq, Manuela Lavinas, and Markus Thiel, eds. 2015. Sexualities in World Politics: How LGBTQ Claims Shape International Relations. London: Routledge. Pierson, Paul. 2004. Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pillsbury, Michael. 2016. The Hundred Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Popper, Karl. 1979. Three Worlds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. 2014. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Routledge. Porter, Tony, and Liam Stockdale. 2016. “The Strategic Manipulation of Transnational Temporalities.” Globalizations 13(3): 270–284. Pothos, Emmanuel, and Jerome Busemeyer. 2009. “A Quantum Probability Explanation for Violations of ‘Rational’ Decision Theory.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 276(1625): 2171–2178. 2013. “Can Quantum Probability Provide a New Direction for Cognitive Modeling?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36(3): 255–274. Pouliot, Vincent. 2010. “The Materials of Practice: Nuclear Warheads, Rhetorical Commonplaces and Committee Meetings in Russian– Atlantic Relations.” Cooperation and Conflict 45(3): 294–311. Powel, Brieg. 2020a. “Blinkered Learning, Blinkered Theory: How Histories in Textbooks Parochialise IR.” International Studies Review 22(4): 957–982.

318

References

2020b. “Whither IR? Multiplicity, Relations, and the Paradox of International Relations.” Globalizations, 17(3): 546–559. Pratt, Simon. 2017. “Defining the Trumpist Insurgency.” Duck of Minerva, March 6 http://duckofminerva.com/2017/03/wptpn-defining-the-trum pist-insurgency.html Prescott, Jeffrey. 2019. “Trump Doesn’t Deserve Any Credit for His Disruptive Foreign Policy.” Foreign Policy, March 14 https:// foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/14/trump-doesnt-deserve-any-credit-forhis-disruptive-foreign-policy/. Price, Huw. 1997. Time’s Arrow & Archimedes’ Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time. New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. “Boltzmann’s Time Bomb.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53(1): 83–119. Prozorov, Sergei. 2011. “The Other as Past and Present: Beyond the Logic of ‘Temporal Othering’ in IR Theory.” Review of International Studies 37 (3): 1273–1293. Pruessen, Ron. 2019. “The Imperial Audacity of Trump’s Presidency is Nothing New for the US Presidency.” LSE Blog, June 11 https://blogs .lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2019/06/11/the-imperial-audacity-of-trumpsmagical-thinking-is-nothing-new-for-the-us-presidency/. Putnam, Robert. 1988. “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games.” International Organization 42(3): 427–460. Purnell, Kandida. 2020. Rethinking the Body in Global Politics: Bodies, Body Politics, and the Body Politic in a Time of Pandemic. London: Routledge. Qingguo, Jia. 2006. “One Administration, Two Voices: US China Policy during Bush’s First Term.” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 6 (1): 23–36. Rachman, Gideon. 2017. Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline from Obama to Trump and Beyond. London: Random House. Rao, Rahul. 2020. Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality. New York: Oxford University Press. Ray, J., and Bruce Russett. 1996. “The Future as Arbiter of Theoretical Controversies: Predictions, Explanations and the End of the Cold War.” British Journal of Political Science 26(4): 441–470. Read, Róisín, and Roger Mac Ginty. 2017. “The Temporal Dimension in Accounts of Violent Conflict: A Case Study from Darfur.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 11(2): 147–165. Reed, David, and Michael Hughes. 2006. “An Exploration of Team Sport as a Dynamical System.” International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport 6(2): 114–125. Reus-Smit, Christian. 2013. “Beyond Metatheory?” European Journal of International Relations 19(3): 589–608.

References

319

Reus-Smit, Christian, and Tim Dunne. 2017. The Globalization of International Society. New York: Oxford University Press. “The Globalization of International Society.” In Christian Reus-Smit and Tim Dunne, eds., The Globalization of International Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 18–42. Revsbaek, Live, and Lene Tanggard. 2015. “Analyzing the Present.” Qualitative Inquiry 21(4): 376–387. Rifkin, Mark. 2017. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-determination. Durham: Duke University Press. Rice, Condoleezza. 2000. “Promoting the National Interest.” Foreign Affairs 79(1): 45–62. Ricoeur, Paul. 2010. Time and Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rixen, Thomas, and Lora Anne Viola. 2016. “Historical Institutionalism and International Relations: Toward Explaining Change and Stability in International Institutions.” In Thomas Rixen, Lora Anne Viola, and Michael Zurn, eds., Historical Institutionalism and International Relations: Explaining International Institutional Development in World Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3–36. Rosa, Jonathan, and Yarimar Bonilla. 2017. “Deprovincializing Trump, Decolonizing Diversity, and Unsettling Anthropology.” American Ethnologist 44(2): 201–208. Rosenthal, Sandra B. 1996. “Continuity and Time: The Divergent Intuitions of Whitehead and Pragmatism.” 32(4): 542–567. 1997. “Whitehead and the Ongoing Problem of Temporality: A Response to Lewis Ford.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 33(4): 981–984. Ross, Robert. 1999. “The Geography of the Peace: East Asia in the Twenty First Century.” International Security 23(4): 81–118. Rothe, Delf. 2020. “Governing the End Times? Planet Politics and the Secular Eschatology of the Anthropocene.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48(2): 143–164. Russett, Bruce, Christopher Layne, David E. Spiro, and Michael W. Doyle. 1995. “The Democratic Peace.” International Security 19(4): 164–184. Ryan, Missy, and Karen DeYoung. 2021. “Biden Will Withdraw All US Forces from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021.” Washington Post, April 13 www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/biden-us-troopwithdrawal-afghanistan/2021/04/13/918c3cae-9beb-11eb-8a833bc1fa69c2e8_story.html. Rynning, Sten, Olivier Schmitt, and Amelie Theussen, eds. 2021. War Time: Temporality and the Decline of Western Military Power. Washington, DC: Brookings.

320

References

Sagan, Scott. 1997. “Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons? Three Models in Search of a Bomb.” International Security 21(3): 54–86. Sagan, Scott D., and Benjamin A. Valentino. 2017. “Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants.” International Security 42(1): 41–79. Sagan, Scott, and Kenneth Waltz. 1995. The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate. New York: WW Norton. Sassen, Saskia. 2000. “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization.” Public Culture 12(1): 215. Sawyer, Robert. 2005. Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Savage, Jesse. 2020. Political Survival and Sovereignty in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Savell, Stephanie. 2018. “The Real Reason Americans Don’t Care About the Costs of War.” The Nation, February 15, 2018. Accessed September 3rd, 2019. www.thenation.com/article/the-real-reason-ameri cans-dont-care-about-the- costs-of-war/. Savitt, Steven. 2006. “Presentism and Eternalism in Perspective.” Philosophy and Foundations of Physics 1: 111–127. Scharre, Paul. 2018. Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War. New York: Norton. Schatzki, Theodore R. 2010. The Timespace of Human Activity: On Performance, Society, and History as Indeterminate Teleological Events. New York: Lexington Books. Schell, Jonathan. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Knopf. Schelling, Thomas. 1966. Arms and Influence. New Haven: Yale University Press). Schmidt, Averill, and Kathryn Sikkink. 2019. “Breaking the Ban? The Heterogeneous Impact of US Contestation of the Torture Norm.” Journal of Global Security Studies 4(1): 105–122. Schmidt, Brian, and Michael C. Williams. 2008. “The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War: Neoconservatives versus Realists.” Security Studies 17(2): 191–220. Schmitt, Carl. 2004. War/Non-War?: A Dilemma. New York: Plutarch Press. 2008. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, Olivier. 2020. “Wartime Paradigms and the Future of Western Military Power.” International Affairs 96(2): 401–418. Schneiker, Andrea. 2021. “Norm Sabotage: Conceptual Reflection on a Phenomenon That Challenges Well-Established Norms.” International Studies Perspectives 22(1): 106–123. Scott, Eugene. 2018. “Before the Midterms Trump Harped on the Migrant Caravan. Since then, He Hasn’t Brought It Up.” Washington Post, November 8 www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/08/before-mid terms-trump-harped-migrant-caravan-since-then-he-has-barely-men tioned-it/.

References

321

Seabrooke, Leonard. 2011. “Everyday Politics and Generational Conflicts in the World Economy.” International Political Sociology 5(4): 456–459. Sewell, William H. 1996. “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille.” Theory and Society 25: 841–881. Shambaugh, David. 1997. “Chinese Hegemony over East Asia by 2015?” The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis 9(1): 7–28. Shannon, Vaughn P. 2005. “Wendt’s Violation of the Constructivist Project: Agency and Why a World State Is Not Inevitable.” European Journal of International Relations 11(4): 581–587. Shapiro, Michael. 2015. “Hiroshima Temporalities.” Thesis Eleven 129(1): 40–56. 2016. Politics and Time: Documenting the Event. Malden: Polity Press. 2017. “Foucault and Method.” In Philippe Bonditti with Didier Bigo and Frederic Gros, eds., Foucault and the Modern International: Sciences and Legacies in World Politics. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 115–134. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. Shepherd, Laura J. 2009. “Gender, Violence and Global Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies.” Political Studies Review 7(2): 208–219. Sheridan, Mary Beth, and Kevin Sieff. 2019. “Trump Administration Plans to Cut US Aid to 3 Central American Countries in Fight over US-Bound Migrants.” Washington Post, March 30 www.washingtonpost.com/ world/the_americas/trump-plans-us-aid-cut-to-3-central-american-coun tries-as-fight-widens-over-us-bound-migrants/2019/03/30/d6814b4252ff-11e9-bdb7-44f948cc0605_story.html. Shifrinson, Josh. 2020. “The Rise of China, Balance of Power Theory and US National Security: Reasons for Optimism?” Journal of Strategic Studies, 43(2), 175–216. Shilliam, Robbie. 2011. “The Perilous but Unavoidable Terrain of the NonWest.” In Robbie Shilliam, ed., International Relations and NonWestern Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity. Abingdon: Routledge 12–26. Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Siniver, Asaf, and Jeffrey Collins. 2015. “Airpower and Quagmire: Historical Analogies and the Second Lebanon War.” Foreign Policy Analysis 11(2): 215–231. Sitaraman, Srini. 2016. “Power and Knowledge: International Relations Scholarship in the Core and Periphery.” Asian Journal of Peacebuilding 4(2): 241–270. Sjoberg, Laura. 2013. Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War. New York: Columbia University Press.

322

References

2017. “Undisciplined IR: Thinking without a Net.” In Synne L. Dyvik, Jan Shelby, and Rorden Wilkinson, eds., What’s the Point of International Relations? New York: Routledge, 159–170. 2019. “Failure and Critique in Critical Security Studies.” Security Dialogue 50(1): 77–94. 2020. “Quantum Ambivalence.” Millennium 49(1): 126–139. Smith, David. 2020. “Trump Talks Himself Up as ‘Wartime President’ to Lead America through Crisis.” The Guardian, April 15 www.theguardian .com/us-news/2020/mar/22/trump-coronavirus-election-november-2020. Smith, Sebastian. 2021. “Biden Declares End to ‘Forever Wars’ in Afghanistan Exit.” Yahoo News, August 31 https://news.yahoo.com/ biden-battles-win-narrative-speech-145536542.html. Smith, Steve. 2000a. “The Discipline of International Relations: Still an American Social Science?” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 2(3): 374–402. 2000b. “Wendt’s World.” Review of International Studies 26(1): 151–163. 2002. “The United States and the Discipline of International Relations: ‘Hegemonic Country, Hegemonic Discipline.’” International Studies Review 4(2): 67–85. 2010. “Introduction: Disciplinarity and Diversity in International Relations Theory.” In Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith, eds., International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–12. Sobek, David. 2007. “Rallying around the Podesta: Testing Diversionary Theory across Time.” Journal of Peace Research 44(1): 29–45. Söderbäck, Fanny. 2018. “Performative Presence: Judith Butler and the Temporal Regimes of Global Assembly.” Diacritics 46(2): 32–49. Solomon, Ty. 2012. “‘I Wasn’t Angry, because I Couldn’t Believe It Was Happening’: Affect and Discourse in Responses to 9/11.” Review of International Studies 38(4): 907–928. 2014. “Time and Subjectivity in World Politics.” International Studies Quarterly 58(4): 671–681. 2015. The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2019a. “Ontological Security, Circulations of Affect, and the Arab Spring.” Journal of International Relations and Development 21(4): 934–958. 2019b. “Rhythm and Mobilization in International Relations.” International Studies Quarterly 63(4): 1001–1013. Solomon, Ty, and Brent J. Steele. 2017. “Micro-Moves in International Relations Theory.” European Journal of International Relations 23 (2): 267–291.

References

323

Sommerlad, Joe, and Chris Riotta. 2019. “President Threatens to ‘Obliterate’ Turkey Economy after Damning Syria Condemnation, Amid Reports of White House Impeachment Panic.” The Independent, October 7 www.independent.co.uk/news/world/amer icas/us-politics/trump-news-live-impeachment-ukraine-biden-turkeysyria-tweets-today-a9145661.html. Sonne, Paul. 2020. “U.S. Military Arms Its Submarines with New ‘LowYield’ Nuclear Warheads.” Washington Post, February 4. Sperling, James, and Webber, M. 2019. “Trump’s Foreign Policy and NATO: Exit and Voice.” Review of International Studies 45(3): 511–526. Spindel, Jennifer. 2019. “Yes, the Trump Administration Can Override Congress and Sell Weapons to Saudi Arabia: Even Over Republican Objections.” Washington Post, May 30 www.washingtonpost.com/pol itics/2019/05/30/yes-trump-can-override-congress-sell-weapons-saudiarabia-even-over-republican-objections/. Spinney, Laura. 2015. “How Time Flies.” The Guardian, February 23 www .theguardian.com/science/2005/feb/24/4. Spirling, Arthur. 2007. “Bayesian Approaches for Limited Dependent Variable Change Point Problems.” Political Analysis 15(4): 387–405. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1994. “Responsibility.” boundary 2 21(3): 19–64. Spruill, Larry. 2016. “Slave Patrols, ‘Packs of Negro Dogs’ and Policing Black Communities.” Phylon 53(1): 42–66. Stampnitzky, Lisa. 2013. Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented ‘Terrorism’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steele, Brent. 2008. Ontological Security in International Relations: SelfIdentity and the IR State. New York: Routledge. 2019. Restraint in International Politics Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steele, Brent J., and Jonathan M. Acuff. 2012. “Introduction: The Evolution of Generational Analysis and International Theory.” In Brent J. Steele and Jonathan M. Acuff, eds., Theory and Application of the “Generation” in International Relations and Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 3–24. Stevens, Timothy. 2015. Cybersecurity and the Politics of Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stockdale, Liam. 2013. “Imagined Futures and Exceptional Presents: A Conceptual Critique of ‘Pre-emptive Security’.” Global Change, Peace & Security 25(2): 141–157. 2015. Taming an Uncertain Future: Temporality, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Anticipatory Governance. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

324

References

2016. Taming an Uncertain Future: Temporality, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Anticipatory Governance. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Stoneham, Tom. 2009. “Time and Truth: The Presentism-Eternalism Debate.” Philosophy 84(2): 201–218. Strachan, Hew, and Sibylle Scheipers, eds. 2011. The Changing Character of War. Oxford: Oxford University Press on Demand. Subotic, Jelena. 2013. “Stories States Tell: Identity, Narrative, and Human Rights in the Balkans.” Slavic Review 72(2): 306–326. 2016. “Narrative, Ontological Security, and Foreign Policy Change.” Foreign Policy Analysis 12(4): 610–627. Svendsen, Øyvind. 2020. “‘Practice Time!’ Doxic Futures in Security and Defence Diplomacy after Brexit.” Review of International Studies 46(1): 3–19. Swaine, Jon. 2018. “Trump Inauguration Crowd Photos Edited after He Intervened.” The Guardian, September 6 www.theguardian.com/ world/2018/sep/06/donald-trump-inauguration-crowd-size-photos-edited. Sylvester, Christine. 2009. Art/Museums: International Relations Where We Least Expect It. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. 2013. “The Elusive Arts of Reflexivity in the ‘Sciences’ of International Relations.” Millennium 41(2): 309–325. Szarejko, Andrew. 2021. “Do Accidental Wars Happen? Evidence from America’s Indian Wars.” Journal of Global Security Studies 6(4): ogaa030. Tankel, Stephen. 2018. “Donald Trump’s Shadow War.” Politico, May 9 www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/05/09/donald-trumps-shadowwar-218327/. Tannenwald, Nina. 1999. “The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Normative Basis of Nuclear Non-use.” International Organization 53 (3): 433–468. 2005. “Stigmatizing the Bomb: Origins of the Nuclear Taboo.” International Security 29(4): 5–49. Taub, Amanda. 2016. “Control and Fear: What Mass Killings and Domestic Violence Have in Common,” New York Times, June 15, www.nytimes .com/2016/06/16/world/americas/control-and-fear-what-mass-killingsand-domestic-violence-have-in-common.html Tazzioli, Martina. 2018. “The Temporal Borders of Asylum. Temporality of Control in the EU Border Regime.” Political Geography 64: 13–22. Thornton, Roger. 2002. “The Peculiar Temporality of Violence: A Source of Perplexity about Social Power.” Kronoscope 2(1): 41–69. Tickner, J. Ann. 1992. Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. New York: Columbia University Press.

References

325

Tickner, Arlene. 2003. “Seeing IR Differently: Notes from the Third World.” Millennium – Journal of International Studies 32(2): 295–324. Tickner, J. Ann, and Laura Sjoberg, eds. 2013. Feminism and International Relations: Conversations about the Past, Present and Future. New York: Routledge. Tillman, Mary Katherine. 1970. “Temporality and Role-Taking in Mead.” Social Research 37(4): 533–546. Trachtenberg, Mark. 2012. The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Turner, Oliver, and Juliet Kaarbo. 2021. “Predictably Unpredictable: Trump’s Personality and Approach toward China.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 34(3): 452–471. Vabulas, Felicity, and Steven Borzyskowski. 2019. “Hello, Goodbye: When Do States Withdraw from International Organizations?” Review of International Organizations 14: 335–366. Van Munster, Rens, and Claudia Aradau. 2011. Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown. London: Routledge. Van Munster, Rens, and Casper Sylvest. 2021. “Nuclear Weapons, Extinction, and the Anthropocene: Reappraising Jonathan Schell.” Review of International Studies 47(3): 294–310. Vaughan-Williams, Nick, and Tom Lundborg. 2015. “New Materialisms, Discourse Analysis, and International Relations: A Radical Intertextual Approach.” Review of International Studies 41(1): 3–25. Väyrynen, Tarja. 2016. “Rethinking National Temporal Orders: The Subaltern Presence and Enactment of the Political.” Review of International Studies 42(4): 597–612. Vazquez, Maegan. 2018. “Trump’s Making the Migrant Caravan a Political Issue: Here are the Facts.” CNN.com, 23 October www.cnn.com/2018/ 10/22/politics/donald-trump-migrant-caravan-fact-check/index.html. Virilio, Paul. 1995. “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm.” Ctheory. net, August 27 www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=72. 2006. Speed and Politics. New York: Semiotext(e). Vitalis, Robert. 2015. White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Vucetic, Srdjan. 2011. The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Waldman, Paul. 2019. “The Trump Administration Takes Climate Denial to New Heights.” Washington Post, 29 May www.washingtonpost.com/opin ions/2019/05/28/trump-administration-takes-climate-denial-new-heights/. Walker, Rob B. J. 1989. “History and Structure in the Theory of International Relations.” Millennium 18(2): 163–183. Walker, Robert. 1991. “State Sovereignty and the Articulation of Political Space/Time.” Millennium 20(3): 445–461.

326

References

Walt, Stephen. 1991. “The Renaissance of Security Studies.” International Studies Quarterly 35(2): 105–135. Waltz, Kenneth. 1979. Theory of International Politics. Reading: Addison-Wesley. 1993. “The Emerging Structure of International Politics.” International Security 18(2): 44–79. 2002. “The Continuity of International Politics.” In Ken Booth and Tim Dunne, eds., Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 348–353. Wamsley, Laurel. 2020. “Shock and Dismay after Trump Pardons Blackwater Guards Who Killed 14 Iraqi Civilians.” NPR, December 23. www.npr .org/2020/12/23/949679837/shock-and-dismay-after-trump-pardonsblackwater-guards-who-killed-14-iraqi-civil. Wang, Jianwei. 2017. “The Discourse on China’s Rise.” China: An International Journal 15(1): 24–40. Ward, Alex. 2018. “How Trump Made the North Korea Crisis Worse.” Vox.com, December 12. www.vox.com/2018/12/12/18130628/northkorea-trump-nuclear-war-jackson. 2020. “Did Impeachment Weigh on Trump’s Soleimani Decision? Maybe.” Vox.com, January 10. www.vox.com/2020/1/10/21059905/ trump-iran-war-wsj-impeachment-soleimani. Ward, Michael D. 2016. “Can We Predict Politics? Toward What End?” Journal of Global Security Studies 1(1): 1–12. Washington Post. 2016. “Americans Need to Stand Together: Clinton’s Remarks Following the Orlando Nightclub Shooting,” Washington Post, June 13. www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/ 06/13/hillary-clintons-speech-following-the-orlando-shooting/?utm_ term=.05e28684e45a. Weber, Cynthia. 1998. “Performative States.” Millennium – Journal of International Studies 27(1): 77–95. 2014. “From Queer to Queer IR.” International Studies Review 16(4): 596–601. 2015. “Why Is There No Queer International Theory?” European Journal of International Relations 21(1): 27–51. 2016a. Queer International Relations: Sovereignty, Sexuality and the Will to Knowledge. London: Oxford University Press. 2016b. “What Is Told Is Always in the Telling: Reflections on Faking It in 21st Century IR/Global Politics.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45(1): 119–130. Weberman, David. 1997. “The Nonfixity of the Historical Past.” The Review of Metaphysics 50(4): 749–768. Wedeen, Lisa. 2015. Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria: With a New Preface. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

References

327

Wee, Sui-Lee. 2018. “Ivanka Trump Wins China Trademarks, than Her Father Vows to Save ZTE.” New York Times, May 28 www.nytimes .com/2018/05/28/business/ivanka-trump-china-trademarks.html. Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Wiebke, Nicholas J. Bell, Mariana Navarrete Morales, and Michael J. Tierney. 2016. “The IR of the Beholder: Examining Global IR Using the 2014 TRIP Survey.” International Studies Review 18(1): 16–32. Wendt, Alexander. 1992. “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics.” International Organization 46(2): 391–425. 1998. “On Constitution and Causation in International Relations.” Review of International Studies 24(5): 101–118. 1999. Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001. “Driving with the Rearview Mirror: On the Rational Science of Institutional Design.” International Organization 55(4): 1019–1049. 2003. “Why a World State Is Inevitable.” European Journal of International Relations 9(4): 491–542. 2004. “The State as Person in International Theory.” Review of International Studies 30(2): 289–316. 2005. “Social Theory as Cartesian Science: An Auto-Critique from a Quantum Perspective.” In Stefano Guzzini and Anna Leander, eds., Constructivism and International relations: Alexander Wendt and His Critics. London: Routledge. 2015. Quantum Mind and Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wendt, Alexander, and Raymond Duvall. 2008. “Sovereignty and the UFO.” Political Theory 36(4): 607–633. Westerman, Ashley, Brian Benk, and David Greene. 2020. “In 2020, Protests Spread across the Globe with a Similar Message: Black Lives Matter.” NPR, December 30 www.npr.org/2020/12/30/950053607/in2020-protests-spread-across-the-globe-with-a-similar-message-blacklives-matt. Western, Bruce, and Meredith Kleykamp. 2004. “A Bayesian Change Point Model for Historical Time Series Analysis.” Political Analysis 12 (4):354–374. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1933. Modes of Thought. New York, Macmillan. Wight, Colin. 2006. Agents, Structures, and International Relations: Politics as Ontology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wight, Colin, and Jonathan Joseph. 2010. “Scientific Realism and International Relations.” In Jonathan Joseph and Colin Wight, eds., Scientific Realism and International Relations. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–30. Wight, Colin. 2016. “Maps, Models, and Theories: A Scientific Realist Approach to Validity.” In Annette Freyberg-Inan, Ewan Harrison, and

328

References

Patrick James, eds., Evaluating Progress in International Relations: How Do You Know? New York: Routledge, 31–50. Williams, Michael C. 2004. “Why Ideas Matter in International Relations: Hans Morgenthau, Classical Realism, and The Moral Construction Of Power Politics.” International Organization 58(4): 633–665. 2005. The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Edward. 2012. “Thank You Vasili Arkhipov, The Man Who Stopped Nuclear War.” The Guardian, October 27 www.theguardian .com/commentisfree/2012/oct/27/vasili-arkhipov-stopped-nuclear-war. Wimmer, Andreas. 2012. Waves of War: Nationalism, State Formation and Ethnic Exclusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wohlforth, William C. 2008. “Realism.” In Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, eds., Oxford Handbook of International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 131–149. Woodly, Deva. 2020. “An American Reckoning: The Fire This Time.” Public Seminar, June 4 https://publicseminar.org/essays/an-american-reckoning/. Xiang, Lanshin. 2001. “Washington’s Misguided China Policy.” Survival 43 (3): 7–24. Yglesias, Matt. 2016. “Don’t Let Trump’s Antics Distract You from What’s Really Important.” Vox.com, November 19 www.vox.com/2016/11/ 19/13685762/donald-trump-hamilton-distraction. Youatt, Rafi. 2014. “Interspecies Relations, International Relations: Rethinking Anthropocentric Politics.” Millennium 43(1): 207–223. 2020. Interspecies Politics: Nature, Borders, States. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Young, Iris Marion. 2003. “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29(1): 1–25. Younis, Musab. 2018. “Race, the World and Time: Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia (1914–1945).” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 46(3): 352–370. Youssef, Nancy, and Alicia Caldwell. 2018. “Trump to Deploy 5,200 Troops to the Border.” The Wall Street Journal, October 30 www.wsj .com/articles/military-to-deploy-5-000-troops-to-southern-border-u-sofficials-say-1540820650. Zanotti, Laura. 2019. Ontological Entanglements, Agency, and Ethics in International Relations: Exploring the Crossroads. London: Routledge. Zurcher, Anthony. 2017. “Donald Trump’s Nuclear Fixation – From the 1980s to Now.” BBC News, 10 August www.bbc.com/news/world-uscanada-40879868.

Index

Afghanistan conflict US troop withdrawal 11, 13, 176 as war 149 Al Qaeda 9–10 alien invasion hypothesis 259–260 amplification, presentist tool 86–88 analogies baseball ‘greats’ 83–84 historical 10, 33–34, 36 soccer match modeling 55–56 anarchy 106–107, 119–120, 134 Anthropocene 17, 123, 229–230 Arab Spring 260, 273 Arendt, Hannah 85, 238–240 astrology 231–232 Bain, William 69–73 balance of power 110–111, 117, 118 Battle of New Orleans 11–12, 159 Berenskoetter, Felix 33, 51, 205, 266 Biden administration 11, 13, 124–125, 174, 190–191 Biden, Hunter 176, 194 Biden, Joe 149, 174 Black lives movement 185–186 Bolton, John 177 borders and indigenous groups 140 temporal 75–76, 127–128, 154–157, 245–247 US border crises 176–177, 190, 192, 194–195 boundless time 54 Bourdieu, Pierre 49, 139 Brexit 1–2, 114–115, 124, 155–156 British Empire 72–73 Bush administration 13–15, 129 Butler, Judith 21–22, 75–77, 245–247

Campbell, David 96, 252 Capitol Hill insurrection (2021) 149 causality 97–98, 224–225 change constructivism 138, 140–141 and (dis)continuity 22–23, 78–79, 84 liberal institutionalism 132–133 and the present 22–23 presentist tool 78–79 realism theory 118–120 versus stability 215 China rising power 13–15, 111–112, 273–274 time zones 12 US–China dynamics 13–15, 111–113, 190, 193–194 chronopolitics 9, 51, 86, 277 classical realism 105–106, 109–110 Clausewitz, Karl, On War 10, 35, 144, 150 climate change effects 4 long-term challenge 195–196 political concerns 3, 123, 273–274 universality and temporality 16–17 US withdrawal from Paris accords 182, 190 clock-time 18, 19, 20–21, 92 Cold War ending of 208–209, 257, 260, 273 failure to predict ending 1, 165–166, 198, 203, 210 submarine commanders 12 and world stability 154 colonialism 42–43, 152, 216–217 consecutivity 97–99

329

330 constructivism 133–141 background 133–134 change and contingency 140–141 change vs continuity 138 emergence 137–138 heterotemporality 138–140 and material facts 61–62 and prediction 204 and sociality 135, 138–139, 141 temporal scope 134–137 contingency 22–23, 108–109, 118–120, 132–133, 140–141, 217–219 continuity 22–23, 78–79, 84, 95–96, 121–122 COVID-19 pandemic 3, 177, 178, 181–182, 186 Cox, Robert 59, 96, 234–235, 245 crises 22–23, 57, 71, 150 crisis, of IR 1–2 critical realism 204 critical theory 50–51, 62, 205 cybersecurity 9, 51 Debrix, François 51 democratic peace and dispossessed groups 130 emergence 126–128 Euro-American influence 125, 130 liberal institutionalism 61, 88 and predictive claims 61 temporality 121 US foreign policy 129 Der Derian, James 33–34, 86, 252, 277 Derrida, Jacques 95 deterrence 116–117 difference 32, 245–248, 267 Disciplinary IR 200, 202 Disciplinary Prediction 29–30, 200, 203–204 dispossessed groups 130, 140, 220–221 Drezner, Daniel 39–40, 108, 109 drone strikes 153, 195 Edelstein, David 109–110 emergence constructivism 137–138 democratic peace theory 126–128 and fluid time 85 IR theories 53–58 liberal institutionalism 125–128

Index paradox of timelessness 79–80, 112 presentist perspective 54–55, 71, 84–85 presentist tool 84–86 realist frames 111–115 temporal distanciation 73–74, 108 in war 165–167 empires 42–43, 72–73 English School 69–73 eternalism 38, 96 ethical responsibilities of IR 25–26, 32, 243–248 ethnographic present 247–248 Euro-American influence in IR 3–4, 25, 91, 92, 111–112, 117, 125, 130, 152, 159 Europe, future projections 114–115 feminist institutionalism 125 Floyd, George 185–186 fluid time 85, 151–154 foreign policy scholarship 171–172 see also Trump administration foreign policy; US foreign policy Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 44 Fukuyama, Francis 128–129 future connection to the past 39–40 great power scenarios 114–115 IR theory 104 of liberal international order 131–132 long term vs short term 109–110 “shadow of the future” 95 see also prediction Gaddis, John Lewis 1, 6, 198, 203 gender 62, 247 generations 162, 163 geological time 17, 44, 123, 229–230 Giddens, Anthony 49, 278 great powers China as rising power 13–15, 111–112, 273–274 China–US dynamics 13–15, 111–113, 190, 193–194 comparability issues 114–115 conflict 5 empires 42–43, 72–73 temporality 161

Index heterotemporality constructivism 138–140 and difference 32, 245–248, 267 and Disciplinary Prediction 202–206 liberal institutionalism 128–132 of the present 31, 51, 81–84 presentist tool 81–84 realism 115–120 US politics 186 and war 157–159 historical institutionalism 123, 131 historical past 143, 206–207, 216–217 historical sociology 33, 50 historiography 242–243 Hobson, John M. 33, 49 Hom, Andrew 10, 51, 52–53, 81, 148 Hoy, David Couzens 47–48, 94–95 Hurricane Maria 176 Hutchings, Kimberly 51, 68–69, 81–82, 150, 216–217, 235 hypothesis testing 202, 205, 250–251, 253, 271 imperialism 42–43, 72–73 indigenous communities 129–130, 140, 220–221 institutional development 132–133 international organizations Brexit 1–2, 114–115, 124, 155–156 shifting temporal terrain 123–124 US withdrawals 115, 124–125, 182–183, 190 IR scholarship accumulation of insight 89–91, 96–97, 241–242 amplification 86–88 conservative status quo bias 63–64 crisis 1–2 Disciplinary IR 200, 202 durational qualities 253 entity/attribute dichotomy 59–60 ethical responsibilities 25–26, 32, 243–248 Euro-American influence 3–4, 25, 91, 92, 111–112, 117, 125, 130, 152, 159 historical and geological methods compared 43–44 historical sociology 33, 50 intellectual responsibility 32, 241–244

331 lasting impact 237–238 new media and multimedia use 252–253, 265–266 Newtonian approach 37–38, 64, 224 and political relevance 254–257 positionality 23–25, 237–244 potential future 228, 230–232, 236 responsibilities to audience 234–235, 240–241 spatiality 277–278 temporality 49–53, 74 IR theory East Asian IR 113–114 epistemological assumptions 88–93 grand theories and prediction 208–210 ontological assumptions 93–99 segregation 58–63, 276 taxonomy of prediction 60–63 and temporality 100–102 value for a presentist approach 102–105 Iran nuclear program 190 Qassam Soleimani assassination 176, 182–183, 184 Iraq war (2003) 125, 153, 210 ISIS 12, 257 Israel, in Palestine 125 Jackson, Patrick 58–59, 137, 203–205, 217 Japan, World War II events 43, 45 Khashoggi, Jamal 177, 191–192 liberal institutionalism 120–133 background 120–122 change and contingency 132–133 democratic peace 61, 88 emergence 125–128 heterotemporality 128–132 and prediction 61 temporal scope 122–125 liberal international order 131–132 Lundborg, Tom 51, 53, 59, 96 “Make America Great Again” 168–169, 181 marginalized communities 130, 140, 220–221 US Black lives movement 185–186

332 Mead, George Herbert 46, 49, 69–71, 84 Mearsheimer, John 105, 118, 208–210 media communication policies as distraction 175–177 social media use by IR scholars 252–253, 265–266 metaphysics of time 36, 37–41 migration 91 US border crises 176–177, 190, 192, 194–195 Mitzen, Jennifer 111 Moran, Chuk 71–72 Morgenthau, Hans 105, 154, 203, 258 NATO post-Cold War scenarios 208–209, 257 Trump challenges 189–190 neoconservatism 129 new institutionalism 125 Newtonian approach to IR 37–38, 64, 224 nonfixity, presentist tool 79–81, 260–262 norms behavioral constraints 189 nonuse of nuclear weapons 97–98, 134–137, 192–193 stability and continuity 140–141 US rejection 174–175, 189–193 North Korea, prediction scenarios 216, 226 North Korean crisis 177, 184, 188, 190 nuclear weapons deterrence 116–117 Iran’s program 190 and marginalized communities 140 norm of nonuse 97–98, 134–137, 192–193 oversight 136 Ukraine 208–209 US low-yield weapons 136, 137 US policy 190, 227 Obama administration 14, 45 Obama, Barack, on war on terror 13 ontological security 62, 104 Pakistan 153 Paris accords (climate change) 182, 190

Index past fixed and unchanging 43–44 historical past 143, 206–207, 216–217 interpretation through presentist lens 4–6, 258–260 IR conception 41–47, 77, 143–144, 159 knowability 45–46 lost history 83–84 meaningful past 82–83 objective reality 44–45 and possible futures 39–40 presumed continuity 82–84 real events 42–43 performativity 75 in war 96, 164–167 periodization of time 16–17, 152, 159, 206–207 policy historical lessons 36 and prediction 202 presentist scholarship 254–257 relevance of IR studies 249–254 see also foreign policy; Trump administration foreign policy; US foreign policy political elites 130, 163 political time 51–52, 177–178 political violence 147–148, 149, 155, 157–158 positionality, in IR scholarship 23–25, 237–244 positivism 19, 37, 58, 79–80, 198, 199 possibilism 38 postpositivism 30, 58, 62, 234–236 postcolonialism 62 poststructuralism 50–51, 86 power balance of power 110–111, 117 power transitions 109–110 protean power 108–109 simultaneity as source 175–180, 183 temporality 108–109 see also dispossessed groups practice theory 70 prediction alternative nondisciplinary agenda 198–199, 213–223 alternative timing orders 216–217 as a concept 199–201

Index contingent predictions 217–219 Disciplinary Prediction 29–30, 200, 203–204 and heterotemporal present 202–206 IR failures and drawbacks 1–2, 55–58, 72–74, 91, 203, 210 IR scholarship 198–199, 201, 202–206 IR taxonomy 60–63 limitations of social science and hypothesis testing 206–208 new social science approaches 224–226 potential IR tools 201–202, 226–232 and regularity of events 206–208 stability rather than change 214–215 traditional social science approaches 210–213 unidirectionality of time 201, 223–225 Present Studies 279–280 present/presentism amplification 86–88 analytical and conceptual resource 20–26, 65–67 change and (dis)continuity 22–23, 78–79, 84 and contemporary politics 171–172 as dividing line 57–58 and emergence 54–55, 84–86 ethnographic present 247–248 as frame of analysis 75–77, 265–268 and global politics 2–3 heterotemporality 31, 51, 81–84 in historiography 242–243 innovation via temporal imaginary 68–74, 99 IR orienting frame 31, 268, 271–275 IR theories 101–105, 235–236, 254–257 knowledge production without accumulation of insight 89–91, 96–97 multiple presents and prediction 219–223 nonconsecutivity 97–99 nonfixity 79–81, 260–262 ongoing indefinite present 185–188, 194–195 ontology 93–97 and the past 4–6, 258–260

333 postpositive inquiry 235–236 and reflexivity 158 as shared intellectual agenda 268–269, 275–280 temporally contingent epistemologies 91–93 theoretical and practical value 6–7 toolkit 27, 67, 77–88 protean power 108–109 Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria 176 quantum social theory 70–71, 214, 225, 272–273, 278 queer studies 223, 228 racist nationalism 115, 172, 179, 181, 184–185, 222 realism 105–120 background 105–109 change and contingency 118–120 core assumptions 106–107 and emergence 111–115 heterotemporality 115–120 and power 108–109 and prediction 60–61 temporal scope 109–111, 126 and temporality 106–109 and timelessness 112, 117 realpolitik 106–107 reflexive analysis 239–241, 267 revisionism 15 Rice, Condoleeza 13 right-wing groups 1–2, 3, 90–91 Saudi Arabia arms sales 195 killing of Jamal Khashoggi 177, 191–192 US relations 191–192, 193 security cybersecurity 9, 51 potential future agendas 226–227, 231 present threats 95 as realpolitik 106–107 and sovereign subjectivity 96 and temporality 52 see also terrorism security dilemma 111, 117 September 11 attacks 9–10, 115, 147, 228–230, 260, 273

334 sexual politics 245–247 simultaneity 175–180, 183, 254 social media, in IR 252–253, 265–266 social sciences limitations 37, 206–208 new approaches 224–226 traditional approaches 210–213 sociality 21, 41, 49, 69–71, 135, 138–139, 141 Soleimani, Qassam 176, 182–183, 184 South Korea 190 spatiality 277–278 stability 214–215 state, the, potential future 230–231 states balance of power 110–111, 117, 118 surveillance and control 9 temporal othering 180–181 Stevens, Timothy 51, 53 strategic studies 35 structural realism 105–106, 109–110 subjectivity, in IR scholarship 23–25, 237–244 Sun-Tzu, The Art of War 35, 150, 229 Syria US actions 153, 183, 195 US troop withdrawal announcements 176 taxonomy, IR scholarship 58–63 temporal borders 75–76, 127–128, 154–157, 245–247 temporal consecutivity 97–99 temporal directionality 86, 89–90 temporal fluidity 85, 151–154 temporal levels of analysis 130, 159–163 temporal malleability 151–154 temporal nonfixity 79–81, 260–262 temporal othering 180–185 temporal plurality 81–82 temporality definition 47–48 and global politics 8–10, 15–17, 263–264 historical analogies 10, 33–34, 36 IR central feature 8–17, 34, 71–72 IR scholarship critique 5–7, 49–53 lessons from history 10–12 proposed intellectual agenda 264–265, 267–268

Index in theory and practice of politics 268, 269–271 see also heterotemporality terrorism AUMF (Authorization of the Use of Military Force) 45, 149 bombing of USS Cole 45 definition difficulties 250–251 forecasting difficulties 251 and IR scholarship 209–210, 249–251, 256 slippage between actors 90–91 see also war on terror Thornton, Roger 147–148 time alternative timing orders 216–217 bounded and boundless 54 clock-time 18, 19, 20–21, 92 and continuity 15–17, 56 debate on universality and linearity 17–20, 40–41 definition 47–48 fluid time 85 IR’s uncritical assumptions 48–49 metaphysical discussions 36, 37–41 neutrality 18–19 paradoxical understandings 34–35 periodization of historical events 16–17, 152, 159, 206–207 as social construct 263 time horizons 109, 161, 163, 229 Trump’s short time horizons 188–189, 193–196 time scales 9–10, 123, 228–230, 257 timelessness 79–80, 107, 112, 115–116, 117, 204–205 toolkit, for presentism analysis 27, 67, 77–88 torture 175, 189 transactionalism 193–195 Treaty of Westphalia (1648) 16, 159 Trump administration bureaucratic contraction 190 communication policies 175–177 corruption and criminal charges 177 COVID-19 failings 3, 177, 178, 181–182, 186 falsehoods 179, 187 foreign policy see Trump administration foreign policy

Index ongoing indefinite present 185–188, 194–195 predictable imaginary 222 racist nationalism 115, 172, 179, 181, 184–185, 222 response to Hurricane Maria 176 simultaneity as source of power and distraction 175–180, 183 temporal dynamics 169–170, 174, 180–185, 196–197 troop redeployment for border control 176–177, 192, 194–195 white nationalism 115, 172, 179, 181, 184–185, 222 Trump administration foreign policy break with tradition 173 characteristics 188–189 and China 14–15, 190, 193–194 colonialist tradition continuation 173–174 democratic peace 129 diversionary activities to control the agenda 175–178, 254 and human rights violations 191–192 lack of restraint 174–175, 189–193 military action and public opinion 254 and NATO 189–190 North Korean crisis 177, 184, 188, 190 policy actions without prior consultation 179–180 temporal dynamics 150, 182–183 transactional nature 193–195 troop withdrawals 11, 13, 176 withdrawal from international order 115, 124–125, 182–183, 190 Trump, Donald business and family interests 193–194 Capitol Hill insurrection (2021) 149 and China 14–15, 193–194 election (2016) 1–2, 155–156, 230 election (2020) 182, 185 erosion of democracy and international institutions 115 impeachment distractions 176, 178 Japan visit 187 Keep America Great 169, 183–184 Make America Great Again 168–169, 181, 183–184

335 pardons for criminals and loyalists 178 personalist motivation 193–194 presidential candidate (2024) 173 viability of Trumpism 172–173 Trump, Ivanka 177 Ukraine 176, 208–209 urban politics 220 US Black lives movement 185–186 Capitol Hill insurrection (2021) 149 Confederate “heroes” 45 contemporary failings 3 election (2016) 1–2, 155–156, 230 election (2020) 179, 182, 185, 195 foreign policy see Trump administration foreign policy; US foreign policy Hurricane Maria 176 military see US military policing 186 public disillusionment with politics 178 September 11 attacks 9–10, 115, 147, 228–230, 260, 273 white nationalism 115, 172, 179, 181, 184–185, 222 US foreign policy Afghanistan 11, 13 China 13–15, 111–113, 190 and democratic peace 129 Iraq War (2003) 153, 210 lack of restraint 174–175, 189–193 nuclear weapons 136, 137 short-termism and personal motivation 193–194 threat pre-emption possibilities 226–227 Vietnam War 11 violent nonstate actors and terrorism 90–91 war on terror 12–13, 45, 52, 115, 147, 153–154, 156, 163 withdrawal from international order 115, 124–125, 182–183, 190 see also Trump administration foreign policy US military AUMF (Authorization of the Use of Military Force) 45, 149

336 US military (cont.) dominance 164 drone strikes 153, 195 low-yield nuclear weapons 136, 137 redeployment for border control 176–177, 192, 194–195 troop withdrawals 11, 13, 176 Trump pardons 192 Vietnam War 11 violence 90–91, 156–157, 207 see also political violence; war Walt, Stephen 154, 208–209 Waltz, Kenneth 65–97, 105, 110, 117, 118, 208, 209–210, 258, 259 war apparent coherence 163–164 as collective performance 163–167 concept 145–146, 156–157 continuity of origins 9–10 dangers of analogies from the past 10 deviation from the expected strategy 164 directionality 161–162 emergence and newness 165–167 Euro-US imaginary 152, 158 generational factors 162

Index heterotemporal difference 157–159 introduction 143–145 IR theories 149–150 lessons of history 4–5, 10–12 past-centric IR focus 143–144, 159 politics of time 10–12, 45 presentist approach 144–145, 147–148, 150–151, 167 strategic studies 35 temporal boundaries 154–157 temporal levels of analysis 130, 159–163 temporal malleability 151–154 war on terror experienced by different levels of society 163 future assumptions changed by 115 temporal break 147 temporal expansiveness 12–13, 45, 153–154 temporal purpose 52, 156 Wendt, Alexander 61–62, 134, 225 white nationalism 115, 172, 179, 181, 184–185, 222 World War I 9, 10–11, 44, 151 World War II 5, 42–43 Yemen 153