International Relations and the Problem of Time 9780198850014

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International Relations and the Problem of Time

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/04/20, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/04/20, SPi

International Relations and the Problem of Time A N D R EW  R .  HOM

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Andrew R. Hom 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019957826 ISBN 978–0–19–885001–4 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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For my grandmothers – May Hom, whose humor, grace, and Chinese cooking at the Montana Cafe left an indelible mark on the Bitterroot Valley; Helen Sharp, gone too soon, whose distinctive laugh and sneaky sweets let us know how much she loved having her grandchildren around; and Rita “Rickey” Lee, who lived ninety-eight years like they were her last, passed on her own terms, and from great trauma wove together a new family that I grew up believing had been around since time immemorial.

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Acknowledgments This book took a long time and incurred many debts along the way. Parts of it began as a PhD thesis at Aberystwyth University’s Department of International Politics, which generously funded my studies. While there, I benefited greatly from the excellent supervision of Will Bain, Campbell Craig, and Hidemi Suganami, whose persistent skepticism helped me elaborate and temper many a key point. Andrew Linklater engaged the project out of curiosity and it was his suggestion to read Elias’s Essay on Time that provided my Eureka! moment. Additionally, Kim Hutchings offered encouragement throughout my studies and has been an inspirational scholar and staunch advocate ever since. This book would not have been the same without their combined efforts. I owe a very special thanks to Brent Steele, who inspired me to return to graduate school and gave a vital early push toward my interest in time. He has since provided friendship along with immeasurable professional support, even though he  was supposed to be rid of me in 2008. For getting me into this profession and  showing me how to inhabit it with good cheer and elbows out, I thank him. Similarly, I met Jack Amoureux, Mauro Carraccioli, Kathryn Fisher, Jamie Frueh, Harry Gould, Eric Heinze, Daniel Levine, Chris McIntosh, and Dave McCourt under various circumstances and they all became fast friends, against their better judgment. I was lucky enough to study and work in several exceptionally supportive en­vir­on­ments. The University of Kansas Political Science graduate cohort offered the sorts of seminar discussions I’d always dreamed of. I enjoyed weekly (daily) arguments with Cristian Cantir and now look forward to catching up with him, Luke Campbell, Terilynn Huntingon, and Andri Innes whenever possible. At Aberystwyth, Ken Booth, Megan Daigle, Toni Erskine, Gerald Hughes, Peter Jackson, Sarah Jenkins, Vincent Keating, Milja Kurki, Dan McCarthy, Andrew Priest, Damien van Puyvelde, Laura Routley, Jan Rucizka, and Kamila Stullerova became colleagues, mentors, and friends. I miss cycling through the Welsh hills with Bobby, LaFleur, and Slugger; and arguing IR theory with Dr. J, Dr. K, and Wallace. At Vanderbilt, John Geer offered research support and Emily Nacol conspired with her old roommate, Michelle Murray, to arrange a conference “play date” with Chris McIntosh over whisky and time. Faye Donnelly, Tony Lang, Vassilis Paipais, and Nick Rengger made my short stay at St Andrews enjoyable. Ryan Beasley and I have had enough fun chats about foreign policy and time that we finally decided to write some things together.

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viii Acknowledgments Cian O’Driscoll, Kurt Mills, Phil O’Brien, Ty Solomon, and Andee Wallace formed a tight-knit cohort at Glasgow. In addition to other epithets, I am lucky to call them all friends. Cian endured many of the arguments here in written, cafe, or pub form. He is—it pains me so greatly to say—an excellent scholar and mentor. Phil provided a sterling example of how not to follow ice hockey, Ty co­ord­in­ated conference attire with me, and Andee made our grant project smarter in many ways, including preventing the Principal Investigator from following the wrong Chris Brown on Twitter. I am grateful to Edinburgh PIR for its excellent research environment. Ailsa Henderson, Elizabeth Bomberg, and Iain Hardie offered support and sage advice; Jamie Allinson and especially Julia Calvert endured a shared office with me—and the requisite gossip that entails; and I made a number of good colleagues and pals across the department. Special thanks to Julie Kaarbo for her long friendship, from taking a huge chance on admitting me to the KU Masters program to helping me get to Edinburgh in more ways than one. The book benefits from many close reads. Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Anna Agathangelou, Claudia Aradau, Fiona Adamson, Felix Berenskoetter, Mick Dillon, Faye Donnelly, Mary Dudziak, Daniel Green, Iain Hardie, Caroline Holmqvist, Milja Kurki, Tony Lang, Daniel Levine, Debbie Lisle, Chris McIntosh, Andrew Neal, Dan Nexon, Astrid Nordin, Phil Schrodt, Ty Solomon, Tim Stevens, Mathias Thaler, Ritu Vij, Edinburgh’s International Relations Research Group, Aberystwyth’s GRoup on International Theory, Glasgow’s International Relations Reading Group, and St Andrews’ Wednesday Research Seminar read various papers. They all commented generously and helped me avoid some glaring oversights. Any remaining errors are my own. Thanks especially to Ugur Ozdemir, who, on the one hand, roots for the wrong baseball team, but, on the other, read my quantitative chapter and spent several hours discussing time in data analysis. Finally, I learned much from three anonymous reviewers going above and beyond the call of peer review. Thanks to Dominic Byatt, Olivia Wells, and their team at OUP for believing in this project and shepherding it through wisely and efficiently. I am grateful to Amanda Anstee for nuanced copyediting, to Antonio DiBiagio for compiling a comprehensive index, and to Shanmugasundaram Balasubramanian for final production. It has been a pleasure to work with all of them, made even better when Dominic emailed out of the blue with seven magical words: “Turns out, I’m a Tragically Hip fan.” Finally, I thank my family. My parents, Harry and Susan, my brother Brian and  his wonderful brood, and my in-laws, Jerry and Sylvia, all tolerated and encouraged a meandering path that led us to settle much further away from them than anticipated. My wife, Halle O’Neal, has always been a beautiful creature and mind, and it has been an absolute pleasure watching her evolve into a great

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Acknowledgments  ix scholar and even better mother. She is an ardent source of inspiration, love, and peace, which I do not deserve but gratefully receive. Our two perfect sons, Hank and Atticus, provide constant, chaotic joy. While I might recall the times before they were born, I can no longer imagine life without their capers and cuddles. Halle, Hank, and Atti, you are my daily glimpses of eternity, I love you so much.

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Contents List of Figures

xiii

Introduction: Two Minutes to Midnight

1

I .   T I M I N G T H E O RY A N D I N T E R NAT IO NA L R E L AT IO N S 1. Timing: The Basic Framework

27

2. Why Timing Matters

54

3. Telling Time: A Theory of Narrative Timing

82

I I .   VA R I E T I E S O F T I M I N G I N I N T E R NAT IO NA L R E L AT IO N S 4. Disciplinary History: Timing Crises in International Relations

111

5. Methodologies: Narrative Reasoning About a Time-Bound World

133

6. Quantitative Approaches: Mathematical Metaphors for Eternity

159

7. Historical Institutionalism: From Pathological to Temporal Institutions

185

8. Critical Approaches: Past Times, Fast Times, and the Rapture of Rupture

208

Conclusion: Re-timing and Reclaiming International Relations

232

References Index

245 291

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List of Figures 1. Response to timing breakdowns

38

2. Timing qualities

42

3. Timing and time symbols

70

4. Narrative timing

105

5. Narrative reasoning and the Time-bound world

157

6. Timing qualities in IR

239

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Introduction Two Minutes to Midnight

On 25 January 2018, the President and CEO of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Rachel Bronson, called a press conference.1 In it, she cataloged rising tensions on the Korean peninsula and the Russia–NATO frontier; uncertainty about nuclear proliferation; arms racing between Pakistan and India; geopolitical competition in the South China Sea; unpredictable US leadership and diplomacy’s descent into “a surreal sense of unreality”; the impact of information technologies on democratic institutions; and climate change. To highlight this “perilous world security situation” the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board moved “the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock 30 seconds closer to catastrophe. It is now two minutes to midnight—the closest the Clock has ever been to Doomsday, and as close as it was in 1953, at the height of the Cold War.”2 Bronson hoped that “this resetting of the Clock will be interpreted exactly as it is meant—as an urgent warning of global danger. The time for world leaders to address looming nuclear danger and the continuing march of climate change is long past. The time for the citizens of the world to demand such action is now.” Timely intervention might still “turn back the clock” because “the danger is of our own making.” So is the time. The Doomsday Clock tells us so. On the one hand, it evokes the ceaseless motion of synchronized gears driving us ever forward in precise increments. On the other hand, it contradicts technical standards and social habits of modern time reckoning, moving backward and forward a mere thirty seconds to a minute in some years (and not at all in most) to reckon global apocalypse. Unlike other clocks, we wish that it would wind backward or at least remain stuck. We despair that over the past decade, some four minutes elapsed. In a golden age of time reckoning, when caesium atomic vibrations or quartz crystals construct precise and reliable time units beyond human apprehension,

1  Unless noted, all quotes taken from (Bronson 2018). 2 The Bulletin also introduced a Twitter hashtag, #rewindtheDoomsdayClock, a “Doomsday Dashboard” to its website which included an animation of global risk entitled ‘Know the Time’ (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists  2018), and commissioned an original music video, “Two Minutes to Midnight” (available at https://vimeo.com/252734746). Two years later, to highlight “the most dangerous situation that humanity has ever faced”, the Bulletin moved the clock to “100 seconds to midnight”, adopting the smaller reckoning unit for the first time in its history (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 2020). Jerry Brown (2020), the two-time governor of California, explained the move: “How else can we tell people where we’re at? . . . Let us not let the moment pass” (see also Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 2020). International Relations and the Problem of Time. Andrew R. Hom, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andrew R. Hom. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850014.001.0001

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2  International Relations and the Problem of Time when a vast assemblage of technologies coordinate and regulate myriad global processes down to the nanosecond, we still talk about apocalypse in terms of fraught seconds and minutes stretched taut over the years. For over seven decades, humanity has perched between two and seventeen minutes to midnight. Our technological achievements reckon time units with ever-growing precision, but those same units expand and contract in our shared anticipation of unprecedented and unimaginable catastrophe. The Doomsday Clock calls forth both the steady march of time and a descent into wreck and ruin—measured passage toward immeasurable desolation. This productive tension between neutral and dangerous time describes the study of global politics more generally. Change and danger seem ubiquitous and inseparable; stability and progress desirable yet fleeting. Each new tick of the clock seems to include the possibility that polities will break up, diplomacy will break down, or violence will break out. In this way, both the academic field of International Relations (IR) and the Doomsday Clock recapitulate a longstanding relationship between humans and time, henceforth called the problem of Time.3 Although we will soon explore this at length, the basic idea is that time flows of its own accord and naturally brings dissolution, discord, and death. How can such dissimilar and even diametric qualities be gathered under the same singular term, “time”? How can we shift so easily between treating it as a malevolent natural force and a neutral dimension reckoned by repetitive motion? What does this apparent contradiction tell us about time more generally and its influence on our efforts to understand global politics? This book works to sort out such puzzles in IR’s relationship to time. To do so, it reconstructs IR’s temporal imagination, developing a novel argument that time is fundamental to international politics and IR because both practical and the­or­ et­ic­al domains are constituted by timing activities, or efforts to construct and relate important change processes according to some standard or frame of reference so that they unfold in intelligible and useful ways. While it focuses on the academic study of global politics, the book understands IR as a “metapractical” domain (Gunnell 2011, 1455) continuous with wider political practices. Symbolic representations of timing activities become the “times” that scholars find in global politics and deploy in IR discourse. However, the way these “times” emerge masks their dynamic and processual roots, making them seem like freestanding or nat­ ural features of existence rather than markers of practical, creative, and in­trin­sic­ al­ly political projects. IR scholars grapple with complex and dynamic political processes and the temporal assumptions and concepts on which they rely feed into the much larger stream of timing efforts and time symbols, all of which 3  Working with a term as common as time presents numerous usage challenges. For clarity, where feasible I use “time” to summarize others’ arguments and capitalize Time to indicate time per se or in reference to a single cohesive phenomenon.

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Introduction  3 constitute Time as such.4 Throughout, I argue that treating temporal phenomena as evidence of underlying timing efforts provides a more systematic and coherent account of time and its importance to global politics and IR. It also affords us novel and provocative perspectives on key theoretical and methodological debates, with important consequences for IR’s vocational identity. This book attempts to change the way we understand time, and in so doing to transform the way we approach IR as an intellectual and political project.

Politics as a Matter of Time Beyond the Doomsday Clock, time matters across a range of political domains. During World War One, soldiers in the trench hated their newly issued wristwatches (which in different circumstances would have been expensive status symbols) because they merely counted off the moments until new orders sent them “over the top” and into the “black and lethal abyss” of mechanized slaughter (Kern 1983, 293 quoting Blunden). In 1939, Adolf Hitler maintained a relentless pace of strategic planning, scarcely conquering Poland before moving on to the invasion of France. He worried that time would, “in general, work against us if we do not use it wisely. The economic resources of the other side are stronger. The enemy can purchase and transport. Nor is time working for us in the military sense” (Gellately 2012, 375; see also McKay 2016, 1). Indeed, Time was Hitler’s constant nemesis: “Time—and it’s always Time, you notice—would have been increasingly against us” (quoted in Fischer 2011, 145). Blitzkrieg warfare, emphasizing speed and the initiative, emerged in part as a strategic solution to Germany’s temporal dilemmas. Two decades later, the National Liberation Front (NLF) of Vietnam developed unique routines for building unit cohesion in personnel drawn from close-knit villages. These rituals turned military service into a communal way of meeting all daily needs, which in turn allowed units to fight less often while subsisting in the jungle almost indefinitely. Such tactics helped the NLF deliberately slow its op­er­ ation­al pace against a technologically superior adversary, which sapped American momentum and morale. In the Vietnam War, time was “the ‘ultimate weapon’ of the Revolution, as well as the ‘final guarantor of victory’ ” (Nguyen 2008, 377). If Nazi Germany’s “tragedy” was to “never have enough time” (Hitler, quoted in Fischer  2011, 145; see McKay  2016, 1), North Vietnam’s triumph depended on expanding wartime beyond American limits (see Hom 2018a, 75–6).

4  Time in IR exemplifies the “double hermeneutic,” a “logically necessary part of social science” in which “lay actors” and social scientific “metalanguages” co-constitute “the meaningful social world” (Giddens 1984, 374; see also Davis 2005, 157).

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4  International Relations and the Problem of Time A quarter century after, the United States initiated the war on terror in response to events now known by calendrical shorthand, “9/11.” This conflict recently passed a generational threshold, growing older than those enlisting to fight it.5 With eerie anticipation, in late 2001 the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Center installed a permanent plaque over its entrance, reading: “TODAY IS SEPTEMBER 12, 2001” (Mazzetti  2013, 11). Almost two decades hence, persistent temporal concerns drove the US Special Operations Command’s new artificial intelligence strategy: “how can we predict . . . and mitigate those risks that come with acting early? . . . We want to get the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right format so they can actually take some kind of action” (Lee 2019). Historically, time featured prominently in political revolutions. During the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, the 1792 National Convention proposed a new calendar of twelve 30-day months divided into three 10-day weeks, or décades. According to the Minutes of the Convention’s Committee of Public Instruction (Guillaume, quoted in Zerubavel 1985, 28), the décade made the day “the functional analogue of the meter and the gram” and substituted “ ‘the reality of reason for the visions of ignorance’ ” in religious calendars.6 Although it enjoyed some success, French subjects did not readily accept the décade’s reduction and re-configuration of their Sunday rest, and in 1805 France reinstated the unreasonable seven-day week. Following the Russian Revolution, the Fifth Congress’s “Rationalization Section” proposed the nepreryvka, an “uninterrupted production week,” achieved by staggering rest days. Amongst wholesale trans­ form­ations of Russian life, this proved a step too far, and Stalin officially returned a common day of rest in 1940 (Zerubavel 1985, 35–43). Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had more success. He replaced the muezzin’s call to prayer and local high noon with newly erected clock towers and introduced the “Gregorian Calendar Act” in 1926, forcibly adapting Turkish life to Western timekeeping to divorce his threeyear-old republic from its Ottoman past (Armstrong 2013). We might cite a number of other examples. The French diplomat Talleyrand claimed that “the art of statesmanship” is “to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence” (quoted in Sulzberger 1976). Champions of democracy understood political representation as a method for solving “the issues raised in the flow of time” so that “at length, a system of justice and order is educed out of chaos” (Lord Macaulay, quoted in Dickson  1919, 17). Early democracies produced order by bringing far-flung populaces under the same time signal (O’Malley 1990; Dohrnvan Rossum 1996, 197–288; Allen 2008). Contemporary democracies deliberately manipulate waiting periods and deadlines to police populations (Griffiths  2014; Cohen 2018; McNevin and Missbach 2018). Citizens in Israel and Russia recently 5  In many IR classrooms, students no longer recall directly the shocks of 9/11 or, increasingly, the global financial crisis. On generational dynamics, see (Steele and Acuff 2012). 6  The proposed day contained ten hours of 100 minutes, each composed of 100 seconds.

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Introduction  5 defeated efforts to change daylight savings times, claiming that they would do “violence to the body’s quotidian clock” or privilege certain groups over “the greater good” (see Gessen  2012; Lior  2012). Foreign policy decision makers frequently experience “time pressure” during moments of crisis or uncertainty (Beasley et al. 2003, 219; Stern 2003, 186–7). Small states like Samoa improve their economic position by “jump[ing] forward in time,” switching from the eastern to the western side of the international date line to align workweeks with key trading partners (Lesa  2011). In powerful states, politicians today worry that military intervention might unleash a “sequence of events” that include “great uncertainty” and perhaps “a new open-ended war” (Khan 2013). The British government highlights the “pace of events” as a central cybersecurity challenge (Stevens 2015, 89).7 Time issues suffused recent clashes over BREXIT, with attempts to “run out the clock” by proroguing (suspending) Parliament met by efforts to “create [additional] Parliamentary time” by taking control of the le­gis­la­tive agenda, by calling an official “Opposition Day” (Hepburn  2019), or, as some observers put it, by “stop[ping] the forward march of time” and “mak[ing] it just stay Wednesday for as many days as they want” to preserve legislative flexibility (Marcus, Bazelon, and Plotz 2019). In debate, the House of Lords entertained a discussion about the meanings of “days,” “calendar days,” and “Lords sitting days” because the differences between them could greatly impact the United Kingdom’s potential timeline for withdrawal from the European Union (HL Debate 2019, cc 1239, 1243–4).

Forever on Our Lips As in politics so in life: “ ‘Time’ and ‘times’ are words forever on our lips” (Augustine 2011, bk. 11 §22). Such ubiquity befits a basic concept, one bound up with questions of action and the deeper meaning of existence (Butterfield 1960, 13) and addressed by grand mythologies (Voegelin  1956; Gunnell  1987, 17–53), ancient religions (Brandon 1965; Gallois 2007), modern philosophies and ideologies (Reichenbach 1957; Chowers 2012, 19), and all manner of ordinary life (Landes 2000; Bryson  2007). Yet despite its constant presence, time remains an enigma (Stevens 2015, 61). It is “the great unsaid in western historical thought” (Gallois 2007, 1), or one of those concepts (like space, cause, and number) that we treat as possessing a singular and settled meaning, for without “the same conception of time . . . all contact between [people’s] minds would be impossible, and with that, all life together” (Durkheim 2012, 17). So says IR. Scholars frequently question whether change or continuity best describes current events (e.g. Rosenau  1990; Neack, Hey, and Haney  1995; 7  This phrase usually signifies overwhelming speed, although recent work notes slow-moving disasters also matter a great deal (Hsu 2019).

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6  International Relations and the Problem of Time Wolin  2004). Early simulations recognized direct links between different crisis drivers and the manipulation of time units (Hermann and Hermann 1967, 403). Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma games claim to capture learning over time and the strategic impact of uncertainty (Axelrod 1984, 124–38, 161–70), while “commitment problems” expose bargaining situations to the “dark side” of the future (Tingley 2011). The “neo-neo debate” posed two distinct and repetitive outcomes for rational actors facing an open future (see Baldwin 1993; Martin and Simmons 1998). One of its contestants, neorealism, predicted “that balances recurrently form,” although “theory cannot say how long the process will take” (Waltz 1997, 916 emphasis added). Constructivists posit that identities emerge from past experience, evolve over time, and seek a sense of stability or continuity against time (Hall 1999; Kinnvall 2004; Steele 2008a; Zarakol 2010b). Furthermore, “representations of time are representations of the scope for human agency” (Tjalve 2008, 11). Institutionalists aver that “[h]istory matters for inter­nation­al politics. Everyone who has studied the subject knows this” (Keohane 2017, 321). Historical context, along with the need to do “the right thing at the right time,” lends international politics its “inherently practical” nature (Kratochwil 2018, 314). IR answers a “ubiquitous question of international life: ‘why now?’ ” (Manulak 2018, 24) and tells us “when mechanisms are likely to operate,” often by specifying “ ‘recurrent scope conditions or contexts’ ” (Goddard  2013). International political theorists argue that temporal events—“not social forces and historical trends, nor questionnaires and motivation research, nor any other gadgets in the arsenal of the social sciences”—pose “the true, the only reliable teachers of political scientists” (Arendt  1958, 482). Postinternational theorists use time as a proxy for development while pondering “future shocks” (Ferguson and Mansbach  2004, 67–105). Despite huge variation in their substantive themes and methodological commitments, these literatures all confirm that “[r]eal social processes have distinctly temporal dimensions” that matter a great deal (Pierson 2004, 5). The future holds a special place in IR’s collective imagination (see Colonomos 2016). Allegedly “timeless,” neorealist theory aims specifically “to see the future world” (Waltz 2008, 384). The same concern drives the tireless advance of statistical techniques, where prediction marks a gold standard that would distinguish contemporary IR from both “pre-science” and “post-modern ascetic nihilism” (Schrodt  2014, 297). When shocking changes occur, scholars offer competing predictions about their consequences (e.g. Mearsheimer 1990; Jervis 1991). Later, colleagues check whose “crystal ball” offered the clearest vision of the future (Fettweis  2004), while others insist their theories could have predicted such changes (Bueno de Mesquita 1998).8 8  These sorts of aspirations lay politics and IR open to charges that they lack the reliable predictions characteristic of a proper science, with substantial implications for research funding (see Chenoweth and Lyall 2012; Gutting 2012).

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Introduction  7 Finally, time runs right through the heart of national security and policy relevance, the bedrocks of mainstream IR. Consider the following passage about United States grand strategy “The Day after Trump”: With Donald Trump’s ascendance to the presidency . . . the future of inter­nation­al politics, and the role of American leadership therein, entered a state of flux. . . . [His administration is] too riddled with chaos to execute any grandstrategic vision. . . . Thus far, it has failed to reckon with the challenges posed— and opportunities presented—by structural trends. . . . Regardless of the specific trajectory of U.S.  foreign policy under this administration, the broad arc is already clear. The world his successor inherits will differ profoundly from the international environment the United States has faced since the end of the Cold War and, in many ways, since World War II. . . . [I]nternational affairs thinkers must acknowledge this as a moment for serious strategic reckoning . . . foreign policy strategists must seize the present opportunity to assess which elements remain relevant in the twenty-first century, and identify where changes are appropriate and necessary  (Lissner and Rapp-Hooper 2018, 7–8).

The article concludes by returning to the relationship between theory, time, and politics: “Envisioning American strategy for a new form of international order” is an essential intellectual exercise because “prevailing trends and a dissonant presidency” mean that “havoc is all but assured” (Lissner and Rapp-Hooper 2018, 22 emphasis added). The context and content of this analysis would be unrecognizable without temporal themes. As the previous examples indicate, so too would IR. For one further piece of evidence, its largest professional body, the International Studies Association, recently asserted that “International Relations scholars are keenly aware of the role of temporal dynamics in understanding phenomena of inter­nation­al politics, and the influence of temporality is acknowledged in works adhering to diverse methodological traditions” (Iqbal 2013 emphasis added). Judging from these assorted comments, IR seems thoroughly and self-consciously temporal. Yet despite these many remarks about time, for decades IR reflected the wider human sciences, where time remained “underdeveloped,” “deeply taken for granted,” and in some cases “consistently theorised out of existence” (Stevens 2015, 36–8 quoting Adam). IR paid almost no attention to time as such, directing analytical focus instead toward topics like territorial sovereignty, geopolitics and power balances, or mechanistic accounts of “billiard ball” states colliding on a fixed, anarchic slate. Time and temporality flitted in and out of theoretical debates, appeared in disciplinary discourse without reflection, and informed other analyses deemed more interesting or more important. These tendencies led to frequent if imprecise charges that IR was a “timeless” social science (e.g. Smith 2004; Wight  2005; see McIntosh  2015; Hom  2018c, 308–11), and to speculation that

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8  International Relations and the Problem of Time time’s importance was simply “ ‘so obvious that it invites neglect by theorists’ ” (Carr  2018, 2). Either way, IR routinely worked with or around time but not directly on it. It therefore remained vulnerable to the blunt admonition of the Nobel laureate, Douglass North (quoted in Pierson  2004, 1): “Without a deep understanding of time, you will be lousy political scientists.”

The Temporal Turn Recently, however, scholars have begun to place time front and center in their analyses of international politics. Along with major strands of historical institutionalist and critical IR work,9 they examine how political power flows from reforms in time reckoning and grand historical narratives (Davis 2012; Clark 2019; Lazar 2019), how states discipline political subjects with deadlines and waiting periods (Cohen 2018), how great powers and strategists perceive time and time horizons (Edelstein 2017; Carr 2018), how long international organizations take to react to crises and why (Hardt 2014), and the influence of time on methods of inference (Büthe  2002; Grzymala-Busse  2010).10 Spanning numerous substantive topics, these works show that time matters in a variety of ways in global politics.11 Despite these advances, at least two overarching issues persist. First, scholars have not yet theorized time in full as a political phenomenon in its own right. They address a host of interest areas and establish a growing catalog of temporal dynamics at work in global politics. Yet in doing so they often work with given concepts of time that seem like self-evident conventions for naming temporal features already “out there” in the world (see Berenskoetter 2017, 152; Davis 2005, 155). In some cases, they trace the political consequences of specific temporal forms. However, many others remain under-elaborated and nearly all of IR’s new times stay isolated from each other, increasing the impression of concepts looking for independent, real-world referents rather than constitutive terms bound up with our world-building projects (Kratochwil 2006, 11). The field has not yet moved on from description to understanding “how time emerges and flows” in sociopolitical life (Blaney and Inayatullah 2010, 199; McIntosh 2015, 469).12 Second, time remains a cottage industry in IR rather than a basic topic of reflection in theory development and refinement or a conceptual and political foundation in its own right. Scholars have not yet incorporated a rigorous 9  I cover these in chapters seven and eight. 10 These complement historical efforts to catalog the politics of material time symbols and tech­ ­ nical time reckoning devices (e.g. O’Malley  1990; Landes  2000; Birth  2012; Ogle  2015; McCrossen 2016; Kosmin 2019). 11 IR here parallels a wider explosion of interest in time across physics (e.g., Carroll  2010; Smolin  2013), psychology and philosophy (e.g. Canales  2015; Ogle  2015), and popular works (e.g. Klein and Frisch 2007). 12  I discuss these issues further in chapter one.

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Introduction  9 treatment of time fully into discussions about how theories develop, what sort of knowledge they produce, and which purposes they serve. We have somewhat sporadic discussion of the impact of one or two temporal symbols on theories and frequent references to IR “in” or “through” time, but much less in the way of systematic discussion of what such impacts and claims indicate about the wider relationship between IR, global politics, and time. Various scholars’ more or less explicit interest in temporal factors might give the appearance of a field deeply invested in the question of time. On the contrary, IR still awaits a fully fledged account of time—what constitutes it, what it means to speak of time and tem­por­ al­ity, and how these relate to our wider efforts to theorize, explain, and understand global politics.

Two Cultures of Time Before delving into these issues in earnest, it is necessary to clear some ground. To do so, I want to draw attention to two dominant cultures of time hiding in plain sight. Nearly all of the examples cited so far include an admixture of these two cultures, which establish a spectrum along which the vast majority of IR treatments of time fall. To see this, consider once more the Doomsday Clock, which mobilizes both cultures to striking effect. First, it reckons with wreck and ruin explicitly by deploying the units of Western standard time, a human invention and technological achievement of the highest order on which the rise of the territorial sovereign state, colonialism and imperialism, warfare, and globalization all depended. Second, it evokes a much older transcultural symbol of time as a problem or naturally malevolent force confronting human affairs—a bringer of disorder and chaos.

Western Standard Time The time reckoned by modern clocks needs little introduction. Its “continuous indication of equal hours” (Dohrn-van Rossum  1996, 282), abstracted from astronomical cycles and subdivided into minutes and seconds, provide nearly all corners of the modern world with a unified, elegant, and rational means of ordering daily life (Borst  1993, 92–124). The Gregorian calendar occupies almost as privileged a position, providing a common global measure of days, months, and years (see Bartky  2007).13 Because of our own familiarity with these reckoning

13  Although a number of lunar, religious, and national calendrical alternatives exist (Richards 1999).

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10  International Relations and the Problem of Time systems, it can be tempting to view clock and calendar time as simply charting the natural, objective dimension in which all life occurs.14 However, it is worth recalling Western standard time’s oft-forgotten history. The consistent motion produced by the standardized clock marks “one of the great inventions in the history of [hu]mankind—not in the same class as fire and the wheel, but comparable to movable type in its revolutionary implications” (Landes  2000, 6). It also represents a relatively recent and intrinsically political achievement. Nascent efforts at mechanized timekeeping first emerged around 1300 ce and achieved significant success in the sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries through international competitions and in the service of national ex­plor­ ation and colonization (Hom 2010, 1160–5).15 Likewise, the Gregorian calendar marks a monumental achievement in symbolic reckoning, but it only emerged in the European Middle Ages from ecclesiastical debates about biblical and secular dating (see Borst 1993, 72; Hom 2017b, 447–8).16 If there is any doubt that these “universal” reckoning systems remain human and social artifacts, we need only recall that every year scientists, standards bureaus, and governments negotiate how to calibrate and adjust this “time of the world,” whose seemingly close “fit” with the motions and rhythms of nature would deteriorate without faithful human intervention (Stevens 2016).17 Despite this relatively recent heritage, for decades IR discourse treated tem­por­ al­ity as identical with Western standard time. Scientific analyses in IR work almost exclusively with Western standard time, reckoning war and peace with the “raw facts” of “nation-years” (Singer and Diehl 1990, 12–21) or simulating crises and analyzing hypotheses using only Western-standardized units (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones  1997; Box-Steffensmeier et al.  2014; discussed later in chapter  six). Citation conventions adhere to Gregorian dating and the field reflects very little on the naming of events like “9/11” (but see Lundborg 2011), the “global 1989” (Lawson, Armbruster, and Cox 2010), the “twenty years’ crisis” (Carr 1939), and so forth.18 When IR scholars refer to “time,” it has not typically been necessary to ask “what do you mean?,” and there has been little reflection on how the time reckoning

14  Western standard time provides a potent political metaphor. After the global financial crisis, observers noted that “Spain still operates on its own clock and rhythms. . . . the country can become more productive, more in sync with the rest of Europe, if it adopts a more regular schedule” based on “reset[ting] the cock” as its neighbors have (Yardley 2017; see Steele 2019, 230). 15  See Ward’s chart of precision timekeeping, created for the London Science Museum and reproduced in (Whitrow 1988, ii). 16  For recent efforts to recover the complex and underappreciated legacy of the Middle Ages in global politics, see (Bain 2016; 2020). 17  Moreover, these conventions turn inside out on other planets. By our geocentric standards, a day on Mercury lasts longer than a year, since the planet rotates slower on its own axis than it revolves around the sun (B. Cox 2019). Thanks to Iain Hardie for pointing this out. For an attempt to rethink the clock as a critical resource, see (Bastian 2017). 18  IR reflects modern, Western society, which assumes “it still ‘really is’ ” the date marked by the Gregorian calendar, “regardless of what anyone chooses to call it” (McIntosh 2015, 470).

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Introduction  11 practices taken as natural play a key role in shaping the temporal experience of political subjects and researchers alike (see Birth 2012; Adam 1990; 2004).

The Problem of Time IR’s second dominant culture of time is almost as prominent and much more ­venerable. The problem of Time refers to tropes, symbols, and assumptions that cast Time per se as a source of disorder, dissolution, and death. On this view, time passes naturally, and carries human projects and lives away in its wake. The problem of Time predates clock-based reckoning by millennia, stretching back before the classical period, when many of our enduring symbols of time emerged (see Gunnell 1987; Brandon 1965; Hutchings 2008b). Indeed, well before precursors of Western thought emerged in Greece, the ancient world recognized time as a figure of discord, an agent or force responsible for the most challenging and pitiable moments in life. Early Near Eastern symbolic systems often understood the world as made by an infinite time deity, also known as the god of eternity, who was at once creator of stability and bringer of change—the guarantor of both finitude and infinitude (Brandon  1965, 13–64). These time gods were temporal and timeless, for they housed the flow of time within eternity, which encompassed the totality of existence and could thus be “full” of time yet also “beyond” it. However, Time quickly underwent a cosmological estrangement (see Gunnell  1987, 17–53). Original time gods, like the Persian Zurvān or the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazdāh, split in two and the infinite, benevolent halves withdrew to the heavens while their malevolent counterparts gained dominion over the “sublunar” realm (Boyce 1957, 313; Brandon  1965, 39–41; Whitrow  1988, 33). Time’s formerly beneficial attributes like the powers of creation, birth, positive change, and infinity decamped, leaving humans a world beset by death, decay, and destabilizing change. As Zurvān then declared, “By Time are houses overturned—doom is through Time—and things graven shattered. From it no single mortal man escapes” (in Brandon 1965, 40). These ways of thinking about Time spread to the classical world via Mithraism, Mesopotamian astralism, and the Mycenaean and Ionian migrations, inflecting Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian monotheism (see Gunnell 1987, 54–124). Herodotus and Plutarch acknowledged Time as an adversary (Brandon  1965, 45–46). Plato’s (2010, 440c-d) philosophical and political thought resounded with issues raised by the spiteful flow of Time (Gunnell 1987). His student, Aristotle (1984, 4.12), observed that Time “wastes things away.” Several centuries later, the poet Seikilos concurred: “Time necessitates an end” (in D’Angour 2013). In Judaism and later Christianity, the story of creation and fall throws humans into a “temporal” existence of sin and certain death (see Pagels 1988), establishing a genetic estrangement between humans and Yahweh analagous to those amongst

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12  International Relations and the Problem of Time ancient time gods. Classical philosophy combined with Judeo-Christian theology in the Roman world, where the poet Ovid (2004; quoted in Stevens  2015, 43) ­proclaimed, “O Time, thou great devourer, and thou, envious Age, together you destroy all things; and, slowly gnawing with your teeth, you finally consume all things in lingering death!” By the fifth century ce, this burden of finitude provided the key problem animating Augustine’s ideas about the possibility of order in a temporal sæculum disconnected from eternity (Markus 1970; Ricoeur 1984, 28). In addition to pre-figuring understandings of human existence, time’s ancient estrangement left a durable reminder of its remainder—eternity—but little hope of re-forging any cosmic unity. Once alienated in and by Time, the only option for humanity became passing efforts to symbolically transcend or “surpass” our troublingly temporal existence “by moving in the direction of eternity” (Ricoeur 1984, 22). In the temporal realm, we find eternity only through symbols of stasis, stability, and structure; continuous lines or cycles; religious devotion; or whatever lends experience a sense of durable order. Any true link to eternity comes through divine intervention at the moment of God’s choosing, known suggestively as both “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4) and the point past which “no more time should intervene” (Rev. 10:6). The problem of Time split Western philosophy and political thought in their roots. Philosophy traditionally opposes qualities of flowing and change in favor of the fixity and objectivity associated with “eternal, immutable Ideas” (Dillon 1977, 92; Gunnell 1987; Toulmin 1990, 89). On this view, “the temporal was so lowered in status that it could no longer be taken seriously; it was not the venue of Being or Truth” (Smith 2008, 53). The Dominican philosopher Meister Eckhart (1992, 237) put it strikingly: “Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. . . . not time alone but temporalities; not only temporal things but temporal affections; not only temporal affections but the very taint and aroma of time.” By contrast: “Heaven is clear and unsullied in its brightness, free from any taint of time and place” (Eckhart  1992, 172). Similar views later drove the rise of republican political thought. Building on the Augustinian sæculum, thinkers like Machiavelli understood their central problem to be “the republic’s existence in time,” that “stream of irrational events conceived as essentially destructive of all systems of secular stability” (Pocock  2016, xxiii–xxiv, 33–4). They labored to imagine novel political orders and cultivate social virtues that might tame fortune and withstand the ravages of time.19 Even amidst contemporaneous efforts to construct a homogeneous and absolute temporal dimension reckoned by clock and calendar, humans recalled this more venerable and vindictive figure of Time. The English poet Edmund Spenser 19  Similarly, Western art depicts the time god Saturn gaining power by castrating his father and keeping it by devouring his own children (Rubens 1636; Goya 1820), or Father Time commingling with the Grim Reaper (Unknown 1620; Flanagan 1896).

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Introduction  13 (1591) referred to the “Ruines” and “Spoil of time,” which “devours” everything on earth. Shakespeare’s (2008, III.1) Hamlet described “the thousand natural shocks that Flesh is heir to” as “the Whips and Scorns of time.” Lord Byron (2005, st. 34) observed that “Time steals along, and Death uprears his dart.” Ruminating on the Napoleonic Army’s destruction, Tolstoy (2010, 524; see Patterson  2017, 105) hailed Time as one of the “strongest of all warriors.” At year’s end, nineteenth century Christian schoolgirls received one last lesson on “the mighty ravages of Time,” that “rapid,” “heavy handed,” and “haughty conq’ror”—“Doth naught but ravage mark his step sublime?” (M.D.F. 1841, 177). Even as societies invented and embraced Western standard time, the problem of Time was never far away. Industrial capitalists quickly turned the standard clock into a taskmaster overseeing factory labor divorced from social relations and measured not by concrete outputs but by “time spent” (see Pitkin 2016, 240–1; Hom 2010, 1158–60). As the would-be bourgeoisie imposed these modern modes of production on the soonto-be proletariat, Karl Marx (1963, 54) declared that “man is nothing: he [sic] is at most time’s carcase.”20 Today, Time remains “the fire in which we burn” (Schwartz 1967), a “thief you cannot banish” who “rob[s] us of our former selves” (McGinley 1953; Hailey 1998, 89), a “deceiver, unconquerable and capricious” (Auden 1995, 59–60), seemingly “boundless” but actually “a prison” (Nabokov 1989, 20). While we try to get on with life, Martin Amis (1991, 26) reminds us repeatedly that “time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that?” It is the “intrinsic cause” of “ruin as ruin” (Hertzler 1988, 55). “Time never waits, time never ends” (Emmett, Levine, and Moore  1984). These examples highlight a number of themes united around the basic idea that, on its own and by its very nature, Time brings discord, dissolution, and death. Politics and IR follow suit. Time functions “as an abstract historical actor” or a “natural phenomenon with an essential nature” that moves and changes society and human understandings (Dudziak 2012, 3–4). The “ ‘harrying pace of history’ ” confounds political judgment (Morgenthau  1950, 304). The “passing of time” naturally erases memory and the possibility of justice (W.  J.  Booth  2011, 750), constrains democratic processes (Linz  1998), and complicates the relationship between domestic and foreign affairs (Woodward 1996, 2). It limits the the­or­et­ ic­al imagination (Qin  2018, 66). Assumptions about time as “a force, ‘arbitrary and violent’, ” help position racial subjects in a global political hierarchy (Murillo, 20  Shakespeare (2002, Act 1 Scn 2) gave an evocative glimpse of this shift in Henry IV, when Falstaff asks the Prince, “Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?” Henry replies that time discipline is for other people: “What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? Unless hours were cups of sack and minutes capons and clocks the tongues of bawds and dials the signs of leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.” Similarly, Shakespeare has Henry speak in prose when in private or before he assumes the throne, but in well-timed verse when he conducts the business of state. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this illustration.

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14  International Relations and the Problem of Time quoted in Agathangelou and Killian  2016a, 24). Political ideologies respond to “the evaporation of eternity as the divine measure against which human time is understood” and “the disappearance of our certainty that the past, present, and future join harmoniously in the self ’s experience and in the human world as a whole” (Chowers 2012, 19; see also Levine 2017, 118 n6; n.d.). Conceptualized less normatively, time remains a stand-alone entity that “operates in the background to affect several explanatory factors in a variety of ways” and makes it, “ceteris paribus, more likely that institutions, actors themselves, and their preferences may change” (Büthe  2002, 484–6). Critical scholars who expressly challenge IR’s temporal presumptions still refer to stable distinctions becoming “porous” against the “sundering forces of time” (Shapiro 2000, 91). Feminist efforts to rethink political time begin by reaffirming the sense that it naturally raises “profound questions around mortality, transience, memory, continuity and identity” (Bryson 2007, 9).

Flood Myths and Nautical Disasters We also call forth the problem of Time using fluvial metaphors. The basic idea was attributed to Heraclitus, who asserted that the universe is like a river in which “everything flows” (Barnes 1982, 65), and “you cannot step twice into the same stream” (in Plato 2010, 402a). In classical Greece, “Cronus” was a word for time and also the name of an ancient stream (Plato 2010, 402b). Marcus Aurelius (2006, 4:43) observed: “Time is a sort of river of passing events.” Since then, fluvial metaphors have offered unsurpassable symbols of the “transit of events through the present” (Ricoeur 1984, 21; Arstila and Lloyd 2014, ix). While flow, flux, and other fluvial metaphors are more ambiguous than devious gods and ungodly defects, they do the same work of describing human existence in vivid, helpless terms.21 Most Near Eastern cosmologies and monotheistic religions include a flood myth in which a deluge threatens humanity.22 Aurelius (2006, 4.43) elaborated the river of time thus: “strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.” In Augustine (2011, book 13) the “brackishness of the sea” that “flowed” out of Adam symbolized humans as “so tempestuously arrogant and

21 Etymologically, they trace back to large natural forces or bodies ingressing human affairs. “Influence” comes to us from fourteenth-century astrology, when it connoted “streaming ethereal power from the stars acting upon character or destiny of men,” see (“Influence, n.” Online Etymology Dictionary 2012). From influence flowed “influenza,” originally a “visitation, influence (of the stars)” that implicated the occult in the spread of disease (“Influenza, n.” Online Etymology Dictionary 2012). 22  E.g., Judeo-Christian: “And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.” (Gen. 6:17); or Babylonian and Assyrian: “By our hand a Deluge . . . will be sent; to destroy the seed of mankind” (Anonymous 2003, 13.105–6, 13.113), and “[t]he raging of Adad (storm god) reached unto heaven // (And) turned into darkness all that was light. . . . (Even) the gods were terrorstricken at the deluge” (see Barton 1937, 327–31; Dundes 1988).

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Introduction  15 so changeably lax.”23 Those devout enough to reform their ways become an “island of purity in an ocean of corruption” (Pagels 1988, 104). “Time and tide wait for no man” (Chaucer, quoted in Byman and Pollack 2007), and human endeavors can easily be “[s]wept into wrecks anon by Time’s ungentle tide!” (Byron 1899).24 And Machiavelli’s (1988, 85) Fortune was “one of those dangerous rivers that, when they become enraged, flood the plains, trees and buildings, move earth from one place and deposit it in another. Everyone flees before it, everyone gives way to its thrust, without being able to halt it in any way.” This flummoxed cant connects Renaissance humanism with Enlightenment science just as it does classical with modern thought. Reflecting on his quest for absolute certainty, René Descartes (2008, 17) reeled: “It is as if I had suddenly fallen into a deep whirlpool; I am so tossed about that I can neither touch bottom with my foot, nor swim up to the top.” So he sought one “immovable point” from which to anchor philosophical investigation and “establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences” (Descartes 2008, 13 emphasis added). What made Isaac Newton’s (1850, 77 emphasis added) mathematical time “absolute” and “true” was that “from its own nature, [it] flows equably without relation to anything external”; yet he also called truth the “great ocean” in which he had never swam (related in Brewster 1855, 407). This fundamental fluidity, then, poses nearly as much a problem as time’s nasty nature. “Pure flux” indicates transit “from nothing to nothing” (Collingwood  1925, 148), and must necessarily be “made comprehensible” (Mink  1978, 185) if we are to avoid drowning in “deep waters” (Hacking 1990, 7). Fluvial metaphors grip our political imagination, too. With the death of King Edward VII of England in 1910, “[a]ll the old buoys which have marked the channel of our lives seem to have been swept away” (Lord Esher, quoted in Tuchman 1994, 18). Four years later, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand rendered observers “no more than wood chips being cast adrift on the roaring river of history” (Jogalekar 2014). The “Arab Spring” left the “[r]ules of the game . . . in flux” in Egypt, where the constitution remained unwritten and parliament “dissolved” (Lynch 2012).25 Nearby, the Syrian civil war involved “pressures that have been in play for decades, . . . And you can feel the dam kind of cracking. What’s behind the dam is not water but history” (see McKnight  2012 emphasis added). These situations contributed to a sense of “cascading crises” overwhelming policy advisors and decision makers (Donilon  2012 emphasis added). Meanwhile,

23  For a discussion of the fluvial roots of Jung’s psychology of libido and its restraint, see Steele (2019, 59–60). 24  In Old and Middle English, “tide” means “time” (“Tide, n.” OED Online 2013). The link endures, as when a popular verse asks, “Time—why you punish me? / Like a wave bashing into the shore” (Rucker et al. 1994). Thanks to Julia Calvert for reminding me. 25  Meanwhile, other analysts lauded Azerbaijan as “an island of stability in a sea of chaos” (Director 2012).

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16  International Relations and the Problem of Time New York City’s 9/11 memorial etched victim’s names in stone surrounding a reflecting pool in the footprint of each of World Trade Center tower. The architect, Michael Arad (2011), elaborated: “There’s something about the motion of water. In my mind it was tied to the passage of time, a marker of the passage of time.” Commemorating the dead, then, required securing those who “passed” against the further passage of time. Scant years later, Barack Obama’s (2015) last National Security Strategy began with a warning: “Today’s strategic environment is fluid.” So it goes in IR. The Great War marked “a break-through, in the grand style, of the forces of disruption, carrying away in their path barriers that had held for a hundred years” and introducing “flux” where previously “all seemed stable and known” (Zimmern  1936, 92–3; Merriam  1922, 317). It exposed humanity “stranded for a time on this floating globe,” desperate to discover the “deeper process of time” and avoid “a deadly literal-mindedness and an inability to keep pace with the fluidity of events” (Butterfield 1960, 15, 13; see also Merriam 1922, 318). Attempts to “diagnose the current unrest” in the United States found a country caught between “drift and mastery” (Lippmann 2015). Similar metaphors framed the political theory of white supremacy and colonialism in Lothrop Stoddard’s (1920) Rising Tide of Colour, which described hitherto “pure” civilizations weakened by war and drowning in immigrants. Cold War “cybernetics” drew the term from the Greek κυβερνήτης, meaning “helmsman.”26 More recently, data presents scholars with a “deluge of information pouring over the internet” that requires careful theorizing and testing before “diving into prognostication” (Ulfelder 2012). IR scholars regularly assign fluvial metaphors to complex and uncertain phenomena. Multipolarity renders patterns of international order “fluid” and throws basic political relations into “flux” (Mearsheimer 1990, 16-17, 39). Internal conflict and “waves” of nationalism threaten to “sweep” or “spill” over state borders (e.g. van Evera 1990, 23; Atzili 2012).27 Terrorism defies understanding because it is a “most fluid and dynamic” phenomenon (Coaffee 2012, 80). Compared with physicists, who can “employ mathematical formulas to investigate the dynamics of turbulent winds and rivers, those of us concerned with global politics have yet to devise a set of elegant propositions on which to base the analysis” (Rosenau 1990, xiv; cf. Tilly 1995, 1601–2). IR scholars only rarely engage the uncertainty and unexpectedness associated with temporal flux as empirical features of interest rather than impediments to knowledge (although see Buzan and Jones  1981). Notably, they now gather such features under the figure of Proteus (Katzenstein and Seybert 2018), the “reluctant seer” of the future and god of the oceans and

26  Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this connection. 27  Political scientists also posit “waves” of democracy (see Gunitsky 2018), although these can still break bad through metaphorical transference, see (Hom 2016).

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Introduction  17 rivers, whose changing shape and volatile personality signified both the sea’s “shifting surface” and an ambivalent relation to humanity (C. L. Gale 2009, 860). Scholars also fling fluvial epithets at each other, as when Michael Banks (1984, 13) refers to realists drowning in an “ocean of ignorance” or David Welch (2010, 452) critiques Ned Lebow’s (2008) account of change as requiring “delicate seamanship” due to the “danger of attempting to explain something fluid in terms of something else fluid.” Alternatively, critical scholars invoke fluvial metaphors to destabilize hegemonic logics. For Robert Cox (1981, 130), “the events of the 1970s generated a sense of greater fluidity in power relationships, of a many-faceted crisis, crossing the threshold of uncertainty and opening the opportunity for a new development of critical theory.” Martti Koskenniemi (2004, 2; also McSweeney 1999, 72) works with “sensibilities” because their “greater fluidity” supports a critique of international law. Regardless of specific deployment, fluvial metaphors retain their classic connotations.28

Solutions to the Problem of Time Given how often we use fluvial metaphors to decry temporal situations, we have good reason to treat them as proxies for the problem of Time. We can deputize in the other direction as well, treating references to stability and order as symbols of Time’s great remainder, eternity (henceforth “quasi-eternal”). Combined with the more explicit tropes introduced above, such rhetoric highlights a pervasive and longstanding habit of trying to solve the problem of Time with symbolic and speculative evocations of eternity. Our other temporal culture, Western standard time, exemplifies this. It is a relatively recent technical and political accomplishment meant to provide an orderly temporal bulwark against Time’s naturally destabilizing flow by rendering social interactions more intelligible, consistent, and manageable (Zerubavel 1976). While Time brings chaos, clocks and calendars impose pattern and order. As William Faulkner (1995, 71) put it, “Clocks slay time. Father said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels.” So it goes in politics and IR. The same Greek philosophers who formalized time as a problem argued that political order depends on our ability to tame flux, setting up a durable antithesis between political possibility and time (Gunnell 1987, 173, 225). Political science works to place analysis on a more determinate footing reminiscent of clocklike regularity, order, and predictability (Almond and Genco  1977, 489–90; see also J.  W.  Davis  2005, 3). Grand narratives of history often take “linear” or “cyclical” shapes, making it easy to think of “linear time” 28  Their widespread usage necessitates periodic reminders that “[t]ime may be ‘like an ever-rolling stream, but it isn’t really and literally an ever-rolling stream’ ” (Stevens 2015, 53).

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18  International Relations and the Problem of Time and “cyclical time” as natural opposites. Yet both originated in intellectual efforts to overcome the more venerable and vindictive figure of Time. We can see this in the way that both stories pit some other force or principle against the problem of Time. In linear-progressive histories, reason and/or providence (e.g. Kant 1991; Herder 2004), a revolution of consciousness (Engels 1893), the rule of law (Bryan 1915; Zimmern 1936), popular self-determination (W. Wilson 1918), science and technology (see Deutsch 1959), the Hegelian spirit of freedom (Fukuyama 2006), democratic deliberation (Benhabib  2002), or evolutionary learning (Modelski 1996) overcome time’s natural propensities for chaos and discord (see Walker 1993, 44; Hutchings 2008b, 28–53). In cyclical accounts the punishing selection effects of anarchy produce recurring balances of power (Waltz 1979) and power transitions (Organski 1968; Gilpin 1981), economic competition settles into “long cycles” (Modelski 1987), or class struggle contributes to an alternatingly “tighter” or “looser” capitalist “world-system” (Wallerstein 1974). Or consider the aftermath of IR’s near-total failure to anticipate the peaceful end of the Cold War (Lebow and Risse-Kappen 1995a; Davis 2005, 2), when John Lewis Gaddis (1992, 39) advised IR scholars to rethink time as something that “in and of itself ” shaped events and experiences. While this was a novel argument in IR at that moment, it recapitulated a longstanding and anxious way of relating to Time, in which we try to tame it or escape its passage in order to achieve something real and valuable—in IR’s case, durable knowledge. Similarly, political the­ or­ies of international relations “seek in the transitory something which reveals in a systematic and coherent manner the more fundamental springs of action” (Boucher 1998, 12). Strategic studies often proceed as if “[b]y definition the first condition for gaining eternity is somehow to wrench loose from the accidental, temporal circumstances into which one has been born and under which one spends one’s life” (van Creveld  1986, 47). More generally, dominant political ­logics pine openly for symbols of Time’s eternal antithesis. “Progress” requires stability; change almost immediately augurs “chaos”; borders, identities, and concepts must be “fixed”; we propose solutions for a “lasting” or “perpetual” peace; and surprises are unwelcome even if inevitable and potentially positive. Time and eternity, chaos and the clock. These powerful symbols enable and constrain a range of IR perspectives, which in turn forward a number of temporal concepts and symbols falling somewhere in between them. To further muddle the situation, we often find both cultures of time operating simultaneously, as in the Doomsday Clock. In IR, various approaches call out the problem of Time and seek answers that function much like its iconic, clockwork counterpart. So just as we ponder the productive paradox of the Doomsday Clock, we might ask how IR scholars can regularly treat time as an unproblematic abstraction and confront it so consistently as the symbol of wreck and ruin. Moreover, how does this animating tension inflect IR’s particular uses of time and the broader contours of the field?

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Introduction  19

The Argument To address these challenging and deeply embedded issues, this book develops a novel approach to time in international politics and IR. It shows that many ­scholars understand the work of theorizing and knowledge development as a matter of organizing experiences associated with the problem of Time into meaningful patterns reminiscent of more neutral temporal visions. Most IR proceeds from the traditional and seemingly paradoxical assumption that intellectual viability depends on our ability to reckon ruin—that is, to placate, manage, or tame the problem of Time by timing political processes in more intelligible and manageable ways. We will find this temporal tension hiding in plain sight in key moments of IR’s disciplinary development, in methodological reflections on the challenges of studying global politics, in attempts to reckon conflict and war with statistical models built on silent narrative timing assumptions, in institutional research that embraces history but still treats time as the ruin of efficient function, and in crit­ ic­al alternatives that would turn time into a tool for reckoning politics differently. Along the way, we will also see that supposedly hard distinctions in IR—idiographic/ nomothetic, explanation/understanding, history/quantitative, narrative/theory, and scientific/critical—weaken and even dissolve when we focus on their treatment of time. Part One introduces the concept of timing and develops a specific theory of narrative timing, which offers a better starting point for analyzing IR’s temporal discourse and for teasing out the temporal dynamics of IR’s knowledge genres. Chapter  one surveys several problems with current ways of theorizing time before adapting a novel approach from Norbert Elias’ process sociology. Building on his provocative claim that all “times” emanate from practical and social timing ac­tiv­ities—efforts to relate and coordinate important change continua so that they unfold in particular ways—it sketches a basic account of how timing works, cover­ing timing standards, active vs. passive timing, and how we respond to breakdowns in timing. It also shows how symbolic descriptions of timing activities communicate knowledge about these efforts but also bury their practical, processual roots under substantive and reified concepts of “time.” This chapter highlights the political power of timing as a particular and purposeful act of synthesis. Finally, it shows how to unpack from temporal symbols those dynamics intrinsic to both politics and theory. Neutral, homogeneous temporal concepts indicate successful, mostly subconscious timing; while references to the problem of Time suggest more challenging timing efforts. Since beginning with timing departs from usual ways of understanding time and temporality, chapter  two makes the case for timing theory’s value. Timing offers a simple but powerful gestalt shift, from taking “times” as existential givens or temporalities as subjective and subordinate constructs to a rigorous framework for tracing how practices and symbolic language interact to produce all the times

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20  International Relations and the Problem of Time of our lives—from our innermost experiences to the rhythms of the universe. These only become “real” and “natural” if they work for us almost by second nature.29 Timing theory also resolves several thorny problems with our grasp of time. Within IR, timing theory offers superior explanatory power while accommodating and often clarifying the way that other time studies approach their object matter. It further stands apart in its ability to integrate IR’s two dominant cultures of time—Western standard time and the problem of Time. Finally, it exposes basic issues in IR as matters of timing, from concerns with change and surprise, to scholarly practices and knowledge development, to central dis­cip­lin­ary discussions like the “neo-neo debate.” Having defended a basic theory of timing, chapter three develops a framework more closely fitted to IR. Drawing from narratology, it formulates an account of narrative timing, which shows how we configure and re-configure narratives to place confounding experiences in a meaningful, serial whole. After emphasizing narrative elements common to all IR scholarship, this chapter shows how narrative emplotment unfolds a temporal world using four distinct timing techniques: the synoptic theme, which acts as the timing standard; creative filtration, which determines what processes matter; cleaving experience, which establishes the story’s durative presence; and concordant discordance, which reinterprets unintelligible and overwhelming experiences as key plot drivers. It then illustrates these narrative timing operations in familiar IR explanatory forms. Finally, the chapter discusses how narrative timing further elaborates the problem of Time and why some narrative temporalities become reified, passive timing meters, which aesthetically resolve that problem while blinding us to its future return. Chapter  three closes by highlighting key conclusions from Part One and their implications for IR. Part Two uses narrative timing theory to tease out the many ways that IR works to time global political life—that is, to identify which political processes matter, specify how they hang together, and propose how they can unfold toward ­particular outcomes reflecting our vocational commitments. The dynamics and tensions involved in this recapitulate our seemingly contradictory cultures of time as both neutral dimension and nefarious force. Taken together, its individual chapters offer a panoramic view of the field through sustained discussions of key temporal dialogs and “hard cases” where time seems obvious, muted, or absent. These chapters treat theories and explanations as practical endeavors—not as static, finished outputs but as putting out processes that unfold a dynamic world in one way rather than another. These discussions yield surprising insights about

29  IR scholars take similar steps to animate and verb-alize a number of other concepts, including “securitizing” (Van Rythoven 2019), “worlding” (Pettman 2005), “casing” research designs (Hanrieder and Zürn 2017, 101), and the processual turn in general (Jackson and Nexon 1999). So far, they overlook the most obvious candidate, time, whose verb “timing” we already use with great regularity.

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Introduction  21 a number of IR issue areas, from realist and liberal theorizing, to research design and inference, models of international conflict, economic institutions and the ­liberal international order, and political subjects and possibilities marginalized in mainstream accounts. Chapter four shows that, from very early on, timing dynamics influenced the emergence and development of IR as a distinct domain of inquiry. In fact, timing crises played a constitutive role in key moments of the field’s history. We can see this in scholarly responses to World War I, the thermonuclear revolution, and the end of the Cold War. Taking a closer look at what analysts said and how they thought about these shocking events suggests that the IR project evolved as a collective narrative timing project. More specifically, when confronted by confounding world-historical changes, scholars explicitly lamented the problem of Time as they worked to rectify, modify, or replace existing accounts of how politics work. In the process, their loosely organized efforts produced and reproduced vocational stories about IR’s role, importance, and potential impact. When IR grapples with temporal phenomena, restoring order to international politics and to its academic study go hand in hand. This supports the argument developed in Part One that, whatever else it does, IR pursues the dual task of securing political practice and theoretical knowledge against the ravages of Time. The remaining chapters analyze the timing dynamics of four distinct IR research areas. Chapter  five addresses key recommendations for how to do IR research. After highlighting the laboratory as a social scientific timing talisman— a place cleansed of the supposedly negative effects of time—it juxtaposes this ideal against the methodological precepts of neopositivism, critical realism, and interpretivism. Despite significant diversity, these approaches grapple with time by developing narratives of less “time-bound” realms to help reason from complex and dynamic phenomena to scientifically viable explanations. IR methodologies rely on narrative timing techniques to unfold a realm more intelligible, manageable, and inhabitable than the brute world from which they draw their research puzzles. Indeed, various knowledge warrants depend on this. Treating methodologies as timing proposals upends conventional IR wisdoms, exposing neopositivism as a science fiction predicated on time travel, critical realism as a brand of theology, and interpretivism as a more empirical and realistic approach to social scientific inquiry. Chapter  six confronts the hard case of quantitative research, which seems firmly based on “timeless” mathematical formulas and Western standard time. It thus appears most resistant to interpretation as a narrative timing project. This chapter excavates quantitative IR’s temporal assumptions and dependencies, with illustrations drawn from international conflict research. It argues that dominant statistical models and the statistical approach in general work to tame overly temporal phenomena by constructing narrative and poetic links to eternal logic. After tracing the narrative timing techniques embedded in IR’s quantitative workhorse, the general linear model, it shows how putatively “time-sensitive”

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22  International Relations and the Problem of Time techniques like time series analysis and event hazard models still treat time as a problem for sound knowledge development. The chapter closes by highlighting the distinctly temporal moves made in the recent Bayesian turn, which suggest that instead of relying on passive timing meters, quantitative research must remain in an active timing mode much closer to lived time than the scientific laboratory. Chapter  seven covers historical institutionalism (HI), a newer approach to international institutions that embraces overtly temporal themes like sequence, path dependence, critical junctures, legacy effects, and the importance of “founding moments.” While historical institutionalists make great strides in setting institutions in motion, this chapter argues that they remain trapped by the problem of Time tradition and moreover that timing theory can help them escape. After summarizing the rise of HI against sociological and especially rationalist treatments of institutions, it uses HI accounts of the “liberal international order” to clarify the role and status of “history” in HI, to show how HI recapitulates and narratively confronts the problem of Time, and to argue that historical institutionalists unintentionally position themselves as horologists who explain institutional faults without challenging the rationalist baseline assumption that institutions should work like near-perfect cooperation mechanisms. This de­pol­iti­cizes HI and hamstrings its efforts to develop a distinctive theory of institutions. However, timing theory can help by recasting institutions as collective timing projects and by embracing a more realistic view of international-institutional possibility. In turn, HI can push several concepts and insights of timing theory further, opening the possibility not only of a more thoroughly temporal account of institutions but an institutionalist perspective on timing. Chapter eight tackles the vanguard of IR time studies, where critical scholars have successfully placed time and temporality at the front of the agenda but done less to elaborate and interrelate their diverse conceptual innovations. Covering four critical discourses of time—“savage” and neoclassical times, accelerating time, and temporalities of rupture—this chapter uses timing theory to assess pivotal assumptions at the heart of critical IR. While they propose to problematize time, critical scholars still reify various concepts and selectively deploy the problem of Time against hegemonic political logics. In each case, timing theory offers a more thoroughgoing and coherent account of critical temporalities. In particular, it shows that past times signal long-running timing successes bound up with power, that fast times need not lead to alienation, and that ruptures can never be ends in themselves unless underwritten by the sorts of politics that many critical scholars refute. Instead, ruptures must be understood as moments requiring fraught new forms of timing, unless we rely on silently shared assumptions and a form of liberal-idealism that depoliticizes critical times just when we should be pushing the politics of time and timing further, a task better met by the open timing standards of reflexive realism.

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Introduction  23 The book’s conclusion takes stock of insights developed throughout and highlights some of their wider implications. After summarizing narrative timing theory’s contributions to IR and our understanding of time, it proposes that taking timing seriously entails rethinking several aspects of what it means to do IR. Timing theory suggests that IR’s intellectual and academic hierarchies require revision and perhaps outright inversion. It also shows how, in re-timing IR, ­scholars can also re-claim their field from arbitrary and largely impertinent scientific standards ill-suited to the level of difficulty at which IR scholarship operates. Timing theory also bears on recent efforts to cultivate a more reflexive brand of scholarship, warning against the tendency to reify any methodological, the­or­et­ ic­al, or disciplinary doxa when studying the temporal domain of global politics.

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PART I

T IMING T HE ORY A ND IN T E R NAT IONA L R E L AT IONS

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1

Timing The Basic Framework

Introduction Temporal ideas and references to time run through the heart of IR, but until recently scholars did not treat time itself as a topic of analysis in its own right. Moreover, two preeminent and seemingly contradictory cultures of time—as problematic figure and as neutral dimension—pervade the field but occasion little reflection or critique. The recent “temporal turn” in IR added numerous diverse concepts of time to IR’s discourse but without tackling these basic concerns or developing a synoptic view of how time emerges and why it matters. These issues suggest that IR would benefit from an explicitly theoretical account elucidating what it means to speak of “time” at all and providing a way to understand the many links between time and politics in practice and in theory (see Lynch 2014, 42). This chapter develops such a theory over five sections. First, to complement the issues introduced already and further the case that we need a new approach such as that offered by timing,1 it covers several pervasive problems with IR’s discourse of time. Second, it discusses the need to move beyond idiomatic references to “timing.” Third, it outlines how the practical activity of timing works, specifying its value as a starting point of analysis and drawing on Elias’ social theory to introduce the most basic components of any timing activity. I focus in particular on breakdowns in timing efforts and possible responses to these as a way to broach the value of active, flexible, and open timing modes over passive, institutionalized, and brittle timing regimes. The remainder of the chapter extracts and extends important implications from Elias’ presentation of basic timing. The fourth section shows how practical timing activities work as the source of time, from elementary symbolic references to full-blown concepts. I also discuss how the language of time transmits important knowledge about timing activities but in doing so obscures their practical, processual, and human elements. Turning this process around, then, provides the key to unlocking the secrets of various

1  IR research on time mostly overlooks timing. It occurs not at all in (Walker 1993; Berenskoetter 2011; Solomon 2014; Shapiro 2016); very briefly in (Hutchings 2008b, 30–1; Hom 2010, 1156, 1166; Hom and Steele  2010, 277; Lundborg  2011, 15; McIntosh  2015, 472, 479); and en­ig­mat­ic­al­ly in (Walker 2009, 198, 252, 131).

International Relations and the Problem of Time. Andrew R. Hom, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andrew R. Hom. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850014.001.0001

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28  International Relations and the Problem of Time times as well as claims about time per se. The fifth section brings timing theory closer to IR by highlighting several intrinsically political aspects of any timing operation, in particular the way it realizes a will to power, or what I call a will to time.

Prison of Our Own Making: Problems with the Discourse of Time Why do we need a new approach to time and temporality, much less one that begins and proceeds so differently as timing? There are, after all, numerous wellregarded approaches to time and temporality drawing on robust theoretical efforts in philosophy, history, the natural sciences, and the wider human sciences. Most of these intellectual domains also enjoy a longer and more august history than political science and IR. Why not, then, work with one more familiar approach or another? At least five issues confront existing approaches to time and temporality as they pertain to IR. Taken together, these suggest that a new tack might pay dividends. First, as discussed in the introduction, IR scholars repeat lay habits in working simultaneously and unreflectively with our two contradictory cultures of time—Western standard and problematic. Second, symbolic and explicit references to time pervade human experience (Gell 1992). Time is the most common noun in English.2 In ordinary life we easily say that the times are changing, that time flies, slows down, accelerates, and passes us by; we readily use temporal markers like “at the same time,” “at no time,” or “in no time”; and we refer regularly to “wartime” and “peacetime,” or “a time for” this or that. Time is both ripe and a source of decay. It reveals truth but kills all its students. It is or is not on our side. It is a river or a commodity. It is something abstract and shaped—curvilinear, unirectilinear, a layered manifold, extensive or punctual. Due in part to this discursive ubiquity but also to recent scholarly interest, IR similarly displays an increasingly prolific and variegated menu of times and temporalities.3 This complements—or exacerbates—the central but enigmatic place of temporal references and assumptions in scholarship. Moreover, scholars shift seamlessly between literal references, metaphor, simile, and rhetorical tropes, referring easily to “temporal borders” (Lundborg 2016a, 103–4; Walker 2009, 31–5), “military techno-scientific time” (Gallagher 2012, 77), “now-time” and “city time” (Stephens 2010, 36, 42), or “timeless time” (Blaney and Inayatullah 2010, 190), to name just a very few. Such diversity does not, to date, receive much in the way of systematic elaboration or “predicate analysis” showing why such qualifiers “stick” and “construct the thing(s) named as a particular sort 2 (BBC 2006). 3  A keyword search for “time” in IR publications returns more Google Scholar hits than “power,” “sovereignty,” “strategy,” “war,” or “security.”

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Timing  29 of thing, with particular features and capacities” (Milliken  1999, 232). Instead, work on time proceeds primarily through common-sense formulations. Finally, despite recent interest in several corners of the field, IR scholars working on time do not engage much with each other. Mainstream and critical ­scholars alike work with both of our cultures of time, while IR’s catalog of alternative times continues to grow.4 Yet there exists very little effort to interrelate, compare, or otherwise place these diverse times in dialog.5 Most IR work on time has not taken up this challenge of time’s ubiquity and diversity (see Stevens  2015, 37). Instead, IR’s temporal researchers often act like isolated knowledge channels, or “stovepipes” (Hom 2018a, 71), which widen but do not deepen (as in K. Booth 2011, 86) our perspective on time as related to global politics. Third, even as they catalog significant variation and disclose some political consequences of particular times (e.g. Edkins 2003; Lundborg 2011), IR scholars also privilege a select few master concepts of time in their analytical frameworks, for example linear/cyclical distinctions (Walker 1993; 2009; Jarvis 2009; Gallagher 2012), classical specifications of chronos and kairos (Hutchings 2007; 2008b; 2018), Deleuzean adaptations of aion and “the pure event” (Hutchings 2007; Lundborg 2011), or hierarchical models of sociotem­poral­ity drawn from the work of J.T. Fraser (Stevens 2015). I address each of these at length in subsequent chapters, but for now it suffices to point out that where these “original” times and temporalities come from or what justifies their use over and above other possible master concepts does not typically receive much discussion, leaving these accounts dependent on whether we find their choice of foundational time(s) plausible and intuitive. This inattention matters, for “concepts are not found in nature but rather are created by humans in their efforts to make sense of experience” and further are “parceled” from a “limitless” menu of experiences and ideas (Davis  2005, 155). Even the most sensitive and systematic treatments, like those in Kimberly Hutchings’ and Tim Stevens’ works just cited, still depend on the implicit authority of classical thought or biophysical speculation.6 Given the aforementioned ubiquity of time symbols, such choices are understandable. Faced with a profusion of times, we must start by acknowledging and identifying them. Also, every analysis starts somewhere, and that same temporal variety provides a wealth of times seemingly ready at hand. However, such practices also encourage an overall situation where “theories and methods have not yet been, or perhaps cannot yet be, extended to all the forms of time which we can identify and in which we might be interested” (Stevens  2015, 46).7 When 4  For a non-exhaustive survey, see Hom (2018c, 305–8). 5  E.g. cf. Shapiro (2000; 2010; 2016). 6 As we will see, approaches referring to “time” and “temporality” as stand-alone entities still ob­ject­ify what they aim to unpack. 7  This encourages an anthropological or geographical reductionism where distinct times just do adhere to different cultures, which closes off the possibility of interrelating times and drawing out their shared features.

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30  International Relations and the Problem of Time combined with the even more pervasive habit—across mainstream and critical ­scholarship alike—of discussing and thinking about time as an entity with attributes, this also reifies and objectifies time as a feature of the world divorced from human experience and activity. Time is something we move within, something that acts upon us or with which we grapple, but always more or less ‘thingy,’ possessing some immutable essence, and operating “irrespective of human desires and interventions” (Stevens 2015, 43–4). In IR discourse as in many others, time acts as a pre-constituted object of knowledge, a part of the “enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse” (Foucault, quoted in Onuf  2012, 33; see also Berenskoetter 2017, 152) and of a “static” (Guzzini 2013, 534) or “substantialist” ontology (Jackson and Nexon 1999, 293–95). Fourth, such an ontology comports entirely with a traditional value scale of time, which locates various human expressions of time beneath more objective, static, natural, or philosophically sound concepts of time—especially those exemplified in Western standard reckoning techniques. This value scale emanates from Time’s ancient estrangement and subsequent settlement in the roots of Western thought.8 It informs philosophical treatments of time searching for its “truth conditionals” or attempting to construct a perfectly consistent and logical account of time in order to establish its reality (e.g. McTaggart 1908; 1968, 89; Smith 2002).9 It also authorizes the classical physics view of time as a neutral, absolute, independent, and mostly “intangible cosmic backcloth against which existence plays out” (Stevens 2015, 61; e.g. Newton 1685; 1760; see Ricoeur 1988, 278 n18, n20). Although later physicists such as Albert Einstein (2001) acknowledged that time might result directly from perspectival timing operations not unlike the one developed in this book, such realizations did not upend the value scale. Rather, if time was “merely” a matter of timing then it was wholly relative, in other words, less real.10 Similarly, even critical time studies distinguish between natural and objective “time” and “temporality” as the subjective human experience of time (e.g. Solomon  2014; see Hoy  2009, xiii; and Arstila and Lloyd  2014). While such moves successfully carve out space to engage more of the variety of human ex­peri­ence, by leaving “time” to the natural world, they buttress this value scale, which conflates “temporal” with imperfect and subjectively lacking and sub­or­din­ates human and social phenomena beneath the more reliable examples of “objective” time. 8  For example, Augustine (2011, bk. 11 chp. 14) defined the temporal as that which “tends toward non-being.” 9  Time’s reality remains an open question in philosophy and the natural sciences (see Stevens 2015, 42–3) but the debate recalls more general efforts to overcome the problem of Time (see Gunnell 1987; Ricoeur 1984). 10  Physicists now interpret time as an evolving and directional phenomenon derived from entropy, the tendency toward disorder (see Carroll 2010; Smolin 2013). Although we cannot delve into this, such explanations overlook the point that entropy’s supposedly intrinsic consequence of temporal directionality derives from a human preference for order over disorder.

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Timing  31 Fifth, even if we might be tempted to accept this value scale and its presumptive demotion of human time, more perceptive observers note that this hierarchy and accounts based on its assumptions produce irresolvable internal tensions. As Paul Ricoeur (1988, 193; 1984) painstakingly traces, philosophers of all stripes ­confront an aporia at the heart of time. An aporia is “a self-engendered paradox beyond which it cannot press” or an “unpassable path” (Doty 1997, 375, 388 n1)—in this case one between subjective-phenomenological and objective-celestial times that bedevils efforts to elucidate the “oneness” of Time in a unified, internally consistent intellectual system. For philosophers and metaphysicians, this manifests in attempts to square subjective, idiosyncratic, and fleeting “human time” with the more objective, regular, unified, and “real” or “actual” time of the physical cosmos (see Ricoeur 1988, 11–96; 1984; for a proto-example, Augustine 2011).11 Efforts to work in the other direction, “up” from subjectively experienced or phenomenological temporality to the time of the universe, fare little better (e.g. Husserl 1964; Heidegger 1996; Merleau-Ponty 2002). Those who take subjective time seriously aver that to “understand subjective time is to understand something central to being human” (Arstila and Lloyd 2014, xi). Yet there is something plaintive about these sorts of claims, and, in any case, while they elevate human experience to a serious concern, they do little to resolve the problems already noted. As Ricoeur (1988, 6–7 see also 23–59) summarizes, “[e]very phe­nom­en­ ology admits, along with Kant, that time is a collective singular”; thus, planetary motion only seems more inexplicably consistent and thus philosophically elevated when compared with the variability of human experience. Ricoeur’s point is that aporia haunts any speculation about time that begins from the presumption of a distinction between objective and subjective times (or time and temporality, as in, e.g. Hoy 2009; Solomon 2014; McIntosh 2015). While metaphysics sub­or­ din­ates subjective “time” as less than real, phenomenology only elevates it “above” the traditional ontological threshold by adding “layer upon layer” of concepts, which are meant to conjure some consistency or elegance out of messy experience but only achieve this at the “ever higher price of an even greater aporicity” (Ricoeur 1988, 11). Together these issues hamper research and undersell the importance of time and temporality to IR. They strand IR scholars between a presumptive reliance on clock time, chronic but unreflective evocations of the problem of Time, and a growing but woolly catalog of alternative temporalities that inadvertently reaffirm a temporal hierarchy privileging the clock and calendar and subordinating human 11  This includes Kant, whose thesis of the “indivisibility of time” would seem to be at once sub­ject­ ive (it concerns intuition and experience) and objective (it is presuppositional and formal). Ricoeur (1988, 23) argues that Kant falls back into the aporetic “oneness of time” because he “is unable to construct the presuppositions concerning a Time which itself never appears as such, without borrowing from an implicit phenomenology of time, which is never expressed as such because it is hidden by his transcendental mode of reflection” (Ricoeur 1988, 44).

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32  International Relations and the Problem of Time initiative and experience. This situation pervades the field and highlights the need for a different temporal vocabulary and theoretical approach, one that can complement and extend such efforts without reinforcing their shared tensions. In addition to a broader perspective on time, we need better theoretical leverage—a more rigorous and systematic explication of Time per se. This requires a deeper understanding of the basic processes, assumptions, and meanings that enable us to speak of time at all (see Lynch 2014, 21, 42).

From Time(s) to Timing Time matters a great deal and yet hides in plain sight. The various quotes and citations noted above indicate that a wide range of political processes possess or respond to temporal dynamics. They also suggest some shared but unappreciated affiliation amongst the many times and temporalities of IR, even if our primary concepts and temporal utterances hamstring efforts to identify it.12 Beyond the five problems just introduced, even IR scholars interested in time have ac­know­ ledged that they “lack a philosophical vocabulary adequate to the challenge” (Hutchings 2007, 83) and that much “work remains to draw out the significance of time more comprehensively for the study of global politics” (Solomon  2014, 671). The rest of this chapter wagers that such a basic commonality can be found and developed by re-focusing our analysis to begin with the activity of timing rather than the entity of time.

Moving Beyond Idiom Before introducing timing theory, it is worth noting that the idea of timing deployed in this book goes well beyond common idioms of “timing.” The word already features in political and IR discourse to some extent. Hesiod (1914, ln. 694) argued that “right timing is in all things the most important factor.” The Japanese strategist Miyamoto Mushashi (2010 [1645]) similarly noted that “there is timing in everything.” And the late Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau claimed that the “essential ingredient of politics is timing” (in Davey 1986, 57). We also find timing in ordinary language with some frequency. Upon arriving at the bus stop just before the bus we might comment “nice timing,” much as we say “bad timing” if arriving just after it departs. When encountering a friend unexpectedly, we sometimes remark “what timing!” A friend who routinely stops by just as dinner is served or just after all the heavy lifting is complete possesses 12  On conceptual affiliations, see ( Davis 2005, 158).

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Timing  33 “a real sense of timing.” Relationships foiled by external constraints suggest “the timing just wasn’t right.” These timings are all matters of co-incidence, temporary intersections of processes with important consequences. Timing works the same way in political science and IR. Many research designs treat idiomatic timing (i.e. coincidence or date) as a causal variable (e.g. McLaughlin et al. 1998; Mahieu 2007; Fangyin 2010) or a second-order issue of path-dependence, feedback, or sequencing (Pierson 2004, 11, 15–16, 44; see chapter five). The same goes for works analyzing time itself (e.g. Hutchings 2008b, 30–1; Hom 2010, 1156, 1166; Hom and Steele 2010, 277; Lundborg 2011, 15; McIntosh 2015, 472, 479). While scholars genuflect that timing is “an overlooked, yet fundamental factor” that “must be analyzed in a more comprehensive manner” (Manulak 2018, 24), they have not yet unpacked this term or elaborated it as a concept. Moreover, we often unthinkingly embed idiomatic timing “in,” “through,” or “over” a free-standing or independent time axis (e.g. Hutchings 2008b, 11; Rixen and Viola 2016, 12). This divorces time itself from human action and, by implication, locates time prior to the subjective temporality by which we might arrive at a timing assessment. Even Pierson’s (2004, 54–55 emphasis added) notably thorough treatment locates timing as part of “the systematic exploration of processes unfolding over time” or as “conjunctures” that link “discrete elements or dimensions of politics in the passage of time.” While this timing may exert important and complex effects, the phenomenon itself takes an ontological backseat to time itself. Much as its status as a “familiar stranger” can make it difficult to gain analytical traction on time (Fraser 1987; also Augustine 2011, bk. 11), our idiomatic acquaintance with “timing” makes it easy to overlook. The view of timing developed in this book is more robust. It describes a holistic and ongoing effort to constitute change processes in the first place, establish their importance, arrange them hierarchically, and relate them to other changes to prod­uce a new relational series that unfolds in some ways and not others. Robust timing concerns much more than mere coincidence or the question of when something happens according to clocks and calendars. Here timing involves the basic antecedent tasks of imagining and producing dynamic processes and showing how these creations eventually produce the sense of time “in,” “over,” or “through” which the coincidences we usually call “timing” occur at all (Elias 2007a, 60). It is only once we have an idea of what matters and how things are likely to unfold that some happening can impinge upon us as “unexpected,” coincidental, or a matter of good, bad, or conspicuous “timing”. For example, the timing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s fateful visit to Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 “could not have been more tactless” because it followed AustriaHungary’s annexation of Bosnia and coincided with the anniversary of Serbia’s great defeat by the Ottomans at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 (Macmillan 2014), a “chief point of reference of Serbian nationalism” traditionally understood by

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34  International Relations and the Problem of Time Serbs to commemorate resistance to foreign rule (Heuser  2017, 55–6).13 We organize this story around calendrical dates and we might conclude that the tactless timing of Ferdinand’s visit helped cause the chain of events leading to the Great War. However, without the longer-term processes of annexation, historical memory, collective identity formation, the coordination of diplomatic visits, and the specific ways they collided in Sarajevo, 28 June 1914 would not have become a matter of idiomatically bad timing or, indeed, a central “when aspect” (Elias 2007a, 85) of international politics. On this view, coincidences and sequences only resolve as such and become important within more holistic timing efforts. Much more than any discrete occurrence or string of occurrences, timing forms a basic constituent of social and political life.

How Timing Works Beginning with Timing Instead of Time Although he is largely neglected by IR,14 Elias’ Essay on Time (2007a) poses a brief but provocative argument that all references to and experiences of time and temporality stem from—and refer back to—underlying timing activities. This means that instead of beginning temporal analyses with discussions of time per se, we should begin with timing. The rationale for this stems from discussions that blend history and theory. Historically, Elias (2007a, 35, 43–4; see also Cauvin 2000) locates the birth of time in human experience during an epoch, quite recent on evolutionary scales but very old in cultural terms, when the growth in size and complexity of human relations and societies necessitated the creation of elaborate symbolic worlds and the means of coordinating widespread, extended activities with one another and the wider physical environment.15 In most cases, these coordination efforts or “social timing activities” (Elias 2007a, 86) emerged in evolving agricultural practices that benefited from seasonal coordination. Social groups represented these efforts with symbolic language, whose “figural qualities” transposed features of timing activities into attributes of the noun “time” (Elias 2007a, 43). Over many centuries, these transpositions settled into a multifaceted conception of time, 13  “We feeling” goes hand in hand with “when feeling.” It took six more decades for Serbia to become a formal part of the Ottoman Empire. There was nothing magical about the calendar date of 28/6/1389 or events on the day. Only historical memory and collective identity formation “recast [it] as a great moral victory” (Heuser 2017, 56) that could influence politics half a millennium later. 14  Although Linklater has engaged a number of IR themes using Elias (especially Linklater 2011a; 2016; also Bucher 2012; Lacassagne 2012; Saramago 2015). 15  IR and political science take note of this epoch’s mythologies (Voegelin 1956) and diverse ordering practices (Watson 1992, 21–134; Buzan and Little 2000) but less so its ideas about time (but see Gunnell 1987).

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Timing  35 which came to occupy a key place in the symbolic order of human societies ­reliant on timing. Much as agricultural civilizations attached religious significance to both recurrent and unique changes in the natural environment because of their impact on crops and social organization (Elias 2007a, 42–4), as timing activities became more crucial to survival, symbols, myths, and even gods of time emerged. These historical observations yield a simple but striking conclusion: Whenever we invoke it or find it in language—and well before it becomes a philosophical, conceptual, or theoretical object of analysis—“time” symbolizes features of robust social timing activities (Elias 2007a, 38–9).

Timing Basics Moving from history to theory, what, then, does this more robust notion of ­timing consist of and how does it work? Timing refers to a type of relationship, established by a human (group), “between two or more continua of change, one of which is used by it as a frame of reference or standard of measurement for the other (or others)” (Elias 2007a, 38–9). What we understand to be time is the symbol of that timing relationship. These straightforward but powerful statements summarize the nuts and bolts of timing, but it is helpful to unpack and elaborate further. Timing is an act of intellectual and practical synthesis, a basic means of establishing relationships between events, processes, and people. It constructs links between the “when-aspects” of very different change processes (Elias 2007a, 85) according to an overarching standard—a privileged change continuum, governing principle, theme, or idea that provides the organizing rubric for stitching disparate changes, processes, and agents together into a coherent and orderly whole. As one horologist notes, “the time standard is everything; the counting is a trivial problem” of technique (Landes  2000, 8). Prominent examples of timing standards include planetary motion or mechanical and atomic oscillations— primarily repetitive motions, although we will discuss less repetitive options below (see page 00). According to its overarching standard, timing proceeds through further op­er­ ations of integration and coordination (Elias  2007a, 60–1). Integration brings elem­ents together so as “to form one whole” or “to render entire or complete.”16 Coordination refers either to specific operations of classifying and placing things “in the same order, rank, or division” or to more general efforts to “bring into proper combined order as parts of a whole” in pursuit of a “particular result.”17 We might think of these closely intertwined operations as ones of gathering and

16  (“Integrate, v.” OED Online 2013).

17  (“Co-Ordinate, v.” OED Online 2013).

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36  International Relations and the Problem of Time arranging. They work together to collect and pose dynamic processes such that their when-aspects form an intelligible whole that enables practical orientation, action, and control (Elias 2007a, 43–4, 62, 85–6, 136). As a practical effort, timing emerges in the midst of discord or simply where there exists untapped potential for meaningful relationships. Where discord obtains, timing provides an alternative to dissention, strife, disagreement, and difference. In either case, as long as the change continua in question are minimally amenable—possessing some intelligible features and not too complex—or can be made amenable by abstraction, generalization, analogy, or other creative adjustments, it is possible to time. When we time successfully, an otherwise unwieldy collection of changes, actors, and processes come together to unfold toward a desired outcome; or we know just what to do and when to do it to steer toward that outcome. When thinking of timing examples, what likely comes to mind is a straightforward instance like our efforts to time our arrivals to the station with train departures or other domesticated and largely clock- or calendar-driven activities. This is a matter of familiarity rather than theoretical necessity. For an international political example of timing, postcolonial states established their legitimacy and membership in international society through the fraught emulation of western metropoles (Vieira  2018). These were dynamic processes organized around the “standard of (western) civilization,” which indicated what sorts of identities to present to the world, what policies to undertake, and even the sequence for doing so (Gong 1984; Zhang 1991). Relatedly, Japan undertook “defensive modernization” during the Meiji Restoration, commencing sweeping sociopolitical reforms intended to emulate and thus “deflect Western economic and political expansion from its shores” (Young 1985, 90). We can distinguish between active and passive timing. Active timing requires conscious decisions, effortful actions, and its adequacy and success are by no means guaranteed. It is a deliberate effort to establish relationships where none previously existed or to dramatically alter extant relationships toward different conclusions. Early efforts to coordinate agriculture with seasonal variation, or technological innovations like rough and ready calendars, the hourglasses and clepsydrae of European and Asian antiquity, and the fits and starts by which early modern inventors developed the oscillating mechanical escapement all represent long-running active timing experiments (Landes 2000, 8). But active timing also extends well beyond technology, to include decisive action “at just the right moment,” which can transform a situation or “alter the course of events” (see Hutchings 2008b, 5–9); or wholesale ideological proposals about reordering the dynamics and relations of social life (see Hanson 1997). By contrast, passive timing “requires no decision” and so little effort that it occurs almost subconsciously (Elias 2007a, 41–3). This may be because the relevant change continua naturally submit to synthesis or because they reflect a record of successful active timing that has by repetition and institutionalization

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Timing  37 become almost “second nature.” Western standard time is a perfect example (see Hom 2010). It requires almost no effort, just a quick glance at the clock or calendar, whose readout is so familiar that we easily think of its display as mirroring time per se. Yet the modern clock shows us no more than a graphical presentation of mechanical or atomic motion, which we relate to any number of other changes and processes. The clock produces an image we use to time.18 The serial passage of time itself provides another. Although we tend to think of “linear time” as something external to ourselves along or through which we move, timing theory links a sense of orderly passage to the phenomenological effects of the intellectual op­er­ations that humans use to orient themselves in the world by “remembering distinctly what happened earlier and . . . seeing it in their minds’ eyes as a single picture, together with what happened later and what is happening now” (Elias 2007a, 31; see also R. Cox 1981, 132).19 These enable an understanding of before and after, help us “envisag[e] together that which does not, strictly, occur together” and eventually produce “the perception of events which happen one after another as a ‘sequence in time’” (Elias 2007a, 61, 31).20 We easily treat the sequence and the time in which it occurs as separate entities, but in these cases they are one and the same. There is, on this account, no given and free-standing temporal dimension “in” or “over” which sequences and relationships unfold. In grasping the series or relationship—say, institutionally-reinforced cooperation, the opening of global markets, or the spread of democracy (Lissner and Rapp-Hooper  2018, 9–11)—we attain (or reinforce) a sense of time’s basic passage.

Timing Breakdowns and Responses Whether active or passive, and whether new or deeply ingrained in our collective practices and meanings, no timing mode is ever complete in the sense of providing an ironclad way of establishing relations successfully and usefully in perpetuity. As a human synthesis animated by practical intent, timing necessarily negotiates disparate, dynamic factors. And as a human activity, it remains vulnerable to our natural finitude—both our ultimate mortality and our more ordinary imperfections of bounded knowledge, bridled action, and unforeseen consequences (MacKenzie 1916, 401; Morgenthau 1946).

18  Similarly, the calendar “harmonizes labors with days, holidays with seasons and years. It integrates the community and its customs into the cosmic order . . . And it does this by making a note­worthy present coincide with an anonymous instant in the axial moment of the calendar” (Ricoeur  2008a, 209–10 emphasis added). 19  As discussed in chapter three, this is a form of temporal gestalt. 20  Evolutionary biological work on the emergence of serial apprehension supports this line of argument (Boyd 2009, 47).

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38  International Relations and the Problem of Time Timing thus possesses an intrinsic underlap between its limits as a human c­ onstruct and the expansive nature of the environment on which and in which it works. At any moment novel changes may emerge that confound it or expose problems in its organizing standard.21 The complexity of its operation and the processes it organizes may create new challenges. Or new competing timing agents may intervene. Precisely because it works by engaging and transforming the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of social existence (James 2007, 1:488; Mearsheimer and Walt 2013, 431), that ceaseless “welter of unique facts” (Morgenthau 1965, 171; Ringmar  1996, 72) from which something may emerge that “erodes or swamps the mechanisms of reproduction that generate continuity” (Pierson 2004, 52), timing enjoys no safe place of rest. So while good timing succeeds and may become increasingly passive, it always remains a “fluctuating, tensile equilibrium” (Elias 1984, 131). Timing modes may succeed, settle, and embed, but they never finish. Furthermore, they may slip at any moment. When timing breaks down, important relations and dynamic processes no longer cohere and unfold in ways conducive to our social and political projects. There are then three ways of re-timing by responses that can help us re-imbue dynamic situations with an intelligible and tractable sense of how they hang together and can or should unfold (see figure 1). First, we can retrofit a novel experience to render it amenable to the extant timing standard and mode. We might identify a shocking event as an “outlier” or “one-off,” which excises it from the array of changes requiring synthesis and thus re-affirms the authority of our hitherto accepted timing standard. For example, decolonization in the 1960s emerged from anticolonial, local efforts to de-legitimate “alien rule,” but scholars in Anglo-European metropoles quickly reinterpreted this sea change as a surprising but confirming episode in “the global diffusion of Western ideals,” which through imperial expansion made anticolonialism possible by bequeathing ideas about freedom and self-determination to native populaces (Getachew  2019, 15–16). Or think of neorealists’ efforts to marginalize the peaceful end of the Timing mode sufficient to pertinent events Passive timing

Retrofit novel event to extant timing mode

Revise extant timing mode owing to novel event

Increasingly active timing →

Devise new alternative from novel event

Increasing degree of difficulty →

Novel event persistently strange/ incomprehensible Timing breakdown

Increasing prevalence of problem of time and fluvial metaphors → Security/stability/order

→

Insecurity/instability/disorder

Figure 1  Response to timing breakdowns (reproduced from Hom 2016, 169)

21  These changes may also unsettle us, for “nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change” (Shelley 1994, 179).

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Timing  39 Cold War as a non-falsifying event and even one that would eventually reaffirm the truth of power-polar politics (Mearsheimer  1990, 56; Wohlforth  1994, 128; see chapter  four), or more generally of “the inductive discovery of additional explanatory factors that can account for the anomalies” in a way that does not challenge the central frame of reference (Büthe 2002, 483). Retrofitting comports with what sociologists call “first order self-reflection,” in which we transform events to fit extant standards, or think about how we might utilize existing pro­ ced­ural rules toward better outcomes, but do not fundamentally scrutinize the standards or their attendant rules (Baert 1992, 86). Second, we can revise either the standard or its modes of synthesis. This accommodates novel change in an adjusted but not wholly different timing regime. For example, we add leap seconds or days to clock and calendar time to re-align evermore reliable human mechanisms with the eccentric heavens. Revision may also work through “re-sequencing” and “re-categorizing,” which turns “marginal” moments into main events, or bit players into protagonists (Baert 1992, 87, 132). For example, various actors revised logics of “temporal othering” to good effect during the environmental debates of the late twentieth century (Hom and Steele 2016). Long treated as backward or behind the pace set by the purported American and European exemplars of human progress, Global South states and rising powers co-opted political metaphors of human development into arguments about common but differentiated responsibilities. States previously con­ sidered “behind” became historically disadvantaged partners deserving of different standards, which would foster equity by allowing them to pursue economic development less fettered by environmental regulations and benchmarks, just as industrialized countries previously had (see also Rajamani 2000; Benney 2018; and more generally Blaney and Inayatullah 2010; Elliott 2017). However, revision may also serve a more “maintenance-based, second order self-reflection,” where we scrutinize and perhaps uncover standards and rules of synthesis but primarily for the sake of reaffirming the overarching project or situation they serve as well as the basic coherence of what has come before (Baert 1992, 17; also Onuf 1998, 62). For example, the United States’ national security response to 9/11 evinced great shock but ultimately produced only a lightly adjusted rubric for interpreting the world, one which still emphasized American masculinity, liberal exceptionalism, and military intervention as the preferred policy instrument (see Tickner 2014, 131–46; Alter 2017, 269). If active revision also falters, we face the more daunting task of new timing. This entails selecting or constructing an alternative standard; working out its implications for integrating and coordinating various actors, processes, and changes; and then putting it into practice to achieve orientation, guide action, and perhaps encourage control in novel ways. For instance, successful revolutions usher in “the dawn of a new era” in which it is necessary to reconvene a

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40  International Relations and the Problem of Time government, redesign institutions from the ground up, and re-order society according to a wholly different vision of how politics should work (Hanson 1997). When political elites declare, “We stand at the birth of a new millennium” (National Public Radio  2017), as Donald Trump did at his inauguration, they point less to any concrete calendrical threshold than to a desire to fundamentally re-configure the way that social relations and processes hang together (see Jackson and Nexon 1999, 292). These situations reflect a more transformative brand of second-order self-reflection (Baert 1992, 87–9), in which discovery of extant timing modes is part of the process of devising unprecedented timing alternatives. As I note elsewhere, these ways of responding to timing breakdowns chart a spectrum of increasing difficulty: “retrofitting requires some interpretive effort to index developments to an existing model; revision significantly alters that model but also remains delimited by it; genuine alternatives reconsider everything and entail fundamental questions about understanding and being in the world” (Hom  2016, 169). Moreover, this spectrum shifts from passive to increasingly active timing: “retrofitting marks the move from passive to minimally active effort; revision is more active; new alternatives require new timing standards, different modes of combination, and may confront a genuine timing crisis—the possibility that no timing standards or modes are adequate to a developing situation” (Hom 2016, 169).22 Finally, this spectrum outlines a shift from rigid or brittle timing to more ­flexible or supple timing. Brittle timing leaves little room for adaptation, it can establish change relations in a strictly limited number of ways, and so encourages an increasingly closed view of time (Hom and Steele  2010, 274–8; Hom  2019). This makes it especially vulnerable to confounding developments or efforts to recategorize or re-sequence its object phenomena, all of which threaten to throw off the narrow fit between its ordering standard, modes of synthesis, and those phenomena. These triggers may seem like exogenous shocks (see Pierson 2004, 52), but they are actually relational, resulting not from the intrusion of a free-standing event but instead from the overly puristic way that a timing standard rules over some changes and rules out all others, which makes it difficult to near-impossible for us to adjust, revise, or otherwise respond to happenings that do not fit within this rubric. For instance, think of national calendars. These passive timing regimes marry highly specific political events to repetitive celestial motion in ways that make it difficult for, say, 4 July to be anything other than “Independence Day” in the US or 14 July anything other than Bastille Day in France (Hom 2017b, 451–3). Many calendar dates also work internationally, like Christmas celebrated around much 22  Re-timing possibilities offer us something in between a secure sense of certainty and the limit condition of radical doubt about whether processes hang together at all.

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Timing  41 of the world on 25 December, Eid and Ramadan observed by Muslims everywhere, or the Hindu festival of Diwali. These timing markers help organize the lives of national and international populaces (Callahan 2006). They also render happenings contrary to their meaning especially noteworthy. Twenty-first century terrorism includes a litany of attacks on Eid, Diwali, Easter, and Passover. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed to detonate plastic explosives aboard an intercontinental flight on 24–25 December 2009, and it became the “Christmas attack.” When he pled guilty, the US Justice Department (2012) press release concluded that ­“­[t] hose individuals who experienced Christmas Day 2009 first hand should be rest assured that justice has been done.” The truck ramming in Nice, France, on 14 July 2016 quickly became the “Bastille Day Attack” (Vincent  2017). And of course the 1973 “Yom Kippur War” got its name from the fact that Egypt and Syria launched first strikes on the most holy day of the Jewish calendar.23 Brittle and passive timing habits also concern national security policy analysts in p ­ eriods of unsettling change and uncertainty: “If foreign policy thinkers do not actively anticipate the forces that will shape the international system and assess these as drivers of America’s global role, they will find themselves four or eight years on with a crystallized set of foreign policy expectations and a transformed world that does not conform to them” (Lissner and Rapp-Hooper 2018, 22–3 emphasis added). In a more active mode, the early twentieth century political and artistic program of futurism single-mindedly cast off the past and pursued a new world order through adversarial and nihilistic commitments to speed, destruction, and violence (Poggi and ANONIMO  2009, ix). For futurists like F.T.  Marinetti, war became uniformly glorious, “ ‘the world’s only hygiene’ ” (quoted in Bowler  1991, 763). Their embrace of the “avant-garde” through ceaseless experimentation points to active effort, while their totalizing interpretation of historical events and political possibilities follow a rigid rule—violence means re-invention; and re-invention only becomes meaningful if it agitates and destroys. In these ways, futurism exemplifies an active but brittle way of establishing dynamic relations. Or consider the covering law model of explanation, which defines a causal relationship that holds as a truth claim only if it covers all (or very nearly all) particular instances of the general situation. This model cannot accommodate confounding events, which threaten to decisively falsify the law that purportedly brings an entire class of events into regular order (Hempel  1965, 422–3; Almond and Genco 1977, 500; Mackie 1980). In the social sciences, it often requires significant interpretive labor to collect complex and contingent phenomena under the covering law’s rule (see chapter three). Supple timing modes allow for greater flexibility of interpretation and meaning. They either already subsume a wider range of changes or allow timing agents to 23  Hassner (2011) finds that religious calendars and especially sacred days exert pervasive effects on modern conflict initiation.

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42  International Relations and the Problem of Time accommodate novel changes through moderate revisions of timing standard or modes of synthesis, or some “viable fallback strategy” in the case of misjudgments or unanticipated interaction dynamics (Kratochwil 2018, 397). This includes what we often call improvisation or a “feel” for the situation that helps agents realize their goals amidst shifting circumstances (e.g. Spohr 2016). It also refers to less repetitive ideas like qualitative “progress” or our autobiographical sense of self, both of which require active effort but can be quite flexible in their interpretive rubrics (Freeman 1993). Progressive stories assure us things are moving onward and upward but might highlight economic, political, democratic, or a number of other measures of progress (see Inayatullah and Blaney 2004; Butterfield 1965). Autobiographies meet self-identity commitments by reference to turning points, setbacks, periods of wandering, struggle, learning, triumph, and vindication (e.g. Augustine 2011), among many others (see Inayatullah 2011).24 Western standard time, on the other hand, often epitomizes supple, passive timing. While utterly repetitive, its sheer enumerated abstraction can accommodate a vast range of interpretations, meanings, and practices and thereby helps us to time widely— from coffee meetings to school curricula to financial transactions to military operations and beyond. Taken together, the active/passive and supple/brittle distinctions offer us an ideal-typical matrix for organizing dynamic aspects of social life (see figure 2). Note that active/passive refers to the level of conscious effort required, while supple/brittle refers to how the timing mode interacts with its objects of change. There is no necessary correlation between active and supple, or passive and brittle timing—we might expend considerable effort timing recalcitrant processes or Active Improvisation / ‘feel’ for the situation Covering law model

Autobiography

Supple

‘Progress’

Futurism Brittle ‘Crystallized’ foreign policy National calendars

Western standard time Passive

Figure 2  Timing qualities 24  See also Henry Kissinger’s (1994) semi-autoethnographic writings on international relations.

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Timing  43 actors in a very specific and rigid manner, or we might need very little conscious effort precisely because of a timing mode’s capacity for new situations (as in Western standard time). Timing modes also move around this matrix, depending on whether or not they continue to time successfully and thus to embed socially. As we will see in Part Two of the book, IR timing efforts tend to move around quite a bit along these typological spectra. That said, unless they abstract as comprehensively as Western standard time, over numerous iterations successful timing modes tend to become more and more passive and perhaps more and more brittle (see chapter three).

From Timing to Time(s) This understanding of timing captures much more of temporal life than idiomatic timing, and it does so with a fairly straightforward framework and concepts. More provocatively, this Eliasian theory of timing also makes claims about time per se. The way we apprehend and think about time flows from how we describe timing activities. And due to peculiarities of human symbolic language, “we can often only express constant movement or constant change in ways which imply that it has the character of an isolated object at rest” (Elias 1984, 112). This linguistic form of “process reduction” encourages us to transform “state[s] of flux” into “static conditions” (Elias 2007a, 61; 1989a, 193–6). More precisely, it leads us to speak and think in terms of “reifying substantives,” which have “the character of things in a state of rest” and “tend to express all change and action by means of an attribute” that seems “additional rather than integral” (Elias  1984, 112 em­phasis added). Such is the case with the “hypostatised” noun “time,” which stands in for more dynamic and relational possibilities, like the verb timing (Elias 2007a, 43, 33; 1989b, 342).25 Combined with our basic timing framework, this linguistic point suggests that humans are involved in timing whenever they meet two criteria: (1) they establish dynamic relationships according to an overarching standard; and (2) they use temporal language to describe these efforts. Part Two of this book unpacks a number of scholarly practices meeting these ­cri­teria to show that IR theorists engage in timing and are thus bound up with time frequently and in surprising ways. This linguistic claim also provides the crux for Elias’ theoretical transformation of time from a stand-alone, physical or metaphysical object of analysis to a sociological object and an empirical outcome of human activity and representation.

25  Describing “time passing” is like referring to the “wind blowing”—noun and verb do similar work, with the latter functioning as “an afterthought” that re-animates the static concept we devised to symbolize process in the first place (Elias 2007a, 36). So we describe “the river flowing,” not “the perpetual flowing of the water” (Elias 1984, 112).

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44  International Relations and the Problem of Time On this view, time emanates from nothing other than timing, and more specifically from the ways in which humans represent the timing activities that concern them. The many predicates we attach easily to time or temporality—for instance linear and cyclical, war and peace, slow and fast, work and leisure—all refer back to and abstract from the concrete aspects of different efforts to construct dynamic relationships. Linguistic abstraction is here a practical resource for coping with the fluidity and vicissitudes of our complex existence. When we invoke “time,” then, we conduct “an intellectual synthesis, a connection of events, at a relatively high level of universality” in order to help us “perform the kind of thinking which enables human beings to come to grips with the kind of problems that arise from everybody’s coexistence with others” (Elias  2007a, 61; 1989a, 213). Time and its predicates open up a “learned fund of knowledge” that helps us to go on in dynamic environments without always having to begin from scratch (Elias 2007a, 54). Without symbolizing timing with “time,” we would be hopelessly “involved” in learning elementary “connections between happenings” and thus unable to build upon past timing successes (Elias 2007a, 54; 2007b). Time as such is thus one of those “relatively disinterested and impersonal concepts of very high generality” that enables social learning across multiple generations (Elias 2007a, 54).

The Power and Peril of the Language of Time However, the abstractions and generalizations that make process-reductive symbols like time useful also come at a price. When iterated repeatedly they disguise the static or objective concept’s “instrumental character” as a means of process reduction and thus help reify and naturalize that concept—from contingent symbol, to stable object of discourse, to “thing” existing “out there” in the world (Elias  2007a, 36, 85; see Levine  2012, 12–16). This symbolic ­concealment becomes all the more important if embedded in intersubjective or social usage, which passes on knowledge but also severs “time” utterances from any specific activity. This helps “fetishize” time as something separate from dynamic relations and human agency (Elias  2007a, 61, 96; see Levine 2012, 15)—an entity rather than a relational marker (Elias 2007a, 36; see also Emirbayer 1997, 304; Jackson and Nexon 1999) and, going further, an existential dimension, ontological force (Agathangelou and Killian 2016a, 24), or even a divine agent.26 By this point, time utterances have become social facts shared by some “plurality of interdependent human beings,” which grants such utterances “relative autonomy” and even “a power of compulsion” over individual actors 26  Even theorists overlooking the importance of timing per se grasp the relational importance of time, as when Durkheim (2012, 17 emphasis added) argues that without a shared time “all contact between [our] minds would be impossible, and with that, all life together.”

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Timing  45 (Elias  2007a, 96–7). The more we use and share concepts of time, the more they seem to exist in spite of and above us.27 As we will see shortly, IR’s two primary cultures of time exemplify this shift. They symbolically convey numerous, variegated lessons drawn from a range of historical timing efforts, but in ways that conceal those efforts’ practical and social character in stylized figurations of malignant deities and perilous fluids or empty containers and clean, straight lines.28 Such process reduction or “entitivization” (Emirbayer 1997) appears “self-explanatory to people who have grown up with such languages. They often imagine it impossible to think and speak differently” (Elias 1984, 112). An important consequence of process reduction is to reify conceptual distinctions between “structures and processes, or between objects and relationships” (Elias  1984, 113), with the former trumping the latter due to their perceived solidity and stability. Here IR’s cultures of time comport with wider disciplinary tradition. The creation and defense of borders, the idealized monopoly of force, and international recognition as a binary status all mark examples where IR scholars hypostatize and naturalize processes as static categories and entities (McIntosh 2014, 10). The normative IR concept of accountability derives from the Old French comptes à rendre, an inherently relational process where one agent renders account to another for certain behaviors (see Borowiak  2011, 185 n1; Keohane  2002, 1123–5). Similarly, security is an utterly “derivative” concept dependent on assumptions or decisions about who should be secured from what or whom (see der Derian 1995; Krause and Williams 1997, ix).29 “The state” abstracts a variety of sovereign, administrative, racial, and violent practices loosely indexed to territory (see Pourmokhtari 2013; McIntosh 2015; Beurskens and Miggelbrink 2017). “International society” abstracts and reifies scholarly choices about how to analyze far-flung relations between specific agents, only to end up granted an agency of its own that obscures those choices and the original actors they concerned (Kaczmarska 2019). Myriad conflictual processes constitute what we call “a war” (McIntosh 2019); gathering them under this term makes it easier to think of wars as discrete events that start and stop, or even possess agency—“Wars . . . will come

27  This process also draws from externalization, a type of psychological transference whereby we unconsciously “project” internal characteristics outward to construct others, events, and external reality itself (Akhtar 2009, 100–1). 28 In this sense, our cultures of time work like dead metaphors, burying their transference of ­meaning in the “elevation” of that transfer to a concept “as such” (Ricoeur 2008b, 115, 305; although cf. Ricoeur 1984, 21). We call time a “river” but do not think of time as wet or composed of specific molecules (H20). Time stands in good IR company here: the state of nature, balance of power, containment, order, structures, levels of analysis, path dependence, progressive versus degenerative research, spill-over effects, theories as models, rationality and sovereignty in game-theoretical approaches (Guilhot 2011b, 296), ruptures (see chapter eight), cyclical violence versus linear progress, and even mathematics (see chapter six) all depend on metaphor. 29  See also Lynch (2014, 31) on “the national interest.”

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46  International Relations and the Problem of Time when they will come” (Bobbitt 2003, 819).30 IR generally proceeds more comfortably with static entities and objects rather than fluid processes and relations (see Hom 2018a, 71; Jackson and Nexon 1999; McCourt 2016; Qin 2018), a habit that supports philosophical inquiry but does not always conduce to practically or politically relevant knowledge (Jung 2001, 4; Steele 2019, 46). The reification of time as an ontological entity rather than a symbol of timing practices also holds important consequences for philosophizing and theorizing time more broadly. “[S]ubstantival . . . thinking deceives us. It endows time with an existence of its own” (Elias 2007a, 65 n17 emphasis added).31 It encourages us to regard “analysis as the equivalent of intuition” (Bergson  1912, 59–60) or lived experiences and practices (McIntosh 2014, 17), and to conflate our analytical choices with independent ontological features (Jackson and Nexon 1999, 295; Elias 2007a, 65 n17, 96). This makes it seem natural to treat time as a metaphysical condition (Kant 2008), a natural and absolute dimension of existence (Newton 1685; 1760), or even a phenomenological “occurrence directly accessible to sense-perception” (Elias 2007a, 84; e.g. Husserl 1964), rather than a social product of relation-building practices.32 It is by forgetting its practical, processual, and relational roots and treating it instead as an object of logic, science, or metaphysics that a host of time theorists founder against time’s seemingly natural limits or “aporetic” qualities (Ricoeur  1984, 5–30; 1988, 11–98; Stevens  2015, 42). Rather than announcing some fundamental “mystery” of the universe (Lundborg 2016a, 117), these difficulties result from the near-universal tendency of time scholars to begin their analysis too late—in the middle of the story, with some given time or temporality

30  See also Qin’s (2018, 25–50) presentation of theory’s “hard core,” in which “the metaphysical conceives” while “the substantive perceives.” 31  A host of theorists embracing process-oriented philosophy grappled with this issue but none worked with a robust concept of timing. Instead they selected various substantive and spatialized tem­poral concepts. Bergson (1912, 55–6; 1979) intended the “homogeneous” and “abstract time” of dur­ation “to facilitate the comparison between the different concrete durations, to permit us to count simultaneities,” a move that had durations “dilating” into each other or humans dilating into dur­ ations. Whitehead (2004, 35) built up “duration” from a given kernel of “simultaneity” that assumed some antecedent time “over which” concrete experiences play out (see Hernes  2014). He felt hamstrung by language: “The word ‘duration’ is perhaps unfortunate insofar as it suggests a mere abstract stretch of time. This is not what I mean” (Whitehead 2004, 36). But, to clarify this, Whitehead (2004, 36 emphasis added) still looked to other substantivals: “A duration is a concrete slab of nature limited by simultaneity.” For Mead (2002, 102, 65), the “passing present” contains past and future via our forward- and backward-looking horizons. And even when trading his substantialized formulation of the “future” pulling us toward death for a more processual account, Heidegger (cf. 1996; 2002) still relied on a free-standing time “in” which appropriation and occurrence took place (see Ricoeur 1984, 60–4). Moreover, while he emphasized the processual nature of Being and animated various ideas like “becoming” or “presencing,” Heidegger never moved from time to timing. His masterwork, Being and Time, remained a titular gerund short. 32  Other examples include capital, money, and society (Elias 2007a, 96), which turn practices into metaphysics (Kratochwil 2018, 20). Unlike these examples, IR accounts have not yet discovered timing as constitutive of politics and metaphysical conceits, although Kratochwil’s recent Praxis (2018, 397, 420–3) comes very close on occasion. For discussions of the “philosophically [un]sustainable position” that “ontologically, [time] just is,” see (Stevens 2015, 43–4; McIntosh 2015, 470).

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Timing  47 instead of its animating timing activities and the symbolic cultures in which they emerge. As Elias (2007a, 61, 36 emphasis added) notes, “one still very widely attributes to ‘time’ itself the properties of the processes whose changing aspects this concept symbolically represents,” an attribution error that makes it possible to “philosophize tirelessly” in a metaphysical or analytical mode about a phenomenon most amenable to social-theoretical inquiry.33 The result? “This has been— down the centuries—a wild goose chase, a hunt for something that does not exist” as an “immutable datum given to and experienced by all humans in the same manner” (Elias 2007a, 101) but instead marks social achievements of creative synthesis and symbolic language. If we want to take this theoretical point seriously, one consequence is that whenever we encounter time and temporality, we should look not to philosophy, natural science, or sub­stan­tival theories for a full and intelligible rendering, since these try to explain the phenomenon using artifacts produced by that same phemonenon. Put differently, trying to understand time using various concepts of time not only reproduces time per se as a stand-alone entity, it locks us inside the very symbolic discourse that we want to unpack and which conceals its own roots in timing activities (Hom 2018a, 73).

Making Sense of “Time” Utterances If we want to escape this self-imposed bind, the first step is to treat all references to “time” and “temporality,” along with temporal modifiers and predicates, as timing indexicals, or symbolic discursive markers of underlying timing efforts. Timing indexicals reflect timing theory’s process-relational roots. They treat temporal symbols as snapshots of timing-in-progress. Much like a snapshot of a house obscures and idealizes those “processes of the maintenance of the house as well as processes of decay and wear which break the house down over time—and privileges it as the ‘essence’ of the house” (Jackson 2004, 282), references to “time” and “temporality” obscure and idealize the very timing activities that grant them their distinctive attributes. They exemplify a human tendency to “conceal” and “hide” the origins of meaning-making practices (Edkins 1999, 2). Thinking about time in this way allows us to organize various times according to their relationship to timing. When timing requires complex decisions, great effort, constant vigilance, or verges on failure, time takes on more figural, discordant, and threatening predicates, as when a time god devours us or the river of time floods and bears us rapidly toward some unwelcome outcome. Problematic time utterances indicate problems with active timing. As active timing succeeds and persists enough to become a largely passive and institutionalized activity,

33  Elias here echoes Ricoeur’s (2008a, 204) “impasse . . . related to pure reflection.”

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48  International Relations and the Problem of Time time takes on more abstract, homogeneous, unified, and generally more docile predicates. Non-threatening time utterances indicate successful and primarily passive timing. Invocations of “time” provide crucial symbolic information about the status of our ongoing timing projects, and by scrutinizing these more directly we can make sense of a wide variety of otherwise disparate and in some cases contradictory references to time.

The Politics in Timing In these ways, timing theory offers a more dynamic means of understanding and unpacking our various “times” and temporal phenomena. Yet it remains quite general and abstract, a skeleton more than a fully fledged account of how we might read international politics as a matter of timing. To bring timing closer to the concerns of IR, we can extract several political qualities from the basic act of timing. First, the timing standard. As noted above, intuitive examples of timing standards include highly reliable repetitive motion akin to the clock or atomic oscillator. Although he similarly emphasizes large-scale repetitive motion and “developmental continuities,” Elias (2007a, cf. 39, 46, 110) also notes that in principle any idea, continuum, or “host” of differences—including biophysical changes,34 decision rules, or a sense of self—that allows us to constitute and synthesize relations can work as a timing standard. So while in places Elias (e.g. 2007a, 84) suggests that successful timing standards meet three criteria—repetition, reliability, and high levels of control—his overall discussion of timing suggests that a change continuum meeting any one of these criteria can work as a timing standard.35 Indeed, a timing standard need not be repetitive or consistent to enable timing. If evocative enough, even fuzzy visions “pull the actor toward the future” (Berenskoetter 2011, 663). And as discussed in chapter three, narratives compose and locate actors and situations in a holistic gestalt (Carr 1986, 41–2). Nor must timing standards come from natural sources—even highly personalized and unique routines might lend ordinary life a sense of continuity (Steele 2008a, 3). All of these examples work as timing standards—not by their inherent consistency or repetitiveness but simply because they allow people “on their own initiative [to] establish more exact and reliable sequences as a standard for other sequences” (Elias 2007a, 39 emphasis added).36 Repetition only becomes appealing if we wish to time again and again in the same way or to use a common standard

34  “[I]if they stop changing for good, . . . people cease to be people” (Elias 2007a, 60). 35  Although, we will soon see that repetition and control do encourage more passive timing. 36  Elias often interchanges “repeatable” with “more exact,” which may acknowledge a tension in his thinking.

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Timing  49 to time a much wider variety of change continua. None of this obviates the usefulness of more idiosyncratic standards for arranging change continua into a useful and orderly whole. Second, almost any change continuum is in principle eligible for timing, from causal processes (see Jackson and Nexon 1999, 302), to discrete events, to more loosely linked differences we pick out from the wider world of experience (Elias 2007a, 46, 110; see Hom 2018a, 71–2). The change phenomena in question might be individual, collective, or hugely social. As long as they are involved in the establishment of shared or in-common change properties, “regardless of their differences in kind” (Elias 2007a, 60 emphasis added), they instantiate timing. All of this is consistent with Elias’ repeated insistence that it is dynamic ­environments plus the human capacity for relating changes to each other, not some mind-independent, material, or logical condition, that provides the possibility of timing and thereby the existence of time. Someone intent on timing may use almost any change continuum as a standard so long as it allows her to bring other continua—selected from a huge range of possibilities—to heel. This may include other social agents. Third, the distinctions between active and passive timing in figure 2 above are more like thresholds on a fluid spectrum. Especially important points include completely novel (i.e. unprecedented) timing proposals, shared but effortful activities, habituated practices, and finally deeply embedded and thoroughly passive timing regimes. For a timing activity to move along this spectrum from more active to more passive, it must transfer working knowledge enabling better orientation, coordination, and control (Elias 2007a, 10). At its most effective and passive, such a timing regime might even become a self-propagating or “unowned process” (Jackson and Nexon 1999, 302), one of those “verbs without definitive agents” (Connolly 2013, 155), or a recipe for synthesizing relations that resides in those relations themselves, which have become widely routinized and thereby come to seem natural and necessary. Fourth, because timing is particular and provisional, no point on this spectrum is immune to novel changes or other timing slippages.37 When timing slips or breaks down, we must necessarily shift from more passive to more active efforts to restore or completely reconstruct social relations (e.g. see Hom 2016, 177–8). Consequently, familiar utterances like “the fullness of time” or “the end of history” or “the dimension of time” have no absolute or proper content. They refer, like any other time symbols, exclusively to practical and provisional timing efforts that can change in any discordant moment. Fifth, when describing successful timing activities, substantival discourse can help institutionalize a particular vision of time. It encourages the pacification of 37  Indeed, “provisional” means to hold “for the time being.”

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50  International Relations and the Problem of Time the timing operations and, insofar as it embeds static symbols of this in discourse, self-propagation. It can even vivify time, endowing this readily accepted symbol of passive timing regimes with a sense of agency and potency—like when we problematize time as an ancient, angry god or unruly force. Finally, timing is “self-centred” (Elias 2007a, 43), that is, positional and perspectival (McIntosh 2015, 474–5). It intrinsically concerns “people of a particular reference group” (Elias 2007a, 61). One agent’s way of timing will not necessarily be adequate to others’ timing needs. In the language of critical IR, timing is like theory—always for someone and some purpose (Cox  1981, 128; Linklater  2007; Qin 2018, 51–74). If it becomes especially passive, and self-propagating, timing might even turn imperial—diffusing and collecting far-flung cultures under its hegemonic standard (see Hom 2010).

The Will to Time A common theme running through these discussions is that, in order to establish orderly or concordant relationships amidst natural disorder, timing involves hierarchy and imposition. It depends on our ability to bend changes to our purpose, and to do so by elevating one change continuum over others as the timing standard. It also only arises for purposes not otherwise fulfilled. Where continua co­ord­in­ate naturally, there is no need to time at all. In situations lacking spontaneous order, we have to elevate one continuum over others or else “synthesis” is more like collision and chaos than integration, coordination, and concord. In social settings, timing further depends upon “the readiness of [a] plurality to submit to an integrating authority” (Elias 2007a, 136). Our capacity to time collectively thus relies on power, control of self and others, and submission—either voluntary (see Adam 2004, 113) or coerced (see Hom 2010, 1163–5)—by the many to a single timing standard, which integrates, coordinates, and unifies to some extent. In this sense, timing is an activity that realizes our “will to power” (Nietzsche  1982, 225–8; Petersen 1999). More precisely, timing manifests a will to time—to impose some standard upon messy or unrelated phenomena to produce a coherent change relationship (see Guilhot 2011b, 283; Stevens 2015, 60–7). Exploring the will to power for a moment helps clarify the will to time. The will to power concerns more than just power as domination or control. It expresses a basic feature of the human condition and an “epistemic prerequisite” to action, the need to impose on uncertain and contingent situations an intelligible “ ‘unity and totality’” that enables an action’s execution (Hom and Steele 2010, 281, quoting Petersen 1999, 95). Absent transcendental value scales or other stable grounds of knowledge and action, the will to power supplies a critical founding moment of political imagination. It injects into a radically open context some vision or frame by which to proceed. With timing, the will to time injects into the radical “flow of

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Timing  51 becoming” (Petersen 1999, 104) some imagined and creative standard for relating important changes to each other. As particular, provisional, and positionally specific, the relations that these sorts of standards establish are “relations of power,” which bind us together and instantiate a temporal politics (Geuss 2008, 37). For example, here is Michael Doyle (1986, 1159) discussing Kant: “Understanding history requires an epistemological foundation, for without a teleology, such as the promise of perpetual peace, the complexity of history would overwhelm human understanding.” The key utility of this idea is to propose a “ ‘purposive plan of producing concord among men, even against their will and indeed by means of their very discord’” (Doyle 1986, 1159). The way in which timing produces time comports closely with the will to power. While the latter begins without any possibility of foundational “truth, identity, and meaning” (Petersen 1999, 89), the former denies any absolute identity or truth of time itself. Initially, timing only produces “radically unfounded” and essentially open or relentlessly provisional “times” (Hom and Steele  2010, 281), which take on more metaphysical or classically “real” attributes only to the extent that they get reproduced and embedded through numerous successful iterations over multiple generations. Combining this insight from the will to time with our earlier distinction between rigid/brittle and flexible/supple timing suggests that the “times” that have come to be understood as “real,” metaphysical, or absolute are no more than the symbolic icons of especially successful and powerful timing regimes, whose initial wills to time we have forgotten along with their dynamic and practical roots. Although the will to time initially imagines the possibility of concrete order amidst a hurly burly of experience, it primarily concerns the method for fitting change continua together. Instead of the substantive features of the processes undergoing synthesis—the matter of what is being timed—the will to time proposes how this should happen. In this sense, the message becomes the medium. Western standard timing regimes propose numeration and repetition as the means of coordination. Less strictly repetitive or more idiomatic standards—such as the narrative themes introduced in chapter three—propose qualitative ideas of progress, decay, or violent cycles as ways to establish relationships. Although timing standards necessarily have substantive content, we put them to work as a methodological rule that inflects the form of timing. This is why a particular timing effort, which arises as a solution to a concrete situation, also holds the potential to move beyond it. Because it works by generalization and abstraction, the originary will to time also leaves timing modes open to adaptation and diffusion to a number of concrete contexts well beyond its original problem situation. Successful timing therefore contains genealogical traces (Stevens 2015, 57) of its animating will to time but remains open to wider uses and abuses. When combined with the peculiarities of symbolic language discussed above, this point highlights the political import of timing theory. By the point that a

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52  International Relations and the Problem of Time timing activity has succeeded and ascended to the level of a socially recognized practice, its standard primarily specifies the form of synthesis rather than any contextual content. So any widespread and socially intuitive temporal utterance symbolizes particular goals, standards, and a will to time operationalized as ­methods of integration and coordination, which may be amenable to other goals and wills. All “times” and temporal references—from globally hegemonic clocks to individual and subaltern temporalities—advance some “earthly ambitions” in proposing how best to relate important changes using an overarching rule (Stevens 2015, 63). They also privilege and marginalize, elevate and subordinate, various agents and processes at the same time. This is why every time and tem­ poral­ity instantiates a “chronopolitics” (Klinke 2013; Stevens 2015, 67), including the temporal facets of ideas about social organization as well as intrinsically political issues of hierarchy, subordination, submission, and questions of “existential engagement with a concrete situation” (Guilhot 2011b, 283), all in the service of orientation and control. Whenever we find “time” in human language, or invoke it ourselves, some timing proposal and attendant will to time comes with it, even if we are no longer aware of this. This political dimension of timing plays an important part in the critique developed in Part Two, where I repeatedly inquire whose or which will to time is implied or reproduced by a particular IR theory and whether this accommodates or does interpretive violence to a given political situation.38

Conclusion In response to persistent problems in the way we think about time, this chapter developed a basic framework for analyzing time as a matter of timing—the act of establishing relations between change processes according to some standard or frame of reference. It then spelled out a number of implications of timing theory, including the crucial discursive links between timing and time, the importance of thinking about concepts of time as timing indexicals, and the political nature of timing efforts. While we have come to think of time as an independent entity, a universal dimension, or an internal-subjective experience, timing theory links these possibilities together through political power, showing how discursive symbols of collective timing efforts constitute and embed particular and positional hierarchies and realize a will to time.

38  By treating scholarship as continuous with political practice in this way, timing theory makes common cause with approaches that deny a tidy subject–object distinction in IR, from constructivism (Onuf 1998; Lynch 2014) to arguments about the revolving door between family, domestic, and international affairs (see Owens 2018; and the discussion of Eslanda Robeson in Hutchings 2019).

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Timing  53 Yet, while it may be clear that timing theory offers a different perspective on time, what remains to be seen here is whether such a perspective has more to offer than other established approaches to time within and beyond IR—does timing offer the sort of explanatory and theoretical value that marks not just a different but a novel approach to time? As readers will likely be aware, across a range of intellectual disciplines there already exist numerous concepts of time and tem­poral frameworks, and IR scholars have used several of them to enrich our understanding of international politics. Why do we need another approach, and what does it gain us in terms of explanation and understanding? The next chapter takes up this discussion by comparing timing theory to principal alternatives.

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2

Why Timing Matters Introduction In order to better understand time and its relationship to IR, why start with a view of time as subsidiary to timing activities? Why not begin with a more familiar conceptual framework like linear/cyclical time or a number of other pos­si­bil­ities, even with their known tensions and gaps? In the previous c­ hapter, I argued that timing theory poses a simple but powerful approach to understanding time. This chapter provides further indications of timing theory’s promise by showing how it resolves several thorny problems across and within other treatments of time. Having introduced these problems earlier, this chapter shows how timing theory addresses each, not only clarifying or easing internal tensions but also offering a more holistic, coherent, and rigorous way to explain and understand time itself and its importance in IR. Such a discussion may seem like a detour to those compelled by the basics of timing theory, but in an area as rich and diverse as time studies it is incumbent on a new proposal such as mine to establish its additional value against and beyond other contending perspectives. To do so, the chapter addresses time in IR and its cognate disciplines. It  opens by showing how timing theory engages problems dogging time ­studies  in general, including the empirical profusion of temporal discourse, the incoherence of master concepts of time, the debilitating traditional value scale of time and temporality, and the aporia of philosophical treatments of time. It then outlines the advantages of timing theory for IR in particular. These include adding explanatory value to alternative approaches like future visions, the theory of the present, and hierarchical models of social time; as  well as timing theory’s distinctive ability to explain the emergence and ­coexistence of IR’s two cultures of time—problematic and highly standardized. Finally, it illustrates how many aspects central to the IR intellectual enterprise come down to matters of timing—from obvious concerns like continuity and  change, to our intellectual practices and knowledge modes, and even to key theoretical debates not known for their temporal sensitivity, like the ­neo-neo debate.

International Relations and the Problem of Time. Andrew R. Hom, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andrew R. Hom. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850014.001.0001

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Why Timing Matters  55

The Advantages of Timing Theory for Time Studies Empirical Ubiquity Skeptics might argue that the presentation in chapter  one renders timing and time too commodiously. As Kenneth Waltz (1959, 80–1) noted, something that explains everything actually explains nothing, since we are interested in understanding why phenomena occur or not, and how they occur in one way and not another. Timing theory offers two responses to this line of criticism. First, it helps differentiate and explain how we get some times rather than others, and in that sense does genuine explanatory work. Second, a Waltzian criticism runs up against the empirical dilemma of time’s ubiquity and diversity in human language. As detailed earlier, time is everywhere; it means many different things to many different groups as well as different things within each group. The profusion and range of “time” utterances that humans deploy leaves scholars of time with two choices. Either we can assume that people consistently misuse the word “time,” or we can take them at their word and treat the multifarious utterances of “time” as empirical indicators of a basic commonality among diverse phenomena. As Stevens (2015, 42) observes: “That we give a name to an entity or phenomenon that we can distinguish as qualitatively different from other aspects of reality suggest its peculiarity and uniqueness, even as we consistently fail to define quite what time is or might be.” The commonality of times, then, needs to be explored further. But this only makes it more conspicuous that, like other symbols, IR has not yet had a “systematic discussion of how to promote theoretically informed empirical analyses” of time (Linklater  2019, 931). Timing theory offers a novel way to make sense of empirical instances of time utterances and symbols and, especially, to incorporate these in a systematic body of knowledge.

Master Concepts As noted earlier, the empirical ubiquity of time co-mingles with our second problem, our tendency to rely on given but unrelated and typically undefended master concepts. Taken together, these issues tend to isolate IR engagements with time from each other, leaving the field “stovepiped” into separate knowledge channels. This situation emerges from the linguistic “deception” by which symbolic descriptors of timing stabilize into different forms or concepts of time. The aggregate result is that time studies in IR and beyond give the impression that there just are numerous, diverse, and ultimately incommensurable master times out there in the world.

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56  International Relations and the Problem of Time Timing theory works differently. Instead of building from a given, master c­ oncept of time, it treats any and all temporal utterances as timing indexicals. Because these indexicals are linguistic artifacts that emerge from timing activities in practice, they usefully direct our attention back to those activities in theory. For ex­ample, references to the 9/11 attacks as a “rupture” or “break” in time or as evidence that “time is out of joint” (Shakespeare 2008, 1.5; Derrida 1994, 96, 26) as a result (see also Al-Azm  2004; Wuthnow  2010, 73; Gray  2011, 79) indicate that novel or shocking changes undercut familiar modes of timing global political relations, or rendered inadequate extant visions of how the world hung together and unfolded. Timing indexicals thus remove the need for given master concepts and indeed any original temporality while offering scholars the chance to systematically analyze and interrelate all the many “times” of social life—a challenge time scholars have not yet embraced. To do so, we need to look beyond or behind time in discourse to locate synthetic efforts to construct and order some change relations while excluding others, all according to an overarching standard of reference. Timing theory thereby offers a sort of “predicate analysis,” which unpacks and organizes various qualities of an entity, time, and shows why some qualifiers “stick” and “construct the thing(s) named as a particular sort of thing, with particular features and capacities” (Milliken 1999, 232). As timing indexicals, temporal symbols can represent timing deeds already done or they can perform new timing deeds (Onuf 2012, 82). Going further, they can function as locutionary speech acts that express a state of affairs (an extant timing mode), as illocutionary acts that help the utterer perform a timing op­er­ ation, or as perlocutionary acts that help the speaker propound a timing proposal in a world populated by her audience (Onuf  2012, 83). The implication of this observation is vital for the rest of this book: Whenever we speak “time” or “temporality”, whether these concepts are widely shared or unique to the point of singularity, whenever we evoke temporal symbols as guides to thought or action, we engage directly in timing—either by reproducing or iterating extant timing modes, by constructing new modes, or by working to inject those modes into social life.

Chapter three covers illocutionary and perlocutionary timing acts in some detail in its discussion of narrative emplotment. For now, here are two examples of locutionary timing indexicals. First, Philip Arena (2013) describes James Fearon’s (1995) “rationalist” explanation for war thus: “When a state expects that the mere passage of time will lead it to fare worse in a potential future war against its rival, the rival’s inability to credibly promise not to exploit its future power by demanding a revision of the status quo can tempt the first state to attack so as to forestall (or at least slow down) the shift in power.” The passage of time here evokes a state’s helplessness to change the trajectory and momentum of existing processes

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Why Timing Matters  57 or events. This has little to do with clock or calendrical duration, and much to do with irreversible or durable changes in the balance of power with its rivals. It thus expresses a set of constructed and coordinated relations, synthesized against the standard of state survival and risk aversion, which unfold toward preventive war if nothing else changes in their relations—i.e. if the time they have already established merely continues to pass. Second, reflecting on a tumultuous first half of 2016, David Bell (2016) writes: There are moments in history when time itself seems compressed, when so many shocking and important events crowd together that it becomes almost impossible to keep track of them. Lenin supposedly said “there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen.” (The remark, alas, is probably apocryphal.) Long before him, the French writer Chateaubriand quipped that during the quarter-century of the French Revolution and Napoleonic regime, many centuries elapsed. In late 1989, a single three-month period saw the end of communist power in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania and the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as the U.S. invasion of Panama, and the Malta summit meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President George H.W. Bush where the two leaders essentially announced that the Cold War had come to an end: many years’ worth of change crammed into a single season. Are we now living in one of these periods of temporal acceleration?

This memorable list of compressions and extensions highlights how important political changes can overwhelm Western standard reckoning techniques, which offer us a means of timing social life almost without a second thought. In these cases, the clock’s and calendar’s passive timing power failed, as symbolically indicated by the growth and shrinkage of their inviolable units and their ultimate demotion to rhetorical tropes highlighting what Bell sees as an alarming increase in the frequency of momentous events. In addition to clarifying the role of temporal language, treating time utterances as timing indexicals works more directly than the circuitous formulations necessitated when working with time as a stand-alone entity.1 For example, Michael Shapiro (2010, 113) writes, “The way that people inhabit time has a powerful ontological significance, so that to disrupt their temporal existence is to disturb 1  Timing indexicals also sidestep the long-running philosophy debate about the ontological status of tensed and tenseless time statements. Tensed utterances refer to “past,” “present,” and “future” as actual locations of events (see Smith 2002), while tenseless statements use relative terms like “before,” “after,” and “simultaneous” (see McTaggart 1908). This literature has not yet considered the Eliasian possibility that both vocabularies symbolize different ways of timing relations and experiences. “Earlier than” and “later than” are relations embedded in the concrete experiences that depend in part on basic timing; while ideas of “past,” “present,” and “future” depend on an “anthropomorphic identification” of the speaker with their situation (Elias 2007a, 31, 66).

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58  International Relations and the Problem of Time their way of being. . . . linguistic practices directly reflect a people’s temporal ­ ab­itus.” This roundabout formulation is, at the very least, adjacent to timing h theory, but requires us to balance unelaborated notions of time as inhabitable, a spe­cif­i c­al­ly temporal existence, linguistic practices, and temporal habitus. Or consider the “eloquent” claim that the contemporary present is: “hurtled into the future without regard for human attachments, needs, or cap­ aci­ties.” It is a present that consumes people and resources in the voracious demand for more and more capital, but it is also a present that is consumed by that demand. The past, as a consequence, is erased with “unprecedented speed and indifference,” while the future can only be imagined in terms of the present. . . . [I]n order to resist the overwhelming and disorientating expansion of the present—a present of “permanent war” and globalization, with one an effect of the other—we need to open up the problematic of time and offer alternative temporalities to that of nation and war (Hesford and Diedrich 2010, 6; quoting Brown 2001, 142).

This passage is an intriguing and perhaps forceful characterization of how passive timing regimes, based on capitalist and security principles, encourage the unthinking replication of globalization and war to such an extent that con­tem­ por­ary practices decisively constrain political imagination. However, unless we intuitively share with the authors the same conceptions of hurtling, voracious, expansive presents able to act directly upon people, resources, and the past and future, we will need to carefully unpack the many ways that they seamlessly predi­cate time as an entity possessing qualities and capacities before we can even begin to understand what it could mean to “open up the problematic of time” or offer alternatives.

Traditional Value Scale Timing theory’s competitive advantages extend to the predominant approaches to time in science and philosophy. It upends our traditional value scale—whereby various concepts of purportedly stable, objective time trump all the varieties of malleable, subjective temporal experience2—by providing a way to understand physical time as itself an outgrowth of social timing projects (Elias 2007a, 86). Progress in the natural and especially the physical sciences depended on the social production and diffusion of consistent and widely applicable time-reckoning 2  Concepts are “independent, transcendent objects of knowledge” representing “eternal, im­mut­ able, Ideas,” while in the sensory realm “nothing is certain or clearly perceived because of its constant flux” (Dillon 1977, 92).

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Why Timing Matters  59 techniques (Bartky  2007; Hom  2010). The symbols these techniques produced became conflated with a natural, abstract, and universal dimension, thus obscuring and embedding their animating social interests (Elias 2007a, 87–8). From here, routinization and linguistic habits “reinforce[d] the myth of time as something which in some sense exists and as such can be determined or measured even if it cannot be perceived by the senses” (Elias 2007a, 36). And while the idea of a pre-existing physical or cosmic time currently prevails, we need only note the vast and contentious assemblage of institutions, norms, agreements, and societies required to govern (i.e. to time) Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and to square celestial motion with more consistent human-made timing mechanisms, like quartz and atomic clocks, to remember that this entire edifice springs from and depends upon social efforts and symbols (Stevens 2016).3 The way in which timing theory approaches even the most hypostatized and reified temporal symbols as timing indexicals further reinforces this historical point. It exposes this value scale as an “almost perverse distortion of the actual sequence of events”(Elias 2007a, 96) by which centuries of fluid, social, and finite timing efforts eventually produced reliable, stable, and seemingly infinite or eternal time per se. It also helps contextualize Einstein’s engagement with timing: “He too did not entirely escape the pressure of word-fetishism, and in his own way gave new sustenance to the myth of reified time, for example by maintaining that under certain circumstances time could contract or expand. He discussed the problems of time only within the limited terms of reference of a physicist” (Elias  2007a, 37).4 Upending the traditional value scale helps us take Einstein’s view of timing more seriously than Einstein himself—not as an indication of time’s unreality but rather as the practical basis for all times. As we will soon discuss further, time is intrinsically relative, not because it is “merely” a matter of timing but because—once we decamp traditional but undefended valuations— that is all it ever can or needs to be. This rescues subjective time, temporality, and lived experience from the bottom of a vast, parochial knowledge economy.

Aporia of Time Timing theory dissolves the aporia dogging philosophical treatments of time. Recall that this aporia pertains to the impasse or gap that such analyses repeatedly encounter in treating subjective temporality as less real than objective time or in 3  We easily conflate these with time per se, but even the solar day “is not an abstract measure; it is a length that corresponds to our Care and the world in which it is ‘time to’ do something, where ‘now’ signifies ‘now that’ ” (Ricoeur 1984, 63 emphasis added, following Heidegger). 4  Einstein and Bergson considered the nature of time at length but habitually substantivized it, as in the former’s “dilation of time” and the latter’s “dilation of duration” (see Topper  2013, 127–35; Bergson 2010).

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60  International Relations and the Problem of Time adding layers to phenomenological experience to render it more consistent and singular and thus push it over the traditional ontological threshold. Timing theory recommends a completely different approach. It treats time not as a philosophical question (i.e. as an immutable quality of the external world or an innate mental property) but an empirical-theoretical issue (a practical and symbolic achievement). With timing, we do not need to bridge the aporetic gap. We can instead inquire as to how and why the heavens, physical motion, or any other non-human element came to be useful for always-human timing activities and, eventually, appraised as the ultimate exemplar of “real” or “natural” time in the first place (Elias 2007a, 103). Put differently, timing gives us the crucial backstory of the widespread social projects that by their success, by our symbolic descriptions of them, and through our consequent tendency to forget, made possible Time’s philosophical aporia. Thus, “human-made symbols . . . are time” inasmuch as they help us successfully establish useful dynamic relationships (Elias 2007a, 13). Instead of another failed metaphysical or logical solution produced by “tireless philosophizing,” timing theory’s sociohistorical orientation dissolves Ricoeur’s aporia. It renders objective/subjective, time/temporality, and physical/human distinctions of time moot by placing social timing practices at the root of any and all times, even our most stable and (meta)physical stalwarts.5 It argues that social timing practices precede any and all times but also that those times are very much real, precisely because they transmit learning about practical efficacy through symbolic language. This puts social approaches to time on a much better footing with regard to the “hard” sciences and their philosophical “queen.” Because philosophical aporia are nothing more than unintended consequences of linguistic reification and social amnesia about timing successes, we have no need to connect objective time to subjective temporality in ways that preserve the parochial preeminence of the former just because it evokes the comfort of eternity. Likewise, we do not need to “add layers” to subjective temporality to reach objective time. In timing theory, “building up” in this way means using repetition, routinization, and symbolic language to obscure the activities that help us construct dynamic empirical worlds—it can never be reduced to a matter of architectonic philosophy. This opens the possibility that social and political times not only precede any philosophy or physics of time in the historical sense, but that what our understanding of time requires most urgently is not more freestanding temporalities, master concepts, or philosophical accounts but rather a sociopol­it­ ical history of time based in varieties of timing. To be clear and to link this back to the ubiquity of time, this does not entail that all “times” refer to the same thing or spring from the same timing—either of which would bring timing theory too close to the aspiration for a “collective 5 This approach goes beyond even the more provocative discussions about time, which find c­ osmic-physical time complementing subjective-human temporality (e.g. Frank 2012); or establish a new basis for time’s ontology on advances in physics (Carroll 2010; Smolin 2013).

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Why Timing Matters  61 singular” that lies at the heart of temporal aporia. Rather, in timing theory different “times” transmit practical knowledge about the “when-aspects of very different sequences” produced by different timing activities (Elias 2007a, 85, 60 emphasis added). It does not propose to collapse these differences but to systematically distinguish them. Furthermore, none of them on their own can exhaust all the pos­si­bil­ities of timing and the change continua that we need to time to go on. This accommodates critical scholars’ argument that there is no single, universal “time of the world” while also interrelating the many “times” of our lives as indicative only of a family resemblance in “making of connections as such” (Elias 1989b, 31 emphasis added), not a monolithic unity, oneness of time per se, or “ecstatic unity” (Heidegger 1996, 309–16). When indexed to timing, time per se can never be more or less than a totality-in-multiplicity of our time utterances, the timing activities from whence they come, and the changes that these activities synthesize.6 This key idea links back to the first problem of Time’s ubiquity, and it packs an important theoretical punch for international politics. It is almost trivial to acknowledge that “social life unfolds through time,” or that “politics occurs in time,” but in their banality these comments obscure that social and political life is like “an immensely complicated and unevenly but often densely trafficked marshalling yard, with components shifting and shunting about in all directions, . . . sometimes directed but more often self-steering” and, moreover, that it all “works only because the member units have learnt a common language of time” (Landes 2000, 1–2). Insofar as this common language describes a shared set of timing practices, and inasmuch as unique time utterances symbolize specific timing efforts, the upshot of socio-political life “taking place in time” is as follows: To be a social being is to time ourselves and others, and to be timed. At any given moment, in each and every experience, we are always timing, just as we are constantly being timed—actively by other agents or passively by embedded timing regimes.

Social existence, on this view, is not so much a matter of unfolding over or through a free-standing Time, or being ensconced in an existential dimension. If social and political life occur “in time”, this is because they emerge or are constituted from ceaseless practical efforts to establish and coordinate a huge variety of dynamic relationships. This is similar to Yaqing Qin’s (2018, xvii, 120) relational argument that social actors “are relators, relating and being related all the time.” “In short, to relate is human” (Qin  2018, xvii). So is to time.7 Timing activities 6  Indeed, “one could not speak of ‘time’ in a universe composed of a single change continuum. If one lived in a single-strand universe of this kind one would never be able to know or even ask when anything happened” (Elias 2007a, 59). On this view, Time is more like the “whole social world,” which can only be understood as a “gigantic river of innumerable stories about itself and its components” (Suganami 1999, 379; see also van Tienoven 2019). 7  Qin’s (2018, 127) wide-ranging theory does not cover time or timing in a robust sense, although it comes close in discussing how “processes and agents are and can only be simultaneities,” producing and constituting each other and making “time and space conjoin.”

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62  International Relations and the Problem of Time compose much of the “stuff ” of socio-political existence, which is to say that in  the most thoroughgoing and literal sense social life is a matter of timing, as reflected by the ubiquity of diverse time symbols.

The Advantages of Timing Theory for IR In these ways, timing theory offers benefits not found in alternatives in the wider time studies literature. It also offers a better—more coherent, systematic, and plur­al­is­tic—way to think about temporal situations than most IR approaches, which work directly with time and thus remain “inside their phenomena of interest in ways that obscure deeper understanding” (Hom 2018a, 75). By beginning with timing instead of some given time, we can achieve superior theoretical power in a number of ways.

The Explanatory Power of Timing Theory First, as shown just above, we crack the explanatory puzzle of being able to trace “how time emerges and flows,” reaching back to the more basic social activities from whence it springs (Blaney and Inayatullah 2010, 199; McIntosh 2015, 469; see Hom 2018a, 71). Consequently, and second, this affords us a heuristic framework, which develops “thematic” content, direct empirical attention, and ul­tim­ ate­ly guides the sorts of explanations about time that we develop (Humphreys 2011, 258). It thus enables us to organize temporal inquiries into a systematic discourse with loosely structured questions and a “rigorous set of interrelated concepts and categories” (Buzan 2010, 24). Taken together, these points indicate the pragmatic potential of timing theory to provide a “disciplined ordering” (Jackson 2011, 114) of temporal contexts that helps grasp together—that is, comprehend (Suganami 1999, 379; see Ricoeur 1984, 41, 142)—the plethora of times and temporalities of international politics and IR in a more intelligible and coherent way than other approaches working directly with disparate, un­defend­ed, and unrelated concepts of time. So, while timing theory asks us to change how we think about time and may thus seem to complicate our grasp of it, in heuristic and explanatory terms “the work becomes simpler” once we have deconfused and related to each other concepts used so readily and for so long that they have become self-evident in everyday usage but detrimental to analysis and interpretation (Elias 1984, 111). Third, timing theory’s heuristic power helps us recast and integrate IR treatments of time.8 For example, RBJ Walker’s (1993, 6; see Wight  1966) dissident 8 

This discussion is far from exhaustive. I cover several other examples in chapter eight.

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Why Timing Matters  63 scholarship criticizes mainstream theory for constraining “all intimations of a chronopolitics within the ontological determinations of a geopolitics” by presumptively assigning liberal-progressive and cyclical-violent temporalities to the domestic and international realms, respectively. Walker (1993, 4–6, 40–3, 112; 2009, 8, 25–6) repeatedly notes that these temporalities are not metaphysical concepts but rather historical responses to the view of time as “a problem to be overcome.” In this sense, my approach shares much (and indeed takes inspiration) from his. However, in Walker the naturalization of time’s malevolence remains a somewhat shadowy and unexplained backstory. As sketched above, timing theory gathers all these symbols of time—as linear progress, cyclical conflict, or a nat­ur­ al­ly destabilizing force—in a coherent account of how the problem of Time emerges from collective experiences of timing challenges, and why its figuration then stimulates solutions in the form of more manageable temporal symbols. Going further, we can put timing theory in productive conversation with three other prominent accounts of time in IR.

Visions of the Future Working in a Heideggerian vein, Felix Berenskoetter explores the political function and emotional impact of visions on IR theory.9 Visions are central to the­or­iz­ ing but present methodological challenges because they are so deeply embedded in society as to be “invisible,” so we must scrutinize “particular moments, such as perceived crises, when policymakers are expected to clarify the direction they intend to take society and the kind of world they want to live in” (Berenskoetter 2011, 664). He combines careful analysis of utopian and dystopian visions with ready temporal concepts like the past, present, and future, and follows Heidegger in beginning with the assertion that social beings just are “thrown into time” (Berenskoetter 2011, 652). Although it relies more on conceptual abstraction, this account of visions comports with timing theory. Utopian visions work as timing standards, expressing basic commitments or purposes and indicating how we should orient ourselves and act in order to realize them.10 Dystopian visions describe a misfit between our commitments and the way social relationships are currently configured, stimulating active efforts to re-coordinate them and thereby avoid catastrophe. Timing theory likewise suggests that the political stakes of timing standards and their modes of synthesis become most apparent in moments of discordant change, those clarifying crises to which Berenskoetter refers. And “thrown into time” existentially symbolizes the pragmatic situation that we have to time to go on. That it does so by adding a disempowering verb to an intuitive

9 

For basic distinctions between timing theory and Heidegger, see chapter one (see p. 46, footnote 31). helps explains why both utopian and dystopian visions hold sway—we prefer even an unnerving vision to an untimed experience full of existential, identitarian, and pragmatic uncertainty. 10 This

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64  International Relations and the Problem of Time invocation of time exemplifies the discursive maneuvers made necessary when we begin in the middle, picking up static and abstract concepts of time instead of thinking about the practical activity of timing.

The Present Timing theory makes several connections with Chris McIntosh’s (2015, 480–1; see also n.d.; Edkins 2003, 29–42) account of the present as the locus of theory and political practice. Mainstream IR treats entities like the state as static, dur­ able, and even natural, which work co-constitutively with a homogeneous view of time—in which there are no significant distinctions between past, present, and future—to enable cross-historical comparison, generalization, and prediction (McIntosh  2015, 471–5, 480–6). This nullifies “the import of the present—or more precisely, disables the ability of present practices to disrupt” the status quo (McIntosh  2014, 14; 2015, 480). Yet what practitioners need most is “granular” knowledge about those disruptions—context-specific, concrete, and limited information about pressing problems (McIntosh  2015, 477; 2014, 23). By contrast, McIntosh views “the present” as the qualitatively unique, durational expanse in which we live and from which we engage other temporal vistas like past and future. In addition to allowing for emergent novelty, he argues forcefully that this approach foregrounds processes and relations as the stuff of social life (McIntosh 2015, 490–4). This in turn encourages “theory that is more responsive” to and thus better able to respond to “new events” as such, rather than relying on stale pasts (McIntosh 2014, 26–7). McIntosh and I share many theoretical and temporal commitments, and pres­ent­ism and timing pursue similar objectives along different tracks. I think that timing theory provides a more promising direction for three reasons. First, pres­ent­ism reproduces elements of the problem of Time. Its mainstream targets become time-less insofar as they propound accounts where “time has no real discernible effect . . . on its own,” which in turn leave analysts free from “any uncertainty as to what may happen” by transforming practices “ ‘in the current of time’ ” into coherent concepts that “ ‘overcome’ ” its intrinsic effects (McIntosh  2014, 9 n18; 2015, 471 quoting Bourdieu). Second, presentism retains something of an entity-based view of time, insofar as the concept itself functions much like a given or extant space—albeit with fuzzy boundaries—in which we find ourselves having experiences and from which the processual and perspectival activities of reconstructing the past and imagining the future emanate. Third, much of presentism comports with timing theory, which, after all, begins with the move of treating “entities as products of processes” so as to “in­corp­or­ate the contingency of relational understandings of international political life” (McIntosh 2015, 490–1 emphasis added). It is a very short but important step from this claim

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Why Timing Matters  65 to timing as the basic activity from which all temporal concepts—including “the present”—spring. Taking that step allows us to proceed more directly. It frees us from the need to begin with a substantival discourse of given “time” and then destabilize this hegemony with other, more contingent yet still “thingy” alternatives like subjective “temporality,” which symbolically reify time per se even as they clear space for alternative explanations of political life.11 Timing also explains why a granular perspective shrinks explanatory scope (see McIntosh 2015, 490). Greater detail means more information that must be coordinated within—that must be timed by—a given theory. We limit the workload here by circumscribing claims and delimiting their scope, or by working in the other direction toward decontextualized claims indexed to and compared across Western standard time. Less context and more clock offers the easiest way to time international politics in theory. What remains to be seen, however, is whether such a constrained timing proposal and puristic timing standard proves useful across numerous practical dilemmas. McIntosh’s (2015, 495–6) answer is no, and timing theory clarifies this as a matter of the inadequacy of an overly passive and sometimes brittle timing regime to variegated and emergent situations. Similarly, his call to zoom in on context and specialized knowledge amounts to a shift toward more bespoke and active timing modes (McIntosh 2015, 496). Timing, then, is a matter of policy relevance, and its active/passive continuum houses the crux of IR’s perennial theory–practice dilemma (e.g. see the reflections collected in Hom 2017a).

Hierarchical Temporality Timing theory appears to differ more from Tim Stevens’ hierarchical model of sociotemporality, drawn from the key time studies figure, J.T.  Fraser. This ­“cultural-cosmological” framework works to reconcile “qualitatively different caus­ ations and times across the organizational levels of nature” (Fraser 1999; quoted in Stevens  2015, 46). It distinguishes six distinctive temporalities indexed to “evolutionary levels of nature”: atemporality “describes a world of electromagnetic chaos,” “the time of no time and consequently no causation”; prototemporality, the “rudimentary” time of massive entities (e.g. “non-photonic waves and particles”); eotemporality, the time of observable objects; biotemporality, the “directed” time of living organisms; nootemporality, the individual’s “conscious awareness of the passing of time and the extrapolation of temporal boundaries”; and finally sociotemporality marks the “highest” level of time produced by social consensus, a “form of knowledge” supporting group survival and its “ ‘way of being’ ” in the world (Stevens  2015, 46–8 quoting Fraser 1999, 37). This hierarchy is notably 11  For example, an edited volume rethinking time and violence recommends treating time “as a force” and “an ontology” (Agathangelou and Killian 2016b, 4).

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66  International Relations and the Problem of Time rigor­ous and coherent, and Stevens (2015, 49–52) extends it helpfully, addressing how we might know “nonhuman temporalities” and how Fraser’s six levels form a “nested hierarchy” comprising all we know about time. Stevens (2015, 68–176) then systematically uses this model to explicate the many times of cybersecurity as outgrowths of different narratives and technological assemblages. This model looks quite distinct from timing theory. But on closer inspection some telling internal tensions and points of external contact emerge. First, the hierarchy rests on the assertion that “time had its genesis at the birth of the universe” and has subsequently “been evolving along a scale of qualitative changes appropriate” to distinct levels of natural processes (Fraser 1999; quoted in Stevens 2015, 46). While this certainly grounds it much further back in history than IR’s other master concepts, it also leaves us no way to authorize or explain this birth of time or its subsequent division. Time, and its many levels, just are; we can hierarchically order them but not explain from whence they come. They also depend upon our intuition that time is a necessary corollary of evolution. And this model still substantivizes and naturalizes time, in this instance as a primordial entity. Second, sociotemporality sounds very much like a hypostatized timing in­dex­ic­al. It emerges from the “stabilisation of the dynamic heterogeneity of multitudinous presents,” it is neither fixed nor unchanging, and it depends upon intersubjective agreement (Stevens 2015, 56). It aids social organization, depends on language, and shapes our politics (Stevens  2015, 57–9). Like timing theory’s view of any temporal symbol, sociotemporality contains “its own genealogy” (Stevens 2015, 57). Finally, just as timing theory posits that if we can speak of time per se this can only refer to the totality-in-multiplicity of all timing practices, their object continua, and our many ways of describing them; Stevens (2015, 63) extracts from sociotemporality the conclusion that “the time of politics” can only be “a multiplicity of intersubjectively constructed temporalities within the broader matrix of sociotemporality.” These points suggest that timing theory can accommodate sociotemporality and clear up the question of how primordial time emerged in the first place. In timing theory, neither the universe as a whole nor its levels possess any innate temporality—only social beings can execute timing and through the symbolic representation of this produce time. This does not weaken Stevens’ hierarchy, it simply contextualizes his lower levels of time as outgrowths of human individual and collective concerns—as produced from our care in the world and how this leads us to establish relations between very different dynamic phenomena in order to realize specific purposes. Electromagnetic waves, particles, observable objects, and most animals are not endowed with capacities of symbolic representation and do not possess their own temporalities in any way we can grasp in­de­pend­ent­ly of our interest in timing them in “our own ‘noetic umwelt’ ” (Stevens 2015, 50).

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Why Timing Matters  67 As Elias (2007a, 43) might put it, they do not have a “time-experience” because such an experience must, in timing theory, be at the very least “self-centered” in the sense of a self-aware agent experiencing a timing problem. Nor does this mean that non-human phenomena do not possess some temporal qualities. They become a-, proto-, eo-, or bio-temporal to the extent that we put them to work—or run up against them—in a huge variety of timing projects. Moreover, while Stevens develops a compelling case for knowing non-human temporalities, timing theory clears up this thorny issue more straightforwardly by dissolving it—we only grasp the temporalities we ascribe to non-human entities and processes to the extent that we successfully time them, a point potentially occluded by speaking about them repeatedly as the “times” or “temporalities” of other things, living or otherwise (Stevens 2015, 46–8).12 To reiterate, none of these connections and clarifications undercut Stevens’ very well elaborated model. Rather, timing theory understands its key times— nootemporality and sociotemporality—as human timing domains and historicizes the rest as outgrowths of these practical efforts, rather than free-standing, natural entities. It also does so with a greater economy of concepts. Finally, timing theory subsumes hierarchical sociotemporality in much the same way it does Walker’s symbolic solutions to the problem of Time, Berenskoetter’s visions, and McIntosh’s present. This ability to accommodate and integrate a variety of different times and temporalities is in itself a competitive claim against those other approaches, which have not as yet shown that they can do so.

Sourcing IR’s Two Cultures of Time Finally, timing theory makes sense of IR’s two dominant and contradictory cultures of time, Western standard time and the problem of Time. In timing theory these are not oppositional master concepts but rather social facts derived from particular large-scale timing activities. By symbolic language, which allows ­people to refer to “cerebral functions” and “sociocentric” activities by means of “reifying” and “impersonal” nouns (Elias 1989b, 342; 2007a, 62), we come to think of these “times” as distinct from their root timing phenomena, from ourselves, and eventually from any other constituents of experience. When timing proceeds easily and as it requires less and less conscious effort, we qualify time as more and more neutral and manageable, as in the homogenous or “empty” dimension reckoned simply and reliably by a standardized clock. Where especially passive, timing indexicals may also receive externalized, independent, and naturalized qualities. For examples, consider Newton’s (1850, 77) 12  To recover their processual character, we then have to call them “constructed” or “assembled form[s] of knowledge” (Stevens 2015, 49).

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68  International Relations and the Problem of Time “absolute, true, and mathematical” time dimension, which flows equably and independently by “its own nature”; or the time of the universe; or the “ambient” temporality ascribed to dominant state and capitalist logics (Vij 2012, 5). Each of these describe some experience of time “as a transit, a passage, [which] is an experience of passivity that delivers us over to the force of circumstances . . . And we cannot help representing this force of circumstances to ourselves as the external course of time” (Ricoeur 2008a, 207). The timing theoretical explanation for this representational habit is that, over many centuries and across cultures, timereckoning devices have become more and more reliable and precise—often with the help of abstract numeration. Both by voluntary adoption and imperial im­pos­ ition, they spread over diverse territories and insinuated into various cultures, becoming more passive and more ubiquitous. The result is Western standard time, a modern hegemon so dominant that we no longer think of it as a con­test­ able concept or even a concept at all—instead we have come to take the humanmade symbols of the clock as time itself (see Hom 2010). As for the problem of Time, this ancient notion originates in problems with timing. The problem of Time gathers together and symbolically predicates or characterizes a huge variety of challenges associated with active timing (Elias 2007a, 109, 43). As such timing becomes more and more challenging, we qualify time as a troubling, relentless, and pitiless force or agent that by itself confronts human experience (Elias 1989b, 342), rather than something emanating from and referring back to that experience. Timing breakdowns force us to actively re-synthesize important but newly disharmonious change relationships. For instance, in periods of instability historians work to “build a bridge” back to more familiar pasts to prevent perceived upheavals from becoming full-blown crises, as  when in 1948 Friedrich Meinecke called on public historians to reconceive “Germanness itself . . . ‘amid the ruins of state and nation’ ” (Levine 2017, 103). Timing challenges also augur the limit possibility that emergent changes will  force us to continually re-time those relationships. At its most demanding, ­re-timing places us in the difficult and seemingly dangerous position of “beginning again” (Foucault 1984, 47). Our sense of danger heightens further if we lack familiar principles or adequate symbols with which to understand and relate important changes, for “[a]ll that is known, is known by its name. The nameless occurrence is frightening” (Elias 1989b, 370; Giddens 1990, 133; Edkins 2003, 1–13). Malevolent figurations of time give a name to otherwise “nameless” occurrences of great and shocking change, which threaten the adequacy of extant timing regimes. In other instances, we blame time as a most general cause of discordant changes because we cannot find any other intelligible explanations for them. Once we make more sense of such situations, we tend to move toward the identification of more fine-grained or concrete causes of pitiable experiences—for example a discrete action, specific structure, culpable agent, reliable mechanism, determinate path, or variable factor (see Suganami  1996). But both instances exemplify the

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Why Timing Matters  69 abstractive, generalizing, and externalizing capacity of language to subsume a range of dynamic properties under relatively simple but powerful static symbols (Elias 1989b, 342). As noted above, time’s menacing mien emerged early in symbolic language when large-scale social timing efforts required extensive active effort and were especially challenging. Once embedded as a symbolic object, the problem of Time may return whenever timing encounters discordant changes or breaks down. Moreover, insofar as institutionalized or passive timing regimes enable greater orientation and control and therefore also open up new possibilities for establishing novel timing relationships that break with extant modes of organization, the problem of Time proliferates as potential while successful timing encourages more abstract and untroubling visions of time. For example, nuclear weapons and their command and control depend upon an array of timing mechanisms of unprecedented precision and reliability. Yet they also helped reconfigure global political relations to such an extent that we needed to invent the Doomsday Clock, with its temporal iconography of catastrophe (see Schlosser  2013; “Timeline” n.d.), to reckon their ruinous potential. In the same sense, the lengthy record of lamentations about the problem of Time introduced earlier exemplifies a learned fund of timing knowledge. It communicates not only figurative lessons about particular timing challenges from one group or generation to the next, but also the basic truths that timing is fundamental to human existence, that it offers great potential, and that it is complex and frequently confounding. These irresolvable tensions make sense of the seemingly paradoxical character of our language of time: “By developing concepts of time and history, man gains control over the experience of change or the primitive intuition of ‘time’ in the sense of flux—both in the social and physical world” (Gunnell 1987, 23; e.g. see Collingwood 1925, 148). Put differently, when timing is difficult, we speak of time as a problem that must be solved and begin doing so by constructing more manageable temporal concepts, which if successful become embedded as domesticated visions of time as such. This also holds for contradictory fluvial metaphors for time. When confronting novel and complex situations, scholars refer to the “fluidity” of the situation or describe events as in a state of “flux.” Yet they also describe time as “flowing” or “passing.” How can it be that time is always “flowing,” yet situations are difficult because they are “fluid” or “in flux”? Fluid/flux and flowing/passing mark two different points on the spectrum of timing indexicals. The latter indicates an ongoing, largely passive timing activity under control. By contrast, “fluid,” “flux,” and their cousin, “chaos,” indicate imminent or developing timing breakdowns (e.g. see Hom 2016, 171–3). The problem of Time, then, is not so much a contradictory tradition running parallel to Western standard time as it is the silent partner to every timing activity. Over centuries of iterations and repeated invocations of both cultures, both

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70  International Relations and the Problem of Time Abstract

Western standard time Neutral

‘Time’ utterances

Chronos Kairos 3 Fluvial metaphors Problematic

2

1

Malevolent gods Figurational Active

Timing

Passive

Figure 3  Timing and time symbols13

manageable and malevolent time came to be treated as discrete, independent, even natural features of existence. In unpacking the process by which these times came to dominate IR’s imagination, we historicize and contextualize what today seem monolithic and natural, and in so doing “provide valuable insights into broader and/or deeper structures of meaning that shape human behavior” (Davis 2005, 231 n6). We also affirm that ultimately there is no proper or in­de­ pend­ent­ly real content of time. Rather, time is whatever people describe when they speak about timing activities.14 It is now possible to sketch a spectrum of timing indexicals that tell us im­port­ ant things about a timing regime’s life cycle, from active promulgation through passive reification and possibly to slippage and failure (see figure 3). The key remains how temporal utterances systematically describe and order dynamic relations. When “time” utterances include more concrete and figurational, discordant, and threatening predicates, this suggests that their referent timing ac­tiv­ ities require complex decisions, great effort, constant vigilance, or that they confront imminent failure. Whenever “time” utterances include more abstract, homogeneous or unified, and nonthreatening predicates, this suggests that active timing has succeeded and perhaps been repeated and routinized enough to become a passive, institutionalized activity. Because there exists a multitude of timing activities along with near limitless potential for new timing projects, some of which only become possible on the shoulders of other timing achievements, the problem of Time proliferates along 13 

This extends a figure from (Hom 2018a, 73). Although philosophical realists might object (see chapter five), timing theory suggests that time descriptors refer only to practical timing activities, and that this symbolic transfer is ontologically sufficient because routinization, pacification, and reification make it seem like a mind-independent entity. 14 

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Why Timing Matters  71 with its less threatening counterparts. It may “return” at any point when we face timing challenges—either due to breakdowns in timing regimes or because we undertake a new timing project. There are thus three particular areas of interest in figure 3: 1) Active timing confronts failure because it is nascent or because discordant changes have destabilized extant timing efforts, and the problem of Time returns; 2) Active timing passes a threshold and becomes more passive, or vice versa, and our time utterances change to reflect this; 3) Passive timing spreads widely and embeds deeply, leaving a neutral, homogeneous time ascendant. While the problem of Time and Western standard time typify this, a multitude of other times and temporalities pepper the empirical and academic records. In heuristic terms, timing theory orients our approach to these references, shows us how to unpack them, and helps organize them as indicators of a wealth of timing efforts operative in international politics in practice and in theory. For example, observations that “time” snuck up on us, that it flies by, or that it has “returned” (sometimes as “history”) suggest passive timing recently turned active. Particularly pitched variants of these themes signal potential timing failures. References to the bare “passage of time” causing outcomes or remarks that time is “not on our side” suggest timing schemes so passively and deeply embedded that their relationships seem automatic or self-propagating. In the latter instance, they also call for decisive action to disrupt or alter the presumed direction of time toward our preferred outcomes. These examples only scratch the surface. There remains much work to be done to catalog and typologize the many ways in which global politics and IR get timed. While the social-theoretical approach adopted so far focuses on explicit temporal utterances, we have strong warrants for expanding the catalog of timing in­dex­ic­ als. For instance, contextualist intellectual historians note that the key to tracking a practical discourse depends less on explicit substantive continuity than shared systematic form, or the way that various references “order and narrate relations of authority” (McQueen 2018, 19–20). For instance, J.G.A. Pocock (2016, 48) traces the Florentine construction of history and time through vocabularies of “usage” and “custom,” “grace” and “providence,” and “fortune,” painstakingly assembling these into “conceptual formulae” that constitute a model for “explicating the succession of particular” occurrences as a form of historical time caught between “experience and grace.”15 This account of “the Machiavellian moment” resounds

15  Relatedly, McQueen (2018, 19–20) identifies periods of upheaval by looking for symbolic ­discourses of “imminence, cataclysm, and rupture.”

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72  International Relations and the Problem of Time with the timing concerns of establishing novel political relations and institutions by imagining an intelligible form of historical time and then “placing” Florentine actors and events “in” it (Pocock 2016, xxiii–xxiv). It also gestures at the breadth of symbols that modern thinkers and actors can use to time political relations.

The IR Project as a Matter of Timing Having introduced a basic theory of timing and shown how it helps us understand and explain various notions of time more systematically and coherently, the rest of this book examines how timing theory might clarify and reinterpret the wider concerns of IR as an intellectual project. In its strongest form, such a discussion suggests that IR itself marks a collective timing effort and that recognizing this and working through its implications allows us to think very differently about what it means to “do IR.” To soften the ground for this argument, it may help to highlight how issues central to timing turn up even in IR discussions that do not explicitly engage time.

Change, Surprise, and Continuity First, IR scholars find in international politics a persistent Heraclitean quality, where “change is constant and everlasting, πάντα ρεί ” (in Gunn  1929, 18). IR’s “domain—call it the ‘world out there’—is of course in constant movement, subject to systemic (Cold War to post-Cold War), constitutive and technological (late modernity to postmodernity) transitions” (Steele 2009, 352–3). Similarly, references to the “changing (empirical) social universe” reflect the assumption that difference epitomizes political reality (Scheuerman 2010, 274). Scholars often pitch this as a hurdle to knowledge development: “No sooner has one’s mind become adjusted to some understanding of the currently new than the rapid developments of our time already presage its obsolescence” (Herz 1959, 33–4). Merit accrues to those who surmount these hurdles. One of the sources of Carl von Clausewitz’s strategic brilliance was that “[h]e was born into one period, lived through another very different one, and died during a third . . . Born and raised into one set of axioms, rules, theories, beliefs, he saw it abruptly shattered by defeat and replaced by another superior to it. It was this fact, however traumatic, which enabled him to compare both sets, contrast them and reflect on their relative merits” (van Creveld 1986, 46–7). While they induce anxiety about just what and how much we actually know about the world, these qualities make IR and international politics what they are—the distinctive study of a practical domain characterized by a uniquely “international time” with “different pace and sequences” than other social realms

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Why Timing Matters  73 (Ikenberry 2017, 66; Sikkink 2017, 231–2). Where would IR be and what would it look like without its record of momentous changes and often confounding events—the global transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Great War, the Holocaust, the thermonuclear revolution and subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1970s oil crisis, the shockingly peaceful end of the Cold War, 9/11, the Global Financial Crisis, and the Arab Spring? We might make the same claim about the intrinsically temporal quality of prominent research m ­ ethods. Where would IR be without the shadow of the future driving the single-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma or the evolutionary dynamic of iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma games; without longitudinal statistics, process tracing, path dependencies, or historical dynamics; or without causal mechanisms and levers, which, once actuated, turn inputs into outputs? For that matter, neopositivist explanations depend at minimum on meaningful correlations—that is, warranted claims about mutual connections or co-relationships between change continua. Going further, timing theory exposes any tension or choice between change and continuity or stability as a false one (e.g. Rosenau 1990; Jervis 1991; Neack, Hey, and Haney 1995; Streeck and Thelen 2005; Sylvest 2005). Stability and con­ tinu­ity derive from relative rates of change. At the micropolitical level (Solomon and Steele 2016), for example, even when a human being is “at rest,” “[y]our heart is beating, you are breathing, you are digesting; your cells are growing and decaying. The change may be slow, but you are continuously changing in ‘space’ and ‘time’—on your own, while growing and growing older, as part of your changing society, as inhabitant of the ceaselessly moving earth” (Elias 2007a, 82). This locates human beings as dynamic change continua in a teeming world in which, despite the appearance of much stability and persistence, change is ubiquitous, if highly varied in pace and scale. Through human constituents, then, change sat­ur­ates social phenomena, while continuity marks a relative, provisional stabilization—a practical exception rather than an ontological foundation. This point scales upward. After 1991 it became apparent that the long-running (but always tenuous and managed) bipolarity of the Cold War left analysts ill-equipped to assess significant tensions and changes behind the Iron Curtain (Gaddis  1992). Or more recently, the “Arab Spring” taugh scholars that “slumbering” Arab publics held latent potential to upend oppressive regimes (see Hom  2016), which were themselves not stable or fixed but actually more like “slow-motion disasters” (Friedman 2013).

Timing Scholarly Practice Relatedly, IR scholars routinely frame all sorts of theoretical interventions as timely knowledge contributions to urgent or important political situations (Hutchings 2008b, 21–3). E.H.  Carr’s formative Twenty Years’ Crisis appeared “at a time of

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74  International Relations and the Problem of Time supreme national and international crisis, it conveys a sense of intellectual urgency—a vital need to think rigorously and systematically about fundamentals” (Wilson 1995, 1). Cybernetic approaches to decision making promised that they would “be of use during an emergency” (Norbert Wiener, quoted in Guilhot 2011b, 296). Sometimes it is events, like the end of the fourth Arab–Israeli war, that call forth long-cultivated proposals like Change without War, which presented “the reflections of one man upon the foreseeable problems of world politics and order upon which I have been thinking for many years, but at a point in time when the number of imponderables was never greater,” namely a period of “unforeseen” and “cataclysmic change” in “the whole of the way the world goes round” (Buchan 1974, 9, 13, 15). What is the promised payoff of these reflections? The timing benefit of discerning “how we may control and adapt to these and future changes” (Buchan  1974, 99). James Rosenau’s (1990, xiii) well-known Turbulence in World Politics, published months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, sought “to tease coherent meaning out of the chaos and turbulence that underlie the current course of events” and focused specifically “on the ways in which world politics may be undergoing profound and enduring change.” A year later, Robert Jervis (1991, 39 emphasis added) asked a crucial question—“will the future of world politics resemble the past?”—necessitated because the surprising events of 1989 made it “clear that we are entering a new world.” Critical IR scholarship, which otherwise places a premium on re-thinking various disciplinary doxa, also invokes timely knowledge. An effort to “reclaim the political” in critical security studies begins: “These are crucial times for the crit­ ic­al security literature” (Nunes  2012). A postcolonial critique of liberal inter­ nation­al­ism concludes by reflecting on “where the world stands today: anxious, volatile, and fearful for the future. The old ideas and ways are sufficient neither to make sense of our problems nor to help navigate the present and future. The world appears to be at an inflection point” (Parmar 2019, 242–3). An edited volume exploring “critical imagination” in IR combines “serious scholarship with accessible style, practical wisdom and timely provocation, it engages with many conceptual challenges facing anyone persuaded that we live in times and spaces of dramatic transformation” (Mhurchú and Shindo 2016b back matter). An autoethnographic discussion of writing techniques responds to “profound discontent . . . with the dominant modes of research and writing” (Doty 2010, 1047). My own work calls out the pervasive influence of “Western frames” of analysis, “spe­ cif­ic­al­ly during pivotal transformations” (Hom 2016, 166), or—like this current book—invokes the importance of careful theorizing at a crucial moment in IR’s “temporal turn” (Hom 2018c; 2018a, 69). So, while writing and review schedules fluctuate wildly and almost always exert substantial lag effects, in IR we highlight the timeliness of a publication as a ritual incantation or habitual throat clearing. More generally, much mainstream IR explicitly strives for political impact and expresses consternation whenever the

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Why Timing Matters  75 field seems to be losing its practical relevance or “usefulness” for the times (Nincic and Lepgold 2000; Nye 2008; see Guilhot 2011b, 295–7). On the other side, crit­ ic­al scholars often position their efforts as “interventions” in both the intellectual and the political spheres and expressly understand scholarship as a form of pol­it­ ics (Sjoberg 2013, 63, 172), a way of putting our fingers on the scales of history. It is nearly impossible to find counterexamples, where scholars aver the irrelevance or complete disconnect between their work and contemporary situations. In IR as in political thought, “even the most seemingly abstract works . . . [are] also polemical interventions” (McQueen 2018, 15).16

Forms of Knowledge, Modes of Timing Or think of what sort of knowledge IR theories offer. They spring from acts of creative synthesis, and use overarching frames of reference to establish relationships between events, processes, and people in complex and dynamic contexts. Theories enable orientation and control, and ultimately say something meaningful about how political life can and should unfold. Although not couched in terms of timing, this basic vision of theory reflects a familiar disposition. Philosophers of science describe theories as “nets cast to catch what we call ‘the world’: to rationalize, to explain, and to master it” (Popper 2002, 37–8). Two early Presidents of the American Political Science Association argued that political science should “discover the principles that govern the political relations of mankind,” and use these for “the reconstruction of the ‘purely political’ into a more intelligent influence on the progress of the race toward conscious control over its own evolution” (Lowell and Merriam, quoted in Oren  2006, 76 emphasis added). In the midtwentieth century, while IR emerged as a distinct academic-institutional entity, its proponents explicitly sought knowledge about relations between events, processes, and historical dynamics under the condition of anarchy (see Guilhot 2011b, 283). The late-century, constructivist revolution arose from a temporal puzzle: “Why does not anarchy always give way to chaos?” (Onuf  2012, 14 emphasis added). As IR professionalized further and adopted specific notions of scientific progress, theory retained this elemental quality as a “systematic reflection on phenomena, designed to explain them and to show how they are related to each other in a meaningful, intelligent pattern, instead of being merely random items in an incoherent universe” (Dougherty and Pfaltzgraff, Jr.  1997, 15). It was centrally concerned to discover “the orderly features of world politics amidst its seeming chaos” (Milner 1991, 70). One reason some theorists dispense with parsimony is that IR’s domains of interest far outpace the dynamism of natural phenomena: 16  Even claims about “untimely” scholarship refer not to sheer irrelevance but rather to important factors marginalized by prevailing logics (see Hutchings 2008b, 71).

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76  International Relations and the Problem of Time “While physicists can employ mathematical formulas to investigate the dynamics of turbulent winds and rivers, those of us concerned with global politics have yet to devise a set of elegant propositions on which to base the analysis. We are perforce impelled to elaborate in ordinary language the variability of turbulent processes if their underlying patterns are to be uncovered and assessed” (Rosenau 1990, xiv). Recent ruminations on the death of IR theory note that “theory is something we do all of the time as we attempt to deal with the various problems we face in our everyday lives. Every person, as they go about their daily lives, is affected in some way by events over which they have no control and the causes of which are not immediately obvious to them. . . . When faced with an event that does not make immediate sense we begin to theorize as to possible explanations” (Dunne, Hansen, and Wight 2013, 408–9). This account finds the­or­iz­ing in all corners of international life; in it, we could replace “theory” with “timing” almost verbatim. Given the claimed ubiquity of both in such similar situ­ations, it would be surprising if theorizing did not share important elements with timing. Moreover, accounts of theoretical change map onto timing dynamics. Just as with timing alterations, “changes in theory flow directly from new issues placing themselves under the . . . analyst’s microscope, with the result that the analyst is led to reconsider approaches, agendas, referents and so on” (Booth 1997, 87 emphasis added). In other cases, periods of “profound turmoil and change” ex­acer­bate ongoing disputes (Holsti 1995, 35), as the end of the Cold War did for IR’s third (or fourth, Balzacq and Baele  2014) “great debate” (Lapid  1989). Whether by exogenous shocks or field-internal disputes (Schmidt 1998), the way that theory develops recalls how we restore timing in the face of new discordance. As George Kennan (1954, 4) put it, “I find it useful, when contemporary problems seem too confusing, to look back and try to find out when it was, and in what manner, that thought and reality began to come apart, . . . and how far we must retrace our steps if we are to put Humpty Dumpty together again.” And where such reflection produces new concepts, these do not signal transcendental or objectively true improvements. Rather, like timing efforts, theoretical innovations are “pragmatic . . . tools” constructed to respond to novel situations, when we are “at a loss what to do” (Geuss 2008, 49). These features of IR in practice—its dynamic domains of interest, the purported timeliness of scholarly interventions, the ways that theory establishes relations between change processes and responds to their breakdowns—all complement the basic vocational position of IR as an applied and “metapractical” science (Gunnell 1998; 2011) aimed at understanding the world in order to influence how it works.17 Across a range of theoretical approaches (e.g. Nincic and 17  The US Congress occasionally debates national funding for political science but not the idea that when faced with “sweeping changes” experts should help “understand political dynamics” and steer them toward preferred outcomes (Congressional Record—House 2012, H2543; Chenoweth and Lyall 2012).

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Why Timing Matters  77 Lepgold  2000; Linklater  2007; Patomäki  2010; Sjoberg  2013) “doing IR” means working to make sense of the hurly burly of political relations and events so as to support some practical objectives and/or normative commitments rather than others—peace rather than war, stability rather than instability, or deterrence rather than nuclear exchanges or “bloody nose” strikes (e.g. Morgenthau 2011, 264; Panda and Narang  2017). From arch-scientific to relentlessly critical, IR scholars offer concordant accounts of that hurly burly, which indicate something about how we might orient ourselves in it and encourage it to unfold in particular ways. Put differently, IR is “a discipline that ‘makes a difference’ to the world,” which means we must “bring theory and the world together: to use the world as the raw material of theory; and to use theory to help us formulate our study and to help us explain, understand and potentially change the varied practices of international relations” (Dunne, Hansen, and Wight 2013, 408 emphasis added). In these ways, the basic vocational orientation of IR toward international politics is a matter of timing.

Active and Passive Timing in IR Theory A further indication that timing theory offers a “good bet” (Kratochwil 2007) for reinterpreting IR is how well the active/passive timing tension captures IR discussions not explicitly concerned with time. Classical realists’ attacks on liberal ideal­ ism and rationalism flowed from disagreements about the relationship between ethical commitments and political action. Realists insisted that translating commitments into action necessarily involved active deliberation about concrete particulars. The rote application of principles, even when reflecting the highest ethical aspirations, could never resolve the “permanent discrepancy” between ideals and action because it ignored facts on the ground (Morgenthau 1946, 173). Such aspirations do indicate that we want politics to turn out one way and not another, but to classical realists this entails actively and effortfully knitting together political relations in all their concrete messiness. It also suggests the necessity of active timing and the impertinence of passive timing for actual political dilemmas (see Hom 2018b, 140). Along similar lines, we might here think of the English School’s “case for a classical approach” to IR (Bull 1966), rooted in ideographic knowledge and deliberative skills, versus American systems theory and cybernetics. The latter “entertained the ultimate machine dream: a ‘fully automated foreign policy’ ” (Guilhot 2011b, 279). This shift paralleled one from strategy, tactics, and judgment in conventional warfare to the game theorized, “automated enforcement” of nuclear deterrence, most notably in Herman Kahn’s “doomsday machine,” an automatic retaliatory clockwork thought to offer “an edge in [conflict] bargaining situations” dependent on credible threats (Guilhot  2011b, 279 n2; see also Kaplan  2008). During this era, it may well have seemed that Cold War deterrence just did work

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78  International Relations and the Problem of Time as an iterated game accurately captured by such models. But, understood through timing theory, Cold War political processes and relations only came to seem like independent phenomena because earlier technological and theoretical in­nov­ations (e.g. nuclear weapons and rational actor assumptions) reconstituted the logics of strategy so effectively that they decisively captured the collective imagination of defense intellectuals.18 In other words, much like the reign of the standardized clock, Cold War cybernetics and game theories offer examples of how successful timing embeds and re-creates, or re-times, what we take to be a reality separate from—rather than produced by—our shared practices. Just as we could not imagine time as an absolute, homogenous, and quantified continuum without the invention of increasingly consistent time-reckoning devices, nor could we come to imagine that parts of international politics worked just like rational, tit-for-tat exchanges without techniques and technologies encouraging such discrete and homogeneous ways of engaging dynamic and complex social interactions. During the same period, classical realists worried about society’s relationship to democracy, which can be usefully understood today as a passive timing standard. As Brent Steele and I note elsewhere, “the idea of democracy derived from a particular bourgeois context during a particular period of history—at a time when such an idea could be used by ‘the rising middle class [to justify] its quest for political power.’ This idea, which was at one time based in a concrete reality, quickly became ‘an abstract political philosophy.’ ” However, democracy advocates, democratic peace theorists, and other rationalists fail to realize that “democracy, as any other political system, functions only under certain intellectual, moral and social conditions,” a situation that becomes dangerous the more that democracy is “kept alive” (or better, that it self-propagates) through ambiguity and through its “ ‘abstractness, generality, and claim for absolute validity’ ” (Hom and Steele 2010, 289; quoting Morgenthau 1946, 73)—all qualities that emblematize a supple and passive timing regime. Or think of a current debate among Just War scholars. On one side sit pragmatic claims that the Just War tradition is a loosely tied set of questions meant to stimulate practical judgment about the justifiability of violence in particular political crises (see O’Driscoll 2018). On the other side, analytically minded revisionists work to derive a Just War Theory—a set of internally consistent principles and universally applicable guidelines meant to make war less likely and to distribute responsibility more evenly amongst its prosecutors (see Brown 2017). Works in the latter vein carefully specify and work out the logical consequences of various positions so that in a particular situation we will not have to deliberate from the ground up. This is the hallmark of a passive timing regime. The prevalence of confounding results that comport perfectly with the animating standard suggest 18 This triumph held grave consequences for older conceptions of rationality and reason, see (Erickson et al. 2015).

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Why Timing Matters  79 it is also a brittle one—as when Jeff McMahan’s (2015, 701–2, 718) theorization of “proportionality in time,” which emerges from a literature opposed to war in general, ends up justifying the extension of formerly limited war to “redeem” mounting casualties. In a similar vein, emerging concerns about AI and autonomous weapons systems among IR ethicists highlight the importance of context-specific, deliberative judgment versus “forms of ‘unthinking’ ” (algorithms, utilitarian formulas, doctrines), which speed up political and ethical decision making and execution. Moving from deliberative judgment through doctrines to utilitarian formulas traces a clear path from active to passive timing modes, with algorithms sitting at a mathematical, passive, and brittle limit determination on who it is legal or acceptable to target.19 Finally, empirical work on security politics mobilizes the distinction between performance and parrhesia. As Andrew Neal (2018, 172) summarizes, in political debates: the effects a performative utterance is meant to bring about are “known and ordered in advance”, whereas the effects of parrhesia are uncertain. In securitization, a successful securitizing utterance is one that performs the “grammar” of security under the right “felicity” conditions and brings about specific se­curi­ tized outcomes, such as the affective attachment of emergency to a particular issue and necessity to a mitigating policy. In contrast, . . . the effects of parrhesia are not codified or known in advance. Parrhesia is an opening up, not the ­performance of an established code . . . [it] makes possible effects which are, ­precisely, not known.

Like performative securitization, a passive timing regime tells us ahead of time how to understand and order relations, it has been tried and tested against similar “felicity conditions,” and we can use it fairly straightforwardly to accomplish certain outcomes. By contrast, parrhesia activates timing. It denies ongoing modes of synthesis and unsettles the extant order to such a degree that we must reconsider, revise, and perhaps start from scratch (Steele 2010, 49).

Timing the Neo-Neo Debate As a final testament to its relevance for IR, consider a hard case for timing theory: the neo-neo debate between structural realism and rationalist formulations of liberalism. For two theories widely regarded as offering “timeless” accounts of

19 

I thank Jack Amoureux for pointing out this line of argument.

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80  International Relations and the Problem of Time politics under anarchy, these approaches display conspicuous timing features. Kenneth Waltz (1979, 81) developed neorealism as an analysis of “relations of coordination” between states, and it was the combined effects of the anarchic “organizing principle” of the international system, functional identity, and different capabilities that oriented and directed states as “self-helpers” in that system.20 Robert Keohane’s (2005, x, 5) neoliberalism analyses how states overcome “discord” through institutionalized “cooperation” in the absence of spontaneous “harmony.” In harmonious settings, state policies “automatically facilitate the attainment of others’ goals,” so “no adjustments need to take place” (Keohane 2005, 51 emphasis added). Discord describes situations where no such natural agreement exists, so states must “adjust their behavior to the actual or anticipated preferences of others, through a process of policy coordination” (Keohane  2005, 51 emphasis added). In order, these reflect particular examples of spontaneous integration and coordination, in which no timing is necessary; a dynamic welter where actors need successful timing to survive and go on; and active timing, as attested to by the importance of anticipation, itself facilitated in neoliberalism by institutional constraints on the range of possible outcomes. The neo-neo debate, then, breaks along different proposals for how states should orient themselves and establish dynamic relations under anarchy. Neorealism elevates anarchy to the timing standard, while neoliberalism allows for the possibility that preferences (Moravcsik 1997) and/or institutions (Keohane 2005) can offer standards of integration and coordination and thus unfold very different futures than neorealism’s cycles of competition and conflict. Timing requires two or more change continua and a standard or reference frame for relating them. So too does IR theory. We assume that the world admits to some amount of integration and coordination, since one composed exclusively of singularities would preclude the possibility of change continua, language, action, scholarship, timing, and theory altogether. Of course, IR scholars differ on how relatable the realm of international politics actually is. On one end of the spectrum is pure determinism, although it is unclear whether any scholars adopt this view. On the other end are minimally stable but often non-recurrent phenomena of interest, including everyday or micro-politics (Solomon and Steele 2016) and the lived experiences of marginalized subjects (Daigle 2015). Somewhere in between lay structures of domination, durable hierarchies, prob­abil­is­tic assumptions, “demi-regularities,” and “contingent generalizations.” Yet all depend on the possibility of constructing more or less orderly relationships out of dynamic phenomena and using these to say something meaningful about how events and processes unfold. When we do this, we are timing social phenomena. Although this differs in form from familiar timing mechanisms like the clock or calendar,

20 

For prominent temporal concerns in Waltz’s structural realism, see Hom (2018c, 8–9).

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Why Timing Matters  81 social scientific knowledge pursues similar practical purposes: orientation, control, and “the direction of activity in shared experience” according to some standard or “objective” (Mead  2002, 12). IR, then, marks a collective effort or collection of efforts to time international politics, albeit in very different ways according to very different standards.

Conclusion Whereas chapter one sketched the nuts and bolts of timing, this chapter showed how they work together to forge a uniquely powerful analytical tool. Treating time references as timing indexicals allows us to systematically explicate and interrelate a much wider range of times and temporalities than other approaches. Equally important, timing theory holds the potential to reconceptualize the IR project as a collective timing effort and to understand why we persistently re­cap­ itu­late Western standard time and the problem of Time. It also broaches the question of just how amenable the international realm is to scholarly timing and what sorts of timing standard and modes are most appropriate for this. Overall, timing theory faces fewer internal inconsistences than its competitors, offers a more systematic approach to time in all its variety, resolves a great number of chronic issues in time studies, and offers far better traction in IR. In order to gain this novel vantage on the question of time and establish its explanatory and theoretical value, the first two chapters ranged somewhat afield from IR’s nomenclature and thematic concerns. The second part of this book aims to scrutinize a variety of IR approaches as timing projects in their own rights, unpacking their specific standards, their passive/active and brittle/supple modes of synthesis, and their forms of orientation and control. To enable that work, we still need to drill down further on the question of how the specific intellectual resources, techniques, and products of IR inquiry work to time international politics. In particular, we need to elaborate more precise tools that can draw time and temporality out of IR’s prevailing modes of discourse. Chapter  three addresses this task using narrative theory.

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3

Telling Time A Theory of Narrative Timing

Introduction Timing theory offers a simple but powerful way to understand and explain time, and one that avoids or resolves numerous problems found across other approaches. Yet its focus on practical timing activities may seem still quite detached from the specific discussions, modes of knowledge production, and methodologies found in IR. That is, the relationship between timing, time, and matters of IR theory and explanation as sketched in the previous chapter (see pp. 72) remain quite general or nebulous. This chapter addresses such issues by using narrative theory to develop a more thoroughgoing and specific account of IR as a timing effort. Developing an explicitly narrative mode of timing, it shows how theories and explanations constitute timing devices in their own right. It also clarifies IR as a narrative community interested in synthesizing or timing various narratives, in producing narrative temporalities, and in the loosely organized, collectively narrativized timing of international political conduct. The first section rebuts claims about the incommensurability of narrative and social scientific theory and uses a narrative theory of action to contextualize IR scholarship. It also shows how narratology falls prey to some of our more familiar issues with time, using this discussion as a springboard toward the synthesis of narrative theory and timing theory. The second section recasts the narrative work of emplotment as a timing function that makes sense of our experiences of change while also providing resources for action, and shows how this works in IR’s two cultures of time. The third charts the move from emplotment to constructed tem­ por­al­ity through four narrative timing devices: the synoptic theme as a standard, creative filtration, experiential cleavage, and concordant discordance, all of which combine to unfold an intelligible and inhabitable change continuum amenable to action. The fourth section then shows how these devices work in IR’s most prom­ in­ent explanatory or interpretive forms, including arch-scientific explanations, structural-rational accounts, causal mechanisms, and historical genres. The final section returns to a key theme in chapter one, the symbolic reification of timing in references to “time,” to discuss how practical narrative timing standards become institutionalized and rigid timing meters, which configure experience but also pre-figure our options for addressing discordant changes. While such International Relations and the Problem of Time. Andrew R. Hom, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andrew R. Hom. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850014.001.0001

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Telling Time  83 institutionalized narrative constructs can come to seem like free-standing or ­natural times, like any passive timing regime they cannot decisively inoculate against the problem of Time, whose return highlights the provisional and ­pragmatic character of any narrative timing mode. The chapter concludes by recapitulating and synthesizing key themes running through Part One.

Narrative vs. Theory? IR scholars with strong social scientific aspirations view narratives as merely “tell­ ing stories,” the opposite of “serious research,” theory, and/or explanation (see Ray  2009, 131).1 Narrative theorists and philosophers, on the other hand, have long argued that “ ‘narrative explanation’ is no longer a contradiction in terms” (Mink 1970, 544). Going further, narrative “is a primary cognitive instrument, an instrument rivaled, in fact, only by theory and by metaphor as irreducible ways of making the flux of experience comprehensible” (Mink 1978, 185; see also Reisch 1991). In IR and political science, as well, the gap between narrative and theory has narrowed considerably (see Bates et al.  1998; Lake  2011), including work using narrative temporality to test theory (Büthe 2002). These developments still treat narratives and theories as distinct, if complementary. Yet most IR publications, “even when they are . . . relentlessly abstract . . ., tell a story, more or less coherently, in accord with a plan which the author may or may not divulge” (Onuf 2012, 27). Indeed, the strong narratological position here is not only to treat international political phenomena as constituted from narratives, although they surely are (e.g. Epstein 2008; Innes 2010; Nalepa 2010; Wibben 2011; Daigle 2015; Krebs 2015; Innes 2016; Spencer 2016; Skonieczny 2018), but also to treat IR explanations and theories as narratives in their own right (Suganami 1999; 2008; e.g. Hagström and Gustafsson  2019; Turner and Nymalm  2019).2 As we will see below, we have strong temporal grounds for doing so.

The Narrative Theory of Action Narrative also helps contextualize IR in a different but related way. Narration is usually understood as a retrospective activity, something that helps make sense of what has happened in life after the fact. We have experiences, and then we con­ struct stories that make them more intelligible and less damaging. On this view,

1 Lake (2009, 51–3) describes narrative as the epistemologically subordinate (and primarily British) alternative to partial equilibrium analyses and comparative statics. 2 For related discussions of IR narrative tropes and scholars as “narrative entrepreneurs,” see (Spencer 2016 chp. 1; Hagström and Gustafsson 2019, 398).

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84  International Relations and the Problem of Time stories are exclusively matters of retrospection, they “are not lived but told” (Mink 1970, 557).3 However, an alternative view refuses the discontinuity between ­storytelling and lived experience. The narrative theory of action (Ringmar 1996, 66–92) contends that in addition to reconstructing past occurrences, narrative also enables lived experience: “life itself [is] a cloth woven of stories told” (Ricoeur 1988, 246; Carr 1986, 91, 96).4 On this account, plot themes and actions are just as intertwined in the emer­ ging present as they are in retrospective reflection because in both cases we must make sense of ourselves and our world to go on (Ringmar  1996, 66; Hagström and Gustafsson  2019, 388). Whether in dramatic scenarios or ultra-mundane moments: To be a conscious human being is to have intentions and plans . . . and the link between intention and execution is always rendered in narrative form. In this way story-telling becomes a prerequisite of action: . . . We tell ourselves what kind of a person we were/are/will be; what kind of a situation we were/are/will be in; and what such people as ourselves are likely to do under these particular circumstances  (Ringmar 1996, 73).

Likewise, Carr (1986, 61; see also Ricoeur 1984, 54; Steele 2008a) argues that nar­ rative is constitutive of action because “we are constantly striving, with more or less success, to occupy the story-teller’s position with respect to our own actions.”5 It is not that we live life and then tell stories about it. Rather we first narratively constitute some part of the realm of wider experiences as a situation in which we act with a view to bringing about some outcome. Afterwards, we use narrative again to reflect on the experience as a whole. In both directions, retro- and prospective, a meaningful narrative placates the discordant aspects of life: we may feel as if we cannot move “past” a problematic experience until we have under­ stood it, but without some prospective understanding and anticipation, we also 3  For a critical summary, see (Carr 1986, 9–15). Mink’s (1970, 557) comment is well known; his qualification less so: “Life has no beginnings, middles, or ends; there are meetings, but the start of an affair belongs to the story we tell ourselves later, and there are partings, but final partings only in the story. There are hopes, plans, battles and ideas, but only in retrospective stories are hopes unfulfilled, plans miscarried, battles decisive, and ideas seminal.” Yet life does have beginnings, middles, and ends—from biological birth and death to the sense that we are “turning over a new leaf.” Some affairs have distinct, torrid beginnings. We might part ways saying “Don’t ever contact me again!” All hopes initially emerge unfulfilled or they would not be hopes at all. And artists, tech entrepreneurs, and IR theorists have all been known to prospectively declare ideas groundbreaking. 4  Ricoeur (1984, 64) is more oblique than Carr, claiming only that time and narrative are “figura­ tive” in human actions. Carr (1986, 8 n14, 14–15) criticized Ricoeur for not going far enough but acknowledged their accounts might not be fully at odds. 5  For one example, in 2016 the White House press secretary described the United States as engaged in an ongoing “narrative battle” with Islamic State (Jones  2016). For another, misinformation cam­ paigns spread spurious counternarratives about unfolding events to impair collective consensus about shared experiences (see Gaufman 2018).

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Telling Time  85 cannot get started.6 This point holds an important heuristic consequence for examining IR as a social scientific project and a vocational practice: when analyz­ ing all sorts of social life and action we should look for nested stories in the form of backward-looking accounts embedded in a provisional, forward-facing auto­ biographical plot, all of which indicate something about how the actor can and should go on in the world.7

Narrative Temporality vs. Time? Narratologists offer us several ways to reinterpret knowledge genres like theory and explanation. They also pay more attention to time as an intrinsic aspect of storytelling than most IR views of theory. However, narratology still recapitulates familiar problems in how it understands time. Narratologists do not explicitly view narrative as a form of timing in its own right. Ricoeur (1984, xi, 66, 244 n14 emphasis added) hints at timing, presenting narrative as the baseline labor that constitutes our orderly and manageable sense of time’s flow, calling narrative “the privileged means by which we re-configure our confused, unformed, and at the limit mute temporal experience,” and noting that a good plot synthesizes heterogeneous experiences into a meaningful series. Similarly, Erik Ringmar (1996, 76; Steele  2008a, 73) writes that “neither the temporal nor the spatial present is a natural, hospitable, location which simply is ‘there’ for us to inhabit. . . . The story we tell carves out a ‘now’ as a moment in narrative time” that is quite tenuous. Carr (1986, 94–5, see also 179) comes closer still: “to be a human individual is . . . to be always ‘located’ in an ever-changing now. . . . But it is much more than this. . . . To exist humanly is not merely to be in time but to encompass it or ‘take it in’ as our gaze takes in our surroundings.” He describes this as a “structured or configured” gestalt, or “temporal gaze” (Carr 1986, 41). While these comments locate storytelling quite close to timing, they also remain within a conventional, hypostatized discourse of time. More specifically, they remain “content to recognize . . . a genuinely universal human trait: the strug­ gle against temporal chaos, the fear of sequential dispersion and dissolution, the need to kill off Father Time or at least stave off (postpone?) his attempts to devour us all” (Carr 1986, 184). In addition to reifying and naturalizing the problem of Time, this reinforces the assumption of two separate temporal categories: the time we constitute to ourselves, and an exogenous, pre-existing, and problematic 6  Similarly, although it cannot stave off biological death, narrative mitigates mortality. As Psalms 90:9 puts it, “all our days pass away in Your wrath; we spend our years as a tale that is told.” Or, “I know that I was born and I know that I’ll die / The in between is mine” (Vedder 2002). 7  Hagström and Gustafsson (2019, 388) discuss “master narratives” like neorealism, which provide a “dominant storyline” that structures “lower-level narratives.” See also Stevens’ (2015, 46) adaptation of Fraser’s “ ‘nested hierarchy of presents’ ”, discussed in chapter two under Hierarchical Temporality.

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86  International Relations and the Problem of Time time “in” which we just do exist. This in turn enables narratologists to treat time as a deleterious natural force against which narrative works. Thus, our “sense of time” depends on “the constant attempt to surmount time in exactly the way the story-teller does” (Carr 1986, 61–2 emphasis added; Ricoeur 1984, 66). Although I agree with much of this account, this way of talking about time and narrative temporality elides narrative’s function as a timing device and therefore a constitutive source of time per se. Moreover, intimations of a time before narra­ tive temporality threatens to re-open several issues reconciled in the previous chapter, including the quest for an objective and absolute existential “dimension of time,” the value scale that this supports, and the aporia of time—those philo­ sophical gaps between objective, natural time and subjective temporal experi­ ence. Therefore, it makes more sense to explore narrative as a form of timing. To do so, we need to unpack narrative and see how it works to time and thereby constructs time itself.

Toward Narrative Timing The key to all this is to specify how narrative works as a form of timing in two respects. First, narrative functions as a timing device—it is productive of timing insofar as it provides a means for the orientation and direction of human conduct in the world, as symbolized in the temporal series that it unfolds from start to finish. This underscores the timing value of the narrative theory of action and helps reframe intellectual communities like IR as loosely collective timing efforts. Second, narrative is the result of timing; it is a timing product comprised of change processes, events, and actors, all integrated and coordinated according to an overarching standard. In this way, narrative constructs and expresses a vision of time. Taken together, these two respects correspond roughly to the perlocu­ tionary, illocutionary, and locutionary force of basic time utterances mentioned earlier (see p. 56). They also mark narrative’s external and internal timing func­ tions. Crucially, it is narrative temporality—the story’s own constructed time— that provides the link between these Janus faces of timing: the time produced within narrative proffers the standard for timing action in the world beyond it. As we will see in Part Two, this marks a key conduit between the inner workings of a theory and its capacity to remake its domains of interest. As with any timing effort, this conduit has political consequences. Narrative time constructs an ideological position, transmits political choices, and proposes different forms of social organization (Klinke 2013, 680; also Stevens 2015, 59). Once institutionalized and reified, it may come to seem like a timing meter—a generalized and abstract tool for establishing or subsuming all sorts of relations under a common theme. Especially successful narratives might even effect an intuitive and seemingly independent “time of ” some social domain. However, as

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Telling Time  87 a timing mode, narrative remains vulnerable to confounding changes or unexpected outcomes, at which point the problem of Time can “return” upon narrative. Taken together with the discussion in chapter one, these points prepare the ground and set the stakes for our analysis of IR’s complex relationship to time.

Emplotment Timing theory understands claims that narrativized actions help us “carve out” or “locate” ourselves in some “now”—in which it is possible to “surmount” the prob­ lem of Time—as an indexical or indication of timing at work. In this case, the story functions as a relation-building tool for orienting ourselves towards, and within, a dynamic environment. This story also emerges from narrative-internal timing organized around emplotment, the process of selecting elements of experi­ ence and drawing them together in an intelligible whole, informed by some theme and unfolding a durative series (Kermode 2000, 45). As above, the way narratologists describe the features of emplotment comes very close to identifying timing without saying so. It “draws together from [some] manifold of events the unity of one temporal whole” and “attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal experience” (Ricoeur  1984, 66, 52 em­phasis added). It attempts to “dominate the flow of events by gathering them together in the forward-backward grasp of the narrative act” (Carr  1986, 61–2 emphasis added). And it works as a “dialectic process that takes place between the events themselves and a theme that discloses their significance and allows them to be grasped together as parts of one story” (Polkinghorne  1988, 20 emphasis added). Put differently, emplotment works to integrate and coordinate multiple change continua, using the plot’s central theme or “lesson” as the standard of syn­ thesis. From these, it produces a thematized series. Emplotment thereby lays a conduit by which the purpose and will to power expressed in the plot migrates outward to the world of action.8 Emplotment comprises two features that help us time—or as narratologists put it, that effectively “humanise time” (Ricoeur 1984, 52). First, the plot sets an intel­ ligible problem requiring action to release its essential tension (Ringmar  1996, 73). This makes the situation inhabitable inasmuch as it renders human agency possible and meaningful. It is crucial that the overall plot and its component parts be well integrated and coordinated for this to work, since we cannot act meaning­ fully in a situation that is incoherent. Second, if a story’s components cohere meaningfully, it unfolds an intelligible series that is also a “model of concordance” (Ricoeur 1984, 3, 38). As long as it 8  I adapt this idea from Ricoeur’s (1984, 36–53) mimetic triad, which is both the act and product of composition.

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88  International Relations and the Problem of Time meets standards of completeness and appropriateness (i.e. all the necessary elem­ents are included; all the included elements are useful), the plot propounds its own self-sufficient “ ‘field of occurrence’ ” (Carr 1986, 23)—a dynamic realm in which every component has its proper place and purpose, nothing important is left out,9 and nothing irrelevant is left in. This series allows the audience to under­ stand the import and the “ ‘directedness’ ” of happenings, processes, actions, and relationships (Ringmar 1996, 73). Their order and interconnections establish an “arc” or “trajectory” from the beginning of the story through the middle to the end. Regardless of its concrete content, which may lend an additional spatial (e.g. cyclical, arrow-like, spiral) or normative (e.g. progressive, decline, apocalyptic, redemption) sense to the story, the narrative “arc” has a basic serial and direc­ tional form as long as it makes use of “before,” “after,” “then,” “led to,” “caused” or other temporalized words that “accrete” meaning (Solomon 2014, 673–4). In this sense, every narrative works as a cosmography, building a world that is complete and temporally coherent precisely because it is not exhaustive.10

Plotting Two Cultures of Time Now it may seem as if this arc or storyline is just an arrangement of events “along the axis of time.” Yet when we configure events in a story we do not just plunk them down along a given axis, since to do so is to produce a bare chronicle (one thing after another), not a narrative (one thing because of another, see Mink 1978, 143–4; Ricoeur 1984, 43; Carr 1986, 45–72; White 1987, 1–25).11 So when we say that a story (re-)structures events on “the axis of time,” we quickly and silently (that is, symbolically) re-affirm two modes of timing: narrative and Western standardized.12 The clock and calendar synthesize events against a singular, axial, enumerated continuum. Narrative is much more flexible, but no less an act of synthesis that unfolds a dynamic continuum. In this way, every narrative consti­ tutes its own particular temporality, which need not (but can) be the same as the unirectilinear, homogeneous, and neutral “timeline” constituted by clock-based reckoning. The crucial criterion is that the plot be “enactable” and “normative”— that it “spring forth” a plausible and actionable world, which is well-timed in the 9  Think here of how critical IR scholars trace the “silences” of mainstream theories (Dingli 2015). 10  E.g., “we know that if we are in this theoretical world, then X set of mechanisms is likely to be operating, whereas if we are in this other theoretical world, then we should expect Y mechanisms to operate” (Goddard 2013 emphasis added). Cosmography reflects one aim of cosmology, the “cultural apprehension of the cosmos and humanity’s place within it”; the other is the scientific study of how the universe works (Stevens 2015, 58). On cosmologies and international politics, see (Allan 2018). 11 Moreover, contemporary fiction often dispenses with brute chronology (e.g. Wallace  1996; Smith 2001). 12  We also elevate chronology—which is only centuries old (Dohrn-van Rossum 1996; Hom 2017b, 447)—over narrative—which covers millennia (Brandon 1965).

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Telling Time  89 sense that it manifests no unconnected singularities or unintelligible accidents and that it is amenable to human intervention (Ricoeur 1984, 41–2).13 If it successfully times its internal components to produce such an inhabitable tem­por­al­ity, narrative might even surpass Western standard timing insofar as the “cognitive order of the reading process is . . . closer to the experience of time than to the notion of clock time extending uniformly from past into future” (Herman, Jahn, and Ryan 2005, 610). Moreover, a well-timed narrative provides an ex­plan­ation for events other than that they simply were “brought” by the “passage of Time.” This is what it means to say that narrative placates, manages, or tames the problem of Time. What, then, of the time that narrative surmounts? Its Janus-faced timing cap­ acity provides further insight into why and how the problem of Time emerged in the first place. During the same epochs that early, active, fraught social timing experiments emerged, ancient myths and cosmologies played central explanatory roles (see Gunnell 1987, 17–53; Whitrow 1988, 19–36; Elias 2007a, 41–9; Boyd 2009, 199–202), especially with respect to the experience of discordant change and the challenges of coordinating social necessities with natural en­vir­ons. The emergence and split of time gods and subsequent delivery of the human realm to the more malevolent ones served an important function. Ancient cosmologies gathered together various, particular, and often disparate experiences of discord—all of which made timing more difficult—under the common symbol of a malevolent deity. This figuration of time emplotted a multiplicity of timing-internal challenges in stories about how the world works. It worked as a catchall that also made the greatest external factor of all—god—responsible for whatever changes could not be attributed to more intelligible ones. These symbolic products of intellectual synthesis helped move ancient cultures from a host of idiographic timing chal­ lenges to a higher level of synthesis and generality (Elias 1989a; 2007a). By treating malevolent gods, or other variants of the problem of Time, as nar­ rative timing indexicals, we can speculate on how well a given story orders the world and enables action. For all its august authority, as a catchall for discordance and surprise the problem of Time marks a small step above narrative incoher­ ence. It signals that a given story’s ability to time its domain of interest has slipped and perhaps verges on breakdown. Just as in wider timing practices, we then require revised or new visions of time to help restore the utility of timing. In the case of narrative, this may work as “a series of rectifications applied to previous narratives” (Ricoeur 1988, 247). And should the problem of Time dominate the story, this signals that we may be out of options or ideas for restoring timing— that ongoing changes and/or unexpected outcomes are rendering our plans and purposes feeble and perhaps futile. This tension between narrative timing

13  This is the temporal dimension of narrative’s “coherence” theory of truth (Polkinghorne 1988, 63, 180; Levine 2017, 104).

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90  International Relations and the Problem of Time and the problem of Time holds important explanatory consequences for Part Two’s ana­lysis of IR: The balance between a story’s configured temporality and its use of the problem of Time as a bit part, role player, or primary antagonist signals its viability as a Janus-faced timing device.

Timing a Story: From Emplotment to Narrative Temporality A well-emplotted story provides its audience with a vision of how the world works (Dienstag 1997, 4–22). Its produced temporality becomes a timing stand­ ard, orienting that audience and suggesting how to enact this temporal series that realizes its animating purpose. This marks the first half of its transmission of nar­ rative time to the world beyond it. The second half is that if these well-timed actions succeed, the narrative effectively remakes the world beyond it, with narrated time replacing the “welter of unique facts” (Morgenthau 1965, 171; Ringmar 1996, 72)—if only temporarily.14 We have then timed some part of the world using the narrative temporality produced by the timing activity of gathering together vari­ ous change experiences in a coherent and meaningful story. This is analogous to the way in which the Western standard clock produces the change continuum of repetitive and consistent step-wise motion, which provides a standard by which actors (who are external to its mechanism) orient themselves in the world and coordinate their actions. Compared with Western standard timing, though, emplotment works quite differently, by artfulness and creativity rather than mechanized rigor. It puts puzzling and troubling experiences “to work,” “making them productive” of a thematic and dramatic rather than a conceptual or logical resolution (Ricoeur 1988, 261). Yet while narrative synthesizes “goals, causes, and chance” using a particular theme, much like more techno­logic­al forms of timing, its desired result remains the “temporal unity of a whole and complete action” (Ricoeur 1984, ix). Whether “told” by the clock or calendar, or by a story, the outcome is a time produced by timing. Even as it poses the timing standard for external action, emplotment also emerges from timing. Recall that timing works by creative acts of “intellectual synthesis” (Elias 2007a, 60–1, 85). In the case of narrative timing, it is discursive rather than technological innovations that achieve a “synthesis of the het­ero­ge­neous” experiences that typify social existence (Ricoeur 1984, ix; 2008b; Carr 1986, 96; see

14  When narratives purport to be “truthful,” they must achieve internal coherence and comport with their audience’s “first-order referents” of experience (Polkinghorne  1988, 62). Social scientific narratives cannot truck exclusively in “that willing suspension of disbelief . . . which constitutes poetic faith” (Coleridge 1847, 2 emphasis added).

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Telling Time  91 Steele 2008a, 72). How does this synthetic effort proceed? By four complementary and recursive timing techniques that arrange messy and even incommensurable change processes into a coherent story. Emplotment works by its synoptic theme, which facilitates creative filtration, experiential cleavage, and concordant discordance. Each of these operations helps construct a full narrative, but each is also a timing operation that grapples with discordant experiences. Because they are recursive and closely intermingled, it is impossible to explicate each timing tool independent of the others. My order of presentation begins with the timing standard (the synoptic theme) and moves toward narrative’s most creative means of resolving the problem of Time, which in turn signals its timing success.

Synoptic Theme The synoptic theme provides an idea of how disparate experiences might become components of a coherent whole. Through a process of authorial judgment, it turns an “indigestible heap of data” (Mink  1966, 185) into a meaningful series leading as if by necessity from a beginning to a conclusion. Synoptic judgment involves “configurational comprehension” (Polkinghorne 1988, 53), the “judica­ tory act of ‘grasping together’ ” various “circumstances, goals, interactions, and unintended results” (Ricoeur  1984, 41, 142; 1985, 61) in a “temporal Gestalt” (Carr 1986, 36), whose unity enables us to “take in” a sense of connected temporal flow in the first place. Synoptic judgment is scalable and embedded. The happen­ ings we take in and use to compose a temporally unified plot come from prior interpretive configurations, which only resolve as such against some broader theme. For this reason, it helps to distinguish between concrete themes, or singu­ lar but holistic plot ideas, and general thematics, or formalized ideas about which types of plot are viable and which are not. Thematics come from metanarratives, those higher level and longer-running stories in which concrete themes and nar­ ratives are embedded and by which they are selected.15 Although in other forms of timing a metric, celestial, or other standard of ­reference may be used, narrative timing proceeds by reference to themes and thematics, both of which work as timing standards. They provide a reference or rubric by which to “co-ordinate” (co-order) happenings “in proper position relative to each other and to the system of which they form parts.”16 This process of “making it whole” also involves integration (Hanrieder 2015, 57) and broadly instantiates the basic synthesis at the heart of both narrative and generalized timing.

15  E.g. early apocalyptic Judeo-Christian literature propounded a particular political theodicy to explicate the Israelite’s more shocking experiences “without delegitimizing the authority of God” (McQueen 2018, 26). 16  (“Co-Ordinate, n.” OED Online 2013).

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92  International Relations and the Problem of Time

Creative Filtration Only those elements of experience that we can coordinate with this synoptic theme will feature in the story (see Ricoeur  1984, 67, 38; Freeman  1993, 198; Steele 2008a, 19). Synoptic comprehension accomplishes this through two op­er­ ations. The first is creative filtration, in which we determine whether happenings, actors, and information are relevant or extraneous to the plot. Creative filtration manages complexity by reducing the quantity of change data we must accommo­ date in the narrative as a first step toward configuring a new change continuum that forms the smooth story arc. In classical parlance, it reduces the river of time to a domesticated sluice, a “strained and filtered . . . spring” (Plato 2010, 402c–d). In addition to reduction, the process is creative because it constitutes elements of experience as relevant or irrelevant according to the theme at hand. On its own, “filtration” suggests weeding out extant experiences, but a narrative theory of action argues that every experiencing agent is also an author, who constitutes experiences and events as such through the recursive process of apprehension, synoptic judgement, and emplotment. Rather than simply sorting or “discover­ ing” them, creative filtration packages and delivers facts and other story elements as such (see Booth 1997, 96; Berenskoetter 2011, 661).17 International politics furnishes numerous illustrations of creative filtration. Is 9/11 a matter of foreign policy overreach and blowback, patriotic solidarity, or “the inexplicable rage and hatred” of the perpetrators (Ross  2013, 67)? That depends in part on whether you reflexively use a leftist/critical, centrist, or more (neo)conservative metanarrative to apprehend and eventually comprehend the shocking experiences of that Tuesday morning. Is Canada an independent sover­ eign country or the “51st US state”? The former is a matter of international norms and laws; the latter subsumes Canada within a modern history “centered on the expansion of the Anglo experience” and the salutary political effects of this (Vucetic 2011, 1–2). Consideration of “humanitarian action” abounds today, but the idea itself is only decades old. It emerged out of a thematic revision, by which French intellectuals and political activists grappled with the confounding experi­ ence of “radical third-worldism,” a revolution-oriented response to suffering in the third world. As Eleanor Davey (2015, 3) traces, third-worldism’s “revolution­ ary zeal” foundered against widespread abuses of power by revolutionariesturned-authoritarians. In search of a new way to grapple with and alleviate human suffering, activist groups like Médecins Sans Frontières helped extract and create from this ongoing problem the innovative category of humanitarianism without borders, pivoting thematically from state sovereignty and self-determination to “the entitlement of affected populations to access relief ” (Davey 2015, 3–4)—or 17  Creative filtration differs from information processing, where cognitive limits meet pre-formed stimuli (Lepgold and Nincic 2002, 3).

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Telling Time  93 what we often call human security. Finally, think back to Captain Cook’s first ­contact in Hawaii, which got off to a cooperative start because the local populace interpreted his entirely coincidental clockwise circumnavigation of the island against their own mythology of Lono, the god of peace, who traveled in the same direction on land. “By this accident, the ‘islanders knew Captain Cook as “Lono” before they set eyes on him’ ” (Grynaviski 2014, 1).18 These examples show how synoptic judgement facilitates the creative filtration of specific information from wider experience. They also highlight how emplot­ ment works less by direct fit, verisimilitude, or correspondence with reality than by “narrative coherence,” or the question of whether or not elements relate clearly to the synopsis and to each other (Polkinghorne 1988, 63). This coherence helps the story rise to standards of completeness and appropriateness, which, as men­ tioned earlier, are preconditions of effective narrative timing.

Cleaving Experience In a similar vein, because every narrative begins and ends, emplotment must sub­ divide the totality of all interacting or colliding change continua that provide its subject matter. We typically understand this as carving out a period or “slice of time” by “break[ing] through the seamlessness of history” (Pierson  2004, 45), which itself “has no starts and stops” (Gilpin 1981, 11). However, much as narra­ tive filtration includes a creative element, slicing or breaking actually form part of a larger cleaving operation, which cuts up experiences of change to render them meaningful within to the confines of the plot. Experiential cleavage works in tan­ dem with creative filtration to drastically reduce the information that must fit within the plot. While creative filtration constitutes and isolates change continua as relevant, cleaving truncates them so that they do not stretch back or unfold indefinitely. Together, these processes of narrowing and truncating purge the plot of any data that might prevent it from hanging together. However, they do not render the plot partial. Just the opposite: they lend the plot a “peculiar sort of unity-inmultiplicity” and more specifically a “temporal unity” or “durative” present (Carr 1986, 36). They do so by establishing the array of story elements that must be timed together in the plot. In this sense, experiential cleavage reflects the dual narrative necessity of lumping and splitting, as when warriors in Homer’s Iliad (1992, 13.429, 13.543) cleave together in battle until one cleaves apart the ­other’s skull.19 This dual meaning highlights how closely splitting and lumping 18  We can criticize such filters for excluding important elements, but this is always a case of com­ peting themes and filtrations. 19  Or, “a man [shall] leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Gen. 2:24).

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94  International Relations and the Problem of Time intertwine in synoptic judgment, as opposed to scientific classification, where they mark distinct operations (see Darwin 1990, 438 and 439 n6). As with creative filtration, we cleave experience by reference to the synoptic standard, which determines when the story must begin and end in order to syn­ thesize all its relevant elements in a way that realizes its key lesson. The beginning marks a happening before which nothing occurred that is needed to clarify the plot arc (Ricoeur 1984, 38; Polkinghorne 1988, 145). The ending provides the last word in the story, both as the serial conclusion of events and the symbolic fulfil­ ment of its hermeneutic promise. It partakes of “description and justification all at once” (Ricoeur 1984, 67; Carr 1986, 78, 61, 49). It is this “closure” (Carr 1986, 41) that gives the story a “sense of an ending” (Kermode 2000)—which can resolve as tragic, ironic, or cathartic. Without some experiential cleavage, even those change continua we creatively filter from wider experience might bring “just one damned thing after another” with many more “damned things in between” (Arntzenius 2012, 5–38), rather than a “meaningful constellation” of events (Ricoeur  1988, 274; see Polkinghorne 1988, 18). Cleaving experiences into beginnings and endings does not render narrative strictly unirectilinear and directional. Endings depend on backward reference, our ability to double back to the plot’s beginning and middle to understand how they serve its thematic purpose and form a complete, temporal whole (Ricoeur 1984, 66), which emerges gradually through the plot’s unfolding. So while it helps delimit the story’s content, cleaving also sets tasks for the narrator, namely to ensure that everything in between its endpoints coheres.20 This is a matter of proportionality: cleaving longer continua of change either necessitates more middle steps or it must be balanced by more stringent creative filtration to keep the narrative’s ingredients manageable. The only other alternative is to leave out many steps between the beginning and the end, which may threaten the plot’s followability.

Concordant Discordance Taken together, these techniques reduce the sheer quantity of information, either by relegating them to prelude and postlude (cleaving) or by classifying them ir­rele­vant to the central theme (filtration). However, the narrative must still ren­ der intelligible and manageable whatever novel experiences, destabilizing events, and other forms of discord remain. More specifically, narrators must put these “enigmas” of lived experience “to work,” connecting and perhaps even driving the plot’s beginning to its conclusion (Ricoeur 1984, 22). Following Ricoeur (1984, 22, 20  This is why I use “cleave” instead of the more common “periodise,” which reproduces the idea of historical markers plunked down on a pre-existing temporal dimension.

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Telling Time  95 70–3; 1988, 261), I call this concordant discordance, the effect by which initially confounding happenings become productive links in the story. A good story contains everything it needs, and everything it contains is neces­ sary. Therefore, any discordant changes that cannot be filtered or cleaved “out” must be transformed by reference to the synoptic theme. Jarring, incongruous, and conflictual incidents seem to come out of nowhere when they confound the existing narratives we inhabit. We must then either (re-) integrate and (re-) co­ord­in­ate them with that narrative theme or, in especially difficult cases, config­ ure a different narrative altogether. Discordant happenings animate the narrative drive, which then works to render them concordant by showing how they are actually a necessary origin, a causal or constitutive plot driver, or an unsurprising outcome in light of the theme.21 Emplotment thereby whittles down confounding experience, “reduc[ing]” it to “dependable conditions” smoothly linked in an account of the past, present, and future (Mead 2002, 65, 43). This does not eliminate discord from the story altogether. Just the opposite, it puts discord to work. Instead of allowing such experiences to call forth a void of  meaninglessness or chaos, concordant discordance makes surprising and confounding happenings serve “a causal sequence in which one thing leads to another” (Aristotle  1932, 52a4; quoted in Ricoeur  1984, 43). Successfully retooled, these enigmatic events might indeed become explanatory stalwarts or the story’s most “ ‘marvellous’ things,” “those strokes of chance that seem to arrive by design” (Ricoeur  1984, 43). This is how “turning points” or “forks in the road” work in stories. More dramatically, this describes “tragic reversals” in which the protagonist’s best efforts have unforeseen and opposite effects that not only thwart her goals but bring ruination (see Aristotle 1932). Similarly, “ironic reversals” use unintended consequences to highlight some pretense or aesthetic practice of cer­ titude: “Virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue; strength becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the mighty man or nation; . . . wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its own limits” (Niebuhr 2008, xxiv; Steele 2019 chp. 2). To underscore their concordantdiscordant function, tragedy and irony mark reversals of fortune in two senses: outcomes reverse the protagonist’s fortunes (discordance), but the theme that emplots them as exemplary lessons about good intentions or conceits reverses fortune itself—from a capricious source of instability (Walker 1993, 39–40) into a “necessary and probable” concordant moment that ensures the “followability of the story” and facilitates its chronological and hermeneutic closure (Ricoeur 1984, 44, 207). Emplotment thereby replaces the problem of Time—which we configure as the bringer of discord—with a coherent and unfolding temporal unity. 21  This is the basic process of “narrative intelligibilification” (Suganami 1999). Even stories about unreason, randomness, and meaningless contain plot themes (e.g. the futility of life) and point to a moral (e.g. stoicism or nihilism).

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96  International Relations and the Problem of Time Narrative timing depends on these four techniques—synoptic judgment, c­ re­ative filtration, experiential cleavage, and concordant discordance. The plot only becomes a meaningful continuum of change, and one that might re-configure our way of going on in the world, to the extent that we can emplot all relevant elem­ ents such that the course of events manifests our synoptic theme. If we succeed in this, the story flows easily: characters, information, and events seem to arrive at just the right moment, and the entire thematic arc seems to move forcefully toward a conclusion. If not, a story “meanders,” “loses momentum,” or otherwise fails to deliver its message. Good storytelling depends on effective timing.

Explaining, Understanding, and Narrative Timing To further elaborate the relevance of narrative timing to IR theorizing, we can find these techniques playing key roles in four of IR’s primary ways of explaining and understanding international politics. Deductive-nomological, structuralrational, and mechanistic accounts form the backbone of scientific explanation and offer hard cases for narrative timing. Historical understanding sits at the other end of the narratological spectrum but shares much with the others in terms of timing. In addition to specifying their formal differences, this section explicates each as a type of narrative timing, which serves the common purpose of comprehension (Ricoeur 1984, 76; Suganami 2008, 344–7) and, more spe­cif­ic­ al­ly, displays the structural elements of a basic narrative (Ricoeur  1984, 178; Suganami 2008, 338).

Deductive-Nomological Explanations Deductive-nomological (D-N) explanations pose a scientific ideal in IR, and one that scholars frame as a distinctly non-narrative form of knowledge (Lake 2011, 474, 466; Mink  1978, 143–4). Yet they revolve around the “idea of a necessary connexion among events . . . of the constant conjunction of these events” (Hume 2007, 75, also 26–7 emphasis added). Where constant conjunctions hold, universal laws must be at work: “If the relation between [A] and [B] is invariant, the law is absolute.” (Waltz 1979, 1 emphasis added). These reliable relationships therefore “cover” all or most cases of the events in question and reduce their uniqueness. On this view, no explanation “is deserving of serious credence” unless it can “demonstrate that the outcome of a particular event is merely an example of an established pattern” (Ray 2009, 137–8 emphasis added). So while many deny its narrativity, the D-N model works by a most stringently synoptic standard. This thematic commitment sets rigorous rules for emplotment. Authorized by their premised constancy, D-N models excise any narrative middle between the

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Telling Time  97 beginning (A) and the end (B)—they decline to show, “step by step, . . . a sequence that regularly culminates in a given outcome” (Singer 1989, 13). The only discord they resolve is the originally puzzling phenomenon that becomes “something to be expected” (Dessler  2003, 388). With no middle and limited concordant dis­ cordance, D-N models can cleave experience disproportionately, skipping over lengthy and even disorderly processes if the end points hold. This flexibility real­ izes the value of “covering” a large number of cases, which is that we sequester their differences in this missing middle in order to meaningfully connect their bookends. IR scholars often interpret D-N accounts as “timeless.” However, the D-N form offers an exemplar of passive timing. Its established relationships hold in any time and place. Far from timeless, it is always timely or perhaps timeful (see Hom 2018c, 308–9). The D-N model does collapse the distinction between “the cognitive order of the reading process” and the “experience of [clock] time,” offering instead relations “extending uniformly from past into future” (Herman, Jahn, and Ryan 2005, 610). It also orders and unfolds relations in the iron-clad sequence of a chronicle: “and then . . . and then . . . and then . . .” (Mink 1978, 144). These links run deeper still. Thanks to narrative and symbolic reification, both covering laws and Western standard time appear to simply tabulate the spon­tan­ eous regularity of a determinate world (Dessler and Owen  2005, 607; Almond and Genco  1977, 500). Both symbolize meaningful passage as “a miniscule or possibly illusory punctum” (Stevens 2015, 56). The clock does so by numerated motion. The D-N model does so by making co-incidence cover intervening events. Its causal relationship is nearly instantaneous or quasi-punctual, where “punctual” connotes a “precise” and “finite point” without extension, the “precise observance of a rule,”22 and, most notably, the quality of being “exactly or aptly timed.”23 No surprise, then, along with “timeless” some scholars dub D-N accounts the “clock model” of explanation (Popper, quoted in Almond and Genco 1977, 500).

Structural-Rational Explanations Many scholars (e.g. Fearon 1995) find the D-N model implausible or too re­strict­ive for social processes and therefore work to fill in its missing middle with elem­ents like structural rationality (S-R), which emphasizes that successful action flows from the strategic logic of a given situation (Dessler and Owen  2005, 598; see Suganami 2008, 334). Different arrangements yield different strategic solutions, all 22  So as events become more “microscopic,” their covering laws become “ ‘correspondingly more certain’ ” (George and Bennett 2004, 228). On coincidence and instantaneity, see (Ricoeur 2008a, 206). 23  (“Punctual, adj. and n.” OED Online 2013; “Punctuality, n.” OED Online 2013).

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98  International Relations and the Problem of Time derived from the universal connections expressed by situational logic and rational expectations. This logic functions like a “string in the labyrinth, en­ab­ling us to make sense of many twists, turns and complexities in an essentially [unirecti]linear fashion” (Hutchings 2008b, 95; Ricoeur 1988, 194; Dessler and Owen 2005, 599). So while it fills in the D-N model’s missing middle, by resolving any attendant dilemmas by the use of universal reasoning or “global optimizing” (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 122), the S-R account retains the temporal promise of if-then generalizations, regularity, and necessity (Linklater and Suganami  2006, 66; Dessler and Owen 2005, 598, 607). However, with S-R modifications begins the Faustian bargain made by all explanatory forms other than D-N, which tames time through sequestration. As soon as they include a middle act and/or greater empirical detail, even accounts championing general rationality must grapple with non-rational or otherwise discordant behaviour (see Ringmar 1996, 39, 66; Humphreys 2011, 257). Often, S-R explainers do so by adding “a subsequent layer [of theory] that explains divergences from the rational baseline” (Glaser 2010, 205, 15, 24, 26 n21), be this offensive and defensive strategies (Lee 2002), bandwagoning incentives (Schweller 1994), threat perception (see Stein 2013), or bounded rationality, which is “attuned to the possibility of unexpected outcomes” (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 125). Similarly, Waltz (1986, 329) consigns non-rational “residual variance” to theories of domestic politics or foreign policy. Here creative filtration becomes a matter of the academic division of labor—whether understood as D-N or S-R, if the explanatory form is to remain elegant and exculpable, irregularity must be for other theorists.24

Mechanistic Explanations By contrast with both D-N and S-R forms, mechanistic explanations elucidate concrete processes in between their beginnings and ends (see Bhaskar 2008, 69), which are, in principle, “consistent with the most continuous spatial-temporal sequences we can describe at the finest level of detail that we can observe” (George and Bennett  2004, 140). However, their eponymous theme requires that these processes and sequences be so “routinised” and “enduring” that they seem to work by their “own device” to produce near-automatic results (Suganami  1999, 370; Kurki 2007, 234 n113).25 Similarly, they feature causal triggers, deterministic forces, and reliable processes (Vasquez 1987, 141–2; Gilpin 1981, 49). So just as a 24  On the boundary between D-N and S-R explanations, see (Kurki 2007, 50; and Wendt 1999, 79). 25  Not all IR scholars understand mechanisms the same; cf. (Kurki 2007, 233; Jackson 2011, 155, 199; Guzzini  2011); and some worry that overemphasizing regularity reduces them to intervening variables or “micro-level theories” (Jackson 2011, 109–10; Guzzini 2011, 332; cf. George and Bennett 2004, 137, 140).

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Telling Time  99 physical mechanism works better when sealed off from the elements, mechanistic narratives creatively filter most non-stable or irregular elements, including “pur­ posive” actions and contingent relations (Suganami 2008, 336). This helps them propound a sense of “blind necessity,” the churning of steady gears in determinate configuration. For example, James Fearon (1995, 381–2, 409; cf. Kurki 2007, 233) qualifies S-R explanations for war with intermediate ingredients like private information and incentives to misrepresent capabilities, commitment problems that confound mutually agreeable solutions, and issue indivisibilities. While these may seem like instances of human variance, he emplots each as a systematic and stable attribute. For instance, rather than misinformation randomly interrupting peaceful solu­ tions, leaders possess stable, strategic incentives to misrepresent (Fearon  1995, 381). Yet even when filtered for stability, more substantial middles like this still entail that mechanistic narratives cleave experience more proportionately than our previous forms. Accordingly, they also must accommodate greater discord. One especially ingenious way of doing so is to include within the holistic explana­ tory mechanism specific, empirical servos, which act as “fail-safes” to redirect discordant events back on the “normal” path. Fearon’s (1995, 380–1, 400; see also Gilpin  1981, 22–3, 209) three additional factors all redirect desires for peace toward war. In these ways, mechanistic explanation’s more proportionate cleaving and less stringent filtration acknowledge the fact that a reliable machine includes many components, but still mobilizes these to ensure regular outcomes (George and Bennett 2004, 30). Like S-R explanations, mechanistic stories extend the D-N model in temporal terms by adding intermediate steps. But they do so to re-affirm the sense of steady passage, which, if no longer punctual, remains aptly timed.

Historical Explanations On the other end of the narrative spectrum,26 historical explanation works by the minimal standard of rendering experiences part of some “ ‘intelligible pattern of events’ ” that need only show “how one thing followed another ‘as a matter of course’ ” (Trachtenberg 2006, 27, 185; Suganami 2008, 335) and “did not take some other possible path” (Lake  2009, 52–3).27 Consequently, historical explanation filters a wide variety of unique causal ingredients into the plot: volition, chance, necessity (see Suganami 2008, 334), contingency (Bennett and Elman 2006, 254–6). 26  Because they make ample use of “reality effects” and “world-building” techniques, historical nar­ ratives share important features with fiction and fables (Suganami  2008, 333 n11, 343; Bain  2007; Ricoeur 1988, 99–240). 27  This section refers primarily to IR works that answer questions like “How did/has it come about that . . .?” or fall under the category of “International History” (Suganami 2008, 330). For a wider sur­ vey of historical writing, see (Green and Troup 2016).

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100  International Relations and the Problem of Time It also works by a range of concrete synoptic themes: decline (Gibbon  2001), redemption/resurgence (Ruether 1998), progress (Kant 1991), cyclicality (Modelski 1987), and continuity (Gilpin 1981; Sylvest 2005). These elements and themes need not meet any overarching thematic standard of “if, then” regularity or rationality (Suganami  2008, 336). They need enable a plausible string of events necessary and appropriate to the conclusion. Amongst IR’s primary modes of explanation, historical accounts cleave experi­ ence more proportionately, since greater detail requires further explication (see Suganami 2008, 343). They also produce concordant discordance in a number of ways that only loosely conform to any “logic” of change and more often simply connect puzzling experiences to “our understanding of the way the world works” (Trachtenberg  2006, 186, 27). These include tragic reversals, turning or tipping points, forks in the road, decisive actions, large forces, or minor but concatenat­ ing occurrences, among many others. Two further distinctions between historical and other narrative forms deserve note. First, although both concern concrete pathways, where mechanistic accounts evoke hermetic machinery, history retains an open-ended view of processes. It may include multiple pathways just to set up an ideographic account of how events travelled along one but not others. Second, history makes plenty of space for the agency, chance, and contingency that other models creatively filter or minimize. None of this means that anything goes in a historical narrative; rather, anything that goes into a historical narrative need only meet its more flexible internal requirements. Historical explanations still weigh archival and other evidence, and some explanations provide better knowledge warrants than others. Yet the historical end product usually collects diverse data under a rich narrative adhering to more flexible standards than D-N, which must move from axiomatic assertions through deductive logic to testable hypotheses, than S-R, which must show how systemic factors constrain rational behavior, or than mechanistic explanation, whose organizing metaphor restricts its viable tol­ erances and connections. Additionally, IR historical accounts can serve either (or both) ideographical or general claims about the past for the sake of elucidating the present and/or anticipating and shaping the future. For all these differences, upon closer scrutiny both the nuts and bolts of his­ torical narratives and their overarching timing purpose intermingle more closely with our other forms of explanation. Because they do not reproduce the world in 1:1 scale, historical explanations depend on small or intuitive covering laws, rational expectations, mechanistic links, and other “microcorrelations” to under­ write their intelligible series wherever it does unfold step by tiny, detailed step (Aristotle 1932, 1456b; George and Bennett 2004, 227–8). For example, ex­plan­ ations of the Great War’s outbreak feature Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination but not how a gunshot kills (aim; bullet caliber; velocity and angle of impact; skull density; hemorrhaging etc.). Even simple concrete events “possess an infinity of physical, chemical, biological, sociological, and yet other aspects and thus

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Telling Time  101 resist . . . complete description and a fortiori, a complete explanation” (Hempel 1965, 422–3). All forms of explanation, then, from arch-rational stories to historical series, depend to some extent on the punctual power of covering laws to help us time political relations in a narrative mode. Finally, they all work to revise and “reduce” puzzling experiences into expected outcomes and their “dependable conditions” (Mead 2002, 36–7). That is, IR narratives all work to “unfold” a series that transforms perplexing, incoherent, and seemingly lawless happenings into some intelligible gestalt manifesting meaningful relationships and clear options for human action (see Hacking 1990, 15).28

From Narrative Standard to Timing Meter Although humans cannot decisively “dominate the flow of events” or “surmount time” once and for all (Carr 1986, 61), we perpetually use narrative timing tech­ niques—from technological clocks to clock models of explanation and beyond— to transform parts of our experience into manageable temporal wholes. These narrative times orient us in the world and help us discern how to act and when. If successful—and we are often successful (Carr 1986, 61)—our actions effectively remake the world in the image of these temporal gestalts. The Janus face of narrative timing manifests in both great accomplishments and mundane activities. In both cases, successfully timed actions or projects encourage repetition and reification. First, just as symbolic “time” utterances hypostatize and separate their referent timing efforts in the process of transfer­ ring knowledge about those efforts, narrative composition “carries with it the capacity for distancing itself from its own production” (Ricoeur 1985, 61; 1984, xi), so that it attains an authority apart from its author. Second, it makes sense to routinize and habituate successful actions if current conditions resemble those of past successes. It is easier to generalize and apply extant narratives to related situ­ ations than to treat each as a singularity requiring a unique account configured from scratch (Bull  2000, 264). As mentioned earlier, beginning anew augurs danger and, in any case, abnegates the timing benefits of symbolic language— especially narrative’s ability to re-configure discrete and idiosyncratic experiences in synthetic and general frameworks of action. Inasmuch as we would always prefer an inhabitable world to an unbearable one, we are encouraged to iterate successful timing by transferring effective narrative themes and plots from one situation to another. We iterate narrative themes and plots more widely and more passively by suc­ cessful transference. This might occur through the thoughtless routinization or 28  So too do some game-theoretic models, which explicate the causal impact of sequence (Bates et al. 1998, 18; Pierson 2004, 59, cf. 61–4).

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102  International Relations and the Problem of Time ritual incantation of familiar tales, for instance the knee-jerk conception of “age-old differences and hatreds” in response to genocide (see Hunt  2004); or through more deliberate efforts to propound and embed a narrative timing mode, as when European Union members actively framed refugees and asylum seekers as migrant parasites rather than structurally constrained global citizens exercising the only agency left to them (Bilgin 2016). Such iterations lock in general features of timing in four ways. We might fixate on a synoptic theme, applying it broadly to disparate experiences without considering alternative themes. For example, “the trend is clear: In the Middle East and throughout the world, freedom is on the march” (CNN  2005), even though other themes make (more) sense of the contemporary Middle East. We might conflate creative filtration with ontological difference so that information deemed irrelevant under a particular theme becomes irrelevant to a whole domain of practice—as when scholars aver that culture, identity, or morality are “not what politics is about.” Similarly, we might naturalize an experiential cleavage, closing off the past and future decisively. For instance, the fetishization of 1648–present as the “age” of the “modern inter­ nation­al system” and 2003–2011 as “the Iraq War” establish chronological barriers within interconnected and ongoing change continua that do not necessarily reflect how things have gone and inhibit accounts that might include 1647 or 2012–present. Finally, we might concretize concordance as an objective and free­ standing “fact” divorced from its narrative uses. For example, 9/11 is a world his­ torical “turning point.” Once reified, these narrative devices tame Time by reducing its seemingly natural flux to more manageable, discrete experiences and tasks. But in doing so they also constrain any give-and-take with experience and evidence, becoming rigid rubrics within which new experiences must fit to matter at all. Pushed far enough through these reification processes, working narratives lose their provisional qualities and become standard frames of reference for integrat­ ing and coordinating new change continua, a measure of emergent experience.29 This turns narrative’s dynamic timing features into a settled and inflexible narrative timing meter. This more brittle form of narrative timing takes a story config­ ured for a particular situation and uses it to pre-figure additional experiences, which necessarily vary to some degree but become more inhabitable in this way (see Ricoeur 1984, 52–90; Aradau and van Munster 2012). Plot arcs subsuming specific empirical episodes become “laws” of history. For instance, W.W. Rostow (1990, xliv) proffered a stadial account of economic and political growth as “a tract for the times” in which Western Cold Warriors feared their countries were “falling behind” economically just as Marxist countries like Mao’s China announced a “Great Leap Forward” (Pearce  1999, 399). But his model quickly 29  See also Levine (2012, 15) on how we conflate a concept with the thing-in-itself.

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Telling Time  103 became reified into a general timing meter, not merely an intellectual comfort for the late 1950s but a “ ‘basic text’ ” or standard for how all polities across different epochs unfold (Pearce  1999, 399; see also Mehmet  2002, 70–2; and Inayatullah and Blaney 2004). While this may seem quite different than technological timing, the transition works just like the ascendance of Western standard time, in which a series of timing successes produced the seemingly neutral vision of a natural, homogeneous, empty dimension of existence, which was in fact artfully and la­bori­ous­ly constructed (Carr 1986, 42; Elias 2007a, 85). By fixed themes, naturalized cleavages, hardened distinctions, and concretized episodes of concordant discordance, a narrative’s particular way of unfolding a temporally manageable and thus inhabitable world becomes synonymous with the Time of the world. References to such a universal time indicate a thoroughly reified timing meter imposing itself more extensively and impertinently across contexts as a general measure of how situations hang together and what sorts of actions they enable. Modern ideologies of liberalism and progress, from eco­ nomic harmony to the democratic peace and “justice cascades” (see respectively Inayatullah and Blaney 2004; Ish-Shalom 2013; Sikkink 2011), illustrate this. We might also reify extant narrative timing modes for the opposite reason. Here the “annoying orneriness of things” combined with our own quotidian intellectual and cognitive limits leads us to construct a desired “other” or “remainder” of tem­ poral existence, symbolized by immutable laws, structures, or some other symbol of order to provide a reliable timing meter (Carr 1986, 43). The expansive identity between the “secular” or “fallen” realm and “temporal” life (Markus  1970), as opposed to the sacred and eternal heavens, provides an archetypical example. Both moves effectively close down time (see Hom and Steele 2010, 274–8; Hom 2019), preventing us from envisioning genuine alternatives or even, in some cases, responding flexibly to puzzling but not wholly unprecedented developments. All of this highlights a certain conservatism intrinsic to timing practices (see Hom 2016, 173–8). We would almost always prefer to re-use, adapt, or revise an extant narrative than compose a new story with a unique theme from scratch. This elevates “received wisdom” over creativity and broaches the seductive possi­ bility of a “transcendental Truth” of Time, which is a “semi-religious” form of “intellectual extremism” (Levine 2012, 15; Elias 2007a, 106; Carr 1986, 42). For there is no guarantee that past successes can help rather than hinder our next negotiation with events. In this way, narrative timing regimes work like “mental maps” (Pierson 2004, 38), or more precisely temporal closures that assure us of the “comprehensibility of existence” through “a certain warm, fear-repelling nar­ rowness and confinement to optimistic horizons” (Nietzsche  2001, 235; also Elias 2007a, 106). Against such closed visions of narrative time, novel experiences will call into question not only the timing meter’s current viability but also its  long and prestigious track record, without which we leave fear-repelling

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104  International Relations and the Problem of Time narrowness for the fearsome possibility that the time in which we imagine ­ourselves is actually quite “open” and even “out of joint” (Lazar 2019).

The Return of the Problem of Time Although narrative provides flood insurance against the river of time, its term and coverage are always limited. Just as any “time” utterance is, like all words (Lynch 2014, 22), finite and unable to articulate the fullness of timing in social life, a story only “stands the test of time” and becomes widely applicable to the extent that it resists effacement by additional developments (see George and Bennett  2004, 229)—that it continues to time important change processes and helps us to act upon them. All actions and systems of meaning, especially rou­tin­ ized and habituated ones, confront the possibility of discordant changes and their consequences.30 Because continua of change continue to change and human imagination remains limited (Pocock 2016, xxiii), even the finest narrative never ultimately or absolutely surmounts time. Indeed, as with other timing modes, narrative reproduces the problem of Time as the symbol of its provisional nature or as an admission of intractable new developments. Consequently, the problem of Time may “return” in several ways. To render experiences meaningful, emplotment leaves many things out. This helps us focus attention and envision a ground for action that is self-sufficient (i.e. complete) because it is non-exhaustive. Themes like “the end of history” (Fukuyama 2006) or the “liberal international order” (Ikenberry 2001) may cap­ ture our imagination for precisely these reasons. But, like any other theme, their felicity flows from the practical purchase they provide on emergent conditions. In light of such developments, we may have to labor conspicuously to re-affirm these themes (cf. Ikenberry 2009; 2011; 2018). Or if global changes do not confound, other challenger narratives may emerge to problematize what dominant themes filter out of their rules for creative filtration (Parmar 2018; see also Spivak 1990, 18–19; Pettman 2005; Agathangelou and Ling 2009). No experiential cleavage can ensure against new developments that recast once-appropriate beginnings and endings as arbitrary acts of “censorship” (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997, 1416) that marginalize, for instance, the longer-term causes of terrorism (see Hoffman 2002), the importance of post-war planning (Tierney 2017), or the ways that political agents can transform military defeats into “moral victories” (Heuser 2017). Concordant discordance works, in the first instance, as a poetic rather than a

30 Hence why emergence sometimes signals emergency and “an unidentifiable sense of threat” (Steele 2008a, 52). Emergencies destabilize our sense of self (Steele 2008b; Solomon 2014) and augur sheer incomprehensibility about our operating environment (Hom and Solomon  2016; Hom  2018a, 76–7; Hom and Steele 2020).

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Telling Time  105 practical resolution. It offers an aesthetic promissory note rather than a decisive inoculation against disharmony. For example, how should we comprehend the many reversals of fortune in counterterrorism wars—from “Mission Accomplished” to torture and Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi insurgency, “the Surge” of 2007, the Taliban’s renaissance, the rise of Islamic State, and its impact on the Syrian civil war? Politicians and analysts spent many words turning myriad processes, actors, and changes into these meaningful events and trying to plot them smoothly along arcs pointing toward freedom, security, and liberal values. Yet, in each case, con­ cordance proved temporary; discord emerged time and again. Not surprisingly, today we select themes of decay rather than progress to make sense of all this as the wages of strategic overreaction (Kydd and Walter  2006, 69–70), a “forever war” (Filkins 2009; McIntosh 2013), or an on­going and self-perpetuating defeat (Hom 2015). As shown in figure 4, we can now overlay the key features of narrative timing and temporality on the diagram of “time” utterances and timing presented in the previous chapter. This augmented diagram sketches three spectrums crucial to the discussion developed in the rest of the book. It traces the moves from responding provisionally to the problem of Time to trying to decisively transcend it, from particular timing devices to general timing meters, and from specific narrative tem­ por­al­ity to reified time. These moves elaborate my claim that various “time” utter­ ances in a field of discourse indicate important things about the status of collective timing efforts: when it foregrounds the problem of Time, timing is active and challenging; when it features more neutral, abstract “times,” timing is successful and perhaps passive and self-propagating. Yet, as before, none are fixed—timing

d en sc ter an e e’ Tr ng m ‘tim i m ied WesternTi eif R

Abstract

e iv Chronos at r Kairos K ar uv Kairos N Fluvial

Problematic

Sy C no Co C reat ptic nc le ive jud or av fi gm da in ltr nt g T ati ent di im on sc e or da nc e

‘Time’ utterances

standard time

Neutral

metaphors hors

Malevolenty

Figurational

sm it ni al gods ha por c d e on m em sp g r t Re imin cula T arti P

Active

Figure 4  Narrative timing

Timing

Passive

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106  International Relations and the Problem of Time activities and narrative times move back and forth along them, and the problem of Time ebbs and flows depending on the interplay of narrative and lived experience.

Conclusion: How Does IR Tell Time? Part One introduced timing theory as an explanation for how different temporal representations emerge and rise to the status of independent “times” in ­inter­nation­al politics and IR. It also demonstrated the analytical value of timing theory against other possible ways of theorizing time in IR, arguing that ­timing  theory stands alone in its ability to resolve persistent problems with theorizing time while offering a rigorous and systematic approach to various ­temporal phenomena. Finally, it showed how narrative works as a form of timing and specified narrative timing devices with special pertinence to IR practices and forms of knowledge. In addition to the explanatory forms already discussed, and despite great var­ iety, in the most general sense IR models a political realm that hangs together in a more intelligible and manageable way than bare evidence might suggest. Many IR theories unfold that world using symbolic language organized in narrative form. They involve a formal beginning and a meaningful conclusion—whether these be historical bookends; inputs and outputs; explananda and explanans; axioms, deductions, and hypotheses; probability estimates; or practical problems and policy prescriptions. Finally, just like timing and narrative judgment (Elias 2007a, 43, 75; Carr 1986), theories actualize wills to power (Cox 1981, 128; Ackerly and True 2008, 693; Amoureux and Steele 2015a), configuring their evidence in par­ ticular ways with a purposeful eye toward what synthetic change-relationships best conduce to orientation, action, and perhaps control in the service of over­ arching commitments. What distinguishes IR from more familiar timing regimes, like clocks or calen­ dars, or from the classical problem of Time, is its more diverse range of timing standards. IR scholars grapple with international politics using an admixture of principles—some technical and precise like clocks, some more like general ­dis­posi­tions—drawn from discipline-internal methodological training, on the one hand, and outward-facing vocational commitments, on the other. The former, methodological standards form the subject of chapter five. The latter, vocational standards include “being useful” via policy relevance (Nincic and Lepgold 2000; see Hom 2017a), reliable prediction (Brandt, Freeman, and Schrodt 2011, 52–3), direct political intervention (Pettman 2005; Särmä 2016), the promotion of great power management (Waltz  1979, 193–201; Bull  2002, 49; Goh  2014) or demo­ cratic institutions (see Ish-Shalom 2013), world orders proposals (see, variously, Suganami 1989; Sterling-Folker 2015; Parmar 2018), impeding rushes to judgment (Mearsheimer  2005; Hutchings  2008a;  2016), cultivating responsibility (Erskine

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Telling Time  107 2014; MacDonald 2018) and other practical ethics (Amoureux 2015b; Robinson 2018), or simply trying to forestall catastrophe (Williams  2005, 170–80; Levine 2012, 1–5; Hom 2018b; Tjalve 2008), among many others. Taken together, these two types of commitments delimit the thematic options by which scholars emplot puzzling or troubling occurrences to help social agents orient themselves, act, and shape outcomes (Lynch  2014, 19). Regardless of which specific vocational or methodological standards we embrace, when IR scholars attempt to make sense of international politics, they usually do so in a narrative timing mode. This suggests that IR approaches of very different stripes share a common temporal condition of viability, and one that recapitulates the paradoxical relationship between timing and the problem of Time, in which successful timing seems to overcome Time itself. Theories must placate, discipline, or surmount what their authors understand as the problematic features of life in Time. They do so by emplotting or timing a narrative, which in turn produces a particular vision of time that is more intelligible and meaningful than its subject matter, and thus amenable to practical realization. This highlights the Janus face of IR’s collective narrative timing project: its many, diverse, and well-timed theoretical accounts produce inhabitable worlds with manageable “times” that indicate to various polit­ ical subjects how to time international politics in practice. What remains to be discovered in Part Two is the rich variety of narrative timing standards operative in IR, along with their theoretical and practical consequences. As we will see, paying careful attention to IR’s narrative timing modes not only clarifies various theoretical positions within the field, but also upends conventional wisdom about IR as a theoretical, scientific, and vocational endeavor.

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PART II

VA R IET IE S OF T I M I NG I N IN T E R NAT IONA L R E L AT IONS

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4

Disciplinary History Timing Crises in International Relations

Introduction Part One uncovered a basic but hidden relationship between timing and time utterances and developed a particular type, narrative timing, more relevant to the work of IR theorizing. Part Two clarifies and elaborates this relationship across a number of disciplinary domains to discover how the tension between narrative timing and the problem of Time animates and inflects IR as an intellectual pursuit and practical vocation. In this chapter we begin with an episodic disciplinary history, which finds narrative confrontations with the problem of Time hiding in plain sight in moments central to IR’s development as an academic field. Using the narrative theory of action,1 I show how scholarly responses to World War I (WWI), the thermonuclear revolution, and the peaceful end of the Cold War constituted the work of IR as a matter of deploying international political narratives against the problem of Time. When confounded by discordant changes, IR scholars responded by rectifying, revising, or replacing working theories in order to surmount challenges linked to temporal dynamics and to cultivate and defend a vocational metanarrative about IR’s scientific status and practical relevance. Two interlocking reasons drove the selection of these episodes. First, they are likely familiar to most students of IR as formative moments in the field’s selfunderstanding.2 Indeed, without them, it becomes difficult to recognize IR as an institutionalized intellectual domain. Second, past coverage missed or marginalized the way that ideas about time shaped the experience and legacy of each episode. Finding evidence of the relationship between narrative timing and the problem of Time in them supports the discussions developed in the rest of this book. If, at key moments in IR’s lifetime, scholars imagined themselves to be defending both politics and theory against the ravages of time, then we have good reason to track temporal symbols and excavate timing practices across the wider 1  This chapter examines only whether IR deploys narrative against time. The rest of Part Two works with the narrative devices developed earlier to unpack IR’s sophisticated timing practices. 2  For fuller accounts, see (Ashworth 2013; Guilhot 2017; Lebow and Risse-Kappen 1995b); for the wider context of Cold War social science, (Amadae 2003; Erickson et al. 2015). Other invigorating and often damning alternative IR histories can be found in (Lynch 1999; Hobson 2012; de Carvalho, Leira, and Hobson 2011; Shilliam 2012; Geeta and Nair 2014; D. Bell 2016; Blatt 2018).

International Relations and the Problem of Time. Andrew R. Hom, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andrew R. Hom. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850014.001.0001

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112  International Relations and the Problem of Time IR project. To support the tasks pursued in chapters five through eight, here I show that IR scholars do indeed use narratives to “trace the course of their history in terms of some framework of meaning which gives them a sense of continuing identity amidst the flux of time” (Niebuhr  2008, 83 emphasis added; also Carr 1986, 163). These episodes also add nuance to the notion of “discordance” introduced in Part One. As we will see, the onset of WWI was only somewhat surprising; what was most shocking about it was the scale and efficiency of slaughter it introduced. Thermonuclear weapons on the other hand presented almost sheer novelty as observers came to realize that they opened up the very real possibility of global apocalypse. And the peaceful end of the Cold War, while an opportune and nonviolent conclusion to decades of tension and competition, remained unsettling simply because it was genuinely unexpected. Taken together, these examples suggest a variety of ways in which change processes can resist the integration and coordination on which good timing relies and thereby engender the problem of Time. Discordance and timing crises arise from events that are predictable yet appalling, utterly unprecedented, or welcome but unanticipated. I chart each timing crisis over four schematic sections. After briefly summarizing the extant narrative(s) of international politics, I show how the experience of discordant change confounded these accounts. Third, I highlight the problem of Time in scholars’ initial reactions to these changes. Fourth, I trace the intellectual shifts that resulted from their efforts to grapple with change as well as what this meant for IR’s social scientific identity.

World War One Working Narrative At the turn of the twentieth century, various liberal narratives viewed war between the great states as highly improbable (see Holsti 1998, 39; Howard 1984, 41). These included stories about economic interconnectedness (Howard 1984, 42); a “new era” of “unbroken peace and steady material progress” driven by public opinion and respect for international law (Suganami  1989, 79); and increased tourism, education, and democratization. These stories complemented a general sense of stability and optimism on the part of practitioners and scholars of inter­ nation­al politics. To be sure, the “prospect of universal war” remained a concern to “pacifists and militarists alike” (Seton-Watson et al. 1915, vii). But even as war unfolded in 1914, many national populaces embraced the prospect because of existing attitudes to combat. For one, a patriotic battle death still signaled glory. It was a heroic, noble,

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Disciplinary History  113 and (perhaps most importantly) exceedingly uncommon celebration of the perfection of “manliness and good learning” (Cannadine  2012, 195–6). For another, all sides assumed the war would be short, sweet, and restrained, much like those of the recent past. British soldiers declared they would be “home by Christmas” as they departed for France in August 1914, and journalists trav­eled to the front without spare underwear (see Mount 2012). Such a mixture of liberal, internationalist, and heroic narratives created a peculiar orientation toward general war as a rare opportunity for heroism, now open to millions via mass conscription.

Discordant Change Instead, WWI became one of the “most shattering experiences of the twentieth century” (Suganami 1989, 79; V. 1922, 60). It was neither short nor glorious but long, constant, and decidedly un-heroic. Conditioned by old ideas of war, earlytwentieth-century observers and populaces were completely unprepared for the “unimaginable” scale and efficiency of modern, mechanized killing (Cannadine 2012, 196). Even those concerned about war prior to 1914 felt that “the great war came upon us like a thief in the night” and raised “subjects and issues hitherto unfamiliar” (Seton-Watson et al. 1915, vii). The onset surprised some, but not all; the way WWI unfolded, however, confounded widely held ideas about violent conflict. “[W]ar itself is as old as the world,” yet “[w]hat is new about this war is the scale on which it is waged, the science and skill expended on it, and the fact that it is being carried on by national armies, numbering millions, instead of by professional bodies of soldiers” (Seton-Watson et al.  1915, 5). WWI offered mass slaughter “so great that the mind can scarcely comprehend it” (1915, 264). Moreover, what “was without precedent was that from the first day to the last the guns never ceased firing” (Maurice 1928, 25). There simply was “nothing in the past comparable or applicable to the present” (Thompson 1921, 566)—WWI was “such a war as history has never known!” (Bryan 1915, 266). It “changed everything” (Latané, quoted in Suganami  1989, 79) and therefore necessitated soul searching about how and why accounts of war could be so wrong and the “existing system of international relations” could be so “woefully inadequate” and “out of harmony with the fundamental facts of modern life” (Beer 1916, 71).

Scholarly Reaction: The Problem of Time Reflecting on WWI, observers called forth the problem of Time. WWI was a “time of stress and strain” and an “age of destruction” (Woolley 1915, 204, 203) in which the “present are days of sorrow, and the world’s life is tragedy now”

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114  International Relations and the Problem of Time (Turner  1917, 483). It shattered the “shibboleth” that “ ‘History is philosophy teaching by example’ ” (Thompson 1921, 565)3 and presented a “testing time” for democracy (Seton-Watson et al.  1915, 1), in part because events were “passing rapidly and impressively before us” in such an “unheralded and unparalleled” manner that the “whole picture of our human world completely changed within a week” (Call 1915, 12, 11). Nobel Peace Prize winner Elihu Root (1921, 227) concluded that the war exemplified how “the passion of the moment” could lead entire regions into “chaos and savagery.” James Joyce put it most vividly, describing the war as turning time itself into “one livid final flame” (Joyce 1992, 23; see Kern  1983, 293). These intellectual reactions corresponded with soldiers in the trenches who, despite having unprecedented access to standardized time reckoning, stopped checking their watches because “the shadow of death lay on the dial” (quoted in Kern 1983, 293).4 Fluvial metaphors helped frame the problem of Time and scholars’ responses. Observers frequently labeled the war and its aftermath a period of “flux” (Warburg 1920, 602; V. 1922, 60; see also Sylvest 2004, 409). Alfred Zimmern (1936, 92–3) called it “a break-through, in the grand style, of the forces of disruption.” The statistician Frederik Hoffman (1923, 61 emphasis added) concluded that the “present drift of international politics is toward chaos and a possible return to the dark ages of half a thousand years ago.” All of this raised the issue of whether social scientists were doing enough to keep “abreast of the rapidly moving times in which we live” (1922, 318). Or as the historian Louis Martin Sears (1918, 202) put it: “In the universal recasting of values attendant upon a catastrophe which is reshaping the entire world, the student of history is summoned to take stock, not so much of where he stands, as of whether he is drifting.”

Narrative Rectification Confronted with such a highly discordant experience, scholars also recognized a duty to rectify or abandon narratives that had worked before 1914 (Root 1921; see Suganami  1989, 79). Invoking Augustine (1993), R.W.  Seton-Watson and colleagues (1915, 13) called for scholars and statesmen to “ ‘rise above tempests . . . to build higher and stronger . . . the walls of that city wherein the souls of the whole world may assemble.’ ” Sears (1918, 206) was more pointed: “Can you in decency sacrifice truth to patriotism or patriotism to truth? . . . is it fair to pursue favorite researches into Mesopotamian tablets or the origin of Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals

3  Alternatively, “time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils” (Berlioz, quoted in Singh 2005, 270). 4  Standardized time reckoning did little to quell the unpredictable facets of war and exacerbated some (see Kern 1983, 268; Hom 2010, 1165–7).

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Disciplinary History  115 when your country calls for just such talents as you possess for an exposition of her own historical evolution which made the war inevitable?” Just the opposite, scholars had a responsibility to render this period of flux “well known” (Turner 1917, 483). More specifically, they felt the need to re-secure knowledge against the ravages of time: “In hours of crisis Truth looms larger, and as she rides upon the storm like a mighty wind and with the noise of many waters the historian scorns a purely platonic quest and seeks to grasp her whole” (Sears 1918, 203). This pursuit provided harrowing but critical momentum toward a new academic field dedicated to international politics: “The war of 1914-18 made an end of the view that war . . . could safely be left in the hands of professional diplomats. . . . The science of international politics has, then, come into being in response to a popular demand. It has been created to serve a purpose and has, in this respect, followed the pattern of other sciences” (Carr 1939, 2). Better knowledge about the causes of war stood at the forefront of this emer­ging science (see Taylor 1996, 8).5 Some blamed the failure of populaces to influence the correct ministers, who in turn relied on an inadequate tradition of balance of power politics (Seton-Watson et al. 1915). Others identified the “immemorial and enduring cause of war” as “group egoism” in the form of “nationalistic patriotism” (Hankins 1922, 505). And still others rediscovered the importance of anarchy as a defining feature of international politics that made war more likely (Dickinson 1916; Sylvest 2005, 274; see Schmidt 1998).6 By “knowing the cause, we may, by avoiding it, avoid the consequences” (Bryan  1915, 270). Causal understanding might even help isolate the discordant present as a historical idiosyncrasy—an extended but rash moment when “the doctrine that ‘might makes right’ ” held sway (Bryan 1915, 265)—and thus re-pave “the road to permanent peace” (Bryan 1915, 270; see Sylvest  2005, 274–5). These views complemented the newly formed League of Nations, a “new method” meant to “conduce to a better understanding” and through understanding, a return to the peaceful status quo ante between the Great Powers (Zimmern 1936, 1).7 The theoretical renovations reached beyond causal analysis. William Jennings Bryan proposed applying an individualistic moral code to the relations between

5  Some called it a return to the nineteenth-century “science of government” (Seton-Watson et al. 1915, 13). 6  Prior to 1914, explanations of political violence were “rather crude” and focused on “the actions of wicked, aristocratic and war-like statesmen and diplomatists” (Sylvest  2005, 30). These accounts foundered once leaders of civilized Europe sparked a general war. 7 Some argued that these efforts reflected instead “retrograde” and “backward-looking” in­clin­ ations toward “security and normalcy” over truly novel proposals (Carr  1944, ix–x). Recent treatments of this era note that while statesmen thought “new times” called for “new norms” (Pedersen 2017), any changes must still comport with the imperial order of the day (see D. Bell 2016; Dunstan 2016; Robson 2017; and for the WWII period, Rosenboim 2017). Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for noting this.

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116  International Relations and the Problem of Time nations, in part through comprehensive treaties stipulating international dispute resolution (Bryan 1915, 270). Seton-Watson and colleagues (1915, 3) thought that peace and stability depended on “full Democracy” and universal education. Or a harmony of material interests might yet combine with a “genuine inter-state” to subordinate nationalism (Hankins  1922, 522–3). For those focused on ­inter­nation­al anarchy, international institutions would encourage dispassionate reasoning over national sentiments while sanctions and other coercive ­mechanisms discouraged potential violators (see Suganami  1989, 79–80). With these modifications in hand, analysts rediscovered a sense of optimism. Although his mind could “scarcely comprehend” the war, once Bryan (1915, 270) concluded that its true culprit was the doctrine of naked power politics, he had such confidence in the solution of international treaties “that a thousand years from now the name of Woodrow Wilson and my name will be linked together in the capitals of the world.” These responses contributed to an emerging conventional wisdom that WWI was shocking but not as overwhelming as it first seemed. Its onset was not entirely unexpected, and the most direct “confrontation with the grotesque newness of everything” that it threw up was confined mostly to the experience of the trenches (Kern 1983, 291). This enabled scholars to retrofit it within a story about humanity in the midst of a lengthy—if at times torturous—moral development (Seton-Watson et al. 1915, 5). The very “horror of war” became an astringent that “prepared the world for more ambitious cooperation for the maintenance of peace” (Sylvest  2005, 275). After all, “ ‘important changes in human conduct . . . do not normally proceed by slow insensible movements; there is an element in them of the catastrophic. This, as biologists now recognize, is no violation of the law of continuity’ ” (Hobson, quoted in Sylvest 2005, 281 emphasis added). While they did alter course from reliance on individual morality to collective restraint and from trust to coercion, the new scientists of politics retained the old outcome of peaceful progress foretold. They creatively and paradoxically re-emplotted WWI as pitiable but confirming evidence of the imminent demise of major war. Some years later, WWI appeared “shattering but not fatal to the belief ” in peaceful progress through liberal principles (Waltz 1959, 8). By their collective revisions to existing narratives about the causes and meaning of war, early scholars of international politics confirmed the knee-jerk reaction of ­ Norman  Angell who, after a most succinct bit of soul searching, asserted in 1914: “No, we have not been ‘successful’. We have merely been right” (quoted in Sylvest  2005, 274). While no doubt shocking, these remarks indicate that WWI did not ultimately present the sort of sheer novelty or utter discordance  that vitiates narrative timing and engenders a complete breakdown of comprehension.

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Disciplinary History  117

The Thermonuclear Revolution Working Narrative As the thermonuclear revolution dawned throughout the 1950s, political realism was making significant inroads in American IR through the works of noted theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and émigré scholars like John Herz and Hans Morgenthau, among others (see Guilhot 2011a; 2017). Although they disagreed with each other on a number of points, classical realist narratives about inter­ nation­al politics typically emphasized the persistent quest for—and balance of— power under international anarchy, the political consequences of the sovereign state and its survival imperative (Morgenthau 1948, 8), and limited war as a policy instrument (e.g. Morgenthau  1948, 4; Herz 1951; Niebuhr 2011, 173). Though eventually undone by “some fortuitous dislocation of the proportions of power” or “by the social animosities which [it] creates and accentuates,” the balance of power remained “the highest goal to which society could aspire” (Niebuhr 2001, 231–2; 2011, 173) and “an essential stabilizing factor in a society of sovereign nations” (Morgenthau  1948, 125). Combined with states’ security and survival interests, this rendered the possibility of merging multiple states “into a single center of authority . . . very remote” (Niebuhr  2011, 172). Furthermore, inter­ nation­al politics made even the attempt most costly: “We may live for quite a long time in a period of history in which a potential world community, failing to become actual, will give rise to global, rather than limited, conditions of inter­ nation­al anarchy and in which the technics of civilization will be used to aggravate the fury of conflict” (Niebuhr  2011, 162). Delicately balanced relations between sovereign states were the best practical possibility, and early realist works tended to subordinate abstract moral principles to concrete political contingencies while acknowledging the inescapable importance of moral judgment (Niebuhr 2001, 4, 231–3; see also Hom 2018b).

Discordant Change The advent of atomic warfare in 1945 and the subsequent thermonuclear revolution in the 1950s undercut this story. Herz (1950, 157) called atomic bipolarity a “heartbreaking plight.” Morgenthau (1950, 304, 307) concluded that the successful Soviet atomic test of 1949 marked a “decisive change in the world balance of power” and “the shattering of the foundations upon which American foreign policy has been built”. He also despaired that the United States’ (U.S.) political reaction to the test displayed “ ‘no glimmering of a new or original thought . . . every­ one is just as he was before—only more so’ ” (Morgenthau 1950, 307).

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118  International Relations and the Problem of Time By contrast, the bomb did not trouble Niebuhr much at first. He saw it as a “turning point” in the long-running story of power politics but no fundamental rupture. It implied “mutual annihilation” and thus “the end of one age and the beginning of another in more than one sense” but also marked the “ ‘logical’ climax of saturation bombing,” adding “new levels of ‘moral perplexity’ ” to classical realism without undoing its foundations (quoted in Craig 2003, 79–80). Because the atomic age was different but not entirely distinct, it elevated rather than destabilized the perennial dilemmas and tragic elements of politics under anarchy (Craig  2003, 80). Niebuhr therefore initially advocated the continued development and limited use of nuclear weapons. However, he might have heeded his own reflection at the end of WWII: “realists are usually so impressed by the power of . . . perennial forces that they fail to recognize the novel and unique elements in a revolutionary world situation” (Niebuhr 2011, 176). Despite their declared disquiet, Morgenthau and Herz originally joined Niebuhr’s embrace of working realist narratives to grapple with atomic discordance. Herz (1950, 157), who would soon give as clear an exposition of the thermo­ nuclear revolution as anyone, initially called the bomb “the extreme manifestation of a [security] dilemma with which human societies have had to grapple since the dawn of history.” For all his insistence that “we need a new foreign policy, based upon new assumptions,” Morgenthau’s early recommendations were fairly staid: a recalculation of the balance of power and “frantic” American re-armament (quoted in Craig  2003, 70). However, further technological developments soon vitiated these early realists’ attempts, a realization that produced significant anxiety. Between 1952 and 1953, the U.S.  and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) tested thermonuclear devices exponentially more powerful than atomic bombs. Once mounted on intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of delivery in minutes, they rendered most realist theories untenable.8 To Herz (1959, 12–13, 22), intercontinental missiles were “truly revolutionary” and sounded the death knell of political authority founded on the “hard shell” of territorial protection. As he began to realize it was not enough to recalibrate the perennial security dilemma, Herz (1959, 14) likened thermonuclear bipolarity to two scorpions in a bottle and despaired that “the most striking immediate effect of the ‘new’ ” was the “impression of a situation which defies rational approaches” and spelled “doom” because it had “somehow become unmanageable” and measureless. Although, occasionally, he overestimated the “newness of the new age,” Herz (1959, 18 quoting Oppenheimer, emphasis added, see also 20–1) ultimately could not shake the specter of novelty: “ ‘One thing that is new is the prevalence of newness, the changing scale and scope of change itself, so that the world alters as we walk in it’. ” The problem was both practical and theoretical. “[I]nternational 8  But not all. Ferreus’s (1954, 402) singular, pseudonymous response insisted that bipolarity yet trumped technological change.

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Disciplinary History  119 politics, not only in its actualities but also in its concepts and terminologies, is confused, and . . . present-day man in the world exists as in a maze” (Herz 1959, 223). For example, power “lost its unequivocal meaning and effect,” for “[n]ow that power can destroy power from center to center everything is different” (Herz 1959, 32, 108). Consequently, the “traditional means of achieving national security and protecting national interests are no longer available” (Herz 1959, 20–1).9 Morgenthau paralleled Herz. Thermonuclear warfare reduced “to absurd clichés the noble words of yesterday” but was itself so absurd as to defy rational speculation (Morgenthau 1961, 234). Because of this, Morgenthau (1961, 234; see 1950, 307) feared that the status quo would persist for lack of viable alternatives: “It would indeed be the height of thoughtless optimism to assume that something so absurd as a nuclear war cannot happen because it is so absurd.” Niebuhr eventually joined them. In 1957 he acknowledged that the revolution “made many of our conclusions otiose,” including classical realism’s stance on limited warfare, nuclear weapons as a fact of international life, and the perennial effects of anarchy as a relatively stable starting point for international theorizing (quoted in Craig 2003, 85, see also 91). Niebuhr (2011, 176) initially discounted the import of the atomic bomb, but the utter discord of the thermonuclear missile left him “philosophically afloat” (Craig 2003, 92, 86).

Scholarly Reaction: The Problem of Time The discordant emergence of thermonuclear technology led classical realists to lament the “flux of time” and the “vicissitudes and hazards of time” (Niebuhr 2011, 84; 2008, 85). It seemed that the “recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning” (Niebuhr 2008, 3). Before nuclear missiles, humanity might survive “for quite a long time” in anarchy punctuated by conflict (Niebuhr 2011, 162); after, however, the correlation between passing time and chronic warfare became unacceptable. In both eras, “anarchy invariably overcomes [its] management in the end” as every “potential anarchy” becomes “actual anarchy in the long run” (Niebuhr  2011, 173–4). But the prospect of nuclear apocalypse meant that the very passage of time itself shortened that “long run” and turned “in the end” into, simply, the end. The problem was political but also theoretical thanks to the disparity between “yesterday’s anticipations and today’s realities” and the fact that the “pace of history in our era is so swift that only the most agile can adjust their imagination to the rapidly changing scene” (Niebuhr 1956, 81; quoted in Herz 1959, 18 n16). This left Niebuhr (2008, 144) in a bind, 9  Herz (1959, 26 n27) echoed Kennan, who in 1954 observed “a sort of schizophrenia. . . . We found ourselves living in two different worlds . . . In one of these worlds the old traditional concepts still applied; in the other, there was only the law of the jungle.”

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120  International Relations and the Problem of Time for while he found the current flow of time overwhelming he also thought it “grievously wrong either to bow to ‘waves of the future’ or to yield to inertias of the past.” Herz echoed Niebuhr’s despair. The thermonuclear revolution was a “genuinely ‘unprecedented’ happening” that “shattered” realism’s “reliance on ‘repetition’ ” (Herz  1959, 17). And the current “unpredictability of discoveries and similar events which have been and still are following each other in such dizzyingly swift sequence” were such that “the mind—and, consequently, policy planning—­cannot keep pace” (Herz  1959, 18). Thermonuclear technology introduced a “decisive change . . . from ‘distinctness’ and ‘separateness’ to ‘pervasion’ . . . so that the power of everyone is present everywhere simultaneously” (Herz  1959, 168–9 emphasis added). Thermonuclear weapons thus represented “ ‘essential change’ ” precisely because they “ ‘concentrate the violence in terms of time’ ” (Herz 1959, 20 quoting Brodie, emphasis added). Herz (1959, 26 n28) further feared that an adequate response required “ ‘an apocalyptic imagination which we do not possess.’ ” For Morgenthau (1948, 4), the atomic bomb exemplified an intrinsically temporal problem in international politics, namely that observers are always “surrounded by the contemporary scene with its ever shifting emphasis and changing perspectives” and therefore “cannot find solid ground on which to stand, nor objective standards of evaluation.” The thermonuclear revolution tinged this challenge with “heroic resignation”: “ ‘Every year if not every day we wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge’ ” (Morgenthau 1967, viii, quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes). Consequently, Morgenthau’s work in this period shifted toward a search for “deep meaning rather than policy defect” and employed a more “anguished, lyrical style,” one at odds with the confident prose of his earlier writings (Craig 2003, 114 and 105) but most explicit about the relationship between thermonuclear missiles, death, and time: the nuclear age has changed man’s relations to himself. It has done so by giving death a new meaning. Death is the great scandal in the experience of man; for death—as destruction of the human person after a finite span of time—is the very negation of all man experiences as specifically human in his existence: the consciousness of himself and of his world, the remembrance of things past and the anticipation of things to come, a creativeness in thought and action which aspires to, and approximates, the eternal  (Morgenthau 1961, 231).

Traditionally, “man” might overcome death in three ways: “by making himself, within narrow limits, the master of death; by denying the reality of death through the belief in the immortality of his person; by conquering the reality of death through the immortality of the world he leaves behind” (Morgenthau 1961, 231). But because it utterly negates everything with little to no warning, thermonuclear war radically altered the quest for transcendent meaning. Instead of possibilities

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Disciplinary History  121 like individualized and/or heroic deaths, societal and historical achievements, or durable physical constructs, the thermonuclear revolution “destroys the meaning of death by depriving it of its individuality. It destroys the meaning of immortality by making both society and history impossible. It destroys the meaning of life by throwing life back upon itself ” (Morgenthau 1961, 233). These comments suggest that the problem of Time marked one of the few features of international politics still salient to analysts confronting the new nuclear age, primarily because nuclear weapons vitiated “specifically human” but also intrinsically temporal goods like the ability to relate past, present, and future with each other; the symbolic transcendence of ordinary and ultimate finitude; and any reliance on working narratives in grappling with new experiences (Morgenthau 1961, 231–2).

Narrative Rectification? The return of the problem of Time in the threat of nuclear apocalypse left classical realists unsure whether theory could survive, for “so radical is the new departure, so bewildering the continuing rate of change that one is inclined to question whether any meaningful framework of concepts relating to any coherent power system and to any consistent foreign policy can be built up at this point” (Herz 1959, 168). Realists foundered in a “cloud of uncertainty” because the sheer novelty of the revolution “raised the moral ambiguity of the political order to the nth degree” and lent it an “eschatological dimension”—a sense that “all our judgments are made under the shadow of the final judgment” (quoted in Craig 2003, 88). It “stagger[ed] the imagination” and caused “a lag in consciousness and awareness of what the new situation entails and what the new trends necessitate,” yet because realists enacted a theoretical metanarrative about prudent action tempered by rational knowledge, this situation only made “peculiar new thinking” more vital (Herz 1959, 35, 25–6, 30, also 167). Because “events now govern the very basis of everything else . . . studying facts, explanations, and solutions is no longer mere ‘philosophizing’ but an essential part of that ‘life’ which is at stake” (Herz 1959, 3). Indeed, scholars must develop a response, for the “refusal to adapt thought and action to radically new conditions has spelled the doom of men and civilizations before [and] is likely to do so again” (Morgenthau 1961, 234). The nuclear age had turned IR theory into a matter of life and death for all. The only truly transcendent achievement now was discovering how to reliably avoid doomsday. This was “not only an intellectual and moral but a political triumph as well. For it would indicate that at least the mind of man has succeeded in mastering that blind and potent monster which in the name of God or history is poised for universal destruction” (Morgenthau 1962, 61). Classical realists thus responded to nuclear times with “agonizing” and uncertain theoretical revisions aimed at averting a nuclear exchange (Herz 1959, 5, 168; see Craig 2003, xiv, 73).

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122  International Relations and the Problem of Time Mainly, realists reconsidered a world state, something anathema to theoretical foundations like the importance of sovereignty and the primacy of power under anarchy (see Craig 2003; Scheuerman 2010). Herz (1959, 302–8) hoped that the bomb was an “attitude-maker” that could convince publics and elites to submit to a global monopoly on nuclear power. This would require a sustained “holding operation” to stabilize international politics while politicians and theorists alike devised and deployed a more universalist or “realist liberal” approach (Herz 1959, 244–97). Niebuhr similarly surmised that the unambiguous evil of nuclear weapons “transcended the relative immoralities and proximate justice of collective politics” (Craig  2003, 112). Raising awareness of this could stimulate collective reaction to shared vulnerability and eventually build consensus on the moral necessity of a world state (Craig  2003, vii, 109). Both were trying to transform thermonuclear rupture into a turning point, a way for international politics to escape doomsday by embracing a new ordering form. Morgenthau also re-thought key points. In his first edition of Politics among Nations (Morgenthau 1948, 8), “the preservation of peace” was a “prime concern of all nations” surpassed only by “the most elemental considerations of national existence and security.” By the fourth edition, Morgenthau (1967, 22) had removed the sovereignty and security trumps altogether—“the preservation of peace” was “the prime concern of all nations,” full stop. This shift held important implications for a world state. In 1948, faced with “the prospects of a third [world war] to be fought under the modern conditions of warfare, the propaganda for a world state has reached broad masses and has imparted to them a peculiar sense of urgency” (Morgenthau 1948, 391 emphasis added). By 1967, warfare was specified more precisely and the possibility of a world state treated much more fa­vor­ ably: “the prospects of a third [world war] to be fought with nuclear weapons have imparted to the idea of a world state an unprecedented urgency” (Morgenthau 1967, 483 emphasis added). These shifts caused some of Morgenthau’s “most inconsistent, even muddled, thinking,” including simultaneous calls for “a diplomatic thaw” alongside recommendations for more confrontational U.S. stances toward the U.S.S.R., and even a chronic return to the possibility that limited nuclear exchanges might still serve policy (Craig  2003, 98). The latter recommendation became particularly problematic once Morgenthau realized that it effectively required political leaders to sacrifice the welfare and perhaps even the sovereignty of their state for the sake of humanity by surrendering while still in possession of nuclear arsenals. This attempt to re-emplot thermonuclear novelty forced Morgenthau to argue against himself that “scientific man could overcome power politics” (Craig  2003, 101), which proved a step too far. So the world state remained little more than a fuzzy ideal for classical realists, who never developed a plausible story connecting this global Leviathan to existing brute conditions. Perhaps this reflected their advancing age or the ever-present

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Disciplinary History  123 pull of Cold War foreign policy dilemmas (see Craig 2003, 132; 2013, 9), but it also stemmed from how the sheer novelty of thermonuclear weapons hamstrung their ability to theorize. Appraising the nuclear revolution, classical realists could not successfully rectify their narratives to provide the practical steps needed to avert global disaster. They confronted the problem of Time and lost.10 The possibility of a limited nuclear exchange morphed from policy tool into potent symbol of the endtimes, and classical realists resigned themselves to holding operations and more conventional hopes of discovering what caused events and what made “policy ‘tick’ ” (Herz 1959, 4). Tellingly, as they began to realize that classical realism might not provide an antidote to the thermonuclear problem of Time, realists yearned for a return to some semblance of clock-like uniformity. Somewhat unexpectedly, this came from one of their protégés, Kenneth Waltz, who spent decades transforming realism into a more positivistic and structural theory offering analytical ­speculations about anarchic and nuclear stability (Waltz 1979; see Craig 2003, 117–65). While quite damaging to the richness of the realist tradition, this effort may have been vital to IR’s wider viability. A social science like American IR, which embraces theory as a means to solving practical dilemmas, risks losing relevance and funding if it cannot generate practical knowledge attractive to political actors.

The End of the Cold War Working Narrative For over forty years, the “single critical issue” of “overriding salience” for most IR scholars was the Cold War between the U.S.  and the U.S.S.R.  (Ferguson and Mansbach  1988, 104). Most assumed its bipolar structure was a “permanent feature of international relations” (Deudney and Ikenberry 1992, 124; Lebow and Risse-Kappen  1995b, 1), and it was considered highly unlikely—bordering on unimaginable—that this “basic framework” would end or that one of the two superpowers would crumble or otherwise “fail to play its balancing role” in the foreseeable future (Gilpin 1981, 237, 235). If bipolarity did somehow pass, it would likely “trigger” a global conflict (Gilpin  1981, 235; see Lebow and Risse-Kappen  1995b, 1). And if either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. underwent domestic upheaval, the “fear of ultimate decline 10  Although see K.J. Holsti (1998, 18) for an argument that the “core of the field did not change,” only its “sense of urgency and insecurity.” Although I concur on the sense of urgency and insecurity in IR’s “era of anxiety,” if the core of the field looked similar four decades later this was due to substantial efforts to alter theory in light of nuclear weapons. IR may have been running in place, but it was still working very hard.

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124  International Relations and the Problem of Time and the perceived erosion of power” would leave the system extremely vulnerable to violence replete with nuclear exchanges (Gilpin 1981, 239 cf. 234–7). This story was inductively plausible, since “episodes of rapid international change appeared to be associated historically with war, and empires rarely accepted their decline with graceful resignation” (Wohlforth 1994, 104). Even so, “[m]ajor international change and precipitous Soviet decline seemed remote enough that writers felt it sufficient to note in passing that analogous events in the past had usually been accompanied by large-scale violence” (Wohlforth 1994, 104). The historical correlation between war and major change left many scholars ill-equipped for the upheavals beginning in 1989. Additionally, by then, scientific metanarratives, imported from philosophers’ analytic reconstructions of natural scientific triumphs, prevailed across much of the field (see Gunnell  1975;  2011; Jackson  2011). While academic IR was ger­ min­al at best in 1914, and its methodological revolution just beginning to flower in the 1950s, by the end of the 1980s it was thoroughly professionalized according to external standards of “good science” and accurate predictions. So, when bipolarity passed with a whimper rather than a bang, it unsettled three working IR narratives: substantive theories of bipolar stability, the corollary account of structural change and violence, and speculative visions of social scientific progress and propriety (see Halliday 1995, 38–9).

Discordant Change Compared with scholars’ expectations, the 1980s were a “decade of astonishing structural and strategic change” (Doran 1991, 155) that culminated in the sudden opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Soviet collapse in 1991. Both events shook the pillars of the post-WWII international order “to their foundations” (Kirkpatrick 1989, 1): “Now, the U.S.–Soviet antagonism is history. Suddenly, unexpectedly, and with hardly a shot fired in anger Russian power has been withdrawn from the Elbe to the Eurasian steppe” (Wohlforth 1994, 91). Yet despite obvious preferences for the end of totalitarian Communism and peaceful international change, many scholars remained uncomfortable with such a sudden and unprecedented development. One reason was that “[h]istory contains no precedent for so striking an example of abrupt but amicable collapse” as that of the Cold War and the U.S.S.R. (Gaddis 1992, 51–2). Another was that the change opened international affairs to greater complexity. It quickly became “difficult to discern the plot of this unfolding drama because three or four plays are being performed on the same stage at the same time” (Deudney and Ikenberry 1991, 249). Additionally, before 1989 neither neorealists nor neoliberal institutionalists, nor most foreign policy analysts, paid much attention to the possibility

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Disciplinary History  125 of structural change (Lebow and Risse-Kappen  1995b, 1).11 A counterfactual illustrated IR’s collective shock: Can anyone imagine a senior international relations scholar applying to the Carnegie Endowment in 1972 for a research grant to investigate the conditions under which Moscow would most likely voluntarily relinquish control over Eastern Europe? . . . investigating how the Cold War might end, or how the Soviet Union might dissolve, would not be part of the daily concerns of a researcher at the Correlates of War Project, or a regime theorist, or a formal modeller, or a political psychologist  (Hopf and Gaddis 1993, 207).

For all these reasons, the end of the Cold War made it “clear that we are entering a new world” (Jervis 1991, 39), a situation that stood as “the third great cataclysm of the twentieth century” (Halliday 1995, 40).

Scholarly Reaction: The Problem of Time Reactions to the confounding end of the Cold War evoked the problem of Time. Charles Kegley (1993, 141–2) observed that IR seemed to be “constantly surprised by events” and recalled that “ ‘[s]urprise,’ the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce noted, ‘is our only teacher’. ”12 Anne Deighton (1996, 92) noted that “some inter­ nation­al relations scholars have run for cover” because they were “caught out . . . by the capacity of history to surprise.” And Robert Jervis (1991, 39) admitted that “[h]istory usually makes a mockery of our hopes or our expectations. The events of 1989, perhaps more welcomed than those of any year since 1945, were unforeseen.” The shock of the Cold War’s end trumped its more auspicious qualities. Others turned to fluvial metaphors for the problem of Time. First came domestic instability in the U.S.S.R., where things “swung from extreme rigidity to extreme fluidity” (Calvocoressi 1990, 672). Then, international: “with the abatement of the Cold War and the dissolution of bipolarity the flux of international politics is back” (Calvocoressi 1990, 674). For John Mearsheimer (1990, 16), the end of the Cold War meant the return of multipolarity, under which “the shape of the international order tends to remain fluid” and “international ‘rules of the road’ . . . tend to change constantly.” Such “fluid politics” would produce foreign policy “miscalculation” and an elevated probability of conflict (Mearsheimer 1990, 36, 39). The historian John Lewis Gaddis (1991, 116) took the fluvial metaphor 11  Foreign policy articles discussed the possibility sporadically and guardedly, predicting “a new flow of difficult” but “hopefully more benign” problems (Rostow 1987, 840, 847; also Ullman 1988). 12  Peirce’s (1933, 36 [5.50]) actual claim was: “Experience is our only teacher.”

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126  International Relations and the Problem of Time furthest: “now that the Cold War is over, geopolitical glaciers are retreating, the situation is becoming fluid once again, . . . The critical question for the future ­stability of Europe is the extent to which the Cold War glacier permanently altered the terrain it covered for so long.” Confronting the return of the problem of Time, scholars yearned for stability and transcendence. In the midst of the collapse, Stephen van Evera (1990, 52 emphasis added) recommended that “the West should seek a settlement that will stand the test of time. A settlement that does not last is worse than none at all, since it provides no benefits and its breakdown will sow bitterness and suspicion.” Mearsheimer (1990, 9 emphasis added) argued that “social science should offer predictions on the occurrence of momentous and fluid events like those now unfolding in Europe” so as to properly re-situate theory in relation to discordant events. But even then, “Time will reveal whether these theories in fact have much power to explain international politics” (Mearsheimer 1990, 10 emphasis added). In the surprising end of the Cold War, IR theorists found the problem of Time set against their working narratives.

Narrative Rectification When “ ‘reality falls through the interstices of the theories’, ” as it did from 1989 to 1991, scholars “ ‘ask why their generalizations fail when they are confronted with something new’ ” (Kegley 1993, 133, quoting Theodore Draper; see also Halliday 1995, 57). Neorealists quickly moved to re-emplot the event. Mearsheimer (1990, 17; also Walt  1991, 226) opined that a conflict-ridden return to multipolarity would validate neorealism: “If the Cold War is truly behind us, the stability of the past 45 years is not likely to be seen again in the coming decades” (Mearsheimer 1990, 56). For others, the end of the Cold War indicated that a “new theorization of inter­ nation­al relations may . . . be needed” (Halliday  1995, 58; also Gaddis  1992, 44). Kegley (1993, 132–3) apprehended a “neo-idealist moment” for international politics that might finally mark the “end of history.” Christopher Coker (1992) concluded that since the advent of nuclear weapons had rendered war incapable of providing meaning, the post-Cold War era marked an important step toward war’s obsolescence. Perhaps the international system was finally “primed for peace” (van Evera 1990; Kegley and Raymond 1992; see Holsti 1998, 19). Going further, it showed that democratic peace proponents had been right all along about the positive connections between trade, democracy, and tranquility—all of which prepared the world stage for bipolarity’s amicable final act (Oneal and Russett  1997). For others, the end of the Cold War left “unfinished business,” namely “the formation of an international society . . . characterized by a broad sharing of political and social values” (Halliday 1995, 59). They downgraded the

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Disciplinary History  127 upheavals of 1989–91 to “one episode in the evolution of [international society],” an episode already imbued with the “challenge to fulfil an old agenda, amid an international context beset by new dangers and tensions” (Halliday  1995, 59 emphasis added). All of these efforts rendered the shocking end of bipolarity more intelligible by casting it as part of an ongoing trend or a decisive turning point in an intelligible plot arc. In addition to these substantive concerns, scholars confronted a metatheoretical question. By 1989, American IR was an established sub-field of political science, replete with an intellectual identity informed by Kuhnian (Kuhn 1962; see Lijphart 1974), Lakatosian (Lakatos 1980; see Simowitz and Price 1986), or hybrid metanarratives about scientific progress. So as they sought ways to inscribe the end of the Cold War in re-worked theories, theorists also reflected on what their labors suggested about IR’s scientific status (see Hutchings 2008b, 87–103). In many instances, scholars drove this process through stinging critiques. Gaddis gleefully compared IR theory unfavorably with “soothsayers” who relied on “the configurations of stars, the entrails of animals, and most indicators in between” (Gaddis  1992, 5). In his judgment, “for all the good our ‘scientific’ methods did; clearly our theories were not up to the task of anticipating the most significant event in world politics since the end of World War II” (Gaddis 1992, 18).13 Neorealism came in for special criticism as “inadequate” (Kegley 1993, 133; Kratochwil 1993; Lebow and Risse-Kappen 1995b; and to a lesser extent Deudney and Ikenberry 1991). Neorealists themselves emphasized the broader embarrassment that IR did not rise to the standards of a proper science given its “spotty” and “often poorly tested” theories and inaccurate forecasting (Mearsheimer 1990, 9; see Lebow, Mueller, and Wohlforth 1995, 187). Anxious about their intellectual bona fides, scholars needed to restore IR’s place in the social science metanarrative. Neorealists downplayed the matter as a “reality check” encouraging sound habits of mind like renewed “focus, provided by an unexpected event of seminal importance; competition, generated by a lively contest between established theories; and data, reflected in a recent outpouring of fascinating new information” (Wohlforth  1998, 651). Moreover, the entire episode supported a scientific trend that “resurfaces whenever we are astonished by events in the domain we seek to understand: science should learn from surprise” (Wohlforth 1998, 651). Democratic peace theorists similarly complained that “it is unfair to argue that the absence of predictions about the end of the Cold War by advocates of the democratic peace proposition demonstrates their (or their theory’s) inadequacies. It is more important that democratic peace theory could generate probabilistic forecasts about the Cold War before its end” (Ray and Russett 1996, 463 emphasis added; cf. Hutchings 2008b, 96). They also speculated 13  This line of argument informed recent debates about the “scientific” status of politics and IR and their eligibility for U.S. government funding (see Chenoweth and Lyall 2012; Farrell 2012; Lane 2012).

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128  International Relations and the Problem of Time happily that one outcome of competition was that despite being ignored for much of the Cold War, a combination of rational choice and comparative analysis now had a chance to demonstrate that “political events in general are on the way to becoming more predictable” (Ray and Russett 1996, 467). Perhaps foreshadowing later efforts to weave the Cold War into a story about the long and all-encompassing rise of the liberal international order (see chapter  seven), Daniel Deudney and John Ikenberry (1991, 244, 249) argued that the end of the Cold War demonstrated the “irreducibly plural” nature of international politics and proved that “no one key fits all the locks,” but quickly decided that due to the complexity resulting from multiple “plays” performed “on the same stage at the same time,” it would become necessary to settle on a single plot. For others, IR’s Cold War failure gave occasion for a fuller rethink. Unlike neorealists, Kegley’s (1994, 20–6, 31) “autopsy” found IR guilty of bad habits and in need of a methods refresher to better understand the Cold War specifically and to reinvigorate the field more generally. While different in many respects, all of these recommendations shared the same moral of rectifying how theory was done in the wake of ­confounding events. Gaddis’ lesson for IR theorists deserves special attention. He argued that in their obsessive quest for scientific legitimacy, scholars forgot that international politics posed “a range of phenomena extending from the determinate to the indeterminate—from predictable clocks to unpredictable clouds” (Gaddis 1992, 27). They had hewed to natural and physical sciences methods too closely (and just  when the hard sciences were embracing indeterminacy, irregularity, and complexity, see Gaddis  1992, 54). Most importantly, the end of the Cold War exposed how structural IR theories ignored time by treating it as an empty “dimension—like length, width, and depth—but not as a process. Structuralists see time as a scale against which to measure events, but they pay little attention to the fact that the passage of time, in and of itself, also shapes events” (Gaddis 1992, 38 emphasis added). To rescue structuralism, proponents would have to fundamentally alter their understanding of time. Although he viewed this as a new theoretical turn, Gaddis actually proposed to bring to IR’s forefront the more venerable and figural tradition of time as the “bringer” of events. And while not as explicit, his targets already implied as much in discursive evocations of time as the wreck and ruin of the international system. More than a little conspicuously, neorealists countered that little to no revision was necessary. Alternative approaches offered only a “proliferation of explananda,” including “the timing of some or all events” and “the rapidity of events,” and such “subtle differences in explanatory focus [as to] prevent theories from competing on the same ground” (Wohlforth 1998, 674). The answer was not to add explicitly temporalized factors to the story, for this would simply infect IR with the same instability afflicting its objects of analysis. That was the last thing IR needed, since the “difficulty of conceptually and empirically separating structure from units is

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Disciplinary History  129 especially evident when power relations are in a state of flux” (Wohlforth 1994, 126 emphasis added). Instead, the situation called for redoubled efforts at monocausal, creative filtration, which might still “isolate those factors that are likely to be the driving forces of history” (Hoffmann, Keohane, and Mearsheimer 1990, 199 emphasis added). Most notably, more of the same trumped anything new for neorealists because the failure to anticipate the end of the Cold War could not invalidate their theory. A consensus was emerging that Soviet domestic reforms precipitated the collapse (e.g. Deudney and Ikenberry 1992, 123), and neorealists seized on this as proof that since they dealt only with systemic causes, the end of the Cold War fell beyond their remit. Measured against a systemic theme: it is not even clear that the end of the Cold War is an appropriate event for “testing” neo-realism, insofar as key elements of the case lie outside the domain of the theory. . . . Put differently, realism simply does not say very much about how a state will behave when it is coming apart at the seams . . . [Thus] criticizing realism for failing to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union is a bit like chiding it for failing to explain the Great Depression, the behavior of sub-atomic particles, or the causes of cancer  (Walt 1997, 475 emphasis added; see also Wohlforth 1994, 93).

Those who embraced nomothetic theorizing additionally insisted that even if rele­vant, a single deviant data point such as the Cold War’s end could not disconfirm claims about general patterns of behavior (Walt  1997; cf. Wohlforth  1994, 91–92). Taken together, these moves creatively filtered the end of the Cold War as irrelevant to both neorealism’s substantive narrative and its animating social scientific metanarrative (Lebow and Risse-Kappen  1995b).14 Several years later, Wohlforth pushed a step further. IR’s initial reaction to the end of the Cold War should also be discounted: “As the sense of astonishment at the unexpected events of 1989–91 fades, so too does the commonsensical appeal of the contention that they have special importance for theory. Methodological arguments that might have seemed petulant in 1991 now appear prudent” (Wohlforth 1998, 655). If so, neorealists spent the better part of a decade trying to “save” their theory from a temporal event that was irrelevant, “quite consistent with realism,” or not a “critical case” (Wohlforth 1994, 125–8). Odder still, neorealists set about “updating” structural theory because they could not just “carry on as if there are no lessons in this series of events for international relations theory in general and realist theories in particular” (Wohlforth 1998; 1994, 92). Indeed, the event had exposed neorealist theory as “terribly weak,” indeterminate in its retrospective ex­plan­ ations of “specific episodes of change,” and superior to its IR competitors but still 14  Critics thought this response leveraged an “inbuilt silence” in neorealism, substituting “ca­non­ ic­al repetition” for rigorous reflection (Halliday 1995, 39–40).

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130  International Relations and the Problem of Time nowhere near “the ideal of scientific theory” (Wohlforth 1994, 127–9; 1998, 651, 679; see also Hoffmann, Keohane, and Mearsheimer  1990, 199). Neorealists touted diversity within their approach, and in one sense they were right: within neorealism the end of the Cold War was at once irrelevant, a valorization of structural balances of power, an indictment of IR as a scientific pursuit, inadequate to destabilize neorealist generalizations, and demanding of updated theory. Such interpretations further emplotted these “new wrinkles” (Walt  1998, 35) designed to ensure neorealism’s progressive research status in a time of flux. A ready objection to the earlier examples of IR theorists grappling with the problem of Time is that both WWI and thermonuclear weapons were by any standard appalling, so anxious reactions and theoretical rectifications had more to do with normative valuations than plain discord. The end of the Cold War undercuts this point. Given that few IR scholars welcome the prospect of general war and/or thermonuclear cataclysm, the peaceful thaw of 1989–91 represented a generally positive outcome. Yet it aroused anxiety, laments about time, and narrative rectifications no less than those previous “cataclysms.” This suggests that it was not whether or not the end of the Cold War was good or bad that moved IR scholars to action but rather that the event reminded them all too vividly that “[s]urprise is still very much with us” (Gaddis 1992, 5) and that time was driving politics.

Conclusion The way that WWI, the thermonuclear revolution, and the end of the Cold War unfolded in the academic discourse of international politics suggests that IR works much like the narrative theory of action, in which social groups constitute collective selves and their temporal stage for action by configuring and re-configuring intelligible stories about both—especially in the wake of surprising developments. In this case, IR scholars worked and re-worked narratives about the international realm to grapple with changes that confounded their existing accounts. As the field grew through the twentieth century, they also moved to ­re-affirm adopted metanarratives of good social science. More precisely, in moments central to IR’s identity, prominent theorists—especially those exemplifying realist and liberal approaches—treated emergent empirical changes as theoretical emergencies introduced in the flow of time. They then rectified their accounts of how both the political world and academic IR can and should work in order to overcome problems explicitly and symbolically associated with time. Insofar as IR accounts are narrative change continua resulting from the emplotment of world historical events according to overarching thematic frames, this record recalls a basic tension between timing and time: while it

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Disciplinary History  131 may lurk in the background for long stretches, the problem of Time pushes to the forefront of discourse whenever a group’s ability to time the world it cares about falters or fails, providing a ready antagonist that animates the work of re-configuring more intelligible stories to effectively re-time the world. These episodes were not the only ones worth covering in an increasingly globalized field like IR (Pettman  2005; Agathangelou and Ling  2009; Buzan and Lawson  2015; Bartelson  2009; Buzan and Acharya  2019). For one instance, the 1970s OPEC oil embargo and energy crisis prompted political economists to consider problems “of staggering proportions,” including stagnation of the world economy, wholesale restructuring of the international system, and other “nightmarish possibilities” (Farmanfarmaian et al. 1975, 201–2). Facing “disequilibrium of a magnitude not seen since the aftermath of WWII,” they tried “to provide a  long-term perspective . . . and to outline adjustment processes through which equilibrium can be restored,” namely restructuring the world capitalist economy (Chenery 1975, 242–3). Decades later, the 2008 global financial crisis, the U.K.’s BREXIT vote, and the 2016 U.S. election caught open-economy politics scholars unawares, prompting disciplinary reflection and theoretical revisions. If political economists wanted to “stop being surprised,” they needed to appreciate that “theory itself is the culprit” and shift attention from micro- to macro-level dynamics (Blyth and Matthijs 2017, 203–5). For another, feminist scholars worked for decades to secure an IR “homestead” (Sylvester  1994;  2007) open to gender politics, alternative methodologies, and activist scholarship (e.g. Cohn 1987; Penttinen 2013; Sjoberg 2013; Enloe 2014; Shepherd 2014; Tickner 2014; Daigle 2015). Mainstream scholars responded with skepticism (see Tickner  1997;  2005), silence, and efforts to re-emplot feminist themes in conventional metanarratives. “[W]ith no less ‘presumptuousness’ than feminists have displayed in invading the hallowed halls of classicism,” Adam Jones (1996, 406) proposed to operationalize gender as a variable by reducing it to “women/femininity.” Robert Keohane (1989, 250) objected that postmodernist feminism would lead to “a dead-end in the study of international relations” bereft of “epistemological essentials” and verging on “intellectual and moral disaster” if it refused to “generate novel [and testable] hypotheses.” While the homesteaders have succeeded in many respects, IR’s treatment of gender and feminism still manifests dynamics of crisis, resistance, and revision. “No academic discipline would be complete without its origins stories” (Tickner 2014, xiii), and I suspect we would find similar timing and re-timing dynamics in a number of other episodes in IR’s autobiography. The ones covered in this chapter offer ample evidence of the import of timing and the problem of Time in the field. They expose fundamental dynamics of narrative timing running right through the heart of IR. However, they only covered an IR rocked by surprise, instability, and uncertainty. This leaves us with the question of whether the field

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132  International Relations and the Problem of Time recapitulates the relationship between narrative timing and the problem of Time  in moments less directly involved with crisis. In their longer-running and more detached intellectual labors, do IR scholars still imagine themselves to be deploying theories, explanations, and interpretations against time?15 The following ­chapters pursue this question across different approaches to the study of international politics. 15  On the tension between “involvement” and “detachment,” see (Elias 2007b; Linklater 2011b, 52–3).

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5

Methodologies Narrative Reasoning About a Time-Bound World

Introduction To demonstrate the importance of narrative timing and the problem of Time trad­ition to IR, Part Two began by tracing significant timing challenges at key moments in the field’s development. This chapter shifts to examining how various corners of IR grapple with time and temporality in developing theories and warranted knowledge claims. Delving into neopositivist,1 critical realist, and interpretivist methodologies, it focuses especially on how IR scholars understand the process of reasoning from experiential phenomena to rigorous explanation and understanding. The next three chapters address the what question, exploring distinct theoretical approaches of special relevance to the problem of Time and narrative timing. By methodology I mean the “intellectual processes that guide research” (Lynch 2014, 6) and flow from our conception of the “hook-up” between our minds and the world we study (Jackson 2011, 32). I do not analyze individual methods or techniques.2 Nor do I attempt a comprehensive review of the methodological stances in question (see Kurki 2007; Jackson 2011; Lynch 2014). Rather, I am concerned with whether and how recommendations about how to develop substantive accounts of international politics in accordance with different knowledge warrants recapitulate our central tension, lamenting the problem of Time while relying on narrative timing devices. Do temporal assumptions and narrative techniques underpin IR’s idea of knowledge and direct ways of reasoning from the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of international life to a scientifically viable account (James  2007, 1:488; Mearsheimer and Walt  2013, 431)? The answer to “whether” questions is that despite significant variation, IR methodologies do use narrative timing techniques to overcome the problem of Time. Tracing how this operation works turns up several counter-intuitive and provocative observations about IR methodologies.

1  I use the term in the manner of Gunnell (1975, 33–42) and Jackson (2011, 41–71). 2  The next chapter treats statistical techniques as timing devices. Steele, Gould, and Kessler (2019, 1) imply we could treat methods as such, insofar as they offer tactical tools to “promote and protect our ideas and arguments about the world.”

International Relations and the Problem of Time. Andrew R. Hom, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andrew R. Hom. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850014.001.0001

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134  International Relations and the Problem of Time To set the stage for these inquiries, the chapter begins with the scientific la­bora­tory, a space that informs IR methodological ideals and which is distinguished by its ability to stave off the vagaries of time. It then scrutinizes each methodology for narrative timing elements, including the wider vocational metanarrative3 from which it flows and how its thematic standard, creative filtration, and concordant discordance work to unfold a particular temporal world.4 In the conclusion, I appraise each methodology as a timing project in its own right, update our spectrum of timing and “times” from Part One, and reflect on the role of science fiction in IR reasoning about the time-bound world.

Scientific Laboratories and Time Much of IR’s knowledge development resounds against the ideal of the experimental laboratory. The laboratory space offers an alternative to natural observation, which provides prolific but often overwhelming or ambiguous empirical data. By contrast, laboratories restrict access and carefully control stimuli by the “ ‘violence of impediments’ ” (Merchant  2008, quoting Bacon), which isolate change continua of interest, prevent external shocks, and reduce internal inconsistencies (Bhaskar 2008, 74). These restrictions comprise the “controlled space” or “closed system” of the lab and distinguish it from the natural or social realms, which are uncontrolled and “open” (see Shapin and Schaffer  2011, 39; Bhaskar 2008, 63–142).5 Whereas laboratories admit no “unexplained variables,” open systems contain numerous and inconsistent elements “capable of acting in an unexpected manner,” including humans themselves, and are therefore in a “chaotic flux” that manifests neither constant conjunctions nor regular sequences (Judd  2003, 23; Bhaskar  2008, 33). International politics exemplifies an open system. It lies “exposed to influences deriving from the other systems in which it is embedded. From them there flows a constant stream of events and influences that shape the conditions” of action (Easton  1965, 18 emphasis added; also George and Bennett 2004, 152).

3  Applying the narrative theory of action to social science, metanarrative thematics inform methodological choices about how to respond to the problem of Time. Methodologies not only conceptualize our hook-up to the world, they also mark a hinge between vocation and theorizing. As Sterling-Folker (2015, 40) puts it, “our theoretical preferences often say more about us and our contexts than they do about the rest of the world.” 4  Because experiential cleavages tend to emerge in particular, substantive accounts, I cover them later. 5  Some scholars explore ways to treat open social realms as experimental spaces (e.g. Mintz, Yang, and McDermott  2011). Lemov (2005) traces the widespread tendency for experiments to migrate from the lab to the wider world.

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Methodologies  135 These fluvial metaphors suggest that open and closed spaces may be matters of timing. Indeed, by drastically reducing discordant occurrences and isolating those that remain, the laboratory supports the reliable integration and co­ord­in­ ation of change continua freed from emergent changes. Within laboratory confines, a properly specified cause always produces a given effect, and the occurrence of that effect always points back to the same cause (Bhaskar 2008, 73). So in our conventional way of discussing effective timing, the “closed space” of the la­bora­tory is scientifically valuable because it is “invariant to . . . time” (Bhaskar  2008, 91).6 The laboratory ideal thus reproduces our long-standing relationship to the p ­ roblem of Time: experimental knowledge advances to the extent that we can assert ­control over change continua freed or isolated from time’s wider passage, which naturally inhibits such knowledge. Scholars committed to a “naturalistic” or “unified” scientific approach (Moses and Knutsen  2012) lament the open nature of social life. “[T]rue experiments . . . remain the gold standard” of modern science (Lake  2011, 474–75), offering “unparalleled control over stimuli” and “superior control over environmental conditions” (“Methodology” 2019). Below these sit quasi-experiments (which do not assign cases randomly), followed by statistical correlational designs (which establish probability of co-variance). Game theoretical approaches respond to the same epistemological challenges of life in time. They compose an “artificial environment” for the express purpose of “uprooting” the decision “from the uninterrupted jetstream of events and its multiple chains of causation” (Guilhot 2011b, 281, 296). This “axiomatic closure” is also a temporal one, which “upgrades” messy political actions “to the status of ‘rational choice’ ” by restricting explicitly temporal effects (Guilhot 2011b, 296) so that—as with other transcendental methods—we might study the “ ‘thing itself ’, the object as it would appear independently of any empirical contingencies, timeless and placeless” (Burgess  2019, 103; see Pierson  2004, 18–19). In the age of nuclear anxiety, these timing innovations offered “a seemingly ‘safe’ way to practice [decision making under uncertainty] in a controlled environment and confine the state of emergency to labs” (Guilhot 2011b, 297 emphasis added). Social scientists could simulate emergencies but would not need to confront the truly novel ones brought by emergent change in the flow of time. A desire for passive timing runs through all these methodological developments in that they flow from the premise that having established durable relationships between factors, we can exploit them to determine how politics unfolds, and we can do this with diminishing effort—up to the point of “fully automated” decision-making processes (Guilhot  2011b, 279). It also implicitly animates efforts to glean data from “the great laboratory” of history in pursuit of “a 6  Bhaskar (2008, 91) uses invariant “to” but not “over” time because lab results cannot endure indefinitely in open systems.

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136  International Relations and the Problem of Time coherent body of timeless propositions” (Kaplan 1962, 3; also Mearsheimer 1990, 9), to treat military interventions as “approximate” laboratories in which to test “ ‘[p]ure’ hypothetical rules about how the state and economy are best designed” (Alahmad 2017, 335), or to ensure that research designs approximate laboratory conditions whenever possible since IR should not be “ ‘in as much a state of change, chaos, and confusion as the contemporary world scene which it seeks to comprehend’ ” (Lijphart 1974, 41, quoting Harrison). As the following sections show, in one way or another IR methodologies respond to these temporal concerns of laboratory life. Some work toward its ideal timing situation with puristic stories, which use clean narrative temporalities to effectively close down empirical situations otherwise vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time. Others reject the “intellectual puritanism” of the laboratory (Bull 1966, 366) and seek instead provisional knowledge about—and more or less within— concrete and fully temporalized settings, where multiple change continua impede overly rigid or closed timing efforts. In both cases, as in the rest of the book, key issues in IR theory and knowledge development hinge on how, and how much, scholars try to tame the problem of Time by disciplining surprise, unpredictability, and discordant change with methods inspired by the experimental laboratory.

Neopositivism: Tall Tales of a Quasi-Timeless Science Based on a vision of scientific progress where scholars test hypotheses against empirical observations (Young 1972, 180), neopositivism is the “father house of IR theory” (Neumann  2011, xiv).7 Neopositivists seek reliable generalizations about correlations between political phenomena, which allow them to anticipate and perhaps accurately predict outcomes in the future when similar conditions avail. Such outcomes would confirm IR’s scientific credentials (Young 1972, 179). This account of social science displays basic hallmarks of timing. Correlations depend on the existence of two or more continua of change in the form of ­vari­ables displaying enough continuity to remain identifiable as “X” and “Y.” Correlation represents a form of mutual or co-relationship achieved by an intellectual synthesis whose express intention is to coordinate changes at a higher level of generality. Finally, this synthesis offers an asset for orientation, action, and control. Having discovered regularities in international life, neopositivism “seeks to use those regularities to make them happen” or prevent them from happening (van Creveld 1986, 40). Like other timing projects, neopositivism grapples with discordant change, which either confounds the search for persistent correlations, threatens the coherence of the variables themselves, or vitiates reasoning altogether. As 7  On the imperial and gender dynamics of neopositivism and the house metaphor, see (Agathangelou and Ling 2004; Weber 2015, 34).

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Methodologies  137 ­ iscussed earlier, challenges of timing often manifest as the problem of Time, and d evocations of just this sort run through Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba’s (1994 henceforth KKV) touchstone guide to neopositivist research, Designing Social Inquiry. KKV (1994, 79) highlight a “fundamental problem of causal inference”: because “a certain degree of randomness or unpredictability is inherent in politics,” because “the social world changes rapidly,” and because “every aspect of social reality is infinitely complex,” “no matter how perfect the research design, no matter how much data we collect, no matter how perceptive the observers, no matter how diligent the research assistants, and no matter how much experimental control we have, we will never know a causal inference for certain” (KKV 1994, 55, 6, 42, 79 emphasis added). Social entities do not work like atoms, which “behaved in the same way a billion years ago as [they do] today (and will continue to display the same behavior a billion years hence), or else the concept of nature itself will disintegrate into sheer meaningless chaos” (van Creveld 1986, 41). The social scientist’s job, then, is to discover regular relationships that, if not eternally reliable, at least confirm that the social realm does not dis-integrate into chaos.

Neopositivism’s Inhabitable Metanarrative: The Hypothetical Laboratory Causal inference plays a leading role in a metanarrative where social scientific knowledge about the external world remains intrinsically uncertain but still possible (KKV 1994, 6) so long as we hew as closely as possible to the standards of natural science. In this unity of science thesis, the experimental laboratory poses the ideal research environment where good science discovers “real world facts” (Jackson 2011, 41–71).8 Therefore, what makes inference “satisfying,” “complete,” and scientific is that it moves “beyond the immediate data to something broader that is not directly observed,” from covariations in the data to causal relations in the world (KKV 1994, 8, 75 emphasis added; cf. Jackson 2011, 156). Since most social phenomena cannot be reproduced inside this closed experimental space free from the vicissitudes of Time (Bennett  2004, 36; Moses and Knutsen  2012, 68), neopositivists must approximate such conditions. They can happen artificially, as in foreign policy and crisis simulations (KKV 1994, 24), or by exploiting rare opportunities where cross-case comparison offers “the functional equivalent of a controlled experiment” (Bennett 2004, 40; cf. George and Bennett 2004, 152). But in many other instances neopositivists construct a hypo­ thet­ic­al laboratory environment in which to test propositions (Collier, Seawright, and Munck 2010, 38). What the natural sciences achieve literally, the social sciences produce narrativistically—by telling stylized stories about situations more 8  Gunnell (1975) argues that self-consistent positivism must remain agnostic about external reality.

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138  International Relations and the Problem of Time lab-like and therefore more amenable to inference than the phenomenal situ­ ations to which they refer. Inferential techniques thus override substantive puzzles: “The content is the method. . . . we can use these methods to study virtually anything” (KKV 1994, 9, 3 emphasis added). This strong claim offers a single standard for integrating, co­ord­ in­at­ing, and ultimately controlling various change continua. More precisely, it propounds a general timing meter, a rigid frame of reference applicable to almost any aspect of social life. Yet as will become clear, we cannot actually use neopositivism’s timing meter “to study virtually anything.” Rather, we use it to study any­ thing virtually, for in an open system the only way to meet the standards of laboratory life is to interpret and emplot time-bound phenomena in ways that render them more amenable to experimental control (KKV 1994, 199).

Thematic Standard: Experimental Control The theme of experimental control delimits what sorts of entities filter into neopositivism’s laboratory story. First, they need to be entities—not entirely fluid processes but rather change continua that are reliable enough that we can “thingify” them as a variable with attributes (Jackson and Nexon  1999, 293–5; McIntosh 2015, 486; Hom 2018a, 73). Second, the research design must control for all “possibly confounding effects” so that we may study whether, “all else held constant, a change in X leads to a change in Y” (Lake 2009, 52). Two examples from KKV are instructive here. First, in elections research the causal effect of incumbency is “the difference in the systematic component of the vote in this district with an incumbent in this election and without an incumbent in the same election, time, and district” (KKV 1994, 90 emphasis added). Of course, it is impossible to empirically observe two elections identical in every way except for the factor of incumbency (KKV 1994, 79). Therefore we observe the singular event and then “imagine that we go back in time to the start of the election campaign and everything remains the same, except that the Democratic incumbent decides not to run for re-election” (KKV 1994, 77–8 emphasis added, see also 88–9). Second, when analyzing incarceration and radicalization, “[t]he Fundamental Problem is that we can observe this person’s beliefs in only one of these situations. Obviously, the same individual cannot be in and out of prison at the same time (KKV 1994, 200 emphasis added). Moreover, “we cannot rerun history at the same time and the same place with different values of our explanatory variable each time” (KKV 1994, 91 emphasis added). Ideally, we would like to take a single individual, wait a year under carefully controlled conditions that maintained his environment identically, except for the passage of time and events in the outside world, and measure the radicalness of his

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Methodologies  139 political beliefs. Simultaneously, we would take the individual at the same time, send him to prison for a year, and measure the radicalness of his political beliefs  (KKV 1994, 200).

These examples highlight three points. First, although they of course realize that such techniques are impossible, KKV use them as guides to reasoning. While we cannot enact these ideals, for reliable knowledge we must think as if we could. Literal impossibilities offer the best bet for getting a grip on practical realities. Second, valid inference in KKV depends on time travel in a robust sense.9 Their desire to “rerun history” or “go back in time” does not refer merely to resetting a clock or manipulating a calendar—as when we reset a stopwatch between trials. Rather, KKV highlight the difficulty in holistically timing phenomena in an open social system. Closed experimental spaces allow us to “re-run” experimental sequences with near perfect temporal symmetry and to check their conditionality, variance, and reliability because we have drastically reduced the quantity and complexity of change continua compared to the open, time-bound world. For example, because it keeps everything else out, a vacuum allows us to ascertain gravitational force by effectively “re-running time” over and over, which is to say by replicating all the necessary and appropriate change processes (Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009, 713 n51). In open systems we cannot isolate change continua so stringently or make them repeat with exactitude (see Bhaskar  2008, 74). This makes it impossible to reproduce the relevant temporal sequence at the level of similarity required for reliable inference—contextual details change, human subjects recall previous trials and may change their minds, some drop out or die. The “time” in which KKV’s election and prison examples occur is irreversible because too much timing is required—the inferential contexts confound comprehensive integration, coordination, and control. Third, because their inference requires an experimental control that depends upon just the sort of comprehensive timing capabilities that open systems inhibit, KKV recommend that we imagine either the simultaneous occurrence of two processes utterly identical but for one salient factor or the possibility of time travel. KKV (1994, 77–84) often call this a “hypothetical” procedure but this is not so if by “hypothetical” we mean empirical testing and falsification, since the very reason for such imaginative “thought experiments” is that their empirical realization is impossible. It is more properly “counterfactual” (e.g. KKV 1994, 77–8), in a fictive sense.10 Short of total control, it is only in fictive configurations that we can decisively time social life by emplotting out all discordance and change processes except those that are reliably coordinated. By using “hypo­thet­ic­al” and “counterfactual” interchangeably, KKV paper over the fictive fulcrum of causal inference, which is to 9  “Time travel” here follows Hutchings (2008b, 95) rather than Blaney and Inayatullah (2010, 196; see Hom 2018c, 317–18). 10  “Fictive” indicates “imaginary” rather than “feigned” (see Shotter 1994, 181 n13).

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140  International Relations and the Problem of Time counter the ornery complexity of open domains by “taking ourselves outside of our world” to enable “otherwise unattainable perspectives” (Lebow  2010, 17, 5) or to pursue flights of the “rational imagination,” including “impossibilities that could never happen” (Byrne 2007, 1, 10; see Jackson 2011, 149). The more fiction, the better. Researchers should imagine “replicating” the fictive experiment as many times as feasible, both to test the hypothetical relationship and to compare it to other possible relationships (KKV 1994, 84). If every story unfolds a world of its own, as discussed in chapter three, then each of these replications adds to a fictive multi-verse full of realms differing by one salient variable (Collier, Seawright, and Munck  2010, 38). Only by this reverie can we force sociopolitical phenomena into the time-free space of the experimental lab, where scientific results emerge (George and Bennett 2004, 138). In this way, its experimental thematic brings neopositivist inference quite close to a social constructionist approach to language (see Jackson  2011, 161). Neopositivist inference springs from the linguistic ability of researchers “to create whole fictional realities that, although we know them to be impossible . . ., give us a sufficient sense of reality” (Shotter 1994, 93).11 It is no exaggeration then to conclude that in order to discover facts about the real world, neopositivists op­er­ ation­al­ize the thematic of experimental control in repeated fictions of parallel worlds more amenable to timing precisely because they are free from time’s deleterious effects.

Creative Filtration: Autonomous and Systematic Experimentation also depends on the rigorous comparison of outcomes associated with each variable of interest. To keep this workload manageable, neoposivitist inference must excise numerous factors implicated in sociopolitical puzzles. In actual experiments, we rely on the violence of laboratory impediments. In social scientific inference, creative filtration must do this work. Both forms of excision counter the problem of Time: the fewer variables considered, the fewer continua requiring synthesis, the fewer discordant changes we confront in trying to establish a correlation amenable to effective timing. Neopositivists acknowledge that they filter out “many obviously varying f­ eatures” of the world in order to “isolate and study” a single phenomenon of interest (Lake 2009, 52). Of course, all social sciences make this bargain to some extent. Neopositivists, however, employ a particularly rigorous rubric dictated by the experimental control thematic. This can be seen in strictures intended to render phenomena as discrete and autonomous variables and to categorize these as systematic or random. 11 “When time travelling with the fictive dream the key is to make the prose natural” (Whitehall 2011 emphasis added).

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Methodologies  141 For example, KKV (1994, 10) reduce numerous processes implicated in international conflict to discrete, autonomous events called “wars.” From these, they further extract “interstate wars,” with 1,000 battle deaths between organized armed forces representing two or more sovereign states in a calendar year (see Small and Singer  1982, 205–6). Each of these operations creatively filters out much of the fluid, complex, and interconnected world of international politics to enable inferential storytelling.

Concordant Discordance: Random and Non-Systematic Neopositivists further subdivide already-objectified entities into distinct classes of variables (see KKV 1994, 81). The discordant events associated with time’s flow become random, chance, or coincidental deviations from “normal” experience that operational techniques “guard against” (Sprinz and Wolinsky-Nahmias 2004b, 10). In particular, “one of the fundamental goals of inference” is to distinguish ­“random” from “systematic” variables and then to further filter random variables as either systematically or non-systematically random (KKV  1994, 56, 81–2). “Systematic” refers to “fundamental and predictable characteristics” (KKV 1994, 56). “Random” indicates features that are “by definition not persistent” and thought unlikely to affect outcomes across multiple cases (KKV 1994, 62). “Nonsystematic” similarly refers to “one-offs” or “transitory” and inconsistent elements (KKV 1994, 56, 62). Examples of systematic features include stable belief systems, large institutions, economic and material factors, or anything predictable ahead of time.12 On the other side, agents, historical discontinuities, terrorist incidents, and disease outbreaks are non-systematic (e.g. Wohlforth  1998), even though they matter much to international politics (see Gilpin  1981; Fisher  2013; Kittelsen 2012).

Unfolding a Regular World Systematic, autonomous variables are highly amenable to coordination and c­ ontrol, while random and non-systematic variables vitiate these benefits of synthesis, confound the neopositivist timing project, and leave scholars “adrift” (Gilpin 1981, 212). The cumulative effect of operationalization along these lines, then, is to eliminate discordance from the possible variable relationships that matter in hopes of rendering the dependent variable—that originally puzzling occurrence we wish to explain—intelligible and expectable. Neopositivist inference thus 12  Although modest granular knowledge also enables prediction, especially of unique or random events (Singer 1989, 13; McIntosh, n.d.).

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142  International Relations and the Problem of Time posits a highly manageable world, where empirical phenomena may be readily timed because only their most readily timed elements (e.g. systematic variables) remain. In this sense, neopositivism depends upon a reified, substantivized, and externalized—that is, a stringently “thingified”—vision of time highly similar to Western standard time. * * * As with any good storytelling, neopositivist inference offers a means of making sense of the world. It reacts to discordant changes with surprise and with laments about the problem of Time coupled with calls to render such experiences less unsettling through knowledge development, which ultimately promises to anticipate future recurrences. In addition to the discussions covered in this section we might recall how, despite failing to predict the end of the Cold War, democratic peace theorists reassured themselves that while future developments would arbitrate theoretical disputes, either political events were becoming more predictable or improved theory was getting better at prediction (Ray and Russett 1996, 463–7; see chapter four). Neopositivism thus instantiates a Janus-faced narrative timing project, which works with thematic standards of experimental control nested within a metanarrative of science to propound realms that are inhabitable by virtue of their regularity and predictability. That said, it is somewhat incoherent or disingenuous for neopositivists to distinguish their purportedly unified scientific approach from narrative. Their claim only becomes possible once neopositivists conflate carefully configured stories about some part of the world with the world per se. Otherwise, the distinction does not hold up under scrutiny. It also props open a breezy gap between scientific theory and humanistic narrative. More importantly, it undersells neopositivism’s narrative innovation. This methodology works by “authoritative fictions” (Guilhot  2011b, 294) to iterate ingenious and regimented stories, in which the “open” or “time-bound” phenomena of politics become regular entities amenable to “closed” inspection and even time travel. Neopositivist inference thus replaces the problem of Time with a purified narrative temporality. It emplots overtly tall tales of quasi-timeless worlds as a way to help actors effectively time “real-world” political phenomena.

Critical Realism: A Quasi-Eternal Theology of Social Science Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment [of Senses]; amid Sounds and Colours and Forms, as it were, swathed-in, and in-extricably overshrouded: yet it is skywoven, and worthy of a God. Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities? He feels; power has been given him to know, to believe . . .  —Thomas Carlyle (2008, 51)

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Methodologies  143 Since emerging in cognate disciplines (e.g. Archer  1995; Bhaskar  2008; Chakravartty 2010), critical realism has begun to flourish in IR (e.g. Wendt 1999; Patomäki and Wight  2000; Wight  2006; Kurki  2007; Joseph  2012).13 Avowedly pluralist about subject matter and method, critical realism coalesces around the contention that all political problems “must be addressed at the level of ontology” (Wight 2006, 4, 248). Because successful action depends on accurate knowledge, before warranting knowledge or prescribing policy we must determine of what the world actually consists and, therefore, what really exists in the world. This position entails a strong claim about how social scientists should relate observable phenomena, unobservable entities, and ways of researching them. Instead of treating them instrumentally, as provisional placeholders or useful patches that help explanations cohere (as many neopositivists do), critical realists claim that unobservables “must be taken to be real, to actually exist” insofar as rigorous and compelling explanations depend upon them (Jackson 2011, 84, see also 79-81; Wight  2006, 31–2; Gunnell  1975). We construct analytical conjectures, which may be more or less accurate, but as linguistic artifacts these cannot change actual causal powers or structures (Bhaskar 2008, 92). Critical realists also break with neopositivists in viewing laboratory ideals as a red herring. For them, controlled experiments identify laws that “prevail outside” the laboratory because their key causal properties “endure and continue to operate in their normal way under [open] conditions” (Bhaskar 2008, 33; Patomäki 2006, 3). Regular conjunctions suggest but do not constitute actual causal ­connections; such connections flow from the stable “power” of some entity to produce (i.e. cause) them and other effects in the “real world,” absent im­pos­ition by other entities and their powers (Wight 2006, 32). These differences aside, like neopositivists critical realists lament the problem of Time. Regular conjunctions cannot exhaust causation because impositions and contingencies occur so frequently in open systems, thanks to temporal dynamics like complexity (Kurki 2007, 91; Roberts 2006, 89; Wight 2006, 256–63), “mul­ tiple and changing forces” (Kurki 2007, 92), tangled “webs of relations” that are “constantly changing” (Wight  2006, 162, 298–9), speed and interconnectedness (Patomäki  2006, 10), and historical heterogeneity (Roberts  2006, 83). Whereas neopositivists work toward solutions to these problems in the form of intellectual syntheses specifying “higher” general laws or regularities, critical realists aim “deeper,” for the real, ontological realm beneath the “flux” and “fluidity” of phenomenal experience (Kurki 2007, 93; George and Bennett 2004, 137). Regardless of metaphorical direction, critical realism joins neopositivism in positing an “absolute dichotom[y] . . . of depth and surface” (Ashley  1987, 408), accompanied by a desire to depart that surface for more stable planes of 13  Some scholars blend critical realism and neopositivism (e.g. Wendt 1999; George and Bennett 2004; cf. Gunnell 2011; Jackson 2011).

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144  International Relations and the Problem of Time orientation, action, and control. It also recapitulates traditional antitheses between fluvial and stability metaphors, which typically proxy for the antithesis between time and eternity. As in classical metaphysics, what lasts is “essential nature” and trumps what passes in “manifest behavior” (Bhaskar  2008, 248). Although critical realists do not go so far as to call phenomenal experience a “movable image of eternity” (Plato 1925, 37c-e),14 they nevertheless assume that problematic features associated with time are merely experiential—a moving image of reality. By contrast, “the world itself is structured, orderly, and endures over time” (Dean et al. 2006, 8 emphasis added).

Critical Realism’s Inhabitable Metanarrative: The Science of Emancipation This version of reality holds vocational consequences. In the critical realist metanarrative of science and emancipation (see Patomäki  2002, 210–36; Bhaskar 2009; cf. Sayer 1997), if science is to be possible at all, reality cannot consist merely of temporal features like fluid dynamics and contingent “sequences of events,” but must also include stable and reliable entities—those “things that prod­uce and the mechanisms that generate the flux of the phenomena of the world” (Bhaskar 2008, 33, 66). Moreover, society itself “must be a structure” (Bhaskar 2008, 248). Consequently, if social science is to be as useful as natural science, it must move from “chaotic complexity” to “deep causes” and “relatively enduring” social structures (Wight 2006, 294, 248; Kurki 2007, 15, 11). The “critical” in critical realism is that proponents want to leverage these moves toward the mitigation of human suffering. As distinct from ontology, beliefs may be false and therefore overlay the actual fundaments of society with unnecessary structures of inequality or domination (Wight  2006, 57). Good social theory exposes this and directs more reasonable action (Wight 2006, 162; Patomäki 2002, 126). It plays a key role in “an ‘emancipatory spiral’, ” which uses knowledge to challenge false beliefs and transform or replace the institutions that cause them with ones that “cause true ones” (Wight 2006, 58, also 51). This metanarrative loads research with normative value. The whole point of knowledge development is to foster “better, that is, more empowered, more eth­ ic­al and more virtuous ways of being and action” by encouraging “informed choices” instead of “propagandistic or strategic attempts to manipulate others”

14  While critical realists distance themselves from this view (Wight 2006, 232; Kurki 2007, 25), the metaphor recalls Plato’s (1969, 517b; 1925, 38b, 39d–e) need to penetrate “past mere appearance” to the “Eternal Nature” of the real (see Jackson 2011, 44).

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Methodologies  145 (Patomäki 2002, 17, 92; Wight 2006, 60). It also enables other smaller narratives. Explanations are “better stories about world politics” (Patomäki  2002, 70–96) that, because they tap into reality, provide “concrete knowledge” about “planning and/or material interventions into the world” (Wight  2006, 163). For instance, “an epic tale par excellence” that is “exciting,” “dramatic,” and accurate makes “new movements and forms of political agency” and, ultimately, “emancipation and edification possible” (Patomäki 2010, 165; 2002, 92).15

Thematic Standard: Stable Ontology In critical realism, human emancipation depends on accurate knowledge “penetrat[ing]” experience and ideas to reach more fundamental, “hidden layers” of reality (Wendt 1987, 370; Wight 2006, 30–5; Patomäki 2002, 92; Kurki 2007, 11). Ontological depth, however, is more of a temporal than a spatial matter. What is real is the stable entity or power that lasts and generates the things that pass through our senses (Bhaskar 2008, 11–12, 242–46). For instance, social structures “underlie” experience because they “endure longer than those appearances and generate or make them possible” (Wight 2006, 35 n85 emphasis added, also 60). The question, then, is how social research can access these hidden layers. In the natural sciences, experimental activity “gives us access to enduring and transfact­ ual­ly active structures” (Bhaskar 2008, 245). Since social science cannot count on experimental control, we must devise “analogous procedure[s] of inquiry” subject to “selective” confirmation and falsification (Bhaskar 2008, 245). This may sound like neopositivism redux, except that instead of telling tall tales of open systems phenomena forced into experimental spaces or transported back in time, critical realists use metaphor and analogy to develop abductive explanations (Wight 2006, 61). These posit some entity or power (like gravity), which “if it was to exist” would convincingly account for an empirical occurrence (Roberts 2006, 70; Wight  2006, 34; see Jackson  2011, 82–3). Stronger still, abduction proffers “transcendental” accounts based on “indispensability claims” about “what must have taken place in order to leave the evidence that we see today” (Taylor 1995, 28; Patomäki  2010, 152 emphasis added; Chakravartty  2010, 5; see Jackson 2011, 102–4). Abduction works expressly by narrative comprehension to achieve “a whole conception of the world that includes our observations along with the posited explanatory factor(s)” (Jackson 2011, 83; see Kurki 2007, 285–6; Patomäki 2010, 152). 15  On the link between truth claims, good intentions, and tragedy, see (Carr 1939; Morgenthau 1946; Hom 2018b).

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146  International Relations and the Problem of Time It also employs forward and backward reference to show that “ ‘the condition stated in the conclusion is indispensable to the feature identified at the start’ ” (Jackson 2011, 102, quoting Taylor). Its standards are coherence and plausibility (Patomäki 2002, 129). And when done well, critical realists claim that it opens a “relatively credible window” between ephemeral experience and durable causal complexes (Patomäki 2002, 129 emphasis added). Knowledge of these firm foundations then grounds emancipatory action.

Creative Filtration: Intransitivity Whereas neopositivists scrub experience of all but its most determinate features, critical realists happily accommodate complexity, contingency, and temporal ­context (Patomäki 2002, 76; Wight 2006, 289; Kurki 2007) if these elements help configure a narrative about why we did or did not observe a phenomenon. However, the thematic of stable ontology entails an important consideration in terms of creative filtration and emplotment. Abductive stories must feature intransitive objects of transitive knowledge (Wight 2006, 248; see Jackson 2011, 108). Intransitive entities do not pass over to other objects of people; they “endure and operate independently of our knowledge” (Bhaskar  2008, 25, 17) Stable and  dur­able, intransitive entities constitute ontological bedrock. By contrast, transitivity indicates passage and passing away, changeability, and transience. While transitive knowledge may be more or less accurate, at most it provides intrinsically malleable raw materials by which scientific knowledge converges toward reality.16 In these ways, the in/transitive distinction recapitulates our classical metaphysical distinction between time and eternity. More importantly, it implies the q ­ uasi-eternalist promise that stability and invariance vouchsafe reality as such (see Patomäki 2009, 312; Bhaskar 2008, 21).

Concordant Discordance: Adding Interference Since “the clean, recurrent stream of cause and effect” of laboratory life is not available to social inquiry (Wight 2006, 30; George and Bennett 2004, 137), crit­ic­al realists reason through intransitive entities in two ways. First, abduction ­posits an intransitive entity as “indispensable” to some puzzling experience (see Patomäki

16  For example, “the events of 11 September 2001, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Holocaust were as they were, independent of anything we might write of them” (Wight 2006, 39; cf. Lundborg 2011; McIntosh 2015, 479–82).

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Methodologies  147 2002, 129; Wight  2006, 280)—for instance, a durable “generative mechanism” underlying “the actualisation of events and their empirical observations” (Kurki 2007, 166). Second, abductive stories secure intransitive entities against confounding evidence by explaining why they did not produce the empirical evidence we would expect. In open systems, intransitive entities “are part of a natural interactional complexity that results sometimes in particular causal relations, while at other times in the suppressing or complete neutralisation of the generative effects in question” (Wight 2006, 30). More telling, “in open systems, causal mechanisms and structures interact in complex ways and tend to change given sufficient . . . time” (Patomäki 2009, 312; Bhaskar 2008, 21–2). This is why critical realists embrace contingent and complex explanations (see Kurki 2007, 1–22, 115; Wight 2006, 289). By adding narrative elements and showing how these interfere with posited real entities’ causal dispositions, abduction can explain empirical irregularities while explicating and guaranteeing onto­ logic­al regularity. If reality is stratified, and each lower layer is more stable than the last, then a reasonable explanation for why a deep entity’s causal powers do not bubble “upwards” to the experiential surface is that elements of intervening layers prevented this. Moreover, since irregularities typify social experience, this ingenious move allows both empirical regularities and irregularities to authorize depth ontology (see Patomäki 2009, 321): empirical regularities result from enduring and stable entities; so too do empirical irregularities, which announce the interference of additional entities, leaving the ontological status of both untarnished. By adding more elements (instead of excising them as neopositivists do), critical realist abduction emplots discordant information in a concordant story limited only by its own internal plausibility and ability to imaginatively subdivide reality. Concordant discordance via interference buttresses critical realists’ strong ontological claim that the “actual is only a part of the real world, which also consists of nonactualised possibilities and unexercised powers” (Patomäki 2006, 9). This claim is crucial to rebutting what they call the “epistemic fallacy,” which denies ontological status to things we cannot experience or know with certainty (see Bhaskar 2008, 36–7; Wight 2006, 28, 246, 252; Yalvaç 2010, 170).17 Yet if we take seriously the innovative practices of creative filtration and concordant discordance evident in abductive narration, we must also allow here for the possibility of an ontological fallacy, which asserts that a mind-independent world is knowable by human effort. After all, it is by the creative work of emplotment that we establish the narrative indispensability of a posited unobserved and intransitive entity, and then conclude its existence independent of our efforts.

17  It is not clear that anyone in IR commits the epistemic fallacy outright (Gunnell 2011, 1461).

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148  International Relations and the Problem of Time This ontological fallacy helps critical realism defend the world from the ­ravages of time. If reality remains “always partially alien” and only partly uncovered (Patomäki 2002, 129) to transitive experience, we cannot rule out some undiscovered but enduring entity’s responsibility for confounding occurrences. As long as an abductive story fits observed phenomena within a necessary, plausible, and coherent whole, critical realists can believe they have caught a glimpse of enduring, intransitive reality. Seemingly falsifying or surprising data only calls for another turn of the abductive wheels to add stories or story elements, for “under­lying each mechanism, or level, there are always other levels waiting to be explained” (Wight 2006, 36). Taken together, these stories comprise an ever-growing stockpile of variations explained (see Jackson 2011, 103–4), which ul­tim­ate­ly reaffirm the general concordance and specifically quasi-eternal bona fides of reality.18 Abduction, then, offers us the view from the “conflux of eternities.”

Unfolding a Theological World In addition to these narrative and conceptual innovations, critical realism gives off more than a whiff of theological zeal. For instance, in addition to refusing empirical evidence as a decisive test of unobserved entities, critical realists insist we should believe in them if we find no better explanatory account. Lest there be any doubt about how far this might go, a founding critical realist, Roy Bhaskar (2000, 50ff), explicitly broaches the possibility of scientific warrants for beliefs in miracles, angels, and gods. If there are always deeper ontological levels under­lying the ones we have rendered intelligible (Wight  2006, 36–7), there is no reason those levels cannot contain supernatural beings. If ontology comes first, faithful critical realists must acknowledge that supernatural beings that are indispensable to the most plausible abductive explanation are “out there” in the real world. This theological inclination, however, turns an important rebuttal to the epi­ stem­ic fallacy on its head. Closely associated with transcendental indispensability, the “miracle argument” claims that extensive successes in the natural sciences could stem from two possibilities: (1) from our accurately developed knowledge of deep reality; or, (2) from a miraculous series of coincidences in which spurious theories are reliably right for the wrong reasons (Bhaskar 2008, 20; Wight 2006, 38–40; Wendt 2004, 290). Temporal considerations run through this argument: “If science is to be possible the world must be one of enduring and transfactually active mechanisms” (Bhaskar 2008, 248 emphasis added). Yet if reality is stratified and always at least partially inaccessible, there is no guarantee that Descartes’ (2008, 16) demon does not lurk “beneath” the objects and practices of scientific 18  The logical (if not the practical) endpoint of this progressive vision is a 1:1 “map of the world” (Carroll 1893; George and Bennett 2004, 143).

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Methodologies  149 knowledge, arranging for his amusement just that confluence of occurrences that the miracle argument denies. When we recall ancient time gods, who dissolve stable orders and generally confound human efforts, this problem in the miracle argument brings critical realism’s inventive use of narrative full circle around time and eternity. Malevolent figurations of the problem of Time, those enduring symbols of dissolution, are just the sorts of interfering entities critical realists need to explain empirical irregularities and other discordant experiences. It is not coincidental in this respect that critical realists conclude that successful abduction “baptizes” unobservable phenomena (Wendt 1999, 63). Critical realism has got more religion still. Compare hopes for “knowing the unobservable” (Chakravartty 2010 emphasis added) and contentions that “there are things going on . . . beyond and behind the appearances that are not immediately accessible to our senses” (Wight 2006, 29) with the prophet Isaiah’s (Is. 48:6) offer to “tell you of new things, of hidden things unknown to you” or Jesus of Nazareth’s promise that “I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world” (Matt. 13:35; Luke 8:17; cf. Ps. 78:2).19 In the Judeo-Christian tradition, deliverance depends on overcoming false belief by appeal to an eternal truth above the temporal human realm; in critical realism, emancipation depends on overcoming false consciousness by appeal to an enduring, quasi-eternal bedrock beneath temporal flux. While God sets the “hands of time” in motion, it is successful abduction that restores our faith in “ ‘an underlying clockwork reality’ ” (George and Bennett  2004, 143 n36, quoting Gribbin) amenable to successful timing and “awakened” by sound science (Bhaskar  2008, 91 n35). Such ways of thinking about the possibility of knowledge development epitomize a “religious attitude” wedded to “the ideal of inhabiting a securely bounded territory of truth and literal meaning beyond doubt, a place given as if by some author beyond time, a place where the unruly can be reliably named and tamed and the man of unquestioning faith can be secure” (Ashley and Walker 1990, 379–81). * * * As with neopositivism, there is nothing necessarily objectionable in this way of making sense of experience. Indeed, critical realists make innovative room for complexity and contingency and produce a particularly creative sort of concordant discordance. Yet in its vocational metanarrative of a critical science of emancipation, its narrative thematic of stable ontology, and its zealous search for intransitive story elements, critical realism reflects a traditional relationship to time, in which we must decamp the temporal realm and embark on a “ ‘quest for certainty’ ” and “search for the indubitable,” both of which satisfy “ ‘a longing for 19 Indeed, a dramatized critical realist account might unfold like This Present Darkness (Peretti 2003), which pits invisible but very real angels and demons against each other for control of human events.

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150  International Relations and the Problem of Time the transcendent’ ” and the eternal (Gunnell  2011, 1469, quoting Dewey and Wittgenstein, respectively; see also Gen. 21:33; Deut. 34:4). Whether the watchmaker is God most high or ontological layers most deep, the key to sound know­ ledge and successful action is a chronometric faith that overcomes the problem of Time. On temporal grounds, then, critical realism does not so much break de­cisive­ly with neopositivism as it operationalizes a similar will to time and the same deep-seated temporal assumptions in different ways.

Interpretivism: Humanizing Time? Ranging widely across IR theoretical approaches, interpretivist methodologies represent a particularly interesting case of narrative timing.20 Moving well beyond critical realists’ embrace of narrative, many interpretivists aim to accommodate time and temporality more openly in accounts meant only to render puzzling phenomena less so. This involves instrumental “idealizations or oversimplifications” intended to turn “the complex chaos of empirical reality into more comprehensible and manageable forms” (Jackson  2011, 113). Moreover, these practices serve overarching purposes like forestalling catastrophe or alleviating suffering and degradation. This may sound similar to other vocational-methodological confrontations with time, and indeed we will see that interpretivism still does express a will to time international politics. Yet, because interpretivism trucks less in “the will to fixity or absolutes” (Cochran 1999, 177), we will also see that interpretivists tend not to treat time as an absolute problem confounding scientific aspirations. To English School scholars it simply indicates that hard scientific approaches are “inadequate” insofar as “they ‘employ a timeless language of definitions and ax­ioms, logical extrapolations or assertions of causal connection or general laws, and do not by themselves convey a sense of time and change’ ” (Linklater and Suganami 2006, 89; Linklater 2007, 46–7). Constructivists reject strict standards of generalizability because social life is “fundamentally temporal”—that is, the “contingencies are too great, the role of unanticipated consequences too pervasive” and human initiative too important (Pouliot 2007, 372; Ruggie 1998a, 135; also Klotz and Lynch 2007, 9, 18; Weldes et al. 1999; Bobbitt 2003, 826). And critical theorists insist that dealing “with a changing reality” requires that theory “continually adjust its concepts” (Cox  1981, 129). Across these variants, “fluid” empirical phenomena necessitate “constant re-evaluation” and “strong reflexiv[ity]” (Lynch 2014, 46–7). 20  I follow Lynch (2014, 12–13) in treating “analyticist” or “reflexivist” methodologies (see Jackson 2011, 36) as “interpretivist,” which comports better with narrative timing’s two-part, Janus-faced emplotment.

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Methodologies  151 In these ways, interpretivists chart a middle course, working to configure time’s presumed messy and disjunctive flow in a narrative temporality intelligible enough (by varying standards) to support action but not so stringent as to erase difference. Where other methodologies attempt to tame time by gauging it against antithetical and quasi-eternal standards, interpretivism placates or humanizes time by less invasive procedures meant only to produce a “useful . . . ordering of experience” rather than a law-like or real account (Jackson 2011, 38).

Interpretivism’s Inhabitable Metanarrative: Provisional and Occasionally Emancipatory By leaving room for instability and change, interpretivists refuse the sorts of direct confrontations with time given by standards of stability and opt instead to begin with the empirics of change. In addition to resting on shaky historical and practical foundations (Pouliot  2007, 378; Jackson  2011, 10–16; Gunnell  2011), stability standards enforce unrealistic epistemic expectations whose utility for explaining and directing political life was never adequately justified (see McIntosh 2015). Therefore, interpretivists proceed provisionally and in a relatively ad hoc manner, producing distinctive brands of knowledge not subject to inspection by external scholarly domains (see Gunnell 2011; Jackson 2011, 188–212). This is a more modest or restrained metanarrative of scientific progress predicated on a minimalist, “one plus” standard: if we can develop “useful insights” and/or “lessons learned” for one or more cases or historical periods, then we have developed IR knowledge (Lynch 2014, 24). Some interpretivists push further, linking these modest commitments to emancipatory projects. But here the so-called “vagaries” of time often provide crucial evidence against the “immutability thesis” that the status quo, based on structured inequalities of power, is natural and fixed (Linklater 2007, 47; Krause and Williams 1997, xii). Within this more critical vein, some interpretivists also focus on their own positionality in order to more adequately justify whatever knowledge they produce (Jackson 2011, 159–60). In terms of time and timing, each of these positions flows from little more than the basic purpose of understanding the present and how we got here in order to enrich our perspectives on the future.

Thematic Standard: Insider Accounts Provisional and practical metanarratives of science allow interpretivists more flexibility in the actual accounts they produce. Structural and deductive brands of theorizing leave us “shut off from contact with the subject” and “unable to develop any feeling . . . for the play of international politics” (Bull 1966, 368; see also Klotz

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152  International Relations and the Problem of Time and Lynch 2007, 20). Here interpretivists highlight the narrative timing meter in neopositivism’s “ ‘imposition of a ready-made plot structure on an independent set of events’ ” and propose instead only a “ ‘dialectic process between multiple events and some theme that gradually coalesces in a single story’ ” (Ruggie  1998a, 94 quoting Polkinghorne, emphasis added). This process often resolves in one of two “insider” thematics. The first is immersion “ ‘content with nothing other than whatever may prove to be the nearest practicable approach to a personal participation’ ” (Linklater and Suganami 2006, 100 quoting Manning; also Morgenthau  1962, 49; Pouliot  2007, 368–9). Interpretivism earns its name here, since this requires “penetrating the minds” of social actors as much as possible by coming to understand how they interpret contexts, choices, and actions differently (Dunne 1998, 7–8; Ruggie 1998b, 859, 877; Lynch 2014, 2, 10–13).21 This often produces a narrative “of a variety of historical processes” that traces “the historical evolution of meanings” to help “deepen our understanding of particular instances” (Pouliot 2007, 367; Linklater and Suganami 2006, 88; Klotz and Lynch 2007, 9). Here history and theory are complementary rather than antagonistic (see Watson 1992; Buzan and Little 2000, 29; Bull 2002; Linklater and Suganami 2006, 84–5). A second insider thematic includes and foregrounds reflection on research practice. Here “inside” refers to the analyst’s mind rather than the empirical actor’s. This is particularly salient for feminist (Pettman 2005; Sylvester 2007; 2013; Ackerly and True  2008; Sjoberg  2012;  2013), critical (Barder and Levine  2012; Levine and Barder  2014; Amoureux  2015b; Amoureux and Steele  2015b; Hom 2017a), and autoethnographic scholars (Bleiker and Brigg 2010; Dauphinee 2010; Doty  2010; Weber  2010; Inayatullah  2011), for whom chal­ len­ ging existing arrangements requires reflexivity about our own knowledge production, which can never escape the broader social milieus of academic engagement and sociopolitical life. Rejecting the immutability thesis entails chal­len­ging the idea that (social) facts have any “essential properties” or even stable meanings independent of their context and purpose in some ideological project (Klotz and Lynch 2007, 13). “Fact,” after all, emerges from the Latin facere, “to do” (Lynch 2014, 14 n4; Kratochwil  2018, 315). Combined with historical narrative, reflexivity enables historicizing critique, which reintroduces contingency to nat­ur­al­ized or reified social structures (Linklater  2007, 46).22 Both insider thematics depend on the narrative power of synoptic judgment insofar as they aim for “a larger picture of the whole of which the initially contemplated part is just one component, and . . . to 21  This is not the same penetration as critical realism. Rather than ontological bedrock, the interpretivist seeks verstehen (understanding) or a “hermeneutic circle” by getting inside someone else’s fallible, finite, and perhaps ephemeral head (see Pouliot  2007, 365; Kurki  2007, 69; Jackson 2011, 112–53). 22  For interpretivist critiques of histories using the past merely as a “quarry” of data illustrating “variations on always recurrent themes,” see (Cox 1981, 131; Polkinghorne 1988, 63; Levine 2017, 6).

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Methodologies  153 understand the processes of change in which both parts and whole are involved” (Cox 1981, 129; Linklater 2007, 45).

Creative Filtration: Ideal Typification Compared with the totality of temporal dynamics manifest in international pol­it­ ics, knowledge cannot accommodate “any and every thing which may be called individual, but rather . . . those things and events which are in some way meaningful, or are relevant to human interest and experience” (Hofstadter  1945, 58; Ruggie 1998a, 94). However, the thematic of insider accounts allows and encourages interpretivists to manage rather than confront these elements. It calls for a “semantics of action,” which identifies basic features of social projects (Ricoeur 1984, 54). This is not a matter of covering laws or stable entities, but rather of “isolating, by abstraction, a part of the ‘conditions’ which are embedded in ‘the raw materials’ of the events and of making them into objects of judgment” (Weber  1949, 185). To do so, interpretivism uses ideal types to creatively filter those materials. Drawn primarily from Max Weber, an ideal type provides a “disciplined ordering of the facts of experience” (Jackson  2011, 114; e.g. Browning  2008, 290–2). Rather than a pathway to regular conjunctions or real structures, it offers us a heuristic device—a “deliberate over-simplification of a complex empirical actuality for the purpose of highlighting certain themes or aspects that are never as clear in the actual world” (Jackson 2011, 37 emphasis added). It creates “imaginative pic­ tures” by “disregarding one or more components of ‘actuality’ that have been fact­ ual­ly present in reality” as long as this filtering operation comports with the “rules of experience” (Weber 1949, 166; quoted in Jackson 2011, 148). And it results in “a purely ideal limiting concept with which the real situation or action is com­ pared and surveyed” to help us understand its significant components (Weber 1949, 93, quoted in Ruggie 1998b, 860; see also Linklater and Suganami 2006, 103). This allows for temporal sensitivity, on the one hand, and the possibility of systematic, knowledge that identifies overlaps between cases, on the other ­ (Lynch 2014, 2).23 While not strictly causal arguments, ideal types extract from the flow of time those change features most useful for rendering phenomena intelligible by highlighting a “deviation” between actual events and our mental models. This helps us “discriminate between adequate, coincidental, and incidental factors” in concrete phenomena (Jackson 2011, 152; Ruggie 1998b, 861). But thanks to its more flex­ ible metanarrative of science and correspondingly capacious thematic standard, 23 Davis (2005, 156 emphasis added) argues that case selection depends on ideal typification because it “is a matter of concept extension and not of identifying real or natural empirical borders.”

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154  International Relations and the Problem of Time ideal typification treats such deviations as opportunities for further interpretive exploration rather than indicators of interference with real causal powers or vari­ables that must be excised to allow for proper inference.

Concordant Discordance: Counterfactuals Inasmuch as they “pinpoint those moments of historical contingency where things could have gone off in quite another direction” (Jackson  2011, 199, 152; Weber 1949, 166), which helps us weigh the importance of particular factors in producing observed outcomes, ideal types often comingle with counterfactual analysis, which renders discordant occurrences more concordant.24 Puzzling happenings become less so by reference to earlier pivots, forks, turning points, or choices, all identified by ideal typification and then subjected to counterfactuals about things turning out differently in order to assess their importance—regardless of their reliability or stability—to those happenings. Interpretivist counterfactuals unfold quite differently than neopositivist ones (cf. Jackson 2011, 199; KKV 1994, 89). Although both involve imaginative reconstructions, as noted earlier neopositivists adopt an “anything goes” approach, up to and including hypothetical time travel, to grant inference a sense of experimental control. By contrast, interpretivists hew to standards derived from the facts of experience (see Ruggie  1998b, 880; Jackson  2011, 20–1) and need not build toward any fictive regularity. They need only identify chance and malleable factors that are either adequate or important to actions and events (Dunne 1998, 187; see Ruggie 1998a, 94; 1998b, 861). Free of narrative strictures about unified science or real structures as the basis of progress, and viewing action as unavoidably temporal, interpretivists can proceed by standards more consistent with lived experience. Rather than trying to tame or transcend them, interpretivists engage change relations in order to comprehend them as part of a holistic Gestalt of the phenomenon in question (Lynch 2014, 17). Ultimately, this means grappling with time in less fanciful, more empirical, and indeed more realistic ways. This is not to say that the overall flow of time does not present interpretivists with discordant events. However, by putting contingency, uncertainty, and fluidity to work in their explanations, interpretivists emplot experiences more min­im­ al­ly and more flexibly. Within thematics of insider knowledge, interpretivists work with a variety of concrete plot themes like tragedy (Levine 2012; Lu 2012; Shilliam 2012), irony (Cochran 1999, 173–211; Niebuhr 2008), satire (Hall 2014; Särmä 2016), and concatenating contingencies (Goetze 2017; Weldes et al. 1999; McCourt 2014; Buzan and Lawson 2015). These tease out the minimal structural features of human experience and action in time, rather than pitching stories 24  This serves singular causal analysis (Jackson 2011, 156) as well as genealogy (e.g. de Goede 2005).

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Methodologies  155 about multiple worlds or ontological layers free from time’s dominion but prac­tic­al­ly unavailable to us. While interpretivism may offer less concordant visions of the fabric of existence, by keeping discord “in” through the ways mentioned, it offers assurances that, if not all, much of lived experience is intelligible and meaningful. We need not move to a world above or below, but can instead pursue provisional knowledge to grapple with and to time this realm.

The Old Temptation to Tame Time By the same token, there is little in these narrative rubrics to prevent interpretivists from turning back to old confrontational habits. For instance, Vincent Pouliot’s (2007, 366, 368) “sobjectivist” methods synthesis recommends “detach[ing] the meaning of a practice from its advent” through intellectual transformations and then objectifying this meaning once “through the in­ter­pret­ation of intersubjective contexts” and once again by “historicization.” Although he appreciates that “social life is fundamentally temporal,” Pouliot (2007, 366–8 emphasis added) seeks “objectified meanings,” which must “lose their temporality and locality” so as to “become open to timeless, universal interpretation.” This takes interpretivism over a temporal divide to the fictively closed spaces of neopositivism. Despite drawing on similar narratological resources as this project, Pouliot (2007, 365–7, 372–3, 378) reads out of them a lesson about removing “temporality” to facilitate reliable interpretation. What makes this comport with mainstream IR is that by detaching dynamic occurrences from their contexts, researchers “stop” processes and then “set [them] in motion,” giving an illusion of control, objectivity, and “timeless, universal” knowledge (Pouliot  2007, 372; cf. Lynch 2014, 10–13). So while we should “study politics in time,” the “temporality of social life” only becomes a legitimate element of knowledge once we render it “fairly static” (Pouliot 2007, 372, 366). Similarly, formal methods and computer simulations can “ ‘re-run’ the tape of history thousands of time[s] in order to model intersubjective evolution over time” or to provide “a ‘social laboratory’ for understanding how structures such as norms emerge from agency” (Pouliot 2007, 372–3, 379). In these ways, Pouliot’s attempt to render interpretive methods amen­able to neopositivist science end up disciplining temporal features that most interpretivists accommodate and even embrace as inextricable parts of social life (see Lynch 2014, 5). * * * Interpretivists use narrative timing devices to gain leverage on the meaning of political occurrences and how past processes, present situations, and future possibilities can be understood together and usefully altered. Although its conduct of inquiry is much more flexible and faithful to the articles of lived experience, interpretivism still works to unfold orderly series. Nor does it guarantee that the problem of Time will not “return,” either in the form of confounding events or, as

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156  International Relations and the Problem of Time we saw, in a shift toward mainstream methodologies. As with explanations and theories of all stripes, “[w]hen a narrative is constructed, something is left out. When an end is defined, other ends are rejected, and one may not know what those ends are” (Spivak 1990, 18–19). So while in terms of time interpretivist narratives comport more closely with empirical reality (see Lynch 2014, 5), like other methodologies they also proffer multiple narratives and narrative temporalities in place of the overwhelming totality of international politics. What sets interpretivism apart, then, is that its narrative timing modes are more supple and open to timing a huge variety of international political phenomena, many of which simply cannot fit within neopositivist or critical realist accounts.

Conclusion Key methodological tenets of neopositivism, critical realism, and interpretivism manifest narrative responses to the problem of Time much like those introduced in chapter three. Each methodology inhabits a wider scientific metanarrative, follows a guiding thematic for reasoning about the phenomena of international pol­ it­ics, creatively filters the complexity of those phenomena in order to gain a particular sort of analytical traction, and renders discordance concordant in novel ways that also comport with these narrative commitments. The extent to which proponents appraise time as antithetical to successful knowledge development directly impacts IR methodological choices. In these ways, prevailing IR methodological approaches support a general timing project called social science using particular narrative devices to tame, discipline, or placate the problem of Time. Neopositivists time international politics by rigorously reducing the number of relevant change continua needing integration and coordination and then mimicking laboratory conditions through a series of fictive accounts of quasitimeless, alternate universes. Critical realists time a greater range and number of change continua, but emplot these in theological stories of a realm whose onto­ logic­al “reality” symbolizes eternity. Interpretivists also time numerous change continua, but they do so with more suppleness and realism in order to identify the semantics of action through a provisional ordering of time-bound experience.

Mapping IR as a Timing Project These differences track from most opposed to time’s flow to least, from least explicitly narrativistic to most, and from most rigid or brittle timing to most flex­ible or open. We can thus situate IR’s methodological alternatives along the spectrum of timing and “times” introduced in Part One (see figures 3 and 4, pp. 70 and 105, respectively), which specifies references to time as indicators of ongoing timing efforts. Indeed, doing so highlights important tensions in IR methodologies.

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Methodologies  157 (… eternity)

‘Time’ utterances

Abstract

Figurational

[Critical realist methodology] nd ce er ns et ’ ra g m ime T Westernin d ‘t m fie standard i Ti methodology] [Neopositivist time Re

e tiv Chronos ra r a Neutral Kairos K Kairos N Interpretivist descriptions & methodology Fluvial uvi l metaphors ors

Critical realist descriptions Problematic Neopositivist descriptions sm ity Malevolent ni al ha por d ecgods n m o m e sp g r t Re imin cula T rti pa

Active

Timing

Passive

Figure 5  Narrative reasoning and the Time-bound world

The methodologies discussed in this chapter map onto this spectrum as follows (see figure 5 above): Neopositivism’s restrictive scientific metanarrative, rigid thematics, and most stringent creative filtration would seem to locate it near the upper right corner, where transcendent timing meters help reify “time” as a thing in itself. Neopositivist’s conflation of all time with Western standard time supports this. Yet neopositivist proposals also lament the problem of Time more than other methodologies, which pushes them further down and to the left, nearer to the point where we respond to timing challenges with new or revised mechanisms that may produce a narrative temporality. This highlights a temporal schizophrenia in neopositivism, which employs notably rigid narrative meters and Western standard time in pre-figured analyses of phenomena largely resistant to both. I think the way to make sense of this dissonance is to understand neopositivism as aspiration, a methodological effort to reckon ruin like clockwork in hopes that international politics will become more amenable to passive timing and thereby less ruinous. Here the laboratory ideal, both in methodological prescriptions and as a heuristic (Mintz, Yang, and McDermott  2011, 493), highlights neopositivism’s grand wager on passive timing. Critical realism’s scientific metanarrative is somewhat less restrictive than neopositivism but still employs a rigid methodological standard for what counts as ‘real’, so it would seem to fall somewhat further down and to the left of neopositivism. Critical realism’s openness to irregularity, interference, and inconsistency in the empirical record supports this, signaling a methodology less vexed by the problem of Time and less enamoured of passive timing. Yet critical realists do frequently lament the problem of Time while gazing longingly in the direction of eternity, that absolutely unchanging and timeless realm

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158  International Relations and the Problem of Time located well beyond Western standard time and indeed beyond the limits of our spectrum. This indicates a different but no less dissonant desire to use the symbolic language of eternity to grapple with intrinsically temporal phenomena. In this sense, critical realists have to move unstable, disordered, and contingent political phenomena further along our spectrum—from phenomenal fluidity to ‘real’ rather than ‘as-if ’ stability—in order to explain and emancipate. Interpretivism’s pluralist and provisional metanarrative, modest thematic standards, and realistic creative filtration all would locate it firmly in the lower left corner of the spectrum, where ad hoc, active timing efforts grapple with the problem of Time. Yet, interpretivists lament the problem of Time far less than the other scholars, pushing the discourse up and to the right. This indicates two provocative points about timing and the problem of Time. First, the best (and perhaps only) way to truly reconcile the problem of Time is to dissolve it by accepting and engaging its purportedly troubling features and by abstaining from the allure and conceits of passive timing. Second, a social scientific or ‘meta-practical’ (Gunnell  2011) discourse such as IR can and should strike a methodological balance25 by negotiating a broad path to knowledge that avoids both the lamentation of time and any transcendent symbols of eternity.

Science Fictions One final observation. In spite of the putative theory–narrative divide that safeguards rigorous, “scientific” IR from the specter of relativism associated with plur­al­ism, it is interpretivist IR that exemplifies a most realistic approach to studying international politics in all its diversity. Provisional metanarratives, flexible thematic standards, and modest narrative timing operations help us unflinchingly engage fluid, contingent, and complex qualities as fundamental constituents of  social life rather than human foibles or the dirty deeds of malevolent time. Moreover, the quasi-timeless stories and implicit theology on which neopositivism and critical realism depend, respectively, suggest that IR methodologies that claim the mantle of science do so by composing sophisticated science fictions evocative of the laboratory or the eternal. If interpretivism produces messier, less elegant, and less stable knowledge about the vicissitudes of international politics, this simply indicates that the reality of lived time and social timing is indeed stranger than fiction. Much more than the usual suspects of understanding, postmodernism, or poststructuralism, it is IR’s “hard” scientific approaches that ask us to suspend disbelief and accept that “anything goes.”

25  By “balance” I have in mind Levine’s (2012) “constellar approach” rather than any independent, neutral position.

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6

Quantitative Approaches Mathematical Metaphors for Eternity

Introduction Chapter five examined IR’s methodological orientations and found that, despite substantial variation, they all relied on narrativized modes of reasoning to time international politics. Having covered the how, we can now examine what sorts of knowledge IR scholars develop through analyses of three particularly apt or challenging approaches. These approaches mark key reference points—two edges and a midpoint—along IR’s cultural continuum of time. This chapter addresses one edge: statistical analysis or the mathematical formalization and examination of theoretical claims. The next two cover the middle ground of historical institutionalism and the other edge of critical IR. There is significant overlap between quantitative IR and neopositivist methodology—for example, the thematic standard of experimental control ­ requires that we warrant knowledge claims about the world, often in the form of statistical tests meant to refine these claims and relegate other substantive alternatives. However, statistical time deserves a dedicated discussion for a few reasons. First, quantitative IR represents too large a sub-field to incorporate within neopositivism. Second, quantitative analysis is a dominant method employed in research publications and receives primary attention in graduate training (Sprinz and Wolinsky-Nahmias 2004a, 5–8). To date, it also sets the high-water mark for many scholars who embrace a unified scientific metanarrative of how knowledge about inter­nation­al politics develops and progresses.1 Given how much of my analysis has concerned various aspects of neopositivism, it would be remiss to ignore its champion. Third, quantitative IR represents a hard case for my theoretical framework. Statistical expressions do not employ what we usually think of as narrative discourse, although social scientists often embed them in ordinary language presentations (Collins 1984). Rather, their mathematical foundations take license from “timeless logic.”2 So it might seem there is very little of time or narrative 1  Some critical realists and interpretivists also embrace quantitative analysis (see Sayer  2010, 118–36; cf. Patomäki 2002, 133–5; Barkin and Sjoberg 2017). On the impact of quantification practices on global politics, see (Ward 2004; Merry 2016). 2  For Einstein, mathematical equations last forever and so trump politics, which are “only a matter of present concern” (quoted in Stevens 2015, 60).

International Relations and the Problem of Time. Andrew R. Hom, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andrew R. Hom. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850014.001.0001

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160  International Relations and the Problem of Time timing to be found here, an assumption that many quantitative apologists and opponents share. And yet, observers in other disciplines note that an equation “is story-like because it speaks of time and therefore organizes experience in time, at least implicitly. The time-speaking themes will shape the raw experience, as a story does when it is more than a mere unthematized chronicle” (McCloskey 1991, 22). So it would be especially conspicuous for an account of time in IR to fail to take a closer look at temporality in quantitative approaches.3 To address this hard case, the chapter develops six points that show how even quantitative IR relies on narrative timing to produce a distinctive temporality in response to the problem of Time. First, it highlights rhetorical peculiarities in the historical development of statistics that indicate their logical foundations initially served to confront the problem of Time. The second section situates quantitative approaches within neopositivism’s metanarrative vision of an inhabitable world. The third section unpacks the story in the general linear model (GLM), the conceptual core of frequentist statistics. I argue that the GLM works as a math­em­at­ic­al metaphor for eternity reliant on narrative timing devices that severely discipline the flow of time even as they rely on some aspects of it. The fourth section covers several alternatives to the GLM, which conflate “taking time ser­ious­ly” with an unreflective incorporation of Western standard time into the model combined with techniques designed to bolster it by removing other attributes associated with time (see Pang 2010, 471). The fifth section introduces the narrative timing elements of a more concertedly temporal alternative, Bayesian statistics, which sets the stage for the sixth section’s discussion of whether quantitative IR might be entering a temporal turn. Because the subject matter operates at a high level of generality and abstraction, I provide illustrations throughout drawn from research on war and international conflict.

Statistics Confronts the Problem of Time Statistics seems like a neutral system grounded in deductive and mathematical rigor. On closer inspection, it also laments and confronts the problem of Time. Emerging as a response to the collapse of pure determinism and a theologically guaranteed natural order, statistics sought to render human finitude intelligible and manageable. As early modern life perched on the precipice of disorder and  inconstancy, scholars and politicians alike strove to re-imbue it with an

3  Rather than advanced methods, this chapter concerns the aspirations and conceptual grounds from which IR statistics spring. It does not address the wider world of data analysis, which would include matters of categorization, clustering, and the rise of “big data.” There is a future discussion worth having about the timing dynamics of machine learning, similarity assessments, and unsupervised vs. supervised analyses. Thanks to Ugur Ozdemir for several invigorating glimmers of this.

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Quantitative Approaches  161 “order, completeness, and reliability” based on new forms of knowledge.4 The groundbreaking “law of mortality” rendered death (ultimate finitude) explicable from a certain remove (Hacking 1990, 40–1). In cases of more ordinary finitude, similarly law-like regularities helped order deviancy—“suicide, crime, vagrancy, madness, prostitution, disease” (Hacking 1990, 3)—by the expression of normal distributions, which subsume observed phenomena under curves that indicate their recorded and expected frequency. Normal distributions fueled descriptive statistics, which “tamed chance” by showing how seemingly random and inexplicable occurrences manifested stable underlying patterns (Hacking 1990). They also tamed problems associated with time. Previously, God or fate governed ultimate finitude, while ordinary finitude flowed from sin and other human shortcomings. With such symbolic bases in decline, statisticians provided a modicum of comfort by yoking both sorts of human limitation to hidden laws: “We coolly calculate the probability of life, to provide against the contingencies of mortality” (Burrows, quoted in Hacking 1990, 72). The normal distribution delimited hitherto fluid and troubling accidents with mathematics and thus (em)plotted the problem of Time: “Despite . . . the variations in men’s minds and circumstances, on which fires, wrecks and deaths depend, they are subject to law as invariable as gravitation . . . violation itself is subject to law. . . . These events are under control” (Farr, quoted in Hacking 1990, 115). Such advances reflected a growing sense that the aim of science was “to destroy Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration” (Carlyle 2008, 53) and thereby reaffirm the prospect of reliable relationships amidst randomness and uncertainty (see Desrosières 2010). Other core statistical concepts exercised similar poetic license. Standard de­vi­ ation, which formally denotes how much results vary from the expected value, is rooted in behavioral norms. Deviation is not too far removed from deviance, and indeed “lower” standard deviation indicates a better “fit” between the model’s ironclad logic and empirical reality, while outliers are unique results that “deviate” strikingly and thus threaten to undercut the model’s promises about the future and, by implication, the bonds of social order. As we saw in chapter four, theory competition in IR often works by interpreting these outliers to render them ir­rele­ vant by virtue of their ephemerality or idiosyncrasy. If, on the other hand, too many outliers emerge, the data becomes too “noisy” for analysis (Green, Kim, and Yoon 2001, 457; Bueno de Mesquita 1998, 142; King 1989, 126).

4  The quote is from the King of Prussia, upon the establishment of a national statistics bureau (Hacking 1990, 27). Ordinary early modern denizens worried little about this: “until about 400 years ago, people were quite happy with their natural ability to manage the uncertainties in daily life, from crossing a street to risking a fistfight” (Pearl and Mackenzie 2018, 5–6). It was only as games of chance, insurance, and the astronomical sciences became more prominent and precise that publics, elites, and scholars recognized a need to formalize probability, mortality, and error.

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162  International Relations and the Problem of Time Similarly, the inverse of the well-known correlation coefficient is the coefficient of alienation (Dorans 2000, 3) or “non-determinism,” calculated as 1 − r 2 , where r2 indicates the “coefficient of determination”; (see Abdi 2007). As the coefficient of alienation diminishes, correlations approach constancy and we near absolute certainty. By contrast, substantial alienation threatens any warrant for inference and our model’s “degree of goodness” (Wackerly, Mendenhall III, and Scheaffer 2007, 2). Note here that instead of a direct antonym for correlation, such as “non-correlation,” statistics uses a more loaded literary term—alien­ation—that augurs existential dissonance. Although IR tends to simply report the correlation rather than the alienation coefficient, the two speak to the tension between certainty and determinism on the one hand and estrangement, contingency, and chaos on the other. High correlation and low alienation indicate that the model synthesizes empirical data into a reliable and readily timed continuum that allows us to understand and solve the problem at hand (Wackerly, Mendenhall III, and Scheaffer 2007, 14).

A Statistically Inhabitable Universe While quantitative analysis can be understood as a subset of neopositivism, it is important to note that the statistical worldview actually informs neopositivism more broadly. “Every concept . . . appl[ied] to empirical social science is borrowed from classical statistics” (McKeown 1999, 166). Thus, it makes sense to ask what sort of world or “universe” quantitative scholars view as inhabitable by social science and political action.5 It is manifestly not the realm of international politics. As Daniel Geller and David Singer (1998, 1) note: “War is a rare event in world politics, but it is always with us. How can we say this? . . . The paradox is that most societies are in continuous preparation for a very rare event.” Another report underlines the implications of this: “In the extreme, how can the probability of an event that has never been seen or may never even have been imagined be predicted?” (JASON  2009, 6). Erik Gartzke (1999) argues that war becomes predictable only “in the error term,” where uncertainty, bounded rationality, and miscalculation reside. Either way, quantitative work labors to explain and predict an event central to IR but interwoven with finitude, novelty, and the flow of time. Indeed, when it comes to war and other crises, surprises are “the Essence of the Problem” but also “endless. Nothing can protect us from them . . . the tyranny of the new is everywhere the same” (Wiles 1971, 34–6). Statisticians prefer a realm of high probabilities, ideally verging on reliably determinate connections. Here the mathematical underpinnings of statistics lend a well-specified and tested model predictive power, scientific legitimacy, and the 5  Tellingly, a statistical “universe” refers to a class of observed events (see Pierson 2000, 264).

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Quantitative Approaches  163 ability to “engineer the future to produce happier outcomes” (Bueno de Mesquita 2009, xx emphasis added; Schrodt 2014, 293). This is because deduction and logic offer constancy, “universal instantiation,” and eternal validity (Geller and Singer 1998, 14), all of which evoke the promise of that which never changes as a standard for grappling with that which does (see Vasquez 2009, 7, 77 n13). For example, deductive logic guarantees “a homogenic relation between different phenomena or between aspects of a single phenomenon that holds for all exam­ ined, unexamined, past, present, and future cases” (Geller and Singer  1998, 17 emphasis added; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005, xii).6 To propound such a stable world, statistical models must be “precise,” “unambiguous,” and stripped “of all accidental details” (Kemeny  1959, 577). They can include novel content only if it is deductively derived (see Bueno de Mesquita 1985, 123; Bueno de Mesquita et al.  2005, 34–5, 264–5)—it cannot be an instance of emergent discordance or a singularity (Linklater and Suganami 2006, 87). Indeed, within a statistical model’s horizon, “no revolutionary inference can be made, since all possible inferences are predicted in advance” (Leamer  1983, 40). Similarly, surprise should only result from failures to deduce the full implications of its axiomatic truths (Kemeny  1959, 578) or assumptions (Snidal  2004, 235). Moreover, surprising conclusions should become more “familiar” and thus “seem less surprising even as the models are applied to new circumstances” (Snidal 2004, 235 emphasis added). There is little room here for the sorts of unprecedented and emergent changes long attributed to the flow of time. Although usually understood as a logical rather than a literary device, in this way the statistical model functions much like a metaphor. It uses restricted forms of novelty for the purpose of rapid instruction (see Ricoeur 2008b, 30, 37–8; 1984, 6). In metaphor, semantic gains come from logical costs, with new meaning emerging “from the ruins of the semantic pertinence as it appears in the literal reading of the sentence” (Ricoeur  1984, x, 23; see Aristotle  1926, III.10). In the statistical worldview, logic authorizes the poetic transformation of data into regularity, as well as the transference of this new meaning from the model to the world it measures (Ricoeur  1984, 6; 2008b, 30). In place of the flow of time, which seems to surprise in ways that dissolve understanding, mathematical models regulate our experiences and offer surprises that disclose hidden principles of order, which in turn promise a more inhabitable universe.

The Story in the General Linear Model In addition to their metaphorical power, statistical models manifest hallmarks of narrative timing more evident in openly narrative, historical, or otherwise 6  Homogeneity collapses the deductive/probabilistic distinction, allowing probabilistic “laws” to assert relationships so stable we can assume they hold over all time (Geller and Singer 1998, 16–17).

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164  International Relations and the Problem of Time qualitative accounts. Although highly formalized, they still work to establish ­relations—in this case, correlations7—amenable to orientation, direction, and control (Moore and Siegel  2013, 3, 13). Moreover, their mathematical terms unfold an intelligible series. We can see this most clearly in the GLM of statistical inference, the basic analytical workhorse upon which much quantitative IR builds (Sprinz and Wolinsky-Nahmias 2004a, 15; Martin 2008, 495).8 The GLM is most simply formalized as follows: Y = α + βX + ε Where Y is the outcome (dependent variable), X is the input factor (independent variable), α is the baseline value of Y when the input factor is absent or negligible (y-intercept), β is an estimate of how much the input factor affects the outcome (parameter coefficient), and ε is the error found in differences between the expected (calculated) and actual (observed and measured) values of the outcome.9 This formula does not look like a narrative, yet it reflects a timing standard of formal control, which sits within neopositivism’s wider thematic of experimental control. That is, the GLM assumes that our knowledge depends on the ability to formalize and measure phenomena in a manner whose symbolic elegance recalls repetition, mensuration, an absence of interference, and the manipulation of factors (see Schrodt 2014, 288)—that is, the experimental control of a closed laboratory space. Its equal sign posits a relationship in which Y varies reliably— equivalently or at least proportionally—as X does. This symbolic fulcrum also provides the rubric by which the GLM emplots temporal phenomena and surmounts the problem of Time. In terms of timing, its relatively simple structure also helps the GLM seem flexible and widely applicable, insofar as it enables a “decent first approximation to pretty much anything” (Schrodt 2014, 294).10

Creative Filtration Compared with lived experience, the GLM creatively and stringently filters data in four ways reflecting its synoptic theme of formal control. First, it requires homogenous variables (Bennett and Stam  2003, 166; King  1989, 126–7). Homogeneity refers to the “naïve” assumption that the behavior of an independent variable (X) is stable from one moment to the next and moreover across large spans 7  Etymologically: “together” (cor) + relation. 8  On IR’s GLM “monoculture,” in particular how it encourages the belief that all inference (rather than regression-based inference) becomes impossible in the common IR situation where explanatory variables exceed cases, see (Schrodt 2014, 293–5, 287; Beck, King, and Zeng 2000, 24). 9  For a GLM with continuous variables: Y = b0 + ∑(biXi) + ε. 10  This is also a matter of pedagogical utility (Wakefield 2013, 257).

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Quantitative Approaches  165 of chronological time (Patomäki 2002, 134). This lets the analyst assign a constant value to the estimate (β) of how influential that variable is (Bennett and Stam 2003, 18; Green, Kim, and Yoon 2001). For example, various IR studies assume that democracy, state preferences, or decision-making procedures exert fixed influence on the likelihood of international conflicts (see Green, Kim, and Yoon 2001, 456; Bennett and Stam 2003, 166). Homogeneity can exacerbate “temporal autocorrelation” (see Box-Steffensmeier and Jones  1997), which occurs when some causally important factor missing in a given “moment of observation” gets excluded from each subsequent “moment,” compounding the error as observation progresses. For instance, in assessing democracy’s impact on war, a GLM might ignore the importance of repeated interactions between countries. But if shared history and diplomatic contact matter, then each additional observation adds to model bias.11 In this way, the GLM’s epistemological assumptions encourage practical timing failures. Second, GLM variables must also be independent. They cannot interact with each other, except in the way being tested. Moreover, the probability of a given event occurring in the present “is not impacted by the past” (King  1989, 126; cf.  Abbott  2001, 45; Suganami  1996, 100), an assumption based on laboratory ex­peri­ments that does not comport with most social contexts (Schrodt 2014, 295). That is, “a datum is a datum, and one can draw inference with equal certitude across [unit pairings] or across years” (Green, Kim, and Yoon  2001, 441–2, 458). Additionally, the GLM’s causal order is predicated on the assumption that vari­ables change at the same rate and within the same “time horizon” (Abbott 2001, 44). If, instead, variables change at different rates “it becomes impossible to spe­cify the causal or temporal order,” even though events “of equivalent causal importance just don’t always take the same amount of time to happen” (Abbott 2001, 47, 46). Third, the GLM filters out complexity. Because each variable requires its own unique parameter, accommodating more factors quickly renders the GLM cumbersome. Thus, “even the most detailed analyses must remain infinitely removed from a full specification of factors that impinge upon the event being studied” (Bueno de Mesquita  1985, 133–4). For instance, international conflict research designs often treat war only as a “dyadic” interaction between two states. The Great War cannot occur in such a model; rather Austria-Hungary and Germany each engage in four simultaneous but discrete conflicts with Russia, Great Britain, France, and the United States (e.g. Bremer 1992; cf. McLaughlin et al. 1998, 240; Suganami 1996, 95; Beck, King, and Zeng 2000, 22).12

11  Since the error compounds with each observation, a common solution is simply to observe less frequently (see Abbott  2001, 55; Green, Kim, and Yoon  2001, 459 n29). The solution to a problem raised by creative filtration is stricter filtration. 12  Researchers get around this by adding interaction or lag terms, but these add complexity and do not easily integrate into the GLM (Abbott 2001, 57–8).

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166  International Relations and the Problem of Time Finally, the GLM creatively filters in a causal hierarchy where large and/or important effects only associate with large, stable causes (McCloskey  1991, 26; Pierson 2004, 51). Causation “can never flow from small to large, from arbitrary to general, from the minor event to the major development” (Abbott 2001, 44). It does not accommodate dynamics like feedback, temporal asymmetry, or se­quen­cing (its values and terms can travel back and forth across the “=” sign) because its variable values represent discrete and self-sufficient measures of the all-important moment of observation. This “eotemporal” view of relational processes (Stevens 2015, 47), in which moments are not meaningfully connected and their order thus entirely reversible, leaves the GLM unable to accommodate the possibility that “relatively small events . . . occurring at the right moment, can have large and enduring consequences” (Pierson  2004, 44). Inasmuch as the GLM operates as “rhetorical dogma” (McCloskey  1991, 32), these assumptions hold important theoretical consequences. For instance, they “disable” statistical analysis of the “micro-generation of macrostructure” (Abbott 2001, 47), which reinforces certain IR prejudices about the systemic sources of state behavior (Waltz  1979; Katzenstein 1996; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; cf. Kaarbo 2015; 2018; Stein 2017). The GLM also recapitulates our venerable aversion to time. It not only precludes “any causing of the large by the small” but also of “the enduring by the fleeting,” or of the significant by the “sudden” (Abbott  2001, 44, 47). Its causal hierarchy complements a more general theoretical value scale that subordinates the passing, fluid, or otherwise irregular and unreliable aspects of social life associated with temporal disorder. The GLM gambles that if it “separate[s] out merely accidental circumstances, the general results then present such a great regularity that it becomes impossible to attribute them to chance” (Guerry, quoted in Hacking 1990, 73 emphasis added). To tame chance we have to tame time by filtering in only those elements we would expect in a concordant universe.13 In IR especially, this temporal dogma ignores numerous impactful “one-offs” or small-N phenomena, including Cleopatra’s nose (Abbott 2001, 47), the many “accidents” of war (Clausewitz 1989, 86, 193), minor perturbations that “snowball” (Pierson 2000, 17–18; Fioretos 2011, 377), singular situations of critical importance (Bull 2000; Steele  2008a), and historical “ruptures” (Edkins  2003; Lundborg  2011).14 Creative filtration here helps the GLM produce concordant discordance, assuring us that big happenings flow from proportionate factors, that the relationships recur (Martin 2008, 495), and that all of these elements compose an orderly and manageable universe. In an important sense, then, the GLM’s prevalence privileges large-N studies over large-impact phenomena.

13  For a technical fix that loosens the requirements of filtration, see King and Zeng (2001). 14  This recalls efforts across IR to move up from the ideographic assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand to larger, more general, causes of WWI—e.g. the “Balkan powderkeg” and Great Power rivalries (Koch 1984) or entangling alliances (Joll and Martel 2007, 49–86).

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Quantitative Approaches  167

Experiential Cleavage The GLM cleaves empirical processes by selecting an appropriate beginning and end of observation. Because it filters out much empirical detail on grounds of non-homogeneity and dependence, the GLM can cleave quite disproportionately. By exchanging any sense of step-by-step connections (such as those found in mechanistic or historical explanations) between its endpoints for a symbolic formulation of constant conjunctions, it also imbues its relationship with a sense of immediacy. “ ‘When x is low, y is high’ ” (Samuelson, quoted in Robinson 1980, 220) vitiates the relevance of middle steps and intervening processes. This becomes problematic if the model includes “censored” data from cases exceeding its observation window. Censoring leads to spurious inferences because it treats partial cases as unchanging even though they may vary significantly just outside the window of observation (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones  1997, 1416, 1430; BoxSteffensmeier, Reiter, and Zorn 2003, 37; see also Suganami 1996, 88, 95).

Concordant Discordance Glossing over the middle of the story helps render discordant changes concordant. Much as in D-N accounts (see p. 96), surprising, novel, or otherwise confounding occurrences between the GLM’s bookends do not hold explanatory import. The GLM also produces concordant discordance less obviously through its “null hypothesis,” which posits no significant relationship between the independent and dependent variables beyond that established by the flip of a coin (Collins  1984, 331). This seems sensible: real and significant correlations should result from something more than chance or random coincidence. However, the moniker “null hypothesis” misleads by suggesting a conceptual and mathematical emptiness that does not actually characterize statistical randomness (Abbott 2001; Collins 1984). “Null” connotes a void, non-existence, the absence of effects or any binding force; mathematically it is synonymous with the “empty” number zero. These ideas associate strongly with the problem of Time, which dissolves relations and augurs chaos and a void of meaning. The null hypothesis implies that we wish to know whether something more than mere time brought about an observed outcome. And yet the GLM does not treat randomness and chance as “empty.” Rather, coin flips distribute more and more evenly with repetition. These “laws” of randomness derived from discrete, independent events, but we now apply them to complex events and processes (see Hacking 1990, 41, 111–12). Probability theory propounds the baseline condition of a bounded game of chance rather than an utterly random, pattern-less welter.15 Likewise, the “null” 15  The “random variable,” then, does not describe actual randomness, but maps events onto a particular mathematical function.

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168  International Relations and the Problem of Time hypothesis concerns neither the absence of effect nor binding force; nor merely the “formal language of uncertainty” (Moore and Siegel 2013, 175).16 Rather, it embeds a substantive claim about existential order. Testing against it is no neutral operation because doing so sets up an “artificial dichotomy” (Gelman et al. 2013, 95) and competition between two theoretical and temporal visions of the world, both of which surmount the problem of Time: the proposed correlation and another model in which chance produces “certain distributions” (Collins  1984, 334, 331 emphasis added). This realm already possesses more order than the sheer accidents or chance or “plain dumb luck” of life in time (Collins 1984, 332). Rather than a “blind nullity” (see Collins 1984, 332), the null hypothesis offers us an orderly emplotment of discordant events under the synoptic grip of a normal curve. Here emplotment is more graphical than strictly narrative, but the distinction holds little difference when we consider that such distributions provide summary stories that reduce discordant novelty by showing that, when enough individually unsettling events occur, their collected outcomes settle within a certain and proportionate range.17 Quantitative scholars readily partake of this concordant discordance. In his expected utility model of the end of the Cold War, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (1998) uses a randomized variable to represent security salience. This helps “capture the range of possible flux in the relative importance of security issues” and allows him to “test the model while controlling, in a sense, for the potential impact of exogenous random shocks that alter the relative importance of security issues from state to state and from time to time” (Bueno de Mesquita 1998, 139 emphasis added). Here nullity delimits novelty and flux, emplotting significant discordance prior to the assessment of whether his theoretical proposition outperforms chance. There is no statistical test for the veracity of the null hypothesis or random distributions—probability theory assumes their veracity (Collins  1984, 336).18 Furthermore, they self-insure against future novelty. Neither single nor multiple outliers can vitiate random distributions because “any finite number of observations of an event, or relationship among variables, cannot be taken as conclusive evidence regarding the relationship among a potentially infinitely large number of instances” (Bueno de Mesquita 1985, 122). A sort of narrative lock-in is at work here. Both confirmation and contradiction of this idea reproduce its worldview much the same. Far from empty, the null hypothesis makes substantive claims about the character of a limitless array of events—it is more accurately an infinity

16  Nor is it consistent with the “deductive-hypothetical” approach: “if we have theory guiding our models, then the tabula rasa of the null hypothesis is both intellectually dishonest—we are claiming to start from a mindset which we most certainly do not have—and the information it provides us is generally useless” (Schrodt 2014, 297). 17  Historically, “normal” associated with “objective,” which underwrote the distribution’s “indispensability” as a knowledge warrant (Hacking 1990, 160). 18  Testing the null hypothesis statistically would involve an infinite regress.

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Quantitative Approaches  169 hypothesis that guarantees that social relations remain minimally amenable to timing, and may become even more so the further we move into the future.19 So does the “law of error.” Since measurement errors are necessarily unpredictable (or else we would pre-empt them), we commonly treat the error term as normally distributed, with a mean value of zero (Bennett and Stam 2003, 23; Leamer 1983, 37; Ostrom 1990, 16). Indeed, we cannot authorize a regression equation without limiting or ordering uncertainty in this way. The law of error thus helps warrant the model’s truth claims (Anscombe 1973, 18) by distilling concord from discord. Moreover, as a “form of cosmic order”, it “reigns with severity in complete ­self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob and the greater the anarchy the more perfect is its sway. Let a large sample of chaotic elements be taken and marshalled in order of their magnitudes, and then, however wildly irregular they appeared, an unexpected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been present all along” (Galton, quoted in Hacking  1990, 186 emphasis added). On this view, errors, random and chancy events, and the baseline ligatures of reality already rise above the hurly-burly of time as a precondition of statistical timing.

Unfolding an Intelligible Series Under ideal conditions, the GLM’s timing devices unfold an absolute, unirectilin­ ear, and quasi-punctual (see p. 97) vision of social relations, in which changes in the explanatory variable directly and immediately correspond with those in the outcome, even if much happens in between them.20 Its synoptic theme of formal control filters in only independent and homogeneous variables and allows only big and stable things to cause important outcomes. If it finds a statistically significant relationship, the GLM imputes a single sequence leading inexorably from X to Y, regardless of context (Abbott 2001, 37–63; Green, Kim, and Yoon 2001, 445; Bennett and Stam 2003, 166; Xenias 2005, 367–8; Moore and Siegel 2013, 56).21 Where no such correlation obtains, the normal distribution of error and null or infinity hypothesis maintain the past, present, and future as a homogeneous and intelligible continuum—the more events occur, the more resolute the pattern becomes. In these ways, the GLM replaces empirical features linked to temporal flux with a series more conducive to communication, measurement, and control— that is, to successful and ultimately passive timing. 19  Thus, even a statistical test failing to move beyond nullity implicitly extends “the range of application of a statistical model of the universe” (Collins 1984, 336). 20  For example, a GLM of the democratic peace makes no distinction between states that achieve independence via secession, mandate, decolonization, or revolution, although these very different pathways impact the peacefulness of the new state. 21  “Significance” rejects the null hypothesis but does not evaluate how or how much that variable matters.

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170  International Relations and the Problem of Time Furthermore, although strictly speaking the GLM assesses relationships within empirical data, it frequently gets conflated with the more “gluttonous” (Schrodt 2014, 294) claim that, despite its manifest richness, variety, and dynamism, the world “actually obeyed the rules of [mathematical] linear trans­form­ations” (Abbott 2001, 59). As two sympathetic critics note, “when the only tool you have is regression, the world has a surprising tendency to look [unirecti]linear and additive” (Braumoeller and Sartori 2004, 135). By this point, the GLM has moved from a specific narrative timing device to a reified timing meter, overlaying reality with a vision of time as a unitary, straight, and predictable dimension.22 In doing so, the GLM glosses over significant variations and challenges of practical timing, even though prediction and control are intrinsically pragmatic ideals that lend the GLM its scientific cache. The problem here is not a “timeless” view of social life but instead the way in which the GLM “fills” time to achieve a unirectilinear vision of social relations.23 So while the GLM relentlessly removes context (McIntosh  2014, 486–8), it does not remove time altogether. Rather, it replaces context with a temporal series amenable to the strictest, simplest, and most passive timing imaginable. These same elements lead scholars to refer to GLM-based inference as “frequentist” statistics. Its ability to explain and anticipate events depends upon the past being a “good predictor of the future” (Bennett and Stam  2003, 8)—there must be a straightforward and determinate continuity between them. Otherwise, there is no rationale for subsuming outlier events under the logic of its distribution. Hence why “big breaks from past patterns” pose such a problem for quantitative analysis (Bueno de Mesquita 2009, xix). Serious doubts persist about this continuity assumption. There exists no necessary (i.e. logical) link between past, present, and future, and the “entire universe up till now may be simply one gigantic accidental sample; if we think otherwise, it is because we impose a pattern of causality on it. Statistics does not avoid this; it simply imposes a model of chance distributions, which themselves were induced from past experience” (Collins  1984, 354 n2). Or perhaps the “ ‘statistical universe’ is always new, the future is always unlike the past” (Wiles 1971, 33 emphasis added). Frequentist statistical inference simply assumes that past events form a subset of a total population. Even inductive inference assumes there exist enough similarities between the past and the present that we can meaningfully compare

22  “Linear” in the GLM refers to the straightforward mathematical transformation of matrices or vectors (see Abbott  2001, 44). GLMs cannot handle sined, cyclical, multilinear, or even curvilinear (e.g. exponential) processes (see Ostrom 1990, 10–11). McCloskey (1991, 25) illustrates this problem nicely: “The commonest theme of battle history, the horseshoe nail, is a case of a non-linear differential equation: For want of a nail the shoe was lost. / For want of the shoe the horse was lost. / For want of the horse the rider was lost. / For want of the rider the battle was lost. / For want of the battle the kingdom was lost. . . . The rate of loss feeds on itself.” 23  On IR misattributions of “timeless,” see Hom (2018c, 308–11).

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Quantitative Approaches  171 them. Both depend upon continuous and consistent temporality connecting important and puzzling events together. Furthermore, the GLM is inconsistent on continuity in two ways. First, it treats variables and moments of observation as independent and self-sufficient, and measures them with discrete intervals of Western standard time (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones  1997, 1423).24 That is, its theory depends on continuity assumptions while in practice it depends on discontinuous occurrences. Overcoming this inconsistency requires brute calculus, gathering more observations over shorter yet still discrete intervals to better approximate continuous processes (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997, 1424). This costly and laborious fix aggravates temporal autocorrelation—a more time consuming solution in mul­tiple senses. Second, the GLM ignores questions of sequence and of path dependence (see Pierson 2004) by filtering out non-systematic factors and cleaving disproportionately. It presumes that “the order of things does not influence the way they turn out,” that a factor’s history “is not relevant to its current future” (Abbott 2001, 51, 39). By filtering out ephemeral and “small” events and eliding any step-by-step causal pathway, it supports the aforementioned causal hierarchy but runs afoul of “fundamental theoretical intuitions about human events” (Abbott 2001, 51, 59), such as the importance of seemingly minor or fleeting events on further developments. Yet, if these “when-aspects” do not matter, it becomes difficult to sustain the belief that the past provides a reliable distribution of future possibilities. In its quest to time politics as generally and passively as the clock or calendar, the GLM suppresses vital aspects of dynamic processes, as well as the impact of one change on another. This undercuts the relational capacity of timing and, as critics point out (Braumoeller and Sartori 2004; Schrodt 2006; 2014), renders the GLM unhelpful and sometimes entirely irrelevant for making sense of many (of the most important) political phenomena. The GLM aspires to a “clock model” of causation noted earlier (see p. 97, and Almond and Genco 1977). The irony here is that while it does abstract a great deal, compared with Western standard time, the GLM simply cannot abstract far enough. Clocks do so fully and completely, treating numbers per se as relation-establishing tools whose substantive agnosticism undergirds their supple timing power. Because it tests substantive claims, the GLM necessarily loads formal terms with some concrete content, albeit min­ imal, as in the instances discussed above. For the same reason, it also treats the past, present, and future as bound together in a durative whole constituted by something much more meaningful than mere mensurability. While the clock’s regularly produced numbers stand for sheer succession, in the GLM they stand for something else and something more—the promise that symbolic succession will produce regularity. These more demanding objectives push the GLM to

24  King (1989) contends this misfit is more a matter of data collection.

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172  International Relations and the Problem of Time priv­il­ege determinism over dexterity, elegance over richness, and an eternal metaphor of order and stability over not only the problem of Time but any sense of dynamic relations. It thus crosses a threshold from the pragmatic and passive power associated with effective timing meters to brittle impertinence, epitomized by a de­cisive­ly closed view of time.

Taking Time Seriously? Not surprisingly, given these issues, statistically inclined critics call for methods to “take time seriously” (Beck, Katz, and Tucker  1998; Box-Steffensmeier et al. 2014, 126, 215), either by accommodating temporal effects within the GLM or by developing alternative methods. These proposals include time series analyses, pooled cross-sectional designs, and the probability of rare events in the first instance, and event history models in the latter. However, the first group works entirely within the GLM’s theoretical assumptions, and the latter marks a distinction with only cursory differences. If there is a “temporal turn” in quantitative IR, so far much of it involves doubling down on deep-seated assumptions about the problem of Time.

Time in, Time Out One of the earliest temporal responses to GLM limitations is time series analysis (Stimson  1985, 914), which incorporates temporal dynamics like the effects of elapsed time on negotiations (Carnevale and Lawler 1986) or of various factors on war duration (Bennett and Stam  2003), and which generally promises to accommodate a more diachronic understanding of social phenomena. Time series models use data collected over “a period of equally-spaced discrete time” (West 2013, 145), e.g. t0, t1, t2, . . . tn. Each datum counts as a different observation (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones  2004, 11–17; Abbott  2001, 44; Ostrom  1990, 6). Proponents claim this brute additive method enables more temporally sensitive inferences. It also remains firmly within the confines of the GLM’s temporal imagination. Time series’ more nuanced temporal intervals still correspond to Western standard time units—the only question is whether t0, t1, t2, . . . tn refers to a series of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months. Likewise, when issues arise in time series research, they typically revolve around the question of on which Western standard time interval to observe (e.g. fiscal quarters or months?). They do not involve serious reflection on the implications of relying on this hegemonic timing regime when grappling with heterotemporal domains of interest. This should not surprise, given that Western standard time provides a most familiar and pre-operationalized variable widely conflated

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Quantitative Approaches  173 with Time per se. Yet, without considering the empirical fact and the­or­et­ic­al consequences of Western standard time’s very recent, overtly political origins (see Hom 2010), this makes it hard to take seriously claims about taking time seriously. Similarly, to establish reliable relationships, time series analyses assume unilinear path dependence or they treat multilinear paths as structural break points requiring a new dummy variable (Box-Steffensmeier et al. 2014, 206–11), rather than basic temporal features of social life (Hutchings 2008b). Nevertheless, time series researchers hope indexing multiple observations of the same case or entity to successive time units (Ostrom 1990, 5) can accommodate multivocal variables (especially when time-lags are used; see Abbott  2001, 50), relax assumptions of variable independence with durative dummy variables, and in some cases analyze non-unirectilinear causal relationships (Beck, Katz, and Tucker 1998, 1260–1, 1262 n7). These improvements should reduce inference errors assessing temporal dependence in the forms of feedback loops, auto­cor­rel­ ation, or historical development (Beck, Katz, and Tucker  1998, 1263) or by in­corp­or­at­ing explicitly temporal phenomena like duration and aging (Beck, Katz, and Tucker 1998, 1261; Ostrom 1990), or memory, shocks, and seasonality (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004, 19, 9–10, 43). The most basic way to address the temporal trends these elements help disclose is to “detrend” the data set, for example by regressing it on a linear timeline (BoxSteffensmeier et al. 2014, 23). Here we assume values change by the same amount between each observation (Box-Steffensmeier et al. 2014, 24–5). However, if the data is “stochastic,” i.e. its outcome values rise and fall over some time period (rather than the entirety of the set) due to temporary or inconsistent processes, then we need more sophisticated techniques. For example, autoregressive moving averages (ARMA) assess whether there exist significant (but indeterminate and inconstant) temporal dynamics impacting our hypothesized correlation. Autoregression tests for whether the prior value or values of a dependent variable has a significant impact on its current value; moving averages show whether any significant spikes or shocks inflect the data (Box-Steffensmeier et al. 2014, 29–33). If the data manifests memory or shocks that do not naturally and quickly recede from the system, which is often the case in time series data (Brandt and Freeman 2006, 6), we may use an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA). This identifies and pulls out temporal structure—like trend (the expected value changes as a function of time but not prior values), “random walk” (values rise and fall over time but never revert back to an equilibrium), or “drift” (current value depends on prior value and a constant)—always with the objective of rendering the data subset more amenable to frequentist regression (Box-Steffensmeier et al. 2014, 125–38). These tools mitigate temporal bias to enable better prediction and control (Box and Jenkins 1970; Ostrom 1990, 5; Beck, King, and Zeng 2000). However, they do so by cleansing or “filter[ing]” the data’s temporal structure, ideally leaving behind

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174  International Relations and the Problem of Time a “pure” series of “white noise”—that is, a data subset normally distributed with mean zero and constant variance (Box-Steffensmeier et al. 2014, 22, 26). That is, successful ARMA and ARIMA techniques expunge significant temporal factors from the data. Tellingly, the null hypothesis equivalent of post-estimation tests (e.g. the Q statistic, see Box-Steffensmeier et al. 2014, 46) is that the data is “sta­ tionary,” that all temporal effects fade or leave the system relatively quickly. This indicates that the expected value of the dependent variable is once again independent of its location in the time series and so we can treat its mean value as constant over the long run. The ideal here remains to return temporal phenomena to the familiar ground of general, linear correlation, where sequence, dur­ ation, process, and shocks no longer matter. These methodological innovations do little to resolve frequentist statistic’s problem with time. The ideal relationship between variables remains unirectilinear (Ostrom  1990, 14; see Abbott  2001). Homogeneity requirements entail that observation still takes place at discrete temporal intervals (Ostrom 1990, 5, 14). And even though there persists “a basic and unpredictable element of randomness” here (Johnston 1984, 14), analysts assume it to be small, of constant variance, self-cancelling, and uncorrelated (Ostrom 1990, 9; Abbott 2001, 45). Other technical patches similarly aim to emplot new data subsets according to the GLM’s synoptic theme. Temporal lags recapitulate the random distribution’s normalizing logic of emplotment. We include lagged variables to minimize temporal autocorrelation—they allow us to treat temporal effects as converging “toward zero when the distance in time becomes larger and larger” (Theil, quoted in Ostrom 1990, 42). Combined with time series data, this produces a “crude approximation” that is more “tractable” because it assumes that the passage of time simply cancels out its own discordance (Ostrom 1990, 43). Known associates of time, like randomness, emergent novelty, flux, and general discordance still have no place in this story of consistent, univocal, and immanently mensurable social relations. Similarly, temporal data only becomes properly “longitudinal” to the extent we can treat it as conceptually identical to other, non-temporal elements. This helps us draw multiple data from a single case and opens up the possibility of combining time series cross-case variations in a “pooled cross-sectional” design. Although these adjustments acknowledge variations within individual cases and may filter out variables that do not change “over time,” the overarching aim remains to de-trend, to add dummy variables, or otherwise scrub problematic temporal features so as to increase the size of the sample population and our prospects for generalizing from it (Green, Kim, and Yoon 2001, 458–9). Temporal factors can provide new data only under the strictest conditions, in which a datum is a datum is a datum. We might expect analyses of rare events to proceed differently. They are, after all, just the things that time is thought to “bring” to global politics. Yet inasmuch as rare events come in for analysis rather than relegation to the margins, they represent indictments—those outcomes so important that we cannot ignore them

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Quantitative Approaches  175 but also ones that could and therefore should have been expected (Baert  1992, 91). For example, while trying to show that fluctuating variables do not undercut the democratic peace thesis, John O’Neal and Bruce Russett (2001, 477) introduce as many lag terms as necessary to increase the number of cases available for testing propositions about rare events like war. This parses time to render one of its problematic features amenable to a generally linear correlation. Gary King and Langche Zeng (2001, 693–5) think the problem with rare events lies in the op­pos­ ite direction. By selecting on the dependent variable, they decrease the universe of cases from which rare events are drawn so as not to underestimate their prob­abil­ity. Within these “smaller-N” designs, rare events exert more influence on results and thus help generate an inference that renders them predictable (King and Zeng 2001, 693–5). The former renders rare events intelligible by reducing the significance of their rarity; the latter by reducing their rarity per se.25 Both operations reflect a persistent desire to fit even the most singular events in a general and passive explanatory timing mode.

Temporal Alternatives to the GLM Event history models (EHMs) mount a more substantial temporal challenge to the GLM.26 EHMs use “data giving the number, timing, and sequence of changes in a variable of interest” to better capture the temporal dynamics of political change (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones  1997, 1414; Box-Steffensmeier, Reiter, and Zorn 2003, 33). Emerging in the actuarial sciences (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997, 1421), EHMs respond to the same links between time and finitude that motivated the rise of frequentist statistics. Instead of the “law of mortality,” actuarial scientists developed “life” or “mortality” tables assigning to each age a “probability of death” by the next birthday. Although they have moved beyond reckoning mortality, the EHM idiom persists in this tradition. Units of analysis “survive” for some duration, during which they are continually “at risk” until they “fail” or the observation ends (Beck, Katz, and Tucker 1998, 1264). This yields three fundamental concepts: survivor function, event occurrence, and hazard rate (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997, 1418). The survivor function represents a variable’s history, while the hazard rate reflects the risk of an event occurring given that it has not yet occurred (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997, 1419, 1425). For example, we can calculate the hazard rate of military interventions, which become progressively harder to end as actors get entangled (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997, 1444). 25  Similarly, temporalized “advances” in data collection amount to little more than the brutish calculus of continuity discussed above. For example, the Polity IIId database advertises more precise “timing” of political changes because it includes sub-annual data (day/month, McLaughlin et al. 1998, 232, 235). 26  For EHM applications, see Box-Steffensmeier, Reiter, and Zorn (2003, 33–4).

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176  International Relations and the Problem of Time EHMs formalize the problem of Time. Hazard rate flows from the idea that every new moment includes (and alters) the risk of dissolution, a situation we might “escape” for some finite duration (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997, 1422). Like a guarantee of ultimate finitude, the only way to decisively “exit the risk set” is by “failing” (i.e. undergoing event occurrence), so “at each observation period, the risk set progressively dwindles until, by the end of the observation plan, no units are at risk” (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997, 1422). The rhetoric of finitude runs right through the EHM, and it is explicitly a “function of time” (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997, 1425).27 EHMs are more suitable for timing dynamic political processes by virtue of their emphasis on duration-dependence, their natural ability to treat variables as unfixed, and their freedom from stability assumptions (see Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997, 1417–18). Yet despite these advances, EHMs do not move much beyond our familiar statistical story of time. Rapidly changing conditions still threaten inference (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones  1997, 1440). EHM advocates tout the innovation of “monotonic” variation (Box-Steffensmeier, Reiter, and Zorn 2003, 37), but this only marks a revolution within the strictures of frequentist unirectilinearity and still precludes variable oscillation. The way that EHM’s use interaction terms to allow causal fluctuations in variables effectively hom­ ogen­izes time as the cost of emplotment: “time (i.e., process time—the duration that has elapsed in the state of interest) is no different from any other covariate and, in fact, may be treated as such” (Box-Steffensmeier, Reiter, and Zorn 2003, 37 emphasis added).28 This allows us to treat hazard rates as “time-invariant,” a common assumption that ties changes in hazard rate to the covariates rather than to any naturally fluctuating situation, seasonality, shocks, or memory functions (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997, 1428). Finally, while it departs from the GLM in several important ways, the EHM is still a probability model testing against the null hypothesis. Its baseline, then, remains an intelligible and concordant vision of how social relations unfold.29

Bayesian Alternatives In terms of theory and interpretation as well as time and timing, Bayesian statistics offer a more striking alternative than incremental adjustments against the GLM 27  By contrast, birth has little importance—the population just dwindles until time runs out. 28  Time here proxies for more complex or less easily specified phenomena. “Civil war duration” means nothing except as a metaphorical dependent variable for additive violence. The independent variable “time length” informs assumptions about, say, how crisis negotiating strategies stress and change “over time” (see Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004, 9). 29  Additionally, while statistical methods sample with time, they have not yet considered how to sample time itself. Yet if we wanted to analyze a country unyoked from the Gregorian calendar or Western standard timing, we would have to impose large and important temporal assumptions at the measurement phase.

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Quantitative Approaches  177 baseline (see Brandt and Freeman  2006, 1; Schrodt  2014, 293–4, 297; and McGrayne 2012 for a history).30 In frequentism, probability represents a limiting value determined by the relative frequency of “infinite hypothetical replications” of events of interest, with model parameters treated as unknown but fixed (Wakefield  2013, 22–3). Bayesian probability measures subjective belief conditional on—and thus fluctuating with—available information, with all unknown parameters treated as random variables (Wakefield 2013, 23).31 The central task of Bayesian inference is then to update prior probability distributions in posterior distributions based on information gleaned from new observations (see Martin 2008, 504). This form of inference departs from the atomized or discrete and homogeneous view of time found in frequentism. Instead, it predicates inference on a connected (if not strictly continuous) series, insofar as an upcoming observation’s prior distribution corresponds to the posterior one calculated after the previous observation, which also represents current beliefs about the prob­abil­ity of the parameter (Wakefield 2013, 86–7). Because of these differences, Bayesian approaches comport with situations featuring a restricted quantity of events to study (small-N), requiring complex ­models to analyse the data, preventing random sampling and experimental control,32 or more generally any in which “the data are talking to you” (Schrodt 2014, 293; Wakefield 2013, 23). Moreover, if the number of parameters in a model exceeds the number of cases, then Bayesian approaches become absolutely necessary (Wakefield 2013, 144). Taken together, these situations comprise most of global politics. Furthermore, Bayesian differences hold three important temporal consequences. First, by accommodating subjective and malleable beliefs about probability, Bayesianism not only incorporates novelty but also assumes the necessity of doing so (see McKeown  1999, 167–88; Lee  2012). Bayesianism “corresponds to how most people actually think” (Schrodt 2014, 294) in situations characterized by “non-linear” relationships, where feedback effects co-mingle with actors’ “adaptive expectations” and their need to “constantly adjust their behavior” as a consequence (Pierson 2004, 33). This holds in research—where no one confronts a data set without some “reference prior” or ideas about what might be (un) important (Brandt and Freeman 2006, 7; Schrodt 2014, 297)—and in social life more generally. Second, while frequentism applies well to “soybeans, brewers’ yeasts, and perhaps even U.S.  voters,” it struggles with international conflict and peace and, indeed, “most of the problems of interest to most political analysts” (Schrodt 2006, 336). By contrast, Bayesian techniques offer better traction on political

30  These distinctions can be more muted in practice (Wakefield 2013, 23–4). 31  Another way of stating this is that Bayesians reverse frequentist assumptions, treating data as fixed and estimators as random rather than the other way around (see Martin 2008, 496). 32  Quantitative IR usually ignores the random sampling and experimental control criteria for linear regression (Suganami 1990; also 1996, 87 n6).

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178  International Relations and the Problem of Time phenomena associated with time, such as relatively rare events of exceeding ­complexity and impact over which we exert nothing even close to experimental control (e.g. the outbreak of the Great War, the oil crisis of 1973, the thermonuclear opening and peaceful close of the Cold War, and the “Arab Spring”). Third, and closely related, unlike frequentist approaches Bayesian models do not need to severely discipline time for the sake of inference. For one example, by producing prob­abil­ity distributions rather than discrete value estimates, Bayesian statistics quantifies uncertainty in a way that is more “direct” (Gelman et al. 2013, 4) but also more flexible, and more importantly one that accords with lived experience and human beliefs. For another, Bayesian models do not rely on moving averages or lagged variables in time series analysis, techniques which divorce temporal factors from the data set expressly to return it to linear regression but do not help us “visualize the ‘story’ of the [time series] model” (Larsen 2016). Cutting finer, Bayesianism handles multiple time series, variable heterogeneity, and serial correlation better (Brandt and Freeman  2006; Pang  2010, 471, 476), providing a more dynamic and durative view of social life by building successive changes in rather than trying to filter them out (McKeown 1999, 181).33 Moreover, Bayesian models better accommodate “innovation accounting” or “impulse response,” which tracks how “shock or surprise in one time series affects other time series” (Brandt and Freeman  2006, 3; see also Pang  2010, 471). Finally, because it depends on available and subjective information, Bayesianism assumes different individuals will assign different probabilities to the same event (Wakefield  2013, 23), granting the model a perspectival or positional quality more reminiscent of basic timing (see p. 48). These all mark promising steps for those who want statistical reasoning to incorporate the possibility of multiple political temporalities. None of this is to say that Bayesian statistics are completely open-ended or amenable to heterotemporality and dynamic flux. Bayesianism still indexes data to Western standard time. So while it emplots heterotemporal processes, the “raw” (i.e. measured) material reflects a temporal monoculture. Bayesian techniques also produce accounts that often map onto three temporal metaphors— the “random” or “drunkard’s walk” (Box-Steffensmeier et al.  2014, 128–35) or barely intelligible disorder verging on chaos, “growth” or unilinear-progressivism (Larsen 2016), and “seasonality” or cycles (Box-Steffensmeier et al. 2014, 43–4). Yet despite these disciplinary vestiges of confrontation, Bayesian models display greater sensitivity not only to the importance of temporal factors but also to the intrinsically temporal quality of sociopolitical processes and knowledge development. 33  Relatedly, Bayesian error bands replace the null hypothesis (see Brandt and Freeman  2006), while autoregressive error processes that model serial correlation may reveal “sub rosa [hidden] pol­it­ical dynamic processes” (Pang 2010, 471).

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Quantitative Approaches  179

The Story in Bayesian Models As Bayesian approaches have only recently made inroads in IR, I will only briefly map their narrative elements here. Instead of a timing standard of formal control, Bayesianism operates more by the synoptic theme of formulated dynamism. Instead of stationarity assumptions, fixed parameters, and normal distributions, this standard accommodates non-stationarity, uncertainty, and continuous updating as intrinsic to the inferential process rather than opposed to it. This does not jettison the general neopositivist thematic of experimental control, al­together. Instead, it reflects this more obliquely, eschewing experimental ideals for models of the intuitive and processual behaviors found in much social phenomena and  underpinning inference even in closed spaces like the lab.34 In this sense, Bayesianism takes a more meandering but recognizable path to the same ultimate scientific destination of accurate prediction (Schrodt 2014, 289–91). This more flexible standard enables less stringent creative filtration. Heterogeneous and non-independent explanatory variables (i.e. taking different values at different times and strongly correlated with each other), subjective beliefs, and multiple perspectives remain in the model. Indeed, these represent features, not bugs, and so must not be “wasted” (Pang 2010, 470). In terms of cleaving experience, formal dynamism opens up the “middle” of the story that the GLM’s quasi-punctual series denies. The links between prior beliefs, updating, and posterior distributions all emplot a durative process between first and final observations. This has direct implications for concordant discordance. Rather than the null hypothesis, Bayesianism revises probability estimates to render confounding changes more concordant with our evolving expectations. It remains a project of whittling down novelty and grappling with the problem of Time, insofar as revision and updating encourage a “smooth” learning process in which the posterior distribution adequately “summarizes” the “accretion of evidence” (Gelman and Shalizi 2013, 9). However, in Bayesianism this is more a matter of bringing the model to the mountain of experience (both that found in the data and that of inference as a process) rather than poetically arid ideals of strict hypothesis testing that smuggle in a normally distributed view of the “chancy” and temporal aspects of life. These distinctions point to an important difference in how Bayesian approaches and the GLM relate to time. Although both operationalize it as Western standardized, in frequentism the past provides a determinate boundary on present and future possibilities. In Bayesian approaches, the past offers only a collection of prior beliefs and observations, while future developments help inference converge on an accurate prediction without needing them to confirm the past. To be sure, Bayesian approaches remain vulnerable to the pull of passive timing and symbolic

34  We might call this an insider’s account of experimental reasoning.

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180  International Relations and the Problem of Time reification. For one, they still assume that all “interesting quantities . . . can be treated as probabilities” (Martin 2008, 503), so allow little room for brute randomness or emergent novelty. For another, Bayesian inference “has integration at its core” and specifically “afford[s] the opportunity to fit models that are otherwise difficult, if not impossible to fit using conventional methods” (Martin 2008, 504). These features promise effective Bayesian timing where frequentist standards would falter, but it is precisely novel timing successes that encourage adoption, diffusion, and reification. Finally, while Bayesian techniques handle rare or singular events better than frequentists, the objective remains generalization and the reduction of novelty via “strong inferences even from a few pieces of evidence” (Bennett 2008, 708, 702–3). In particular, Bayesians may be tempted to infer that a “least likely” case successfully explained warrants a much wider claim about the phenomena in question precisely because they have shown how especially implausible dynamics came together to produce it (Bennett 2008, 713). And there is nothing to prevent us from overinterpreting, say, carefully traced and tested hypotheses about whether highly specific material-economic factors and Soviet ideas influenced the singularly peaceful end of the Cold War as evidence of a global timing meter at work—for instance, that ideas trump material interests (see Bennett  2008, 714–18). Bayesian inference still works to turn problems linked to Time—singularities, diverse evidence, complexity—into warranted inferences that help us “converge” on probabilistic “truths” that, ideally, clarify future possibilities (Bennett  2008, 708–9, 718).35 Compared with frequentists, Bayesians just work toward these goals with more flexible timing techniques.

Is Quantitative IR Taking a Temporal Turn? As mentioned, Bayesian modelling only recently appeared in politics and IR (Brandt and Freeman  2006, 1; Moore and Siegel  2013, 176). While such a sea change involves many factors, matters of timing play a prominent part. The Bayesian turn marks a move away from ideals of passive statistical timing—epit­ om­ized in the GLM and its relative dearth of durable, significant, and interesting correlations—to a wager that formalizing a more active mode of timing offers the best bet for practical success. We can see this in a prominent Bayesian’s attack on frequentism. Decrying IR’s pervasive but spurious reliance on linear models, Philip Schrodt (2014, 294–5) contends that “just because many things are linear doesn’t mean that everything is linear—and in many cases, [alternatives] are better suited than linear methods for dealing with issues commonly found in political science data.” 35 Relatedly, see Bennett’s (2008, 712–13) illuminating discussion of the “underdetermination” problem in Bayesianism.

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Quantitative Approaches  181 IR remains enthralled with the “gold standard” of regression analysis, even though its presumed stable effects, independent variables, and experimental or random samples of homogeneous populations rarely hold in IR contexts (Schrodt 2014,  296). “Envious” dreams of experimental control combine with “slothful” and unreflective disciplinary habits to “drift” IR “into a mode of expression which while comfortable . . . is simply dead wrong in the contexts where we apply it” (Schrodt 2014, 296 emphasis added). This produces “greedy” or “garbage can models,” which throw any and all variables into a prepackaged regression (Schrodt 2014, 288–92). This might make it easier to “fit the error”—that is provide overly optimistic assessments of model accuracy against existing data—but actually renders the model especially sensitive to any new data (Schrodt 2014, 288).36 Here the shift from passive to entirely inflexible timing comes back to haunt frequentism in the form of an ever-growing list of potentially confounding outcomes. Indeed, Schrodt (2014, 291) notes that linear regression is quite “brittle” and prone to go “berserk” in conditions where independent variables cor­rel­ate highly with each other—as in most IR data sets.37 As discussed above, this only worsens to the extent that we  conflate general linear models with a warranted claim about actual social phenomena or the lived experience of time. At that point, we no longer carefully construct or cull data from empirical processes so much as we report experience to an idealized timing standard of limited pertinence. When juxtaposed to statistical laments of time, such as that “the likelihood of an exogenous random shock to the initial data increases over time” (Bueno de Mesquita 1998, 139 emphasis added), these Bayesian criticisms underscore just the sort of timing regime dynamics discussed in chapters one and three. Frequentism, and especially the GLM and variants, looks very much like a timing proposal that, by virtue of successes in foreign and idealized disciplines and unreflective mimicry in IR, became a hegemonic, passive regime. As such, it encourages many analysts to simply presume that it offers the best (or only) way to scientifically time political relations or, even worse, that it accurately describes the way the world hangs together and unfolds. Whether active or passive, timing theory contends that all timing activities hinge on matters of practical adequacy. So even though the GLM enjoys an elevated epistemological and methodological status, it remains a figurative effort to explain various phenomena, and one that has thrived in IR—as many imported methods do—mostly on the symbolic power of its key concepts (Pearl and Mackenzie  2018, 1). Its practical efficacy, however, will depend on how well it comports with and allows us to understand and/or direct lived experience.

36  Additionally, because social science usually analyzes collinear processes, adding more independent variables almost always balloons the variance of the estimated coefficients (Schrodt 2014, 288). 37  For example, Schrodt (2014, 287–91) estimates conservatively that scholars have reanalyzed the original democratic peace data set (see Oneal and Russett 1999) over 4,800 times.

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182  International Relations and the Problem of Time Bayesian inference offers a more active mode of timing that builds into statistical models the dynamic and processual features of social life (e.g. Mercer 2005, 87–8; McKeown 1999, 179–83). In addition to the features already discussed, its use of probability distributions rather than point estimates imbues inferences with some sense of an open future conditioned by emergent changes. In these ways, Bayesian IR affords a more capacious understanding of and more flexible relationship to time. However, as with any repeatedly employed timing mode, Bayesianism can become more embedded and passive if it succeeds in supplanting frequentism. It remains an open question whether this more expressly temporal approach to quantitative IR can resist the pacification and reification attending all successful relation-building efforts.

Conclusion Frequentist statistics exemplify a narrative timing meter. The GLM and its ­offshoots work by formally abstracting and reifying qualitative narratives and assessing these against the neopositivist ideal of an utterly concordant world. In particular, its facile use of Western standard time combined with an aversion to most other temporal elements of social phenomena suggests that mainstream quantitative IR propounds and depends upon a particular, quasi-eternal vision of international politics amenable to passive timing. These approaches do not reflect on temporal assumptions or the import of time itself. Instead, either by elision or co-optation, they try to ensure that time’s flow does not get in the way of a certain kind of inference and a particular interpretation of significance. Two final points illustrate this claim. First, insofar as it produces a “thematized story” (McCloskey  1991, 22), the GLM constructs an exceedingly rigid narrative temporality: certain entities are connected in a single, unchanging, and unidirectional way, and this preconditions the model’s ability to assess when we might expect variables to fluctuate. Adding elements does not change this, so most of the action (and much of the literature) is in the error term, where correlation and confidence collide with alienation until statistical technique sorts them out and the accuracy of the story can be assessed. Statistical innovations like these cannot resolve the productive temporal dissonance that runs through the GLM, which treats time as a warrant for certain assumptions and as irrelevant for others. These inconsistencies stem from its mathematical underpinnings, which offer technocratic guarantors of its internal coherence at the expense of all but the most basic and rigid story structures of “simply predictable” phenomena readily “reexpressed as equations” (McCloskey 1991, 25). Moreover, inasmuch as temporal elements like auto­cor­rel­ ation contribute to biases in inference, this model locates time itself primarily in  the error term, reaffirming the venerable problem of Time tradition. GLM

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Quantitative Approaches  183 stories, then, are ill suited for ordering the complex and unstable phenomena of inter­nation­al politics. As such, we might ask whether statistical approaches to IR would be better positioned as under-laborers to middle-range and grand theories as well as historical, qualitative, and “merely” descriptive accounts. Using non-formalized, ordinary language and literary devices, these approaches provide greater flexibility in grappling with temporal phenomena. Now they might benefit from simple tools encouraging greater internal coherence and consistency. Quantitative techniques would be quite well-suited for this role, since the accuracy of a stat­is­tic­al test shares much with narratology’s coherence theory of truth: the difference between spurious and accurate inferences in quantitative models is more a matter of whether hypotheses comport with model parameters than how closely they correspond to reality (Collins 1984, 339). When we consider how much filtering and cleaving it requires to produce data eligible for this test, and how little discordance it accommodates, it does indeed look like narrative coherence trumps correspondence in the logic of statistical inference. Second, time series, pooled cross-sectional, and otherwise time-sensitive work under the frequentist umbrella conflates time wholesale with Western standard time reckoning (e.g. Beck, Katz, and Tucker 1998; Bennett and Stam 2003; BoxSteffensmeier and Jones  1997; Bueno de Mesquita  1998; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005; Geller and Singer 1998; Green, Kim, and Yoon 2001).38 It treats time as a concept just as obvious as economic variables like “price,” “interest rate,” and “GDP,” which are “unambiguously specified in a quantitative form” (Schrodt 2014, 288). Of course, Western standard time marks an instance of time produced through especially effective timing; but this is neither the only timing activity, nor the only temporality around, nor a comprehensive account of Time per se. It is a product of a particular timing practice especially amenable to quantitative ana­ lysis. Quantitative IR shows little awareness of Western standard time’s origins as a substantive human project that did not so much discover an empty and neutral dimension of social life as construct and disperse it (Hom 2010). Such an unreflective use of Western standard timing looks all the more conspicuous when we consider how mightily much quantitative work labors to scrub inferences and tests of all other temporal qualities, such as random walks, growth, seasonality, and non-stationarity. It also highlights striking differences between frequentists and Bayesians. Taken together, these points suggest that if there is to be a rigorous and coherently “time-sensitive” branch of statistical analysis in IR, scholars will need to grapple directly with the politics of time—that time works less like a tidy economic indicator and more like other “important political science concepts—‘power’, ‘legitimacy’, ‘authoritarianism’, or ‘civil war’—[that] are 38  E.g., the term “moment” can include a wide variety of durative happenings. Yet in quantitative research, “moment of observation” refers only to a specific readout on the clock and/or calendar.

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184  International Relations and the Problem of Time qualitative . . . measured indirectly and can be operationalized in a variety of equally plausible ways” (Schrodt 2014, 288) depending on what sort of statistical timing we seek. Without this sort of reflection, “time-sensitive” quantitative ana­lysis will offer mostly a collection of absolute, unirectilinear stories augmented with enumeration and a metaphor for eternity whose literary temporality is far too often mistaken for literal time (see Walker 1993, 98).

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7

Historical Institutionalism From Pathological to Temporal Institutions

Introduction While the role of time in quantitative IR remains an open question, over the past two decades international institutions research openly embraced history and temporality. Historical institutionalism (HI) emerged to challenge rationalist and sociological accounts of international organizations and regimes (see Pierson 2004; Fioretos 2011; Fioretos, Falleti, and Sheingate 2018, 517–656; Fioretos 2017a; Rixen and Viola 2016). HI sits somewhere in the middle of IR’s temporal continuum, more open to contingency and process than quantitative work and more interested in foregrounding temporal dynamics than most mainstream IR, yet distinct from the critical approaches covered in the next chapter because it remains committed to neopositivist explanatory standards. While HI scholars regularly claim to take time and temporality seriously, this chapter argues that doing so entails more than working with intuitive temporal concepts. HI scholars would benefit from thinking harder about time and tem­ por­al­ity as such. Currently, their accounts fall short of fully grasping the temporal character of international institutions because they remain firmly embedded in IR’s two dominant traditions of time. Narrative timing theory critiques and aug­ ments HI’s view of institutions by providing an explanation for HI’s theoretical constraints and fomenting an alternative freed of rationalist strictures. To account for time in IR institutionalism, it makes more sense to bring time all the way inside institutions—not as an external dimension or sundering force that impedes opti­ mal efficiency but as something produced by and within institutional processes. That is, to fully embrace the historical and temporal side of international institu­ tions, we need to think of institutions themselves as global timing regimes. The chapter develops this argument with illustrations drawn from various elem­ents of the liberal international order, especially international economic institutions. After summarizing the emergence of a historical approach to institu­ tions, it highlights the problem of Time animating HI accounts. It then shows how HI scholars compose narratives to address this problem, replete with more flexible standards and techniques of creative filtration and experiential cleavage and novel forms of concordant discordance. These explanatory innovations not­ withstanding, HI unwittingly reproduces rationalist assumptions, which inhibits International Relations and the Problem of Time. Andrew R. Hom, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andrew R. Hom. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850014.001.0001

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186  International Relations and the Problem of Time theoretical development and consigns it to underlaborer for other institutional theories. Timing theory helps redress this situation and offers a novel view of institutions as timing achievements in their own right. Working the other way, HI advances can foster the further development of timing theory.

The Rise of Historical Institutionalism Some backstory will help frame the ensuing critique. Long before the rise of HI, political scientists and IR scholars envisioned institutions primarily in rationalist (RI) or, latterly, sociological (SI) terms.1 Rational institutions are “objects of [state] choice” and causally “consequential” based on “the ability of actors to anticipate the consequences of particular types of institutions” clearly and consistently (Martin and Simmons 1998, 749). They impose “largely time-invariant rule[s] of the game” on state behavior (Fioretos 2011, 372) but also adapt “when fundamen­ tal conditions, and therefore the incentives facing them, change” to establish new coordination equilibria (Keohane 2017, 324). Even as it gained adherents, this rational choice template for analyzing institu­ tions encountered significant difficulties explaining institutional phenomena (see Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal  2017, 135; Martin and Simmons  1998, 750; Keohane 2017, 324–5). Careful observers also noted that it contained problematic temporal assumptions. Most conspicuously, it assumed that when confronted with ­environmental changes, institutions make “swift and direct moves to new efficient arrangements” (Manulak 2018, 3, 9; Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 118). The RI world is also a clockwork one where institutions offer “passive, efficient solutions to market imperfections” (Solingen and Wan 2017, 168; see also Barnett and Finnemore 1999) that compress “institutional time” into a vanishingly small punctum: Canonically, rational choice scholars view institutions as coordinating mech­an­ isms that sustain particular equilibria. These institutions are as if formed on a tabula rasa. The institutional past or status quo is largely irrelevant in determining a new institutional equilibrium triggered by some exogenous event. An institu­ tion that breaks down or is replaced is an institution erased from memory— “there is . . . no sense of ‘path’ at all”. Any new equilibrium is as likely to happen as any other; the past has no voice in the selection of a new institution. . . . in a world of synoptic rationality and full information, such calculations take no time at all  (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 135 emphasis added).

Social theory, which emphasized the impact of ideas and norms, provided an ini­ tial challenge to RI (Fioretos 2011, 372). According to SI, socialization patterns 1  This section draws heavily on (Fioretos 2017b, 6–12).

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Historical Institutionalism  187 and intersubjective understandings, rather than instrumental calculations, drive processes of institutional coordination and conflict (Fioretos  2017b, 6). Organizational cultures and systems of meaning trump strategic action and may transform actors’ incentives and identities (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 131; Keohane 2017, 325). Those actors rely unreflexively on existing scripts and rou­ tines, which “filter” novel problems through guidelines and logics of appropriate­ ness (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal  2017, 132). Yet while it countered RI in these ways, SI also propounded an overly sanguine view of institutional proliferation as a reliable pathway to “convergence in states’ national policy and institutional choices” (Fioretos  2011, 384). This emphasis on progressive or happy stories about institutional coordination downplayed the “clash of power” and interests that frequently accompanied institutional creation and change (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 133; see also Hall and Taylor 1996, 954). A stronger challenge to RI came from historically minded institutionalists, who paid less attention to “problem structures associated with timeless co­ord­in­ation and collaboration problems” (Fioretos 2017b, 6) and more to historical vari­ation and the impact of developmental processes that did not always conclude with institutions “taming” the state. Historical institutionalists argued that institutions can have “multiple and unanticipated effects” not directly linked to “their crea­ tors’ preferences”; that institutional creation and choice reflect an admixture of culture, norm diffusion, and strategic calculation tempered by contingency and uncertainty; and that they emerge under “short time horizons” but produce un­desir­able long-term effects (Pierson 2004, 15–16, 41–4). Once created, his­tor­ic­al institutions become “sticky” or slow to change, even as their operating environments and constituent preferences shift. They persist “over time despite major shifts in global distributions of power” and even during periods of intense upheaval (Fioretos 2017b, 17). To fully grasp international institutions, HI scholars recommend “bringing temporality into the study of politics” (Mahoney, Mohamedali, and Nguyen 2018, 71; also Fioretos 2011; Rixen and Viola 2016; Fioretos 2017b, 4; Solingen and Wan 2017, 169; Weaver and Moschella 2017, 275). Building from the central assumption that “ ‘time is the dimension in which ideas and institutions and beliefs evolve’ ” (Pierson  2004, 1, epigraphing North), HI sets about theorizing “the conditions under which temporal processes matter” and “the processes that shape, reproduce, and alter international political institutions over time” (Fioretos 2011, 369–70). This entails searching for “concepts with temporal properties” and factors that might “impact the origin, stability, and change of institutions over time” (Fioretos 2017b, 12) and generally paying more heed to the importance of surprise, process, contingency, and unintended consequences (Rixen and Viola 2016, 10–12; also Pierson 2004; Fioretos 2017b). So far it has produced intriguing accounts of institutional path dependence and “lock-in” effects (Mahoney, Mohamedali, and Nguyen 2018, 71–2; Pierson 2004, 15–16; Capoccia 2018, 89),

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188  International Relations and the Problem of Time the politics of incremental reform (Rixen and Viola  2016, 4; Fioretos  2017b, 12–17) and institutional layering (Pierson  2004, 155–6), the importance of “founding moments” and “critical junctures,” and numerous “long-term” bouts of institutional change overlooked by rationalist frameworks of short-term strategic “selection” (Pierson 2004, 15–16, 157–65; also Fioretos 2017b, 12–17).

Historical Institutionalism’s Problem with Time The term “historical” can mean several different things. Proponents affirm that what makes HI historical and supplies its “distinguishing feature” (Fioretos 2017b, 26) is not historical research per se or even an “empirical focus on a relatively distant past” but rather a commitment to incorporating “the role of temporality” into accounts of international institutions (Fioretos  2017b, 26; Rixen and Viola 2016, 4–10; Solingen and Wan 2017, 168).2 However, just as plenty of his­ tory trades in temporal tropes and concepts without reflecting or unpacking its temporal assumptions (see Fasolt 2004; Inayatullah and Blaney 2004; Leira and de Carvalho 2017; MacKay and LaRoche 2017), HI so far works with time without analyzing it as such and unreflectively reproduces IR’s two temporal traditions.3 First, it presumes a unified and frequently rectilinear world historical dimen­ sion in which institutions move. While HI scholars note that institutions often follow arcs that are “slow and far from linear,” concepts like path dependence, sequence, and founding moments all work on the assumption of a single, shared, and ergodic or directionally specific continuum (Fioretos  2011, 379, also 371; Hall 2018, 38). This is how “the past affects the present and the future” in discernable ways, why effects “lock in” (Fioretos 2011, 383, 387–8), and why path dependence and “period effects” matter (Rixen and Viola 2016, 13; Hall 2018, 38). It is also the condition that allows us to search “much earlier in history” to identify “crucial junctures” that cause current events (Capoccia  2018, 89). This unirectilinear dimension also provides the slipway to suboptimal, “inefficient,” or “pathological” outcomes. Because institutions cannot go back in time and cannot avail themselves of multiple temporalities, ordered sequences and contingent events pile small immediate effects up into long-term consequences. A visual account of “causality and time in historical institutions” renders this point clearly (Mahoney, Mohamedali, and Nguyen  2018). To clarify the causal logic and summarize various HI explanations, it simply plots institutional evo­ lution along a horizontal axis composed of discrete and homogeneous 2  HI explanations do unfold much more like the historical narratives covered in chapter three (see “Historical explanation,” pp. 99), including a greater emphasis on contingency, chance, and rich empirical detail (Mahoney, Mohamedali, and Nguyen 2018, 71). 3  As Stevens (2015, 37) notes, historical IR often develops an “incomplete perspective on time, concerned principally with remaking the past in the present, or with the construction of meaning over time” but not “embracing the ‘radical uncertainty of historical meaning’. ”

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Historical Institutionalism  189 time  units (T10, T20, T30, . . .; Mahoney, Mohamedali, and Nguyen  2018, 75–8). Institutional-causal time is merely an orthogonal and spatial alternative to cross-sectional analysis. “Horizontal length” on the x-axis stands in for “duration” (Mahoney, Mohamedali, and Nguyen 2018, 75)—a concept theorized extensively and with sophistication in the wider time studies literature (e.g. Bergson 1960). What look like multiple timelines act only as forks or decision points that, once passed, cannot be recovered (Mahoney, Mohamedali, and Nguyen  2018, 75). Institutional actors might change decision spaces, shifting up or down the y-axis, but in terms of time they move inexorably from left to right at even intervals. This treatment exemplifies HI’s greater interest in how institutions unfold “over time” (Mahoney, Mohamedali, and Nguyen  2018, 75; Fioretos  2011, 387–8) than in time itself. But it cannot adequately “capture various dimension of temporality” while “structur[ing]” politics exclusively along a neutral temporal continuum (Mahoney, Mohamedali, and Nguyen 2018, 67; Hall 2018, 38). Second, the problem of Time delimits HI’s imagination. While they assume that political processes unfold over an objective dimension much like Western standard time, HI scholars try to tame the “temporal” dynamics of these phenom­ ena by developing narrative explanations that reduce the discordance associated with Time’s passage. Their central empirical puzzles are what temporal dynamics inhibit institutions from “selecting the most efficient design or policy option in a given instance,” why they frequently “grope their way” to lesser outcomes, and why these include “so many unintended consequences and discord if political action was driven by carefully calibrated rational calculations or the institutions reflected widely accepted practices and norms” (Fioretos  2011, 376; 2017b, 7; Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 118). These puzzles emerge from the seemingly straightforward observation that institutions are “temporal” rather than static. However, what renders them fully temporal here is not merely dynamism and diversity but the ways they “contrib­ ute to unpredictability (outcomes may vary greatly), inflexibility (the more time passes, the more difficult it is to reverse course), nonergodicity (chance events may have lasting effects), and inefficiencies (forgone alternatives may have been more efficient)” (Fioretos 2011, 371). Historical institutionalism features a trad­ition­al, deleterious brand of temporality linked to “great indeterminacy” (Fioretos 2017b, 21; Sikkink  2017), “fluidity” and “flux” (Capoccia  2018, 90–1; Helleiner  2017, 216; see also Manulak 2018, 10), and junctures characterized by “ ‘crisis,’ ‘turning point,’ ” and “ ‘unsettled times’ ” (Capoccia 2018, 89). These in turn lead to “sunk costs,” “drift,” “displacement,” and generally suboptimal consequences (Fioretos 2011, 374). When spooled out over a unirectilinear temporal dimension, these negative temporal qualities sunder even efficient decisions, ensuring that “gaps in accountability are not closed but potentially grow over time” (Fioretos  2011, 386–8, 380),4 or that stable social conditions get “ ‘eaten up’ over time,” eventually 4  See the contrasting “dominant features” of RI, SI, and HI in Fioretos (2011, 374).

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190  International Relations and the Problem of Time causing “structural crises” (Hanrieder and Zürn 2017, 99). Temporal features drive pitiable institutional results, which play out through and become more likely with the pitiless march of Time itself.

Historical Institutionalism’s Narrative Solutions to the Problem of Time HI seeks sound knowledge to reduce and explain these instances of temporal dis­ cord. More specifically, it configures accounts of international institutions with narrative timing devices. These effectively humanize time and render “history” as a gradually changing or “syncopated process” rather than any “constant flux” (Hall 2018, 38).

Synoptic Theme HI holds interlocking commitments to a metanarrative of sound social science deployed for positive effect. Their skepticism about SI liberalism notwithstand­ ing, HI scholars still primarily analyze “good” institutions to understand why they do not function as well as they should. They focus on liberal and progressive efforts over the past seventy years to improve international cooperation, ensure the orderly workings of the international system, tame the state, or promote val­ ues like “universal” human rights and economic development.5 Relatedly, HI retains an RI thematic when it shifts merely from expecting efficient institutional adaptation to explaining why this so rarely occurs by reference to temporal con­ straints (Fioretos 2011, 374, 376–7, 381, 386; Solingen and Wan 2017, 171–3; Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 125, 132–3, and table 6.2; Weaver and Moschella 2017; Rixen and Viola 2016, 10). Here we see both the temporalizing move of treating institutions as living, social phenomena rather than ironclad “formal rules” combined with the endur­ ing hope that institutionalized rules and norms will “transform inter­nation­al politics to become much less full of discord” (Fioretos 2017b, 8). Unlike RI, HI allows for history to be inefficient, that is, to fail to produce “conditions under which institutions are successfully adapted to new circumstances” (Fioretos 2017b, 13). But it does not challenge the meaning or pertinence of “efficiency” for thinking about institutions in the first place. Novelty and contingency remain

5  A large body of critical scholarship finds in “good” or “universal” projects plenty of power pol­it­ics, particular interests, and imperial and colonial legacies (e.g. Walker 1993; Inayatullah and Blaney 2004; Pettman  2005; Jahn  2009, 200; Levine  2012; Shilliam  2012; Geeta and Nair  2014; Hutchings  2016; Epstein 2013; 2017; Molloy 2017).

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Historical Institutionalism  191 anomalous explananda or deviant explanans—laboring under the liberal synopsis that institutions improve international cooperation and inhibit competition and conflict.

Creative Filtration These synoptic themes provide the standards by which HI scholars filter and cleave institutional phenomena. An explanatory story contains all it needs and makes use of all it contains. HI’s rationalist thematics entail that critical junctures, which shape effects well down the road, be “a set of ordered consequences of deci­ sions and developments” (Capoccia  2018, 89).6 Similarly, lock-in and positive feedback pluck features from complex relational processes that comport with the metaphorical appeal of causal mechanisms, which reproduces a sense of time’s orderly flow (see chapter three, pp. 98). And scholars reserve the term path dependence “for only those processes where endogenous institutional developments trigger exogenous demands for change,” while “institutional adaptation” covers only outside-in triggers (Hanrieder and Zürn 2017, 95). The liberal thematic creatively filters substantive foci. Early calls for a more historical approach to institutions’ outcomes highlighted the impact of unantici­ pated consequences with primarily happy examples like the unexpected positive influence of human rights accords and the European Court of Justice on inter­ nation­al politics (Martin and Simmons  1998, 750). Leading collections of HI research feature chapters on liberal international order, transnational governance of and beyond the state, international trade and economic development, the spread of human rights, and international law and courts (Rixen and Viola 2016; Fioretos 2017a; Fioretos, Falleti, and Sheingate 2018). Longstanding norms and laws of combat and security institutions receive far less attention, and even then the focus stays on ostensibly cooperative and stabilizing entities like the UN Security Council and the nuclear non-proliferation regime (Rixen, Viola, and Zürn  2016 chp. 5; Fioretos  2017a chp. 8). Especially sticky regimes of meaning and practice, like slavery, colonialism, and latterly the war on terror, receive only passing mention across major HI works, mostly as contextual dressing and never as institutions in their own right worthy of incorporation into IR’s institutional story.7 6  Despite the term’s ordinary language connotations, by contrast “change is not a necessary element of a critical juncture” (Capoccia 2018, 95). 7  Fioretos’ (2011) conversation starter made no mention of slavery, colonialism, and counterterror. Colonialism inhibits the work of the UN and the growth of health governance in Hanrieder (2015, 62, 71–7; also Hanrieder and Zürn 2017) and the spread of the liberal international order in Ikenberry (2017), who covers centuries of rampant slavery without mentioning it once. Greater HI engagement with colonialism does appear in comparative politics (e.g. Kohli 2018; Levitsky and Way 2016), and American institutionalists cover slavery (e.g. Frymer  2018; Gottschalk  2018), but these treatments have not yet impacted IR. Furthermore, “the self-undermining type of path dependence is far less

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Experiential Cleavage Where RI treats institutional changes as discrete moments of strategic design and selection devoid of context and duration, HI cleaves more expansively, in­corp­or­at­ing slow-building events and composing causal chains on the scale of years and decades. This often involves delineating periods with fuzzy boundaries— “opportunity structure[s] for change” or “the second major wave of globalization” (Weaver and Moschella 2017, 276; Solingen and Wan 2017, 169–70)—or calen­ drical markers—the “development of the international trade regime after World War II, especially during its first decades” (Hanrieder and Zürn  2017, 97). The two forms co-mingle and nest within each other. The Hague Peace Conferences inaugurated a long “ ‘Hague Peace Era’ ” that gained momentum from “1946 on,” when various international courts began emerging (Alter  2017, 253–5). The “incremental origins” of the “Bretton Woods order” began between 1932 and 1944, from Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration to the departure of his top economic advisors (Helleiner 2017, 216–17). The years from 1973 to 1994 (when Middle Eastern states launched eight ballistic missile strikes and East Asian states none) and 1960s–present (when four Middle Eastern states used chemical weap­ ons and East Asian states none) help distinguish the security consequences of diverging economic policy after World War II (Solingen and Wan 2017, 170). HI scholars also cleave unhappy institutional evidence just outside the primary plot window. Slavery provides the origin point in the development of human rights law (Alter 2017). Colonialism marks the “formative experience” of twenti­ eth century security institutions (Solingen and Wan  2017). This same analysis starts its account of East Asian peace and stability with “Japan’s postwar economic miracle” (Solingen and Wan 2017, 170), or just after Japan exhausted itself driving for military hegemony, suffered two atomic attacks, and endured military occupation. Finally, HI scholars cleave experience through debates about the duration of critical junctures. The precise criteria for a critical juncture varies, but usually includes destabilizing occurrences that interrupt stability and open the possibility for significant changes to institutional process, structure, and membership (Rixen and Viola 2016, 12, 22; Fioretos 2017b, 15). Previously, analysts imagined these “genetic moments for institutional equilibria” as brief, exogenous shocks or con­ centrated periods of transformation (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007, 342; and Rixen and Viola  2016, 12; Sikkink  2017, 232; Capoccia  2018, 89). More recent works contend that critical junctures may take much longer than previously realized. Constituted by “great indeterminacy,” they may “open” before discrete shocks and intense periods of transformation and then close quite slowly (Helleiner 2017, 225; developed and elaborated in historical institutionalism in general and in theories of international institutions in specific” (Hanrieder and Zürn 2017, 100).

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Historical Institutionalism  193 Fioretos  2017b, 21). Indeed, international critical junctures sometimes “last for decades” (Sikkink 2017, 232; see also Alter 2017, 251).8 It depends only on how long “the window of contingency stayed open” (Sikkink  2017, 233; see also Helleiner  2017, 225). This comports better with HI’s theme of longer chains of institutional development that help identify what “delays” institutional function (Sikkink  2017, 233–4). While other neopositivists compose quasi-punctual accounts of complex processes (see pp. 97 and 169), HI expands the punctum of significant change by filling it with causal content (see Fioretos 2011, 375).9

Concordant Discordance and Orderly Institutional Series By filtering creatively and cleaving experience, HI composes more capacious nar­ ratives. As discussed in chapter three, greater capacity usually brings more empir­ ical enigmas. HI turns these into concordant discordance in four ways that build upon each other, working from the innards of the plot outward to the HI project as a whole.

Critical Junctures First, because indeterminacy and flux characterize critical junctures, HI scholars “detach the concept from notions of randomness” and “infinite possibility” by positing a “range of plausible alternative[s]” restricted to options “historically available” to elites rather than all “hypothetically possible” options (Capoccia 2018, 92–4). They also operationalize “criticalness” in two terms: “probability jump and temporal leverage” (Capoccia and Kelemen  2007, 360). The first refers to how much the identified juncture increases the probability of a particular outcome; the second to “a measure of the duration of the impact of the critical juncture relative to the duration of the juncture itself ” (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007, 361), with duration again reckoned in Western standard units. This effectively turns the uncertainty and contingency of the juncture into long-term probability drivers (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007, 361). Expanding critical junctures also helps tamp down their shock value, as s­ cholars recast indeterminacy as the gradual emergence and adaptation of typically progressive institutions. Multiple, potentially discordant occurrences become a sustained, durative act of concurrence. While they may not be “inevitable, ­predetermined, or non-conflictual” (Sikkink  2017, 234), long critical junctures count as such by closing eventually or at least opening toward liberal horizons (e.g. Alter 2017; Ikenberry 2017). 8  See also Hanrieder’s (2015, 47) account of the World Health Organization’s six-year “long found­ ing moment.” 9  Importantly, this shift also allows gradual and minor causes to produce important changes (Rixen and Viola 2016, 19–22).

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The Long View Relatedly, and second, slow-moving and distant causal links help re-inscribe institutional shortcomings in pat stories with progressive morals. For example, while the “Hague Peace experience” initially seemed a failure, the long view re­assures that “the Hague ideals were not simply hopes and aspirations” because they “survived in the minds of legal advocates,” produced “fundamental legal pre­ cepts,” and transferred norms to regional movements (Alter  2017, 258). These gains simply took decades rather than years to coalesce. Or two centuries of world historical cycles punctuated by great power wars produced path dependent arrangements that “laid down” the “tracks” of a “liberal international order”: “Open markets, international institutions, cooperative security, democratic com­ munity, progressive change, collective problem-solving, shared sovereignty, the rule of law” (Ikenberry 2017, 61–2, 71). Its benefits arrived incrementally and in fits and starts, to be sure. This was not “a simple story of rules and institutions shifting to accord with rapidly changing distributions of capacities and interests. The ‘older order’ is not easily swept away” (Ikenberry 2017, 59, 71). But, once set­ tled, neither is the newer liberal one (Ikenberry 2017; 2018). Suggestively, while they claim that these plots are far from “linear or progres­ sive,” HI scholars also understand the story to confirm progressive lessons. The upshot of the “Hague Peace era” is that “the larger vision of subordinating power to the law . . . endured” (Alter  2017, 258; also Goldstein and Gulotty  2017, 210). Institutional inefficiencies notch stages in the liberal order project—“liberal order 1.0, 2.0, 3.0,” and so on (Ikenberry 2001; 2009; 2011; 2017; 2018)—which mark incremental shifts that, as such, lend the liberal epoch its comforting stickiness (Ikenberry 2017, 64). These inventive narrative moves poetically resolve discord. They transform the pathological problems of institutional pasts into temporal promises about the present and future. Incrementalism becomes persistence; inertia, durability; and RI vices provide the institutional virtues that prop up the liberal-internationalist status quo.10 Overlooked Causes Third, HI scholars whittle down discord by emplotting departures from the rationalist baseline of speedy and effective coordination as intelligible effects of underappreciated causal sequences. Sometimes they explain huge variations in the development of similar institutional projects through historical comparison. Failure to embrace the same dynamics that helped Global North actors “so promptly” realize institutionalized economic and normative progress leaves 10  Similarly, Krasner (2017, 40, 47, 54) emphasizes “founding moments” but insists that only an unprecedented global threat (nuclear apocalypse or a global health emergency emanating from “weak” states) could destabilize the institutional present, all while systematically downgrading any other potential precedents—e.g. the formation of the EU—as one-offs. Founding moments matter, but all but the apocalyptic ones are safely behind us.

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Historical Institutionalism  195 Global South regions mired in slow-moving reform pathways that “delay” the arrival of “fully functional” and legitimate institutions (Sikkink  2017, 234; Solingen and Wan 2017, 171). Sometimes politics gets in the way. The pursuit of power, domestic opposition, and regime survival inhibit the rational and respon­ sive coordination provided by ostensibly non-ideological institutions (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 133; Solingen and Wan 2017; cf. Barnett and Finnemore 1999). Or “political conflicts” like the Cold War cause “political disturbances,” which combine with authoritarian regimes and ideological projects like Marxism to hamstring the march of cosmopolitan human rights treaties and norms across Latin America (Sikkink 2017, 233–4, 242). Cold War governments resist the logic of international legal governance (Alter 2017, 258). Path ­dependent mechanisms distribute political power to entrenched players (Helleiner  2017, 225; Fioretos 2011, 376), who impede the resolution of critical junctures.

Disciplined Changes Fourth, emplotment disciplines world historical ruptures. World War II and the horror of the Holocaust become meaningful less for killing and traumatizing bil­ lions of political subjects (Edkins 2003) and more for spurring humanity to create the United Nations and a legal-normative consensus about human rights but­ tressed by an international trade regime. The thermonuclear revolution raised the specter of global apocalypse but mostly birthed a non-proliferation regime. The shocking end of the Cold War confounded various expectations but also pushed “state preferences” toward the embrace of “compulsory international judicial oversight” (Alter 2017, 269). The 2008 financial crisis ruined millions of ordinary lives but this deprivation only “intensified” halting efforts to reform key Bretton Woods institutions (Weaver and Moschella  2017, 274–5). These accounts lean heavily on an implied future perfect tense (the “what will have been,” see Currie 2010), working quickly to inscribe troubling experiences in stories of slow but steadfast efforts to tame power politics in the “expectation and a desire for a different world” (Alter 2017, 270). These narrative timing devices supply a number of ways for HI to configure stories consistent with rationalist and liberal thematics. They enable a vision of institutions as “human creations” (Fioretos 2017b, 6) that also humanizes inter­ nation­al time, unfolding a lengthy but intelligible realm growing ever more inhabitable because it is populated by more and more transformative institutions. Political ruptures inaugurate long critical junctures, which ultimate resolve co­ord­in­ation problems. Institutional inertia and inefficiency result from temporal pathologies and power politics, not from the intrinsic complexity and dynamism of international relations. Historical institutions may work slower than we like, but they work nonetheless, cultivating cooperation gains that grow “over time” (see Alter  2017; Fioretos  2017b; Weaver and Moschella  2017, 286–7; Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 133).

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Historical or Horological Institutionalism? HI initially developed these narrative techniques in response to growing ­skepticism about RI claims “that institutions could be quickly adapted when external circumstances changed,” with implications for their “efficiency” and “costliness” (Fioretos 2017b, 9). Yet this skepticism did not extend as far as RI’s basic terminology, which also included terms like “pathological,” “ir/rational,” “equilibria,” and “Pareto frontiers” (Martin and Simmons 1998, 749). Combined with how HI uses narrative to discipline a number of temporal characteristics, this economistic vocabulary quietly and quickly sets the rules of engagement for HI’s interventions against RI and SI and reaffirms the rationalist vision of reliably efficient and seamlessly adaptive institutions as an analytical baseline and ­normative ideal.11 Institutionally coordinated action still follows cost–benefit microfoundations, just boundedly rational ones prone to unexpected outcomes (Fioretos 2011, 373–5; Rixen and Viola  2016, 26–7). HI surpasses RI in explaining dysfunction and suboptimality without reflecting on or challenging the notion of optimality as a standard for institutional function. HI analyzes institutional pathologies, which acknowledges not only that they work slowly but that they could work better. Efficient institutions are more legitimate ones (Weaver and Moschella  2017, 275–6, 285–7). And while HI doubts that institutions will emerge and adapt quickly to “fill” shifting international spaces with efficient governance, their explanations for this do little to disrupt the stylized vision of a political realm full of cooperation cogs. Moreover, what prevents the realization of this ideal is that “history indeed appears to be relatively inefficient” (Fioretos 2017b, 13). Unlike rationalists, HI focuses on actual institutions, but ends up treating them like broken clocks, mechanisms deemed faulty according to rationalist bench­ marks (see Almond and Genco 1977, 489). That is, HI works as a horological pro­ ject (see Kelly 2018) interested in understanding institutions better so that they might work more reliably and efficiently to rationalize the time of institutional coordination and progress (e.g. Weaver and Moschella  2017). For horological institutionalists, well-oiled progressive institutions remain the overarching stand­ ard by which to evaluate and adjust international practices. They can at most diagnose faults and tinker with institutional mechanisms, without grappling with the prior question of whether it even makes sense to think in terms of institu­ tional pathologies, inefficiencies, and dysfunctions if “greater efficiency does not appear to be the dominant trend” in international life (Fioretos 2017b, 13). All of this makes it difficult to sustain the claim that HI embraces temporality in all its forms. 11  This also owes to the early influence of American and Comparative Politics work on institutions (Fioretos 2017b, 10).

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Historical Institutionalism  197

The Wages of Horological Institutionalism In addition to temporal inconsistency, this horological orientation holds im­port­ant consequences for the HI project. Because it overlooks the political origins and legacies of the Western standard time it treats as natural and objective, HI unin­ tentionally depoliticizes research it has pitched as an antidote to the “ ‘curiously bloodless’ ” quality of RI and SI, which marginalize clashes of power and interests (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal  2017, 133, quoting Hall and Taylor). The way it recapitulates the problem of Time tradition works hand in hand with its focus on “good” institutions to cast time as the cause of inefficiency, without ac­know­ledg­ ing the temporal roots of economistic notions of efficiency (Thompson  1967; Mirowski 2005; Blaney and Inayatullah 2010; Pitkin 2016). Some HI also commits the domestic analogy error (Suganami 1989). On this view, “the international realm is largely subject to the same conditions that make HI concepts tractable at the domestic level,” so voluntarist international institu­ tions can and should work like coercive domestic institutions of governance (Rixen and Viola 2016, 26; Zürn 2016). This way of thinking treats all levels or scales of political space as territories in need of taming and timing (Rae  2002; Callahan  2006). Even sympathetic observers acknowledge, however, that while “core” HI mechanisms like increasing returns or lock-in “require a pretty deep foundation of social structures to operate,” international politics lacks the “equiva­ lent of the hierarchical state” with enforcement powers (Farrell and Finnemore 2017, 146–7). Here horological institutionalism misses a chance at “theoretical distinctness and independence” (Rixen and Viola  2016, 26 and especially n10), making it all too easy for other approaches to frame it as the secondary work of specifying “institutional dysfunction” in the “error term or residuals” (Manulak 2018, 17). Horological thinking and tinkering begets disciplinary underlabor.

The Rationalist’s Revenge To highlight this, consider how easy it is for rationalists to co-opt HI’s treatment of time. A recent attempt proposes that “temporal focal points” (TFPs) allow RI to “problematiz[e] temporal factors” and conceptualize temporality more fully than HI (Manulak 2018, 24, 9). TFPs offer better tools to unpack the horological puz­ zle of why institutions remain “deficient” or “mired in inferior equilibria” when “Pareto-improving solutions are available” (Manulak 2018, 4–6). The rub is that potentially cooperative states “face important temporal coordination problems that derive from the risks of pursuing institutional change. Divergent ex­pect­ations concerning bargaining timelines hinder the achievement of beneficial change,” allowing “risk-dominant equilibria” to “trump payoff-dominant equilibria” and limiting institutions’ capacity “to fit changed conditions in a timely manner”

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198  International Relations and the Problem of Time (Manulak 2018, 4 emphasis added). However, this situation “can change rapidly following the emergence of prominent temporal signposts” or TFPs—those “conspicuous phases along the temporal continuum” like crises, auspicious anniversaries, and other prominent events. By spurring information gathering and risk-acceptance, TFPs enable “a convergence of expectations in time that increases the probability of agreement” (Manulak 2018, 3). Curiously, neither time nor temporality are focal points of this account of tem­ poral focal points. It divorces institutions from time and reduces temporality to a subjective belief. States and institutions play no role in producing TFPs, much less the supposedly universal “time” in which they emerge. Instead of political actors, this narrative grants agency to time itself. “TFPs find states (not the reverse)” and their “coordinative power . . . derives heavily from their exogenous origins” (Manulak 2018, 6, 12). And while they may “amplify” or “crystallize” them, “actors do not create TFPs,” even though such moments are “purely symbolic” (Manulak 2018, 6, 12, 18). Unless we can find the year 2012 written somewhere in the universe, or believe that it named itself “Rio + 20” (Manulak 2018, 2), this treatment of insti­ tutional time verges on incoherence.12 The distinction between rationalist TFPs and horological institutions boils down to two issues: (1) whether temporal drivers of institutional pathologies are exogenous or endogenous; and (2) how long is too long when it comes to institutional adaptation. On the first issue, time either must remain exogenous to institutions to preserve their presumptive rationality or must play the role of endogenous contaminant, inhibiting rationality from the inside. The second might yet form the basis of an interesting dialog about experiential cleavage amongst RI and HI scholars. This account of TFPs calls states taking three to ten years to negotiate “slow to coordinate” (Manulak 2018, 23), while HI work dis­ cussed above proposes that critical junctures and founding moments can last for decades (Alter 2017; Sikkink 2017; Hanrieder and Zürn 2017). Nevertheless, in terms of time, these modest distinctions highlight a further cost of horological institutionalism: by not taking time and temporality as seriously as they could, horological institutionalists make it too easy for RI to incorporate HI’s “distin­ guishing feature” without thinking through its wider meaning and implications. This makes sense when we recall the ease with which temporal idioms reify the practical activities to which they refer and obscure their own symbolic history, rendering time natural but enigmatic. By its own admission, HI’s theoretical core “is intuitive and its practitioners tend to eschew meta-theoretical debates” and “concept innovation” (Fioretos  2011, 392). As HI scholars began to study 12  TFP arguments also lean heavily on ex post identification by their effects rather than ex ante and discursive evidence that international actors apprehended pending events or moments as particularly opportune. TFP-indicative activities like information gathering, attempted negotiations, and issue linkage (see Manulak 2018, 23) also occur in the humdrum between focal points. Finally, there is little discussion here of why some symbolically loaded moments matter more than others.

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Historical Institutionalism  199 confounding institutional outcomes, they picked up ready-to-hand temporal concepts and logics without reflecting on time per se. Yet if HI seeks to account “for diverse patterns of incremental reform anchored in nuanced theories of the institutional interests of states as these are configured over time” (Fioretos 2011, 367–70; 2017b, 12), it will need to consider a more nuanced and innovative approach to time and temporal concepts, one that goes well beyond tracking change over time or treating temporality as an impediment to institutional function.

From Horological to Temporal Institutions If not a horological approach, how should scholars investigate interesting phe­ nomena like slow-moving organizations, high thresholds to change, and surpris­ ing outcomes? Timing theory offers substantial value here.13 But first, even more so than with other branches of IR, we need to distinguish between idiomatic “timing” in HI and the robust theory of timing advanced in this book. HI mentions “timing” frequently in core discussions.14 But it does so intuitively and idiom­at­ic­al­ly to indicate when something happens (e.g. Newman  2017, 77; Hall  2018, 41–2; Fioretos 2011, 381–2), often in tandem with “sequence” (e.g. Pierson 2004, 11–13, 196; Fioretos  2017b, 16; Solingen and Wan  2017, 169; Sikkink  2017, 231) and usually in ways that restrict timing’s explanatory power to a single point in that sequence (Rixen and Viola 2016, 11; Newman 2017, 78). HI scholars work with “timing” regularly but do not work on it much at all—like rationalists, they make little attempt to define or elaborate timing beyond ordinary language connota­ tions (Manulak 2018, 24). They treat it as theoretically subordinate to Time per se and commensurate with other causal factors like path dependence and critical junctures—all of which, we will see, can be understood to emanate from robust timing processes.15

13  Many of the alternative accounts of time and temporality covered elsewhere in this book could also add to HI (see chapters two and eight). Eventful temporality, how we turn jumbled experiences into discrete happenings, can explicate critical junctures as social constructs (McIntosh  2015; Lundborg  2011) rather than exogenous events. Kairos and chronos map closely onto institutional transformation and reproduction, the punctuated and the equilibrium, respectively (Hutchings 2008b). Institutional layering may share links with hierarchical sociotemporalities (Stevens  2015). And debates between RI and HI about the appropriate pace of change as well as narratives of institutional norms cascading at different speeds recall elements of temporal othering (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004; Blaney and Inayatullah 2010; Hom and Steele 2016; Hom 2016). 14  As a blunt indicator, “timing” appears in half of the chapters and receives ten discrete index entries in the recent Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism (Fioretos, Falleti, and Sheingate 2018), and appears in every chapter in two recent IR surveys of HI (Rixen, Viola, and Zürn  2016; Fioretos 2017a). 15  Fioretos’ (2011) early intervention mentioned “timing” on six occasions, while things change “over time” or happen “in time” on thirty-four occasions. Sequencing looks at the cumulative causal effects of “intersections of events, or causal chains” (Rixen and Viola 2016, 13), which already reduce relational processes to discrete occurrences and concurrences.

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200  International Relations and the Problem of Time In timing theory, reducing “timing” to mere matters of sequential order overlooks the story behind various temporal concepts and dynamics, ensuring that temporal factors remain not only reified but also inexplicable within the HI framework. Yet proponents identify temporality with “the notion that the tim­ ing . . . of events shape[s] political processes” (Fioretos 2011, 369) and argue that institutionalists must pay “attention to timing” because “[w]hen something happens (timing) may determine what options are available and are eventually selected, which ideas are legitimate and illegitimate, as well as what the contextual conditions look like that impact the prospects that institutions follow one or another path” (Fioretos 2017a, 16 emphasis added). This section therefore shows how we might reformulate HI by the simple but powerful step of moving from substantive temporal symbols and idiomatic timing to a robust view of timing. This provides a more coherent framework for understanding the temporal elem­ ents of institutions, one that retains HI’s narrative flexibility while freeing it from the biases and constraints of rationalism. Furthermore, timing theory offers a novel reading of institutions as timing regimes in their own right, a move that can put HI and timing theory in productive dialog with each other. International institutions on the ground manifest the hallmarks of timing situ­ ations. Featuring both continuity and change, they are “ligatures fastening sites, relationships, and largescale processes to each other” through “formal rules that states adopted to coordinate their affairs” (Katznelson 1997, 103; Fioretos 2017b, 8; also Rixen and Viola  2016, 10). They enable and constrain relationships and constitute identities, empowering some states and individuals to steer an or­gan­ iza­tion and in some cases transforming state identities through membership (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 123–4; Sikkink 2017, 231). As with any large and complex timing project, they also produce surprising outcomes and open up novel possibilities for further synthesis. These are the “unintended consequences” that HI traces to bounded rationality and “interaction effects” (Fioretos  2011, 380) rather than to the creative emergence fostered by successful timing projects. Like all timing modes, historical institutions are positional. They privilege some actors and modes of coordination over others, as when international economic regimes helped Western European states drive the diffusion of capitalist market relations during the Cold War and after (Ikenberry 2017; Solingen and Wan 2017). Different institutions and institutional agents apprehend different situations as crises or critical junctures (Capoccia 2018, 91, 97; Blyth 2002). When combined with our distinction between supple and brittle timing, the positional quality of timing offers greater traction on one of HI’s enduring research puzzles: the emer­ gence of critical junctures and institutional founding moments (Sikkink  2017, 235). Timing theory suggests these might originate in slips or misfits in existing timing regimes, especially brittle ones vulnerable to complexity or novel change. Unless blessed with extremely stable operating environments, highly formalized

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Historical Institutionalism  201 institutions should face more critical junctures and experience chronic instability or crisis, given the complexity of their task and context. Timing theory works for both granular and grand views of historical institu­ tions. HI’s microfoundations rest on “evaluations of the costs and benefits of adapting to new circumstances with the costs and benefits of maintaining or los­ ing their investments in past arrangements” (Fioretos 2011, 373). Removed from its economistic trappings, this statement describes the basic timing work of medi­ ating between existing modes of synthesis and changing circumstances. At the macro level, institutional “intercurrence” resounds with timing dynamics: “Since they emerge from a succession of particular historical conflicts and constellations, institutions . . . juxtapose different logics of political order, each with their own temporal underpinnings. For this reason, the various pieces do not necessarily fit into a coherent, self-reinforcing, let alone functional, whole” (Thelen and Conran 2016, 61–2). Robust timing themes infuse individual HI concepts as well. Critical junctures represent the timing crisis of nearly overwhelming discordant change. Sequence and path dependence mean nothing without the ability to relate “when aspects” between different change continua, a process that depends on a timing standard. Path dependency is not merely a way to capture left-censored causes or pathological development. It is a consequence of the ongoing effects of passive timing, which would not persist long enough to carve a path (much less a determinate one of great “distal” reach) unless they consistently enabled intelligible and useful relationships with “continuing effects” that also deepen “investments in existing and past designs” (Capoccia 2018, 89; Fioretos 2011, 384–5). The importance of origins and legacy effects attest to the power of good timing, whose salience grows and embeds through repeated successes to encourage the sort of continuous relations and effects that help us look back at certain experi­ ences as generative moments.16 Problems of “relative sequencing” emphasize how the relationship between different processes impacts on institutional develop­ ment. These might arise from “idiosyncratic” domestic paths different from inter­ nation­al ones (Newman 2017, 77), “mandated sequences” intended to standardize the codification of norms into laws productive of a “global legal temporality” (Sikkink  2017, 234–5), or “institutional layering” amongst multiple institutions and contexts, which work much like nested timing (Fioretos 2011, 385–90; Thelen and Conran 2016, 62). These examples of relative sequencing all depend on syn­ thesizing two or more differently constituted change continua into a single “event chain” conducive to “policy convergence” (Newman 2017, 78; Sikkink 2017, 231). For example, voice and vote reforms in the IMF and World Bank occurred within 16  By contrast, inadequate timing vitiates the influence of its origins, encourages modifications rather than legacy effects, and significantly reduces the incentives for reproduction.

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202  International Relations and the Problem of Time larger contexts of governance reforms, including “debates over leadership selection, staffing, core mandates, and organizational culture” (Weaver and Moschella 2017, 276). Each of these reform issues involved the alteration of particular standards and rules unlikely to work in the same way or with synchronized rhythms. How these nested timing modes interacted set the pace of institutional change (e.g. Weaver and Moschella 2017, 276). Active and passive timing enrich the HI story of institutional emergence. Historical institutions appear in “the wake of major exogenous shocks” and crit­ ic­al junctures (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 133). Once created they tend to stabilize and persist according more to their own internal incentives and con­ straints than external factors (Rixen and Viola 2016, 12). If this continues “over time, institutional arrangements may come to serve functions that are quite remote from those originally intended by their designers” and “persist after their original causes are no longer present or persist when more efficient alternatives exist” (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 133; Fioretos 2017a, 12). This story maps onto the growth of passive timing—from active proposals about new standards of synthesis meant to grapple with discordant experiences, through initial success and the increasingly passive repetition and reification of timing modes set by this standard, to a thoroughly embedded regime that outlives its timing entrepreneurs and becomes a self-propagating way of creating and maintaining relations. Much as passive timing may produce a widely shared symbol of time, a status quo institution becomes a legitimate “focal forum for dealing with a particular cooperation problem—often because it has been [used] in the past under similar circumstances” (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 122). It reproduces “symbols and myths,” “cultural values,” and especially “scripts of behavior” (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 131), which may vivify it and help it “outlive [its] original rationale” (Fioretos 2011, 376; Hanrieder 2015).17 This “modal type of institutional choice in international relations” (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal  2017, 136), then, arises through passive timing resources and successes. Passive timing dynamics also run through the individual drivers of self-reinforcement and path dependence. Self-reinforcing institutions create ­ “complementary relationships with other institutions” that enhance their value (Fioretos 2011, 377–8). They also “lock in balances of power or policy paradigms” benefiting “those in privileged positions” (Fioretos 2011, 377), just as intrinsically positional timing always benefits particular agent(s), establishes new relations, and through accumulated successes embeds a dynamic order in social life. Institutional inertia points to the conservative character of timing. Institutions dig in their heels, if (1) “major reversals in policy or changes in institutions become less likely over time”; (2) increasing returns encourage stability even 17  Here the “relatively unproblematic activation of an existing institution that seems ‘obvious’ for the problem at hand” expresses the power of passive timing (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 123).

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Historical Institutionalism  203 after the original rationale lapses; or (3) actors who benefit from institutional arrangements can “incorporate new institutions and policies in ways that are compatible with the existing structure” (Fioretos 2011, 377–8). These correspond with (1) the difficulty of imaging an entirely new timing standard and our unwill­ ingness to try if existing timing modes satisfice; (2) our capacity to retrofit events to perpetuate a timing project; and (3) how maintenance-based revisions preserve timing practices by accommodating novel developments (see figure 1). For example, the 2008 financial crisis produced “innovations” like the “transformation of the Financial Stability Forum into the Financial Stability Board and the addition of a new intergovernmental layer in the form of a leadership summit” (Fioretos 2017b, 16). These did little to respond directly to the contemporary crisis and appeared more like adaptations of “blueprints originating in the late 1990s in the context of a different crisis,” but they also enable institutions “deeply implicated in causing the crisis” to consolidate their position (Fioretos 2017b, 16). Similarly, a passive timing regime falls apart completely and necessitates brand new timing only if its object change continua shift so thoroughly as to befuddle its rubric of coordination. More often, disorderly and discordant change occur but remain beneath the threshold of total dissolution, so we would rather alter the existing timing mode just enough to go on. Just as re-timing augurs uncertainty and fears about the future as it becomes more active, truly novel, or “de novo,” institutional creations are “wide open” to unpredictability and contingency (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 123–6).18 Re-timing is difficult and new timing is especially fraught. In the terms of timing theory, then, it is neither puzzling nor pathological that occupying a “strategic position . . . at the founding moment” would confer “greater benefits from reproducing extant arrangements than from embracing radical change,” nor is there any necessary reason that institutional timing or re-timing must “ensure greater collective efficiency” over “positions of privilege and divisions of labour” (Fioretos  2011, 376). These supposedly “sub­ opti­mal” characteristics highlight the formal features of—and political incentives for—passive timing. Much as we would prefer to be in a time we recognize, insti­ tutional agents are “inclined to stick with the devil they know” whenever feasible (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal  2017, 127). Although they did not realize it, HI ­scholars have been concerned with the challenges and consequences of institu­ tional timing all along. Consider, finally, the gradual reform of Bretton Woods institutions. To say that the IMF and World Bank are “critical for macroeconomic coordination . . . and development support” in a “world of increased financial integration” ac­know­ ledges their contributions to synthesizing global modes of economic orientation, relation, and control (Weaver and Moschella 2017, 286–7). These organizations 18  This trip “down the institutional choice selection tree” (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 117) is driven by the decreasing adequacy of the status quo timing regime.

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204  International Relations and the Problem of Time faced a timing challenge or “crisis” once a critical number of states came to view their seventy-year-old governance arrangements as “obsole[te]” in the twenty-first century and especially after the 2008 financial crisis, which accentuated “long-term changes in the distribution of global economic power” (Weaver and Moschella 2017, 287). Efforts to reform underlying governance rules (Weaver and Moschella 2017, 279–81) involved re-timing by revising standards and pro­ced­ures to change relations between the organizations and their smaller member states, and relations between the member states themselves. Re-timing altered identities, “empower[ing]” weaker actors as key drivers of the reform process (Weaver and Moschella 2017, 276). It also enabled powerful actors like the United States to creatively adapt their strategies for maintaining institutional power. Significant re-timing proposals by newly empowered entrepreneurs competed with efforts to revise and retrofit in the context of legitimacy norm “cascades” throughout the institutions. A dynamic situation, actors reeling from a shocking event, nested modes of coordination moving at different paces, and competing proposals about the standards for pursuing economic relations all combined to inhibit the sort of radical ­re-timing that some states desired, and the sort that might have produced a distinctive temporal designation like the “dawn of the post-2008 era.” Instead, analysts still yoke international financial governance in the 2010s to “Bretton Woods 1944” and express great uncertainty about the prospects for more “profound transformations” in international economic relations (Weaver and Moschella 2017, 288). * * * These straightforward theoretical shifts confer several analytical benefits. First, HI habits of thinking about change “over time” (Fioretos 2011, 370, 381) overlook institutions’ key contribution to the creation of time. Timing theory offers a more dynamic account of how institutional change, stasis, and crisis emerge from and through timing. And it need not separate causal factors from institutional tem­por­ al­ity (see Sikkink 2017, 234–5) because it emphasizes how iterated processes of integration and coordination constructs together the institution and the time “in” which its exists and “over” which it persists. Second, timing theory frees HI narratives from presumptive thematics in­herit­ed from RI. It is unclear whether any political institutions ever met rationalist standards of optimal efficiency. Early speculation about the HI agenda noted that if temporal phenomena like messy action with unanticipated consequences “dominate political outcomes, we would have to draw on alternatives to rationalist models in a way that goes far beyond using them as a way to specify preferences and goals” (Martin and Simmons 1998, 750). HI scholars have not yet taken this point on board in full. In timing theory, these sorts of phenomena resolve not as deviations but more sensibly as indicators of past timing success, of or­gan­iza­tional forms

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Historical Institutionalism  205 that did come into being, helped establish new social relations, and persisted—not by providing clock-like coordination or supple adaptation in transformative moments but by enabling the sort of satisfactory and effective maintenance of extensive dynamic conditions that allow institutions to function at all. Third, timing theory helps HI dissolve the problem of Time. Instead of blam­ ing so-called suboptimal institutional outcomes on problematic temporal fea­ tures, timing theory treats both effects and causes more straightforwardly as the inherently messy stuff from which institutions emerge and endure. This comports more closely with HI’s own observation that critical junctures, upheavals, and continuous processes reflect “the nature of change and continuity in the inter­ nation­al system” (Fioretos 2011, 367). And while it may not enable the “deductive complete theory” that some proponents seek, timing theory offers a far less “woolly and vague” account of institutions’ temporal dynamics and the time in which they move (Rixen and Viola  2016, 5). Taken together, these features enable a more coherent and systematic account of the whole life of international institutions, in all their twists and turns. They move historical and horological frameworks toward a more thoroughly temporal understanding of international institutions.19 Fourth, temporal institutions help bridge gaps with other types of institution­ alism. HI scholars criticize SI for focusing too much on how institutional actors: carry their existing scripts and routinized responses to problems into new domains and seek to reproduce the old institutional logic without regard to the specific needs in these domains. . . . Institutional survival or perpetuation becomes an end in itself; it is not the result or byproduct of effective or­gan­iza­tional response to new challenges  (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017, 132; Fioretos 2017b, 6).

In timing theory, this looks like a difference without a distinction. SI directs our attention to survival through routine; HI to survival through satisficing and iner­ tia. With timing theory, we can read institutional actors as typically trying to accomplish all three: to reaffirm the institution’s efficacy by responding effectively to new challenges—ideally by reproducing tried and trusted scripts. Indeed, it would be surprising if institutions did not draw important ontological and af­fect­ ive benefits from their own routines, repertoires, and autobiographical narratives, which help constitute their continuous life and the time they inhabit (see Solomon 2014; Hom and Solomon 2016; Hom and Steele 2020).20 19  See also Pierson (2004, 139–42) for a metatheoretical critique of HI in political science. 20  Here HI would also benefit from ontological security theory’s stress on the importance of iden­ tity continuity in critical situations (e.g. Steele  2008a; Mitzen  2006; Zarakol  2010a; Rumelili  2015; Agius  2017; Pratt  2017; Kinnvall, Manners, and Mitzen  2018). If institutions exist and exert them­ selves on the international stage, as all institutionalists would aver, then we should not be surprised to find them struggling and striving to persist as all social agents do.

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206  International Relations and the Problem of Time

Toward an Institutional Account of Timing While timing theory offers significant clarity and analytical value to HI, the latter can flesh out timing theory with more granular concepts of institutionalization, a focus on institutional interaction, and rich empirical research. An HI freed of its underlying rationalism can also help specify how timing moves from active to passive and back. Concepts like lock-in, positive feedback, increasing returns, and self-reinforcement, (Fioretos 2011, 377) suggest individual pathways between initial timing success and passive institutionalization—or the way that those rela­ tions come to seem like second nature. The incremental phenomenon of institu­ tional exhaustion (Rixen and Viola 2016, 14) directs attention to how a lengthy series of relatively minor consequences or changes in a passive timing regime might cause it to “slip” or falter, seemingly without warning. Recent attention to negative feedback effects, when institutions lose their legitimacy through “re­act­ ive sequences” driven by “self-undermining mechanisms” and those who “lose” under the current arrangement (Hanrieder and Zürn 2017, 100; see also Fioretos 2017b, 18), offers much more detail and nuance to timing failures. This causal chain works through “institutional output, external resistance, crisis, and institu­ tional response” (Hanrieder and Zürn 2017, 100), helping unpack long-run pro­ cesses and recover subordinated actors from otherwise brute notions of timing power, slippage, and failure. Timing theory also awaits the sort of rich empirical work found in HI, which could develop fuller inquiries into how political actors come to effectively time important processes and large populations in particular contexts. HI concepts can help organize research here. The blunt notion of “timing modes” encompasses an exceptional range of diverse phenomena, from clocks to national and global calendars, the UTC regime, various national and regional histories, impactful interstate organizations, and the increasingly urgent issue of climate crisis (see Allan 2017, 817–18), just to name a handful. In many cases these modes are nested, to be sure, but the more interesting question is how, and what the effects of nested timing are. And here HI ideas about layering, conversion (a form of timing revision), and displacement (an outcome of timing competition; see Rixen and Viola 2016, 14; Streeck and Thelen 2005) might help us typologize timing modes and their consequences.

Conclusion Historical institutionalists seek to move the study of international institutions from “stationary” objects of analysis to “diverse and dynamic processes” by taking temporality seriously (Fioretos  2011, 371; Mahoney, Mohamedali, and Nguyen 2018; Solingen and Wan  2017). In this, two interconnected factors constrain

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Historical Institutionalism  207 them. The intuitive character of the temporal concepts that scholars use makes it difficult to reflect on the assumptions and meaning of time underpinning HI and all too easy to equate various institutional features with the problem of Time. Also, HI grafts under-theorized temporal concepts onto a rationalist metanarrative to explain why ideal institutions do not adapt seamlessly and efficiently and produce optimal equilibria. Together, these undersell HI as a horological addendum to rationalism, an underlaborer that explains why institutions do not function the way they should and in doing so props up the presumption that they ever could. When HI scholars follow rationalists in branding as pathological that which is processual, sticky, and slow-moving, and then identify temporal processes as the root causes, they recapitulate not only the problem of Time but its traditional other—the clockwork symbol of eternity. Yet it makes little sense to call institu­ tions suboptimal and pathological if optimality and efficiency are consistently beyond their grasp. In these ways, HI works like approaches discussed in this book, where Western standard time and the problem of Time co-mingle when scholars struggle to time international politics using standards inadequate or illsuited to the dynamics and relations that interest them. International institutions are historical, but they are also temporal in many more and richer ways than HI realizes. To see this, we need to think about institutions as timing projects. On this view, the very fact that so many institutions arise, exert influence, and persist in an emergent and unsteady change environment like the international realm speaks to the power of timing. Furthermore, institutions are not merely faulty analogs of reliable and supple clocks. Rather, they stand as unique achievements of timing in their own right.

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8

Critical Approaches Past Times, Fast Times, and the Rapture of Rupture

Introduction So far we have covered two examples of mainstream scholarship deeply bound up with temporal concerns but varying significantly in how they engage time and propose to time international processes. At one end of IR’s cultural ­continuum of time, metaphors of eternity provide temporal logics driving quantitative research toward passive timing practices poorly suited to the domain of international pol­it­ics, although Bayesian approaches make room for more flexible timing modes. Somewhere in the middle, historically minded scholars collect an even more diverse set of concepts needed to theorize the effects of temporal dynamics on international institutions, but do not embrace a thoroughly temporalized view of institutions that might escape rationalism or the problem of Time tradition. Critical IR occupies the other end of this temporal continuum in at least three respects. First, critical scholars took an early, sustained, and much more diverse interest in time (e.g. der Derian 1990; Walker 1993; 2009; Shapiro 2000; 2001; 2010; Edkins  2003; Inayatullah and Blaney  2004; Hutchings  2007;  2008b; McIntosh 2015), providing initial impulse toward a “temporal turn” in IR (see Hesford and Diedrich  2010, 6; Berenskoetter  2011; Hom  2018c; cf. Chamon  2018). Second, they openly embraced time as a political concept in its own right and one relevant to numerous issue areas, rather than a problematic or pathological variable. Third, unlike quantitative and historical-institutionalist work, critical IR expressly deploys time to undercut dominant logics and recover marginalized voices in global politics. “Critical IR” here refers to self-identified postmodern, poststructural, postcolonial, and otherwise post- or anti-positivist works. Destabilizing hegemonic foundations provides their metanarrative thematic, and “being critical” entails exploring the alternatives enabled by different visions of time (Mhurchú and Shindo  2016a, 2–3; also Çalkivik  2016, 233–5; Lundborg  2016b; Shapiro  2016, xiii; see Hom 2018a, 71; 2018c, 306). Hegemonic politics abound in global life, so this expansive metanarrative thematic permits a great diversity of individual organizing standards, plot lines, and

International Relations and the Problem of Time. Andrew R. Hom, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andrew R. Hom. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850014.001.0001

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Critical Approaches  209 temporal symbols.1 Amidst an ever-growing list of critical times and tem­por­al­ities, four prominent approaches stand out by their more substantial explication and/ or range of adherents. Two claim to undermine hegemonic politics by re­cover­ing alternative temporalities from the past, namely “savage” times and the classically inspired triad of chronos, kairos, and aion. Two others—accelerating times and temporalities of rupture—do so by leveraging the future in particular ways. Over four sections, I analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each, before arguing that we can understand them better in terms of timing. I contend timing not only accommodates but also improves upon critical IR time studies on their own terms.

Past Times 1—Savage Temporalities The first emerges from a critique of temporal Othering, a knowledge system based on Enlightenment histories of a universal humanity following a unitary developmental trajectory (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004; Hindess 2007; Hom and Steele  2016).2 This system is temporal because it explains contemporary differences by reference to varying rates of development contingent on geographic, political, and cultural placement. It represents a form of Othering because it

1  This chapter does not cover many of them. An ever-growing list of omissions includes “chronotopicity” (Ouma 2012); “time proper” vs. “proper time” (Grovogui 2016, 56); the “temporality of ‘statism’ ” vs. postcolonialism (Abourahme  2016, 151); overlapping “temporal traces of citizenship” (Stephens 2010, 34); time as “ontology” and “capital” as temporality (Agathangelou and Killian 2016b, 4; 2016a, 25); “children’s time,” “camp-time,” “family time,” “wartime,” the “temporality of war and humanitarianism,” and that of “generic childhood” (Opondo 2016, 209–10); “spatio-temporal disjunctures” within the state, “the spaces of temporal presence,” the “‘visual time of the horizontal society’,” the “time of consumption,” the Middle Eastern “clash of temporalities” between “state-oriented mapping” and “the story of the Levant,” “presence-in-time,” the “agonistic temporality” of the novel, the “‘geography of time’ ” (Shapiro  2000, 81, 83, 84, 87–8, 90, 93); “African time” and “now-time” (Shapiro 2010, 27, 39–42); “mobile” and “‘plastic’ ” temporalities “‘wholly without direction’,” the “tem­ poral trajectory of moral damage” found in the “diremption between witnessing and knowing,” “documentary time,” which captures “event time” but differs from historical time and the “static picture,” and “ordinary biological time” (Shapiro 2016, 36, 42, 38, 71, 44). This list evokes a conceptual “battle royale” where new entrants periodically join an increasingly crowded space with little explication and even less dialogue (for a rare exception, see Bilgin 2016, 221). Occasionally scholars wield contra­dict­ ory terms, as when three authors in the same volume dub a suspended present as “atemporal” (Vij 2016, 173), a “lingering” perpetuation of time (Abourahme 2016, 151), or a “timespace compression” (Davidson  2016, 262). While we might welcome temporal variety as evidence that IR heeds compelling arguments about the necessity of “heterotemporality” or “time pluralism” (Hutchings 2008b, 166–76; Blaney and Inayatullah 2010, 7; Stephens 2010, 34; Vij 2012, 9; Edkins 2013, 289), many of these accounts of time remain incipient at best and a closed shop or insider’s discourse at worst (Hom  2018c, 307). It remains difficult to say something meaningful and systematic about them as a whole until their proponents say more about each. 2  For a curiously ahistorical account of temporal Othering, see (Prozorov  2011). For temporal Othering in contemporary security studies, see (Hom 2016). Weber (2015, 36–7) opposes “queer failure” to similar “developmental temporalities.”

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210  International Relations and the Problem of Time invests European metropoles and their cultures as the apex of development, with all Others assigned some spot “behind” them on this shared scale. As Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney (2004, 50) put it, “the spatially distinct Other is thereby converted into a temporally prior Self.” In this story, Anglo-Europeans become “mature,” “adult,” and “forward-looking”; while other cultures become “immature,” “child-like,” and “backward.” Such assignments underwrote colonialism and imperialism, political and economic modernization, and various other “Western” projects to remake the world in its image (see Hindess 2007). To resist these sorts of deeply embedded narrative “logics of history,” Blaney and Inayatullah (2010, 196) recommend “traveling in time” to recover better but forgotten ways of negotiating difference and co-existence.3 For example, to resist modern pathologies of restless consumption and the need to “conquer ‘problems’ of instability, poverty and inequality by inflicting (or is it re-inflicting?) the same abundance—the same wound of wealth—on others,” they recommend taking “savage economics” based on sharing practices, and the “savage times” these practices produce, as serious alternatives to capitalist exchange (Blaney and Inayatullah 2010, 7, 186–99). In contrast with progress via production and wealth-accumulation and its “developmental logic” of clear breaks with the past, hunter-gatherers share in abundance and thus “experience and participate in time in terms of continuity, not disjuncture” (Blaney and Inayatullah 2010, 190).4 In its ritualized form, this practice “creates and recreates time and the cosmos as the present” so that “ ‘all that exists [derives] from a single, unchanging, timeless source’ ,” which produces the “ ‘spontaneous order’ of hunter-gathers” (Blaney and Inayatullah 2010, 190–1, quoting Myers). The savage’s “timeless time” thus encourages cooperation over competition, the responsible management of resources rather than crisis and scarcity, and communal cohesion over material gain (Blaney and Inayatullah 2010, 190).5 In their fascinating exposition, Blaney and Inayatullah highlight the narrative foundations of modern time, but tend to ascribe to savage time a natural, protean status illustrated by these quotes. Moreover, while I agree that we should view the “modern faith” that chaos is “the sole alternative” to irrevocable progress with skepticism (Blaney and Inayatullah 2010, 191), we can also read their account of savage economics as a narrative in its own right, with “savage time” its emplotted temporality and an indexical that communicates and obscures various ex­peri­ ences with hunter-gatherer timing. In this story, sharing provides the synoptic organizing theme. It creatively filters in rituals and situations of abundance, while sidelining practices of abstract valuation and exchange along with situations of 3  This notion of “time travel” differs significantly from other critical views, see (Hom 2018c, 317–18). 4  Others ascribe “cyclicality” or “circularity” to indigenous orders (Shaw 2008, 110, 74; cf. McClintock 1992, 85, 91). 5  As with much critical IR (Hom 2018c), this cryptic formulation depends on silently shared in­tu­ itions about what constitutes time.

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Critical Approaches  211 scarcity, instability, or crisis—the latter all relegated to the consequences of modern accumulation. As a form of “time travel”, it cleaves experience broadly, connecting the past to the present for the purpose of reflexive critique. From these timing operations, savage time produces concordant discordance in several forms: in the continuity between ancient practices and contemporary problems; in the aforementioned elision of crisis and scarcity—situations which surely did occur in hunter-gatherer societies prior to the modern epoch, due to environmental, societal, or other developments; and in the assertion of a spontaneous order, which escapes novel changes in part by emerging from no specific point and depending on no particular orderer. Taken together, these devices unfold a smooth and inhabitable world of ritualized exchange, which reconfirms itself at each turn. Savage time thus displays several hallmarks of not only narrative but passive and self-propagating timing. Exchange practices instantiate passive timing, while periodic rituals invest a symbolic authority that helps them self-propagate, producing order without “an authoritative orderer” (Blaney and Inayatullah  2010, 191)—and time seemingly without any timers. Yet an absence of orderer does not equate with spontaneity any more than continuity entails timelessness. Timing theory helps avoid such conflations and facilitates a clearer understanding of indigenous order, something Blaney and Inayatullah (2010, 190) hint at by mentioning how rituals seamlessly transmit “scripts of behavior” that allow savages to “go on in society” without a sovereign authority. This highlights the value of any received tradition, which provides an established and seemingly independent or natural code of conduct that propounds continuity amidst experiences of change. Timing theory also helps us foreground the politics of hunter-gatherer so­ci­ eties. Whose will to time do attributions of timeless time or spontaneous order reflect? Which indigenous perspectives get privileged and what alternatives get precluded? Unless we are to believe that hunter-gatherers never experience conflicting objectives, needs, or desires, and that they persist always in abundance, timing theory recommends attention to the idea that wherever there is order there is at least a particular, positional, and powerful ordering idea—whether this simply be “the way things were always done,” a collective understanding of group needs, or a directive cosmology setting value hierarchies and standards of action. Unless we are to believe that hunter-gatherers never encounter confounding changes other than those imposed by hegemonic logics,6 then their “continual 6  They do: “hunter-gatherers tend to ‘explain experiences which could be at odds with [their] cultural representation,’ such as a paucity of game or foraging sources during a season or individual hording, ‘as temporary, accidental, and remediable exceptions.’ Such anomalies are inconsistent with the ­cosmological experience of hunter-gatherers and are relegated to the margins” (Blaney and Inayatullah 2010, 187–8). A timing framework understands these sorts of moves as part and parcel of timing management and rectification. Edgerton (1992, 50–1, 154; cf. Blaney and Inayatullah 2010, 186) notes that even in situations of abundance, indigenous sharing practices differed according to variable calculations and not infrequently required “relentless” social pressure. He also embraces economistic and

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212  International Relations and the Problem of Time recreation of the world” depends on efforts to successfully emplot varied ex­peri­ences in a “cosmology of time” (see Blaney and Inayatullah 2010, 195–7). While these points underscore the paucity of symbolic language for representing diverse timing domains, they need not vitiate Blaney and Inayatullah’s rich account. Just the opposite, timing theory pushes indigeneity further in the directions that they already want to go. The will to time calls for inquiry into the source(s) of seemingly spontaneous order, those narrative and practical activities that help synthesize continuity out of emergence. Further still, timing theory elevates hunter-gatherer societies as one of our great exemplars of timing. Shared survival needs, a consequent interest in sociability, and an understanding of their environment as “giving” not “stingy” all help locate the value of sharing “principally in its occurrence and recurrence” (Blaney and Inayatullah 2010, 191, 197 emphasis added). This is the epitome of a passive and self-propagating timing regime and as such deserves a place in any record of timing achievements. Long before humans tinkered with sand or water, devised escapements, or measured with quartz and atom, they synthesized human relations and social orders through routinized activities like sharing, hunting, and foraging, all emplotted in symbolic cosmographies.

Past Times 2—Neoclassical Times Second, critical theorists turn to classical Greek notions of chronos, kairos, and aion (henceforth c/k/a) and their reinvigoration in continental philosophy for new ways of destabilizing hegemonic times.7 Chronos refers to orderly, universal, and determinate flow (Hutchings 2008b, 5; Lundborg 2011, 3–4). Kairos marks a moment of opportunity in which transformations can be initiated (Hutchings 2008b, 6). Working in tandem or alone, these temporalities fix the present as part of a smooth flow or as a moment of opportunity to steer political processes. By contrast, aion ascribes a pure movement of “becoming” or limitless potential in every instant, inexhaustible by c/k (Hutchings  2007, 82–8; 2008b, 69, 154–77; Lundborg 2011, 1, 16–17, 21), which dissolves any particular, unified present and “[c]onstantly flees . . . in different directions” (Deleuze, quoted in Hutchings 2008b, 69; Lundborg 2011, 21, also 2, 25–6). Aion represents a “pure empty form of time, which has freed itself of its present corporeal content” (Deleuze, quoted in Hutchings 2008b, 69; and Lundborg 2009). temporal Othering assumptions by referring to these practices as symptomatic of “maladaptive” or “sick societies.” For debates about interpretations of past or indigenous cultures, see J. W. Bennett (1995). 7  Although I treat these together for the sake of clarity, Lundborg (2009; 2011) relies mostly on a chronos/aion distinction, while Hutchings’ (2008b, 69, 153 n5; cf. 2007) most sustained discussion focuses more on chronos/kairos.

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Critical Approaches  213 From neopositivism, to modern historicism, and even some poststructuralism, Kim Hutchings (2008b, 176) traces how theorists rely on various admixtures of chronos and kairos to construct models of politics, which assume either that kairos can interrupt chronos or that, unfortunately, chronos overwhelms any kairotic potential. Despite great variety, these efforts routinely produce visions of world politics as a “unified present” that renders the past and future intelligible and “overestimate[s] the capacity of the theorist to grasp and intervene in the times” (Hutchings  2008b, 176). Theorizing itself becomes a hegemonic and “timely” activity here—an effort to leverage the status quo or intervene at a propitious moment to redirect the course of events and become a “time creator” rather than merely a “time creature” (Hutchings  2008b, 73; 2016, 39). These habits exclude women and the subaltern subject from serious political and ethical consideration, pushing them to the natural or private spheres (Hutchings 2008b, 162). Or Tom Lundborg (2011, 108; 2009; 2016a) looks relatedly at how dominant political practices “fold” and fix the uncertainty and possibility of novel occurrences into staid, chronotic events with particular meanings. For example, the shocking crashes of four airplanes become “9/11,” which inaugurates the Global War on Terror (Lundborg 2011, 45–61). Hence the appeal of aion, which gives us conceptual tools to grapple with the multiplicity of any happening and the intrinsic “heterotemporality” of political life in general (Hutchings  2008b, 83; Lundborg  2011, 17). This includes both a “ ‘pure’ or virtual dimension” of possibilities as well as an “actual” dimension in which some “particular state . . . of affairs” resolves through attributions of presence and completeness, which elevate some story, arrangement, and subject(s) over others (Lundborg 2011, 1, 9). Focusing on this virtual dimension allows us to escape hegemonic conceptual and political orders and thus makes theory “untimely,” unyoked from any dominant mode of expression (Lundborg 2011, 9; Hutchings 2008b, 166–74). Thanks to its clear elaboration, analytical purchase, and our veneration of classical Greek thought, the c/k/a triad sets the high water mark of critical IR work in a heterotemporal vein. In particular, Hutchings uses c/k to construct a compelling and systematic account of international political theory and IR as narratives about our political present. Yet c/k/a is not without tensions. First, it maintains a somewhat mixed relationship to the problem of Time. Chronos includes lifecyclical, profane, and natural “times” as well as “the maenad Fortune, an irrational and irresistible stream of happenings” (Hutchings 2008b, 6, 34, 8). Kairos includes novelty and the disruption of order and predictability (Hutchings 2008b, 7, 30). Yet chronos and kairos also provide solutions to the problem of Time. Homogeneous chronos replaces time’s natural wildness with neutral order. Kairotic moments are rare opportunities for human agency to overcome time’s propensity to bring dissolution and discord. So even as each contains elements of the problem of Time, the analytical appeal of chronos and kairos rests on their capacity for tame

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214  International Relations and the Problem of Time time’s disposition toward disorder. Working in the other direction, although Hutchings and Lundborg understand aion as a more comprehensive and eternal form of time per se, the way that they use it turns the problem of Time into a sort of noble savage set against hegemony. That is, aion’s appeal rests on its supposedly natural (and in unexplicated ways its more positive) wildness and the potential of this to destabilize the unified or “linear” times of modern politics (Lundborg 2011, 29). This does not challenge the problem of Time so much as it yokes it to the critical metanarrative, turning time’s purportedly nat­ural tendencies against the hegemonic orders that critical scholars wish to prob­lem­atize. Put differently, in aion critical scholars reaffirm the problem of Time, but from a specific position within the hegemonic order they wish to escape.8 Second, this triad often slips into reified, substantival language, dubbing kairos a “creative force in its own right” that “intervenes” in chronos, itself “inscribed in the universe as a whole” or simply “internal to particular kinds of entities” (Hutchings 2008b, 25 n5, 31, 69). Or aion’s “emptiness” marks the “ ‘eternal truth of time’ ” (Hutchings 2008b, 69, quoting Deleuze). Although both Hutchings and Lundborg view time as constructed and contingent, this way of speaking downplays its human roots and instead reproduces substantival assumptions about time as a given thing, agent, or force. It does not entirely free us in full from “an external point of view” (Lundborg 2009). Because Hutchings and Lundborg put c/k/a to such effective use unpacking and highlighting the narratives that construct and constrain world political time, we need not programmatically unpack the narratological elements of this triad to understand its timing function. However, despite the triad’s utility, there are good reasons to treat c/k/a as timing indexicals rather than stand-alone concepts, which unintentionally reinforce the sense of time as an independent entity. Instead of a universal time, a spontaneous moment of opportunity emerging on its own, or an eternal truth, with timing theory we can understand the c/k/a complex as follows: Aionic potential symbolizes a situation in need of timing—a dynamic and emergent bramble (becoming) open to different modes of synthesis and requiring the establishment of some relations to make it inhabitable. Social agents respond to this need with kairotic, active timing, using a standard or rule to at least min­im­ al­ly order the situation and so enable orientation, action, and control. If widely repeated, this kairotic timing activity may become a more passive, chronotic practice, and eventually a regime conflated with time per se—until a novel 8 Additionally, chronos is both the time of the universe (Hutchings 2008b, 31) and a “particular” expression that “does not represent a ‘universal’ order of time” (Lundborg  2011, 30). Aion marks a decisive break with chronos because the former marks the “instant” and the latter the “now,” except when chronos counts a “succession of instants” (cf. Lundborg 2011, 16 and 30). And the “infinite line” of aion disrupts the “linear time” of sovereign history without further explication of linearity (cf. Lundborg 2011, 17 and 29; see Hom 2018c, 314–16).

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Critical Approaches  215 change or timing entrepreneur throws it off and casts us back into an aionic situation in need of further timing.

On this reading, aion is only pure and empty because it describes a situation in which we must time in order to go on—one full of “qualitative change” and “shifting and unfamiliar contexts,” devoid of guarantees, and affording “no orientation relative to the present” (Hutchings 2008b, 153 n5, 171, 69). This is why we associate aion with desire (Hutchings 2008b, 69–70) and the need to choose a standard that might allow us to say “ ‘here, the moment has come’ ” (Lundborg  2011, 6, quoting Deleuze). So while proponents describe it as an “empty” form of time, aion marks a situation full of timing possibilities. As Deleuze (2004, 172 emphasis added; see Lundborg 2011, 39 and 22) puts it: “It is I who am too weak for life, it is life which overwhelms me, scattering its singularities all about, in no relation to me, nor to a moment determinable as the present, except an impersonal instant”. Good timing transforms the singularities of the impersonal instant into an inhabitable now. By that standard we then establish dynamic relationships—some chronotic, some kairotic—that allow us to make sense of our experiences and to evaluate the future and past “with respect to this definitive present, and from the point of view of that which embodies it” (Lundborg 2011, 1).9 This is just what social agents do to survive and go on amidst a welter of complex changes—that is, within the “pure movement” of “becoming” (Hutchings 2008b, 69–72; Lundborg 2011, 16–17; 2009). In other words, c/k/a offers a neoclassical account of how survival and social action depends upon good timing. Even more telling for timing theory, proponents claim that one of aion’s key benefits is to shift our thinking from objects to processes, from “stating that ‘the tree is green’ ” to a sense of “active process: ‘to green’ and ‘to tree’ ” (Lundborg 2009; also 2011, 92; and Hutchings 2008b, 60). It is surprising here that c/k/a scholars do not take the opportunity to shift from concepts that processualize time to the more direct tactic of thinking about timing processes. This is a crucial analytical difference between “of time” and “to time.” Keeping with the former reifies and obscures the very dynamic, relational phenomena they want to foreground. The c/k/a triad then requires additional hermeneutic work to reconnect time with social subjectivity or highlight its contingency and dynamism. We need chronotic actualization to “weave together” various “instants” in order “to form the impression of a homogenous movement,” which in turn “makes the past and future its two oriented dimensions” (Lundborg  2009). We then need kairos and aion to remind us that such impressions only work “inside partial worlds or partial systems,” which are not “empty” but “embodied” amidst, we must also recall, “an ongoing process of becoming” (Lundborg 2009; also Hutchings 2008b, 69). Each 9  Hence why it matters that chronos not be strictly “independent” but “always exists in relation to Aion” (Lundborg 2011, 39).

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216  International Relations and the Problem of Time of these concepts propounds a substantival view of processual phenomena. Each requires significant symbolic facility. Taken together they hide the timing process behind characterized times acting on each other, which requires just the sort of  “speculations about the nature of time” that proponents wish to avoid (Hutchings 2007, 88). When compared with timing theory, then, c/k/a charts a much more circuitous journey from given times back to processes identical with—but not identified as—timing. Moreover, timing theory clarifies and extends c/k/a in at least four respects. First, as mentioned, it suggests that chronotic predicates like “homogeneous” or “continuous” are symbolic representations of passive timing (Hutchings  2008b, 57, 63–4). Second, this helps deepen the relationship between chronos and kairos. If chronos marks passive timing at its best, kairos distills active timing’s creative potential to disrupt and remake social relations. Third, timing exposes “timely” theory as a doubly active sort of timing: the theorist not only elaborates how change continua relate, she also writes “with great urgency” at a “critical moment” (see pp. 73). She times her proposal about how we might time political phenomena to current events. Fourth, timing theory buttresses one of the primary critiques mounted by c/k/a. The ideas of will to time and timing standard help explain why unitary temporal visions prevail both in theory and practice—every temporality constitutes a unity insofar as it allows some social agents to establish self-sufficient relations in particular ways. References to the “ideal of political time as a unified and unifying . . . present” gesture at these willful timing processes (Hutchings 2008b, 21, also 127, 152, 175). Likewise, timing positions the critical alternative of heterotemporality not only as an ethico-political category but also as a matter of explanatory adequacy—a question of whether we can theoretically accommodate the temporal, and empirical, multiplicity of world politics with stand-alone, finite concepts of time. In this sense timing comports with the crit­ ic­al IR metanarrative. But it goes further by avoiding dependence on a natural and thingy conceptual hierarchy in which the prospect of a stable universal or physical time still holds sway (Hom 2018a, 73–5; see pp. 58). Finally, by making all “times” and “temporalities” derivative of diverse underlying timing practices, timing theory renders Time per se—if we can speak of such—always and already heterotemporal. Hegemonic or otherwise unified variants obscure this, and it is time scholars’ task to reflect and grapple with this without reifying and substantivizing time anew. * * * Like the savage times of sharing discussed above, c/k/a derives its authority from the past—in this case classical Greece rather than hunter-gatherers. But whereas the savage’s “timeless time” challenges modern logics of consumption and wealth by recovering forgotten passive timing regimes, the critical leverage of c/k/a hinges on active timing. Its only passive member, chronos, functions primarily as

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Critical Approaches  217 a foil. Moreover, aion calls for “an active process of drawing and experimenting with lines, without having any preestablished lines—of history, society, and the world—to fall back on” (Lundborg  2011, 88).10 As the latter part of the quote makes clear, this is about timing without a net, the ur-timing challenge of establishing relations in unprecedented situations. So where savage times undermine modern temporal logics with long-running, passive timing alternatives, c/k/a does so by recovering venerable aion’s impulse to active timing possibilities.

Fast Times: Accelerationism Critical scholars also challenge the present order through the horizon of the future, albeit in very different ways. First, accelerationists emphasize the eschatological effects of quickening technology, information networks, and globalization on social exchange (see Stevens 2015, 105, 196–200). On this view, time itself is accelerating (Scheuerman  2004) and alienating humanity in the process. Information technologies bring us closer together but estranges rather than connects (Rosa  2010). Habituation to technological mediation constrains our “freedom of political action” (Virilio  1998, 51). All this outpaces democratic deliberation and checks and balances, suborning the rise of the executive (Scheuerman 2004; Wolin  1997). Finally, digital technologies eclipse territorial borders and render late-modern conflict less about sheer destructive power (a question settled by the atomic bomb) and more about payload delivery speed and conflict simulations (der Derian 1990, 298; 2001, 11; Virilio 1998, 49). These rich works develop stark narratives about technological change. They share the synoptic theme of warning about an alienation invasion, which necessarily filters out alternative uses of technology or other effects of acceleration, leaving behind only discord and disillusionment. The way they cleave experience complements such filtration—many accelerationist accounts begin in the mid- to late-twentieth century. This focuses our attention on the era when accelerative technological innovations emerged in earnest and when the rate of innovation itself surpassed existing frameworks’ ability to adapt (Scheuerman  2004, 10). Cleaving in this way also helps avoid comparisons with previous eras, which might disclose that—much like past generations despaired archery as an affront to honorable conflict long before simulations and artificial intelligence threw the ethics of war into doubt (see O’Driscoll  2015, 5)—“[s]peed has always been a

10  This passage exemplifies a critical tendency to invoke history in the abstract and without clarification about whether this refers to “the past,” to the practice of crafting historical narratives, or to the discipline of history (see chapter three, “Historical Explanation,” note 00). References to “historical time” in critical IR often take on distinct and sometimes diametric meanings without acknowledgement (cf. Çalkivik 2016, 243; Shapiro 2000, 83; Lundborg 2016a; with Bousquet 2006).

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218  International Relations and the Problem of Time feature of the natural and social worlds, and the ‘past is packed with just as much speed and ephemera as the present’ ” (Stevens 2015, 76–7). Accelerationist narratives invoke a “golden age” view of the past free from acceleration and estrangement. For instance, Robert Hassan (2016, 89–91; see also 2009) distinguishes two eras: that of “analogue time,” the continuous motion of the clock, which like all “analogue” technologies possesses an “equivalence to nature” and its “organic, unfolding, and durational processes”; and that dom­in­ ated by “digital (network) time,” those “discontinuous and quantized” links forged by accelerative and automatized inventions.11 The “analogue” era united humans with each other and with their environment; the digital divorces all. Similarly, Hartmut Rosa (2003, 19 emphasis added) argues that the late-modern epoch has “de-temporalized” life, which “is no longer planned along a line that stretches from the past into the future; instead, decisions are taken from ‘time to time’ according to situational and contextual needs and desires,” leaving us all bereft of “stability of character and adherence to a time-resistant life-plan.” “Classically modern” politics possessed a clear “temporal index” and “history was perceived of as (directed) progress” (Rosa 2003, 19). Politics today is “situationalist,” merely reactive rather than directive (Rosa 2003, 20). In other words, “the time of political projects, it seems, is also over” (Rosa 2003, 21). Along with smuggling in specific notions of what counts as “political” and “temporal,” these narrative mechanisms produce a different sort of concordant discordance, one in which pessimistic determinism replaces uncertainty and contingency. While this may seem underwhelming as a form of concordance, even certain decline trumps the sheer void of meaning opened by utterly confounding events. This sort of unirectilinear-regressivism comports well with the synoptic theme of warning and subsumes all human experience under “one universal story” (Fuller 2002, 400). Taken together, such timing devices construct a closed view of time and more specifically a normative counterpoint to the unirectilinear-progressive celebrations of modern, “Whig” historicism (Butterfield  1965; Schmidt  1998, 18–19). Rather than universal progress accomplished by the children of Reason, technological change heaps fragmentation on late-modern orphans (der Derian  2001, xv; Scheuerman 2004, 18; Talisse 2005). This reproduces the problem of Time in full: the accelerated passage of time unerringly dissolves society. In this sense, accelerationism offers us what Steve Fuller (2002, 398–9) calls “Tory history,” a historiographical tendency to invoke a stylized past, characterize the present as fallen, and extrapolate a sense of “continual disappointment” into the future.

11  Hassan does not explicate how the clock instantiates continuous rather than discrete time. His epochal delineation produces other curious formulations, e.g. the airplane and automobile exemplify “analogue” because they mimic birds and horses, respectively (Hassan 2016, 89).

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Critical Approaches  219 Timing theory helps clarify the terms and stakes of accelerationist discourse. For one, it recommends skepticism about any claims of the acceleration of time itself until we receive an explication of how the denominator of the ratio (Δv/t) by which acceleration is determined could itself be determined to speed up.12 It also avoids those awkward and unclear formulations into which intuitive concepts of time can drive theory. For example, what causes the aforementioned “de-tem­poralization of life” is the “temporalization of time” (Rosa 2003, 19–20). Similarly, the “acceleration of time” alienates humans from time itself (Rosa 2010). This latter claim requires that we juggle at least three understandings of “time”: time as a measure of acceleration, time as acceleration, and the positive time from which “accelerating time” divorces us. Instead of these overly abstract conceptual knots (see Klinke 2013, 680), timing indexicals offer a more direct approach. Technological capabilities, globalization, and increasing interconnectedness may accelerate rates of social exchange, yet it is not that a universal, independent time is itself speeding up—nor is it on its own divorcing us from a golden age or from ourselves. Rather, the “accelerating” predicate refers to those change processes integrated and coordinated by the timing practice. A timing effort beset by such an emerging quantity and complexity of changes that it faces breakdown and failure will induce the experience of changes and new information “arriving” too quickly and thus make us feel slow and ineffectual. But of course, like time, “arrival” is an entirely positional and perspectival ascription dependent on our relation-building efforts. Reified temporal language encourages us to ascribe this all to the pitiless flow of time, obscuring its roots in practical timing issues. The same process leads accelerationists to misread this timing crisis as an overly deterministic process. Individuals and social groups are passive and impotent “time creatures” in the face of an onrushing and “flattened” time rather than potential “time creators” or timing agents facing new challenges (Hutchings 2016, 39; 2007, 80; 2008b, 161; see also Stevens 2015, 39; Klinke 2013, 678). Yet other critical theorists emphasize the potential of human creativity to complicate and mitigate these accelerated processes, and their discussion reflects a concern with active timing. For example, while accelerationists hear echoes of Futurism and fascism in our “valorization of velocity” (der Derian 1990), William Connolly (2002, 16, 140–75; see also Shapiro  2001) finds new opportunities in speed. Although technology inflects social life, the relationship is open-ended and emergent, not least because human agents exercise creativity and flexibility (Connolly 2002; Hutchings 2008b, 156). We can use information networks to oppose those nationalistic, ethnic, and fundamentalist movements that want to “decelerate” life and reverse its trajectory

12  I also have previously referred too easily to “accelerating temporalities” (Hom 2010, 1166).

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220  International Relations and the Problem of Time in order to “return” to an “imagined past” (Connolly 2002, 143). We might also leverage the different “life-paces” created by technological change to pursue novel “experiments of the self ” or develop a more “fugitive democracy”—a “plurality of interconnected sites of democratic action,” which shape “working conditions, educational possibilities, forms of identity, income levels, ecological environment, border relations and citizen entitlements” (Connolly 2002, 142–6, 153).13 Fugitive democracy theorizes speed rather than velocity and acceleration, for it takes an agnostic, scalar view of change ratios instead of pre-determining their direction. Accelerationists proffer a closed and passive account of a timing crisis in which they have pre-determined technology’s meaning and impact. More ambiguous alternatives like Connolly’s (also Hutchings  2008b, 132–41; Stevens 2015, 180–204) allow that novel changes might activate rather than automatically pacify social agency and exchange, for in such situations technology provides us tools, not teloi. In this sense, retaining the potential for active timing keeps the future open, helping us analyze and even criticize late-modernity without moving decisively beyond hope.

The Rapture of Rupture Finally, critical scholars challenge status quo logics and present practices of pol­it­ ics by focusing on the deconstructive potential of ruptures (e.g. Shapiro  2001; Edkins  2013; 2003; Lundborg  2011). These connote disjunctures or rips in the fabric of socio-political order, as well as gaps, breaches of continuity, or shocking breakdowns in the way things usually work. All of these meanings inform tem­ poral­ities of rupture and the way that critical scholars engage rupture’s association with radical discontinuity. Critical scholars embrace rupture for two reasons. First, the empirical irruption of radical discontinuities from politics marks a key ontological fact or wager, namely that politics is composed not of clean relations between unified subjects but rather of “junctures and disjunctures,” which are encompassed by every collective or historical event (Shapiro  2000, 82). Actual, undeniable ruptures that rend the otherwise seemingly smooth fabric of social life force attentiveness to the ubiquitous discontinuities that political power usually papers over with “universalizing pretensions,” “closural impulses,” and hegemonic practices (Lundborg 2016a, 114; Shapiro 2000, 82). Attention to ruptures marks an effort by critical IR scholars to put time itself back in motion and to emphasize its

13  Connolly responds to temporal concerns initially lodged in Wolin (1997). Contra accelerationism, fugitive democracy also highlights how past, supposedly sanguine “deliberative” practices ironed out difference, homogenized populaces, and encouraged a “circumscribed politics of place” (Connolly 2002, 142–4).

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Critical Approaches  221 dynamic multiplicity rather than the sense of a stable and unified dimension in which politics unfolds unproblematically. Second, ruptures open up a different approach to politics. Once rent, social relations can be imagined in novel ways less dependent on or less productive of “violent practices of response” (Lundborg 2011, 87; Edkins 2013, 286; 2003). To think through these sorts of possibilities, critical scholars often link ruptures to the “pure event,” a situation of “becoming” or abundant potential in which no settled form of order or subjectivity has actualized (Hutchings 2007, 88). As such, the pure event admits no “overarching structure” or “temporal borders” and “lacks presence, meaning and identity” (Lundborg  2011, 87, 114–15). Thinking through the “pure event” helps us take ruptures seriously because it “highlights the limits of any attempt to grasp or ‘comprehend’ the event” or “ ‘anticipate’ the future” and indeed “breaks with any and all explanatory/interpretive frameworks” and “renders structures (‘ideational’ as well as ‘material’) open and necessarily incomplete” (Lundborg 2016a, 115). If ruptures breach the bulwarks of the status quo, the pure event broaches “a future that is radically open, radically unknown and always potentially disruptive” of hegemonic politics (Lundborg  2016a, 117 emphasis added), one in which we cannot return to or rely on the comforting order of so-called “linear time” but must instead engage “the radically other” and explore the possibilities of “another politics” (Lundborg  2016a, 117; 2011, 88; Edkins 2013, 289; see also Shapiro 2000, 85; Walker 2009, 16). These remarks do not merely point toward new interpretations of events, which would at most replace old closures with new ones that still constrain how we think about time, change, and various forms of life (Lundborg 2011, 109). Instead, theorists of rupture seek a completely new way of relating to experiences and to difference itself (Lundborg 2009). They want times of rupture and the pure event to function like works of art, namely by “mak[ing] productive political use of the way concepts in language do not hold” (Edkins 2013, 286). New modes of thought call for new methods. Jenny Edkins (2013, 292) ­recommends “ ‘local and occasional’ ” explorations of how “a particular text disturbs a particular order” and its generalizations. Shapiro (2016, 120–1, 163–4, quoting Marker; cf. Bousquet  2006, 745) suggests “aesthetic practice,” which emphasizes “disagreement” and the sublime in order to “summon” further political “­ disjunctures” and remind us “ ‘you never know what you are actually [confronting]’. ” Lundborg (2011, 93–105; e.g. see 2018) incorporates Deleuze’s “lines of flight,” the “molar” (calculable/structural) instead of the “molecular” (particular), and an “ethics amor fati [love of fate],” which embraces risky but productive learning processes without regard for their outcomes or costs. The proposals all orient us toward uncertainty and incalculability as ways to resist sovereign practices and perhaps even as ends in themselves—they forward variations on the theme of “ ‘a politics without denouement’ ” in which we learn to live with difference and uncertainty rather than seeking closure (Shapiro  2000, 95, quoting Nancy). In this sense, proposals about

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222  International Relations and the Problem of Time rupture are political while refusing any particular pol­it­ics (Shapiro 2001; Lundborg 2011, 100–1; Edkins 2013, 283–6). As a category of analysis, rupture shares with timing theory an emphasis on uncertainty, process, and fluidity—all premised on change as fundamental to social life. As such, times of rupture pose another hard case for timing theory. However, timing theory breaks with theories of rupture along questions of what we can and should propose about the future and about time itself, and what it means to speak of time at all. It insists that time is political all the way down because it symbolizes some particular effort to get social relations to unfold in one way rather than another. This comports with time scholars who note an in­tim­ate and perhaps inextricable link between any temporality and political assumptions (Stevens  2015, 67; Hutchings  2008b; McIntosh  2015, 470–1; Solomon 2014; see also Adam 1990). Moreover, critical scholars themselves routinely acknowledge the linguistic mediation of time. So unless we are to think of “rupture” and “the pure event” as metaphysical trumps,14 it is entirely consistent with critical theorizing more broadly to treat them as linguistic artifacts or part of a “language game” (Lynch 2014, 15; Fierke 2003), which describe states of affairs but also embed particular ethical commitments, moral judgments, and “a vaguely defined ‘better’ alternative” (Lynch  2014, 66; Elias  2007a, 104; Crawford  2003, 198; Berenskoetter 2011, 655). Elsewhere, I have critiqued the discourse of rupture on its own terms, finding in it a hidden particularism and liberal-idealism that silently authorize the idea of “rupture” as a salutary opportunity requiring little in terms of hard choices or concrete proposals (Hom  2018c). Here I want to extend this critique by using narrative timing to unpack rupture, showing how it actually works, why it appeals, and on what claims and assumptions it depends. The first step in linking rupture and timing theory is to treat “times” and “temporalities of rupture” as timing indexicals. Recall that time is no more and no less than a linguistic family constituted and delimited exclusively by our capacity to time, even if we “still very widely attribute to ‘time’ itself the properties of the processes whose changing aspects this concept symbolically represents” (Elias 2007a, 61). In timing theory, no temporal utterance can be purely formal or substantively empty because—as symbols of practical relations—they make sense only insofar as they organize particular change processes (Elias 2007a, 38). Here we might adapt Elias’ (2007a, 38–9 see chapter one, “Timing basics”) central claim: “the word [‘rupture’], one might say, is a symbol of a relationship that a human group . . . establishes between two or more continua of change, one of which is used by it as a frame of reference or standard of measurement for the other (or others).” Put differently, talk of pure

14  Conspicuously here, advocates cut rupture and pure event from the same cloth as the “eternal truth” of aion.

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Critical Approaches  223 possibility or empty time still posits some earthly ambition and symbolically indexes that purpose with predicates of rupture and disjuncture. Theorists of rupture would likely resist the idea that they are engaged in any active, practical timing project at all. Instead, they insist there can be no effort to imbue time with concrete commitments other than the continual negotiation of difference. Thinking through rupture concerns only thinking about “the conditions under which something new is produced,” those sorts of “encounters that do not submit to the standard lines and limits of history and instead open up to something completely different” (Lundborg  2011, 1, 87, 101 emphasis added; 2016a, 117; Edkins  2013, 283–6; Campbell  2005). They specifically reject any “linear progression which gives the comforting illusion that one knows where one goes,” for the whole point is to “stage encounters that surprise, that demonstrate the contingency and disparity of life-worlds” and nurture “another politics, where the impossibility of any partition of the sensible without remainder is acknowledged” (Edkins 2013, 289; Shapiro 2000, 85). Yet, the phenomenon and discourse of rupture work much like basic timing. As with aion, ruptures are situations ripe for—indeed, desperately in need of— timing. Ruptures mark extended moments of blooming, buzzing potential in which a huge variety of dynamic relations and processes may avail. This potential is both promise and problem. As narratologists and IR scholars of anxiety point out (Berenskoetter  2011, 661; Carr  1986, 41, 94–5, 184; Steele  2008a), humans find unlimited possibilities unsettling and managing that anxiety is part of what it means to be a human and social creature. Its dissident cachet notwithstanding, the quantity and quality of possibility that theorists ascribe to rupture can be overwhelming and uninhabitable because it destabilizes hegemonic routines but also vitiates any working decision rule, course of action, or basic “reconstruction . . . essential to the conduct of an intelligent being” (Mead 2002, 37). To negotiate rupture, we need to time. Moreover, rupture theorists broach “another politics” or “completely different” ways of organizing political relations but delimit these to “more productive” ways to think politics and time. The point is to “disrupt” hegemonic logics and prob­lem­atize “the ‘modern’ political present and the sovereign voice of history and reason” because these too often reproduce violence, inequality, and the sub­or­din­ation of individuals (Lundborg  2011, 92; 2016a, 116). Novelty, difference, and pure/empty potential, then, do not resolve as such—rather, they are pre-determined against dominant politics and temporalities (Edkins 2003; 2013; Shapiro 2000; 2001).15 It is worth noting that these hegemonic foils also work as timing modes. Rupture theorists resist actualization, “the moment we designate by saying ‘here, 15  This marks a key distinction between rupture and heterotemporality, which emphasizes times “in which multiple, parallel and interacting presents may be understood in relation to one another” (Hutchings 2007, 88).

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224  International Relations and the Problem of Time the moment has come’ ” (Lundborg 2011, 6), because this closes down potential in a particular arrangement. “Here” orients us, “the moment” specifies some changes and not others, and “has come” presents this arrangement as a ­“seemingly coherent whole” (Lundborg 2009) with a temporal designation—the “terrorist attacks of 9/11,” “the end of the Cold War,” “the dawn of a new era.” To “fold” or “actualize” an event out of multiplicity, then, is to time. Lundborg (2011, 87 emphasis added) says as much when he highlights how “continuously reproduced” tem­poral constructions become rigidified “border[s] in time” and “standard line[s]” that “limit . . . what kind of change is allowed to take place in the world.” If the discourse of rupture describes situations in need of timing and challenges hegemonic modes of timing but makes no explicit substantive claims about how politics should unfold differently, the question becomes how it coheres as an alternative at all. Hidden narrative timing mechanisms do most of the work. Although proponents assert that ruptures are full of possibilities, they position ruptures against a much more limited and familiar target—the “linear time” of the sovereign state (Shapiro  2000, 83; Edkins  2013, 286; Lundborg  2016b, 263) and the ways it limits social life. These targets provides rupture’s constitutive other and allows the discourse to invoke pure potential but evoke a particular and clas­ sic­al­ly liberal vision of the value and rights of the individual and the consequent worth of liberation or emancipation (see Sterling-Folker 2015, 41; and the discussion in Hom  2018c, 325–6).16 “Radical openness” and “pure potential” look promising within the confines of sovereign domination. Beyond, things look less sanguine, for radical openness or pure potential per se must necessarily include worse—indeed, unimaginably worse—alternatives, unless we are to believe that three-quarters of a century of Holocaust, nuclear weapons, and genocide exhausts millennia-old capacities for creative cruelty. The discourse of rupture creatively filters out these issues with optimistic glosses like “possibility,” “alternatives,” and “something that is yet to emerge and yet to be known” (Lundborg  2011, 113), and by focusing exclusively on that something’s relationship to hegemonic politics rather than the full potentialities of social life. As is often the case, creative filtration and experiential cleavage work together. The story of rupture also elides any historical forms of political order other than its bête noire, the modern sovereign state—even though the state emerged in part as a novel way to constrain violent practices associated with the Reformation wars (Williams  2007, 8–21; Hom  2018c, 324). Together, these narrative techniques subtly delimit what can be synthesized in “times of rupture.” They also invert the problem of Time, turning its supposedly natural and “protean 16 Campbell (2005, 129–30) offers an explicit defense of deconstruction as “affirmative” and “progressive.”

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Critical Approaches  225 fecundity”17 against the seemingly given, architectonic order of modernity. Because this order exhausts capacities for harm in such accounts, pure potential becomes affirmative, sheer dissolution liberatory. Against this very carefully cleaved and  filtered narrative backdrop, the problem of Time plays the role of noble savage, naturally disrupting a political realm filled only with modern forms of hegemony. In these ways, claims about rupture’s radical openness emplot, symbolize, and substantivize a particular timing project. This project precludes malevolent possibilities that must be part of potential and difference as such and treats ruptures exclusively as empirical disruptions to hegemonic order (Shapiro  2001, 232–3) that help deconstructionists make “real leaps ‘towards the new nation whose time is always liberatory and . . . radically new’ ” (Agathangelou and Killian 2016a, 30; also Lundborg  2016a, 115–17). Such framings quickly and quietly transform a theoretical disposition or “category of practice” into a “category of analysis” (Brubaker 1996, 16; see McIntosh 2014, 17). Proponents also ascribe particular attributes to “times of rupture” derived from the changes and relations they want to support, in this case a different, less harmful politics than the current states system. All of these moves signal an effort to time. Although they claim otherwise, proponents do not actually emplot ruptures against standards like “multiplicity itself ” (Lundborg 2011, 92), politics without “denouement” (Shapiro  2000, 95), or the affirmation of a remainder in lived ex­peri­ence (Edkins  2013, 292), for these ideas far exceed desires to foster ­bottom-up politics absent of violence and subordination and affirming the individual. Furthermore, even if they refuse to elaborate (Edkins 2013, 292) or insist rupture’s future “can never be known in advance” (Lundborg 2011, 88), it is clear that theorists have already determined that times of rupture do not include harmful possibilities worse than the modern state. If rupture cannot point to substantive possibilities, it must delimit negative ones, for any “newness of our action is not ex nihilo, but contingent and contextual” on the sources of our underlying commitments (Amoureux  2015a, 34; also 2015b). Far from a truly “active process of drawing and experimenting with lines, without having any preestablished lines—of history, society, and the world—to fall back on” (Lundborg  2011, 88), rupture works as a variation of the liberal lineage that treats the individual, not the Leviathan, as the key empirical and normative referent (see Siedentop  2015). It arrives there over an idealized “rainbow bridge” (Arendt  1981, 149–57; Hom 2018c, 327) that “ ‘gentrif[ies]’ ” rupture (Edkins  2013, 286, quoting Žižek) by making pure difference spontaneously yield better forms of co-existence.

17  The phrase is from Markham’s (2014, 97) analogous critique of idealized protest movements.

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226  International Relations and the Problem of Time This silent shift houses rupture’s concordant discordance. Like other critical concepts, rupture defines “the political” only “by its unconventionality” and roots an optimistic vision of progress “squarely in its refusal to describe what form a newly imagined politics might take” (Markham 2014, 97). Working closely with creative filtration and experiential cleavage, it offers us the glimmer of a better future unfurling spontaneously from the empty, “pure” present. While vital, this must remain a glimmer so that future stays just murky enough to appeal simply by virtue of what it is not.18 The discourse of rupture contests one timing project with another. It delimits possibility and difference per se as antithetical to hegemonic logics and practices and gestures at a “better means of orientation,” if not explicit “control” (Elias 2007a, 104). This has much less to do with an outright refusal to “ground time” than it does with a tacit timing conflict (see Berenskoetter  2011, 655; Crawford 2003, 198) in which critical timing entrepreneurs are captured by their own deconstructive language. The way critical scholars symbolize and reify their practical timing project lets them down. Ruptures initially help them prob­lem­ atize facile frameworks like the sovereign state and its unilinear history. But these active modes of critique become increasingly passive as they grapple with other deconstructionist commitments to thinking “the political” without reconstructing “a politics,” which (according to this way of thinking) would close down pure potential in new logics of control. This moves the discourse of rupture from engaged critique to a sort of naive emancipation dependent on assumptions of spontaneous progress, some sort of prelapsarian state of nature found in classical liberalism (see Vogt  1997), or the harmonious ontology attributed to ancient Arcadia (see Dipple  1968).19 It also marginalizes vital questions attending any politics of time or time of the political: Which future or range of futures should become of this present and how can we support such eventualities? These concerns sit at the heart of political exploration but play no part in IR’s discourse of rupture. Timing theory accommodates the key purposes and moves symbolized by rupture but goes an important step further. Once we think of ruptures as timing challenges, it becomes clear that a thoroughgoing critical project must treat hegemonic dissolution as the midpoint, not the endpoint, of the story, to ensure that what follows is not worse. It also recovers the politics of ruptures by encouraging us to  consider their intrinsic positionality.20 Every rupture implies “ ‘a horizon of 18  In this way, “times of rupture” resolve further as language games, in which speaker and a­ udience “must know the rules of the game to understand the meaning assigned to the discourse and actions of self and others. Moreover, in most cases there is more than one game going on at the same time, but they occur in the same ‘intersubjective space’ and therefore overlap” (Lynch 2014, 40; Fierke 2001, 123–5). 19  My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify these points. For a similar argument about the liberal roots of feminism, see Butler (1978). 20 The discussion here complements recent efforts to show how IR, critical variants included, reproduces Western or Eurocentric frames (see e.g. Pettman  2005; Agathangelou and Ling  2009; Hobson 2012; Alejandro 2018; Ling 2017; Howell and Richter-Montpetit 2019).

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Critical Approaches  227 events’ ” or a possible range of occurrences (Burgess 2019, 96, quoting Chrétien). Moreover, rips in the smooth flow of time look very different depending on vantage point. Lundborg (2011, 45–61; 2016a, 115) presents 9/11 as a prime example of how hegemonic “politics of response” end up “folding” ruptures into “a sovereign politics of time” where loss must be national sacrifice redeemed by violent security practices. While I agree with much of his diagnosis of America’s post-9/11 pathologies (see also Subotic and Steele 2018), this rendering overlooks that such a rupture marked “the fullness of time” or culmination of extensive planning and sovereign actions on the part of the hijackers. Ironically for critical scholars, 9/11 only works as a “rupture” at all if we appraise it from the subject position of the United States and its close allies. Moreover, while it may make some sense for scholars to prop open ruptures in the interest of exploration and experimentation, ordinary citizens, “professionals of nothing” (Booth 1997, 114) and “everyday theorists” on the ground (Jackson 2015, 957–8) face survival challenges and other reasons for needing more immediate ways to go on. For these subjects, in addition to bringing visceral trauma (Edkins  2003;  2013), such “incorporeal,” “empty,” or purely abstract moments (Lundborg 2011, 16, 30) as rupture may constitute intolerable, “an­onym­ous nows” (Ricoeur 2008a, 208). Only by filtering out these perspectives and relying on the concordant discordance afforded by rupture’s extremely high level of abstraction and generality can theorists lend refusals to respond to traumatic disjunctures the patina of progress.21 Indeed, theories of rupture offer a substantivizing tour de force, where the “reducing grammar of substantives and predicates” (Connolly 2013, 154–5) transmits knowledge so successfully that it gives rupture a “fetishcharacter” that obscures the practical processes on which disruptive timing depends, along with its human and political stakes (Elias 2007a, 61–2; Lynch 2014, 41). Once unpacked, the story of rupture looks more like Christian eschatology, authorizing privileged witness “at the edge of time” from almost “celestial perches” (McQueen 2018, 27, 1) and a practical holding action on the promise of better things to come from a source beyond the argument itself, which also prevents those catastrophes that sit “just beyond the human power of imagination” (Levine 2017, 106). This is the rapture of rupture.

Empty or Open Time? Rupture shares several themes with timing theory, while my criticisms of it comport with reflexive realist positions on the limits of theory, practice, and politics (Williams 2005, 169–80; Hom and Steele 2010, 279–92; Hom 2018b, 139–40). 21  Like hegemonic times, temporalities of rupture make more sense if we already all agree they exist (Edkins 2003, xiv–xv).

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228  International Relations and the Problem of Time As such, the discussion might appear to contradict my own arguments about the value of open time and especially “active withholding, when scholars not only refuse to render assured interpretations of unfolding events, but also vigorously interrogate such responses” in order to resist “quick and dirty explanations that reinforce tired policies” (Hom 2016, 179). This sounds much like critical pro­posals to explore rupture and the pure event while maintaining room for novel and organic forms of practice. However, if we distinguish more carefully between open time, on the one hand, and empty rupture, on the other, things resolve more clearly and distinctly.22 In timing theory, a claim to “open time” refers to a flexible and provisional but still concrete, practical timing mode. It cannot refer to a void of meaning or total absence of propositions about how to establish dynamic relations—situations which, if they matter at all, entail timing. Moreover, active withholding serves vigorous interrogation in the “constellar” style outlined by Daniel Levine (2012, 225–39; see Hom  2016, 179), which takes concrete propositions as its objects. Likewise, both practices explicitly seek a desired outcome that is “open” in the sense of balancing multiple competing and incommensurable proposals so as to prevent reification into a certain and brittle story or overbearing mode of co­ord­ in­ation. Both reflect a first-order need in IR to “promote some kind of equilibrium, necessarily unstable, between the different aspirations of different groups of human beings” that forestalls catastrophic harm (Berlin 1998, 47–8). The point of open times, then, is not to sustain an “empty form of time” as a “pure” pathway to more affirmative politics (Lundborg 2011, 14), but rather “the disciplined labor of thought” (Ashley and Walker 1990, 403) that can actively imagine more temperate (that is, concrete but purposefully indeterminate) forms of time symbolic of more flexible timing modes. Compared with rupture, open time embraces “understated” but never hidden timing standards; it authorizes but also demands “only what is minimally necessary to go on without precluding other options” (Hom 2016, 179; see Hom and Steele 2010, 278). In open timing, active withholding is a means of temporary abeyance, not an enduring demurral reliant on the supposedly natural abundance of time itself to deliver better alternatives. Reflexive realism and open timing retain a similar commitment to affirmative engagements with difference and the “irreducible plurality” of political life (Williams 2005, 130), an openly liberal position highly similar to the virtues of “multiplicity itself ” (Lundborg 2011, 92). However, instead of invoking creativity as such while evoking particular brands of progressive affirmation, reflexive realism argues that “while politics is the realm of human creativity, the essence of this creativity lies in the acceptance of limits. . . A recognition of the limited constructability of the world—a limitation that emerges from its very constructedness,

22  I have not previously formulated open time this precisely, so this section acts as a self-corrective.

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Critical Approaches  229 and is thus the objective condition of social and political existence” (Williams 2005, 133–4). Moreover, reflexive realism acknowledges and embraces the fact that—just as all timing proposals embed some will to time in the service of ­particular positions—“will and power . . . must be taken seriously and worked with if one is to create a viable liberal order” (Williams 2005, 130). The discourse of rupture relies on time itself to deliver preferred alternatives, a position that depends on smuggling in a liberal-idealist narrative temporality and the symbolic reification of what it can mean to speak of time at all. Like any timing effort, affirmative politics require active, willful, and—crucially—reflexive work to construct the sort of practical and flexible political relations by which these commitments can be nurtured and realized. As a narrative timing analysis shows, times of rupture work in a passive mode, where relations, connections, and the way forward are so familiar as to require little conscious thought. Passive forms of timing hide their will to time in readily accepted temporal predicates and at­tri­butes. Accelerationists predicate time as a uniformly alienating ratio or social force that vitiates all hope. Times of rupture hinge on an immediate and un­acknow­ledged conflation of the refusal to interpret or reconstruct pure possibility with the promise of a rapturous future. Timing theory offers a more thoroughly temporal elaboration of rupture, which foregrounds its timing demands and works toward meeting these needs via open timing proposals that are neither full of possibility nor devoid of content. In open timing, possibility is a means to concrete political ends, not a politics or an end in itself. If theorists of rupture foreground “the impossibility of any partition of the sensible without remainder,” realist open timing works to forestall an un­acknow­ledged remainder of rapturous rupture—catastrophe.23 Arguments for rupture conclude, “[i]n the end one can only hope that something different will emerge—another way of encountering the event that is not based on a violent inscription of being and increasingly sophisticated practices of security” (Lundborg 2011, 115). Yet as sympathetic observers note, when it comes time to consider alternatives, “well-practised critique” does not demur but rather “reveals itself as an ethical project” (Burgess 2019, 108 emphasis added). And as liberation theologians might remind us, neither hope in isolation nor hope for a distant future divorced from our present offer a viable program for liberatory or affirmative lived politics (Gutierrez  1974). In the time of the world, before any rapture, we must weave hope, possibility in all its messiness, and political power together in an open vision of time that supports maximally flexible and practically viable modes of timing social relations that also delimit our capacity for catastrophe.

23  Lundborg’s (2018, 1) recent essay shows how “remaining with uncertainty” necessarily affirms not only progressive politics but also “the worst forms of destruction.” Through a partial reading, he misattributes this affirmation to neorealism rather than deconstruction, producing a far more “value free” neorealism than neorealists ever have (see Hom 2018c, 328 n214; see Craig 2003 chp. 7).

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230  International Relations and the Problem of Time

Conclusion Critical IR displays a keen interest to engage time in all its diversity and multi­pli­city in order to break with the mainstream strictures . But while it undoubtedly covers more temporal variety, critical scholarship on time also reproduces tendencies found in the wider field. Critical scholars still substantivize and reify time as a concept or entity whose symbolic predicates transmit knowledge while obscuring or completely forgetting the underlying timing processes and purposes from which they flow. As with dominant times, dissident temporalities also rely more on intuitions or shared hermeneutic toolboxes than rigorous and systematic explication and elaboration. Only within particular and usually silent delineations of social and political life do savage time, aion, accelerating time, and pure rupture work in the ways that scholars ascribe to them. Furthermore, key issues and tensions in each of these critical times emerge around questions of active/passive timing and open/closed time. In particular, while they differ in many other ways from quantitative and HI work, critical times still lean heavily on passive timing regimes at just the point when active efforts to establish novel political relations become most important. This involves forgetting the necessary power politics in savage timing, eliding the timing needs of those confronting aionic or pure events, reimbuing time with malevolent and deterministic attributes, and counting on rapture to underwrite a time of rupture that otherwise remains stuck at the first step toward more affirmative politics. These sorts of silent transmissions are conspicuous in a discourse explicitly opposed to drawing “borders” in time or making any temporal assumptions at all. Yet it is precisely those silences in savage exchange systems, aionic possibilities, accelerating modernity, and the pure possibility of rupture that provide “the borders that enable the very concept[s] of [critical] time to be produced in the first place” (Lundborg  2016a, 110). Moreover, just like their hegemonic foils, those borders in critical thought enable theoretical practices that effectively “take charge of time, decide on how to break free from the past, claim freedom . . . in the present, and guide us into the future” (Lundborg 2016a, 110). In each of these instances, critical treatments could better observe their own vocational commitments and theoretical purposes by moving from time to timing. Doing so would comport more closely with critical emphases on complexity, fluidity, process, contingency, uncertainty, and varied subjectivity. It would also help distinguish between scholarly efforts to disrupt hegemonic politics and to time political relations differently, and the symbols and concepts used to do so. Finally, embracing the promise and perils of active, reflexive timing would help critical IR distinguish between open time—that flexible but concrete symbol of dynamic political relations that welcomes critique—and empty time, which vitiates any “capacity for establishing relationships” at all (see Elias  2007a, 38),

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Critical Approaches  231 including those orienting and directing us toward a hopeful future. In terms of timing theory, all times are political, not just those of the sovereign state (as in  Çalkivik  2016, 238; Lundborg  2011; Edkins  2013). Acknowledging and em­bra­cing this, in all its messiness, as reflexive realist timing does, is absolutely necessary for those as committed to a broadly liberal project as many critical time scholars are.

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Conclusion Re-timing and Reclaiming International Relations

This book scrutinized how IR theory relates to time, in particular how and why scholars simultaneously treat it as a problem to be solved and as the neutral dimension reckoned by Western standardized clocks and calendars. To do so, it developed a theory of narrative timing based on the practical, processual, and narrative roots of IR knowledge. It used this framework to unpack and explain the importance of temporal assumptions and narrative timing across the field, from disciplinary history to methodologies, quantitative work, institutional theory, and critical scholarship. To close, I briefly review the conclusions of these discussions before reflecting on their wider consequences for our thinking about time and for the IR project more generally. In sum, once we take a close look at time through timing, the whole of IR appears quite different.

Where Did the Time Go? Getting a discussion on time off the ground presents some challenges. This stems from its ubiquity in political life, its enigmatic role and meaning in IR, a lack of dialog about it between various approaches, and IR’s two dominant but para­dox­ ical cultures of time. To reconcile these issues, Part One developed Norbert Elias’ brief sketch of the basic social activity of timing into a theory of timing for IR. It showed not only how timing works in practice but also, just as importantly, how it produces “time” utterances and reified concepts of time that we treat as referring to something independently real. Additionally, it highlighted the differences between passive and active timing, elaborated the power political roots of all timing, and introduced the distinction between brittle and supple timing as a means of organizing the temporal diversity found in IR discourse. Chapter two elaborated the analytical value of timing theory. It discussed timing’s ability to explain diverse and competing concepts of time, to avoid philo­soph­ic­al aporia and unhelpful value scales, to make sense of IR’s temporal cultures, and to extend and interrelate other prominent accounts of time in the field. If this might seem like timing claims to do too much or apply in too many instances, we should

International Relations and the Problem of Time. Andrew R. Hom, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andrew R. Hom. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850014.001.0001

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Conclusion  233 recall here one of its key wagers—namely that every “time” utterance and temporal symbol describes and elides some practical effort to time social relations. So if time and temporality are everywhere, and they are in the discourses of international politics and IR, then we have to take seriously the possibility that “timing is ­everything” in a robust sense. Additionally, this chapter showed how timing theory sets time in motion and keeps it there, thus avoiding the habit of either treating time as natural and obvious or adding increasingly baroque qualifications to try to make sense of it. Finally, it argued that Time itself is constituted by no less than the efflorescent totality of change continua that impinge upon experience and our efforts to organize and direct them. Chapter three combined basic timing with narratology to develop a theory of narrative timing more closely fitted to IR’s modes of discourse. It argued that theorizing global politics works in much the same way as emplotting stories and that both replace the temporal welter of experience with meaningful serial wholes. Crucially, this is not merely a retrospective activity in life or in IR; both of which routinely grapple with present and ongoing experiences using four key narrative timing devices—synoptic theme, creative filtration, cleaving experience, and concordant discordance. These effectively humanize time and thereby provide a practical timing standard for going on in the world. IR constitutes itself as a scholarly community through various narrative timing proposals and responses to confounding occurrences. When IR scholars evoke the problem of Time, this suggests their efforts are faltering or failing. When they invoke Western standard time or a similarly pacified symbol, this suggests their theories are timing global politics more successfully. Working and increasingly passive plot themes become timing meters when they pre-determine the frames by which we reckon new ex­peri­ences. However, as a provisional and particular achievement, no timing meter can decisively tame the problem of Time.

Stranger Than Fiction, Strangest as Fiction Part Two applied narrative timing to IR. Chapter four showed that key moments in the field’s development manifested the hallmarks of timing crises, including shocking occurrences, theoretical revisions, and laments about the problem of Time. Chapter  five discussed how diverse methodological approaches grapple with “Time-bound” social life and direct scholars to configure stories of more manageable and orderly temporal realms to enable sound inference and other forms of warranted knowledge. One particular striking consequence of treating methodologies as timing projects is that although they often run afoul of externally and aesthetically derived standards of science, IR interpretivists configure the most realistic and responsibly systematic stories of international life precisely

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234  International Relations and the Problem of Time because they do not turn away from its intrinsically temporal features. Selfidentities notwithstanding, it is other methodologies that rely on science fictions: neopositivists compose a peculiar multiverse confederated by quasi-timeless and entirely hypothetical worlds; critical realists invest abductive tales with a zeal redolent of religious desires for stable “anchors” amidst the fluid and temporal world. If interpretivist accounts sometimes seem stranger than fiction this is only because “scientific” approaches lean so heavily on tall tales and quasi-eternal promises. Chapter  six examined a hard case for timing theory, quantitative IR. After showing how statistics poetically confronts Time-bound social phenomena using eternalist imagery, it located narrative timing and a particularly rigid, unirectilinear synopsis of continuity at the heart of the general linear model, exposing its inner workings as temporally and internally incoherent mechanisms of passive timing. It also found methods claiming to “take time seriously” underwhelming because they rely unthinkingly on Western standard time reckoning and work mostly to eliminate features associated with the problem of Time from the data. By contrast, recent interest in Bayesian methods re-conceive quantitative research in a more active timing mode, although they remain vulnerable to passive diffusion and reification. Chapter seven’s discussion of historical institutionalism also concerned a hard case, since the approach distinguishes itself from rationalist theories by its embrace of temporality. Contrary to this promise, historical institutionalists still depend on IR’s dominant cultures of time. Their explanatory narratives cast temporal features as the cause of “inefficiency,” “pathologies,” and maladaptation to contextual changes by “good” institutions. Not only does this recapitulate the problem of Time tradition, it also implicitly reaffirms rationalist assumptions and vocabularies of international institutions as perfect clockworks. In this, historical scholars unintentionally cast themselves as horologists—or diagnosticians of faulty clocks—and make it all too easy for rationalists to co-opt their approach. One way out of this bind is to begin thinking of international institutions as timing complexes, which would allow us to develop a more thoroughgoing view of temporal institutions while cultivating a productive dialog between historical institutionalism and timing theory. Finally, chapter  eight turned timing theory on a different sort of hard case, critical IR, which already features numerous temporal analyses and frameworks. Here timing theory not only clarifyied and inter-related notions as disparate as  “savage” times; chronos, kairos, and aion; and “accelerationist” time; it also extended many of these in a more thoroughly critical fashion. This was especially evident in times of rupture, which timing theory exposed as a liberal, de-politicized story that ends prematurely in the middle and thereby reifies a vision of time vulnerable to disastrous excesses.

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Conclusion  235

New Times for IR? In addition to reframing and reconceptualizing discussions central to the field, an account of narrative timing theory pervading IR at the very least suggests the need for an extended and wide-ranging conversation about the many ways in which IR relies on and produces ideas about time. Going further, timing theory offers two further benefits. To begin with, it opens up expansive avenues for future research at the intersection of IR and time studies. Narrative poses only one type of timing, and there remains a number of other basic timing modes to be elaborated and studied. In particular, we need to learn more about the timing activities implicated in political practices, of which pol­it­ ical narratives are only one integral example. We might also investigate further the relationship between Western Standard timing and the modern international system, which has only been sketched so far. In particular, how did the emergence and institutionalization of technological timing standards help authorize ter­ri­tor­ ial sovereign units, inflect modern conceptions of the state as security provider, and impact the historical development of our common sense of what it means to be “secure”? Alternatively, since the problem of Time features heavily in the trad­ition of political theory informing IR, we could turn timing theory on philo­soph­ic­al discourses of order, security, power, justice, and authority. Such efforts would help draw out the historical-sociological intent in Elias’ original vision of timing. We cannot understand the development of the inter­ nation­al realm without an account of how human groups have grown larger and larger in size, diffused further and further over territory, and integrated more and more with other groups and with the natural world thanks to sophisticated concepts and practices that facilitate orientation, coordination, and control (e.g. Gunnell 1987; Watson 1992; Elias 2000; 2007a; Linklater 2011a). Elias and Eliasian IR scholars often call these the growing “chains of interconnectedness” (e.g. Lacassagne 2012). Many of them included monumental timing efforts (see Zerubavel 1985; Dohrn-van Rossum 1996; Landes 2000; Adam 2004), with results proceeding in fits and starts, that enabled humans to move from associating in isolated clans to villages, cities, societies, kingdoms, states, empires, and supra­ nation­al organizations. All of these developments relied on extensive and repeated encounters with discordant change. For instance, traversing natural geographic boundaries such as rivers or mountains may bring a group in contact with other, very different, groups; crossing oceans will almost certainly lead to strikingly novel and increasingly complex encounters (Dunne  1997; Wendt  1999, 141; Bastian 2013). In such instances, people can either turn back or work to time and re-time their social and political existence, establishing concord in the midst of discord by revised or novel frames of reference, or by violently imposing existing timing standards. Timing and re-timing, then, may pose new opportunities for

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236  International Relations and the Problem of Time cooperation or may help spread and embed forms of harm (e.g. see Linklater 2011a; 2016; Aradau and van Munster 2012). Because human existence depends on good timing, political tensions attended every shaky step between the earliest and smallest human collectivities and the current global age. Through hunting and gathering, calendars and organized agriculture, revolutions in violent technologies, sophisticated intellectual systems, transoceanic explorations, empires, the globalization of Western standard time, and total war and thermonuclear interdependence, features extracted from a multitude of timing activities embedded deeper and deeper into language and lent time both its abstract and neutral as well as its concrete and problematic qualities. We can think of many of these efforts as a matter of “bounding power” (Deudney  2007), but they are just as much matters of taming time. After centuries of such timing projects and linguistic calcification, then, the very marrow of time now seems both homogeneous and malignant, and time theorists labor to overcome this contradiction. Yet the multi-valence of time is not a philosophical problem so much as a collection of predicates that indicate the multitude of past and ongoing timing activities by which humans organize themselves and go on in the world. Scholars of time should treat them as such, as empirical opportunities rather than metaphysical stumbling blocks. In doing so, time studies and IR scholars could take a crucial step toward elaborating global politics as a thoroughly and unabashedly temporal domain. We could also heed Hutchings’ (2008b) compelling call to take heterotemporality seriously, not just as an ethico-political alternative but as an empirical baseline: by focusing on timing before “times” we see that international politics is intrinsically heterotemporal in that it includes a multitude of timing activities and, at its upper limit, all the totality of change continua that might possibly require integration and coordination. This in turn should afford a much richer descriptive taxonomy of socio-political timing activities and the times they engender.

Re-timing IR Narrative timing also holds striking implications for IR writ large, in particular a distinctive and more useful view of IR as an academic field and vocation. First, it proffers a unified vision of IR as a social science, but not in the usual way implied by the “unity of science” thesis. Rather, IR coheres as a collection of more or less systematic efforts to elaborate and analyze global politics using different forms of narrative timing. Chapter  three showed how two supposedly incommensurable methods—D-N and historical explanations—actually circle back on each other. D-N accounts only accomplish absolute and quasi-punctual succession by assuming that some historical pathways are so regular as to require no elaboration, while historical accounts only work to the extent that some of their connections are “covered” by shared intuitions about how parts of the world work in absolute

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Conclusion  237 and quasi-punctual succession. There is not so much a nomothetic-idiographic divide, then, as there are two interdependent genres of social scientific narratives that substitute clean temporalities for the “flood of Time”. If we must locate these in a methodological or explanatory hierarchy, then perhaps the pertinence and flexibility of the narrative genre relative to its phenomenal objects can provide an alternative rubric to the usual value scale imported from philosophy of science. This alternative privileges narrative forms that can speak to but also change with the many times manifest in global politics as more useful and durable subsets of timing than accounts that promise universal and constant utility but in practice look more like one-and-done efforts. If we take timing ser­ious­ly as an intellectual and a practical activity, then better for a theory or explanation to survive by flexibility than to mistake its brittleness for permanence. Time, we often say, goes on; and “a theory is never finished” (Waltz, quoted in Walt 2003). Or as James Davis (2005, 157) notes, “insisting on fixed and congruent understandings as a criterion for scientific status would be to foreclose the opportunity for conceptual systems to evolve and grow.” Indeed, vocational commitments to using social science to ameliorate or mitigate violence and suffering depend implicitly on this view of supple timing—that is, progress depends on the possibility of change, not permanence, in both the world and our theories of it (Davis 2005, 2; Cox 1981). Taking these concerns seriously entails scrutinizing IR’s timing standards more closely—not just how they help IR scholars synthesize and coordinate changes into intelligible and enactable accounts, but from whence and by what justification they emerge in our scholarly discourse. As John Gunnell (1975; 2011) and Patrick Jackson (2011) discuss, the standards by which IR and political science more generally tend to operate come primarily from exogenous, retrospective, and aesthetically reconstructed metanarratives of scientific progress, often premised on nineteenth-century views of the natural world. Although these metanarratives displayed little experience or interest in the concerns of global politics, they proved irresistible to many IR scholars. There are likely several reasons for this, one of which is that such stories turn away from the problem of Time and toward its long-standing and more comforting Other, eternity, for knowledge warrants based on the promise of a realm constituted by objective, stable, orderly relations and thus ever-timely covering laws (some verified by large-N statistical tests). As discussed throughout Part Two, such presumptions subordinate process, change, instability, and particularity at several points in the process of developing knowledge and theory. Yet it is precisely process, change, instability, particularity, and small-N/large-impact) events that constitute much of global politics. This is not just my own empirical assessment but that of much of the field, as the pervasive references to change, effluvia, and the problem of Time noted in this book indicate (see also Davis 2005, 159). Such a misfit between IR’s dominant modes of knowledge production and evaluation and the domains they analyze recommends great skepticism about the appropriateness of these

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238  International Relations and the Problem of Time rubrics: can we really expect to time global political processes simply by importing and imposing standards that possess no special relevance to those changes and which “mortgage” IR to philosophical aspirations with no necessary connection to scientific success (Gunnell 2011, 1465–6)? We could put the question more starkly and in terms that complement recent efforts to cultivate a more reflexive vocation and sense of scholarly practice (e.g. Ackerly and True  2008; Hom and Steele  2010; Hamati-Ataya  2013; Barder and Levine  2012; Levine and Barder  2014; Amoureux  2015b; Amoureux and Steele 2015b; Steele, Gould, and Kessler 2019). Recall that one of the key claims of timing theory is that when the problem of Time elbows its way to the forefront of our discourse, the timing activity under (symbolic) discussion is not going well. Given that scholarly reckoning has so far done little to alleviate the ruinous state of global affairs, and that the problem of Time continues to play a prominent role throughout IR discourse, we need to ask whether, on its own terms, IR as currently constituted and self-understood can succeed as a collective timing project. At minimum, it remains an entirely active and relatively nascent effort, so perhaps the silver lining of this gloomy question is that there remain copious opportunities to revise, rectify, and reconcile our narratives of global politics with their object matter. However, the arguments developed above also suggest that doing so will prove unnecessarily difficult if IR continues to over-privilege external, passive, and impertinent timing standards. Scientistic techniques have a place in IR but not one endowed with any defensible authority to set field-wide timing standards. When this happens, IR embraces other disciplines’ metatheoretical baggage and ends up mistaking the international realm’s nature for iniquity, its essence for evil. Surely IR already has enough home-grown challenges.

Embracing Different Timing Standards More positively, asking these sorts of questions allows us to begin to think about what different social scientific standards, ones calibrated specifically for timing global politics, might look like. What standards of scholarship might supplant the quasi-eternal ideals already mentioned, which inform so much of “normal” social science and mainstream IR? Developing and elaborating such ideas is likely to be a lengthy, thorny, and contentious process, so for now I just want to note the potential of the antitheses of quasi-eternal standards, which are generally more (if not entirely) aligned with interpretivism’s metanarrative of provisional knowledge. We might cultivate explanations, ways of reasoning, and a general vocational disposition informed by more supple themes that not only accommodate but explicitly foreground the idiographic, the inconsistent, and the provisional aspects of international life. For reference, figure 6 organizes examples of supple and brittle/active and passive timing standards covered in the chapters above.

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Conclusion  239 Active Interpretivism

Historical institutionalism

Chronos/kairos/aion Bayesian statistics

Critical Realism Neopositivism

Supple

Brittle ‘Times of rupture’ ‘Savage’ times

Accelerationism Frequentist statistics

Western standard time Passive

Figure 6  Timing qualities in IR

Based on the descriptions of IR scholars and the arguments developed through timing theory, we have good reasons to incline toward the left hand side of the timing matrix introduced in chapter  one and, more specifically, its upper left quadrant. In defense of idiography, the lack of covering laws or non-trivial empirical regularities in our field effectively self-recommends that we privilege historical, qualitative, and other approaches commonly marginalized for generating too much case-specific information. In any epistemological calculus, it should be better to know something about a specific and important moment than to know very little about everything, everywhere, in perpetuity. To adapt Isaiah Berlin (1993), better a timely hedgehog than a fox with no time at all. In defense of inconsistency, we might take a cue from interpretivist ideal types and pursue further means of elaborating variation and impermanence in sociopolitical life while refusing to treat these qualities as outliers from some fictive norm. Here a more deliberate study of metaphor in IR would help explicate the numerous ways we use language to negotiate fluid experiences constituting sociopolitical life (Ricoeur  2008b, 351; e.g. Marks  2003; Regier and Khalidi  2009; Burke 2016). Also, we must at least consider the possibility that the multitude of phenomena that we group under singular objects of analysis like “international conflict,” “diplomacy,” “state,” “structure,” and “agency” are simply too different to submit to a common term—we have to consider the possibility that various ontological foundations of IR have little beneath them but disciplinary doxa. As this book showed with time and timing, such a possibility need not preclude theory if we adopt the metatheoretical standard that theory is not for establishing general continuities among particular instances but rather for accounting as rigorously and systematically as possible for their differences (Tilly 1995, 1601–2). Finally, in defense of fleeting occurrences, our appraisals of these should be conditioned less by metanarratives of “good” science and more by their actual impact on global

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240  International Relations and the Problem of Time politics. The thermonuclear revolution (Craig 2003; 2017), the peaceful end of the Cold War, 9/11, and highly unpredictable elite decision makers like Donald Trump (Glasser  2017; Hom and O’Driscoll  2017; Jervis  2017; Osnos, Remnick, and Yaffa 2017) may be singularities. No matter, if contemporary global affairs are unimaginable without them, then they deserve theorization—all the more so if these singularities might interact with each other (see Legum 2016; Krauss and Titley 2017). These brief considerations push IR away from explanatory-predictive social science and toward a more descriptive or speculative project befitting its complexity and its continued reliance on metaphor.1 This is only a problem if IR continues to bow to alien standards of science and the sorts of timing they prescribe. Freedom from epistemological interlopers is also the freedom to consider the possibility that IR has not yet progressed beyond a descriptive encounter with its domains of interest. I do not mean this as a criticism, either, for if we take IR scholars’ own claims about the fluidity, complexity, uncertainty, and novelty of global affairs, then describing them adequately and in ways that approach systematicity is a full-time and worthwhile job. This is one reason why some mainstream scholars welcome the possibility of developing “increasingly comprehensive historical explanations of particular cases drawing on theories” as well as “drilling down deeper” into particular phenomena with the possibility of disaggregating them into multiple sub-types (Bennett 2013, 473). It also broaches the possibility of bringing dissident and critical voices “in” to a much larger IR tent, where subaltern and other marginalized subjects receive an equal epistemological and the­or­et­ic­al footing with states, elites, and international organizations—IR as a fundamentally heterotemporal genre (Hutchings  2008b, 166–76).2 Taking time and timing seriously in the ways outlined above suggests that all these phenomena and agents feed into “the Time of global politics,” albeit in very different ways, and are thus worth accommodating in a much larger, unapologetically more complex, and indeed a moving “image” of IR.3

“Time’s The Revelator” Going further, timing theory invites us to question IR’s presumptive place in the academy and think about the possibility of a dramatic relocation. Prominent 1  Such dependency typifies a discourse more poetic and speculative than logical and systematic (see Ricoeur 2008b, 355–8). 2 A thriving literature provides heterotemporal accounts of global politics (e.g. Ayoob  1997; Daigle 2015; Abourahme 2016; Bilgin 2016; Perera and Seeman 2016; Vij 2016; Go 2017); the next step is to massively expand what “counts” as IR proper. This would also pre-empt diffident dissidents, who forgo dialog by insisting that they are “not really ‘doing IR’.” 3  This image retains plenty of room for more traditional areas like systemic theory (Hom and Steele 2020), Great Power politics (Edelstein 2017), war (McIntosh 2019), and foreign policy (Beasley and Hom n.d.)—all of which can benefit from timing theory.

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Conclusion  241 recent publications broached “the end” of IR theory and asked whether there was any point to continuing to do IR (see the collections in Dunne, Hansen, and Wight 2013; Dyvik, Selby, and Wilkinson 2017), reflecting enduring disciplinary anxieties about the status and value of IR as a scholarly pursuit far behind other applied and/or theoretical sciences. The contributions to these volumes included reflections on disciplinary reconstruction of the sort pursued here alongside vary­ing and almost ritualistic forms of self-flagellation—IR too scientific and not scientific enough, woolly and closed, irrelevant and yoked to elite viewpoints, and so on. They also arrived over a decade after four political scientists made the trenchant point that “God gave physics the easy problems” (Bernstein et al. 2000) in the form of the regular, isolatable, and often clock-like processes that constitute the natural world (see also Almond and Genco 1977). The arguments in this book suggest we could go further: gods of Time gave all other scientific pursuits the easier problems. Compared with other disciplines and fields, IR grapples with the largest, most “open,” most complex and dynamic system—what we might call the most Time-bound realm of all. Again, IR scholars tell us as much even as many of them search for ways to overcome this situation by borrowing methods, metaphors, metanarratives, and timing standards from other disciplines. But just as there was never any compelling argument made for why these imports made sense for reckoning the ruin of global politics, so should we be wary of adopting their tropes of success, failure, and proper science. Nicholas Rengger (2005, 326; see also 2017) objected to IR’s discourse of tragedy on the grounds that while “tragic” events are those that could have turned out differently, IR tends to emphasize the frequently unavoidable necessity of “dealing in darkness” so it does not really deal with tragedy because it assumes that things cannot be otherwise. We might say something similar about the subject matter of IR in relation to its scientific identity. As Davis (2005, 158) notes, the problem of scientific success “lies not with practitioners [of political science] but with the subject itself.” This echoes the more general point that “international affairs are hard to reduce to intellectual order, perhaps because they are changing character even as one tries” (Hollis and Smith 1991, 88). Political life, and especially global politics, simply do not admit of the sorts of regular and determinate connections on which other disciplines’ theories, concepts, and methods depend.4 We cannot take this as a problem unless it could be otherwise, just as we cannot treat Time as a problem unless we have direct access to eternity. On this view, it is not that IR has failed as a social science so much as that the wider human sciences have failed global politics, and IR scholars have abetted this by unreflectively tabulating and perpetuating the losses along the way.

4  Like political science and IR, several of those disciplines recently had their foundations shaken by widespread replication and retraction crises (see Ladd 2015; Gelman 2016; Marcus and Oransky 2018).

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242  International Relations and the Problem of Time The rigor, parsimony, and elegance of these other disciplines might succeed in producing happier “times” in simpler domains, but, in IR and its efforts to understand and direct global politics, they mostly produced a unified but enervated timing meter when multiple and active techniques were needed.5 IR scholars could continue to lament our inability to succeed in a game rigged by timing standards misappropriated from more cloistered pursuits. But rather than damning IR as some wretched and unwashed field or “dismal science” that cannot get its facts, theories, and predictions straight, taking timing seriously suggests that global politics is the realm that robs paeans to intellectual progress of their seductive harmony, that exposes scientistic epics as tall tales, that decisively baptizes the easy elegance, dear stability, and eternalist certitude of more domesticated pursuits in the river of Time. As the artist Gillian Welch (2001) put it, “Queen of fakes and imitators, Time’s the revelator.” In this sense, IR offers a proving ground for simpler tools developed against purportedly “higher” standards that actually work to lower levels of difficulty. IR scholars routinely deal with change processes that are large-scaled, interpenetrating, emergent, conflictual, and involving diverse actors laboring under the specter of global catastrophe. In other words, IR reckons with a most fluid and ruinous domain, where it is especially difficult to understand how events unfold or to ensure they will unfold in some ways and not others. In this way, IR is the “hardest” science of all. In a knowledge domain reckoning a persistently ruinous realm, we need to invert the wisdom of Meister Eckhart (see p. 12): the “smell” of Time is the essence of intellectual courage, not a “taint” on their academic honor.6 Given the immensity, density, and mutability of global politics, it is simply disingenuous to bemoan the more discordant aspects of Time’s flow such as dissolution, imperfection, and surprise. These aspects are precisely what constitute global politics. The necessity of grappling with them sets IR apart from other domains of inquiry. We might as well embrace the challenge of how to till our own unique field instead of farming out the project to more elementary, passive timing projects (see Ricoeur  1988, 273). This means scrutinizing and diversifying IR’s intellectual trad­itions going forward.7 But if we as a field really desire to “take time seriously,” 5  For a related argument about rethinking IR through music (which also relies on a timing meter), see Franklin (2016). 6  This point has been misinterpreted as “imposing” a gendered understanding of courage and a sort of scholarly “blackmail” (Chamon 2018, 411–12). Such claims overlook the wider discussion of how timing theory opens epistemological and theoretical space for IR research traditionally branded as “unrigorous” or “unscientific.” Furthermore, that discussion takes inspiration from feminist ­scholars, who have long been making courageous arguments about what and who matters in global politics and sometimes undertaking harrowing research to prove their point (e.g. Cohn  1987; Enloe 2014; Tickner 1997; 2005; 2014; Daigle 2013; 2015; Shepherd 2017). 7  (E.g. Sjoberg  2012; Sabaratnam  2013; Owens  2015;  2018; and the “Women and the History of International Thought” 2019 blog; Vitalis  2015; Tickner and Blaney  2012; Shih  2015; Weber  2016; Epstein  2017; Sevilla  2017; Adiong, Mauriello, and Abdelkader  2018; Aydinli and Biltekin  2018; Chang 2018; Lightfoot 2018; Doak 2019; Dübgen 2019; Shahi 2019).

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Conclusion  243 as scholars periodically claim, then IR can start by engaging timing theory to scrutinize the efficacy of our existing timing standards and to explore more pragmatic, temporary, and stopgap measures for reckoning a realm constituted by diverse political timing modes. Not only mainstream theories but also critical/ reflexive accounts must delimit the reification potential of their preferred vision of how the world should work in order to prevent it from becoming a standard by which scholarly or political practice is timed.8 In short, IR must become more comfortable in the furniture of finitude and less content with empty monuments to eternity. If this sounds overly iconoclastic, we might also keep in mind that critical and mainstream IR alike tend to privilege analytically that which they presume ontologically and thus get the explanatory payoff backward. If mainstream scholars presume durable and stable structures and then subordinate fleeting and ideographic features in their quest for general regularities, so too do critical scholars positing a world of flux and time subordinate durable features in their quest to elevate the “marginal” and the fleeting. But a Heraclitean ontology of dynamic change not only does not preclude studying the relatively durable relational structures and stable features that we might find in global politics, it actually makes these “anomalies of . . . persistence” even more noteworthy (Keohane 2017, 323), as stable outliers from the fluid baseline, and more specifically as likely sites of successful and increasingly passive timing embedded deeply into the collective consciousness—that is, as fascinating instances of the political power of timing. This would mark a step toward dissolving the problem of Time, inasmuch as thinking about “ ‘things’ and ‘objects’ not as fixed entities, but as temporary stabilizations of various processes” indicates that “time is not identified with decay or lack of true being” (Kratochwil 2018, 319). It may turn out that IR’s mostly confrontational ways of grappling with Time are the only means by which complex and discordant phenomena can be rendered intelligible and thus inhabitable. However, so long as these approaches stem from uncritically imported timing standards indexed to quasi-eternal ideals, this possibility is little more than a presumption or question wide-open by virtue of its neglect. The arguments developed in this book suggest that inasmuch as IR continues to rely on dead metaphors and impertinent, ineffectual timing standards borrowed from other disciplines, it will continue to configure narratives that mostly facilitate the habitation of entombed aporias and ensure that emergent changes engender intellectual and political emergencies. When it adopts neopositivist and critical realist methodological narratives; deterministic but impoverished forms of explanation that privilege regularity over reality; overly “linear” quantitative techniques; and a horological rather than a temporal view of 8  Avoiding teleological or brittle endings and balancing incommensurable accounts against each other are important steps (Hom and Steele 2010; Levine 2012).

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244  International Relations and the Problem of Time institutions; and when it depoliticizes time in the service of idealized critique; IR gives away too much to other timing projects or to standards ill-suited to the for­ mid­able and fluid issues of international politics. If IR must reckon ruin, and there is little reason to think otherwise, we should begin at the beginning, with problem-specific and pragmatic timing standards calibrated for description, ideography, and inconsistency and embedded within a most provisional, prudent, and open-ended vocational metanarrative. Only then can IR develop its own global and political timing standards scrubbed clean of the smell and taint of eternity.

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Index Note: Figures are indicated by an italic f following the page number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. 1970s energy crisis  131, 177–8 2008 financial crisis  4n.5, 10n.14, 72–3, 131, 195, 202–3 aion  29, 212–17, 223, 230, see also chronos; Deleuze, Gilles; kairos; ‘pure event’ alienation  22, 162, 182–3, 217–19, 228–9 anarchy  17–18, 75–6, 79–80, 115, 119–20 apocalypse  1–2, 87–8, 91n.15, 164n.10 nuclear 120–1, see also Doomsday Clock; nuclear weapons; thermonuclear revolution Arab–Israeli war, fourth, see Yom Kippur war Arab Spring  15–16, 72–3, 177–8 Aristotle  11, 95 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal  4 Augustine, Saint  5, 14–15, 30n.8, 31, 114–15 sæculum in the thought of  11–12 Aurelius, Marcus  14–15 autobiography  41–2, 42f, 84–5, 205 balance of power  17–18, 45n.28, 56–7, 115, 117 Bell, David Avrom  57 Berenskoetter, Felix  63–4, 67 Bergson, Henri  46n.31, 59n.4 Bhaskar, Roy  134–5, 135n.6, 143–5, 148–50, see also critical realism Blaney, David L.  209–12 BREXIT  4–5, 131 Bryan, William Jennings  115–16 Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce  162–3, 168 calendar, calendrical time  4–5, 33–4, 36–7, 37n.18, 39–40, 56–7, 80–1, 90, 192, see also clock time; time-reckoning; Western standard time ‘clock and calendar time’  9–10, 12–13, 17, 31–3, 39, 57, 88–9, 206, 232 Gregorian  4, 9–11, 10n.18, 176n.29 national calendars  4, 40–1, 42f Carr, E.H.  73–4

Carr, David  84–5, 84n.4 catastrophe  1–2, 63–4, 69, 73–4, 106–7, 114, 116, 130, 150, 227, 229, 242, see also apocalypse; Doomsday Clock causation, causal inference  33, 41, 65–6, 95, 97, 99–100, 115–16, 135–7, 139–40, 143, 146–7, 150, 153–4, 165–6, 170–3, 176, 188–9, 191–2, 194–5, 199, 204, 206 change: and timing  2–3, 6, 11, 18, 21, 33, 35–6, 38–41, 43, 49, 56–7, 60–1, 63–4, 66, 72–4, 76, 86–7, 90–1, 100, 150–1, 153–4, 175–6, 187, 204 ‘critical junctures’  22, 166n.13, 187–8, 191–5, 198–202, 205 ‘discordant’  63–4, 68–9, 71, 82–3, 89, 95, 104, 111–13, 117–19, 124–5, 136–7, 140, 142, 167, 201, 203, 235–6 novelty: and timing responses  38–9, 38f, 41–2, 49, 76, 94–5, 103–4, 121–3, 135, 167–9, 177, 179–80, 185–7, 190–1, 202–3, 213–15, 220, 223, 240, see also timing: breakdowns, responses to sources of  12, 38, 56, 64, 69, 112, 116, 118–19, 162, 200–1, 210–11, 218 ruptures, turning points  22, 41–2, 56, 95, 101–2, 118, 122, 126–7, 154, 166, 189–90, 195, 220–30, 234, see also timing: breakdowns, responses to technological  1–2, 9, 36, 72, 77–8, 90–1, 118–20, 217–20, 235–6 tragedy, tragic reversals  94–5, 100, 104–5, 118, 154–5, 241 chronos  29, 70, 166n.13, 212–17f, see also aion; kairos chronicle  88–9, 97, 159–60 ‘chronopolitics’  51–2, 62–3 chronological time  88–9, 164–5, 88nn.11–12 Clausewitz, Carl von  72 ‘cleaving experience’, see narrative: techniques of timing

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292 Index climate change  1, 206, see also environment clock time  4–5, 9–13, 10nn.14, 17, 17–18, 31–2, 36–7, 48, 51–2, 56–9, 65, 67–8, 77–8, 80–1, 88–90, 97, 171–2, see also calendar; chronos; Doomsday Clock, Time-reckoning; Western standard time Coker, Christopher  126–7 Cold War  1, 7, 57, 72–3, 76–8, 102–3, 122–3, 194–5, 200–1, see also thermonuclear revolution fall of the Berlin Wall (1989)  57, 73–4, 124 peaceful end of  18, 38–9, 72–3, 111–12, 126–30, 168, 177–80, 195, 223–4, 239–40 colonialism  9, 16, 162n.5, 164n.7, 191–2, 209–10, see also postcolonialism; ‘temporal othering’ ‘concordant discordance’, see narrative: techniques of timing Connolly, William E.  219–20 constructivism  52n.38, 75–6, 140, 150 constructed temporality  38, 56–7, 66, 67n.12, 76, 82–3, 86, 102–3, 166n.13, see also timing: as human construct continuity  2, 5–6, 9–12, 14, 17–18, 38, 38f, 45–6, 48–9, 54, 58–9, 71–3, 76–7, 98–100, 111–12, 115–16, 123–6, 136, 143–4, 146, 151, 157–8, 161, 163, 169–72, 187–8, 192–3, 200–3, 205, 210–12, 216, 218, 220–1, 234, 237–40, 242–3 cosmology  11, 65–6, 89, 211–12 cosmic time  12, 30–1, 58–9, 60n.5, see also time-reckoning: ‘objective’, ‘neutral’, or ‘physical’ dimension of time Near Eastern cosmologies  11, 14–15, see also time gods counterfactual analysis  139–40, 154 Cox, Robert  17, 50 ‘creative filtration’, see narrative: techniques of timing critical International Relations (IR)  8, 14, 17, 19, 22, 29–30, 50, 60–1, 74–5, 88n.9, 150, 152–3, 208–31, 234, 242–3, see also hegemony critical realism  133, 148–50, 152n.21, 157–8, 157f ontology  143–50, 152n.21, 154–5 theology  21, 148–50, 156, 158 Cuban missile crisis  72–3, 146n.16 cybernetics  16, 73–4, 77–8 cybersecurity  4–5, 65–6 Davey, Eleanor  92–3 Davis, James W.  237, 241 decline/decay  87–8, 99–100, 104–5, 218, 243 decolonization, see postcolonialism

Deleuze, Gilles  29, 215, 221–2, see also aion democracy  1, 4–5, 13–14, 16n.27, 17–18, 36–7, 41–2, 78, 106–7, 115–16, 164–5, 217, 219–20, see also peace: ‘democratic’ Descartes, René  15, 148–9 Deudney, Daniel  127–8 Doomsday Clock  1–3, 9, 18, 69–71, 77–8, 121 Doyle, Michael  50–1 Dunne, Tim  75–6 Eckhart, Meister  12, 242–3 Einstein, Albert  30, 59, 59n.4, 159n.2 Elias, Norbert  19, 27–8, 34–49, 48n.36, 57n.1, 66–7, 75–6, 222–3, 232, 235–6 emancipation  144–6, 149–51, 157–8, 224, 226 emplotment  20, 56–7, 82–3, 87–91, 93, 95–7, 104–5, 147, 167–8, see also narrative English School  77–8, 150, see also International Society environment (natural)  34–5, 39, 186, see also climate change eternity, eternal time  11–14, 17–18, 21–2, 59–60, 143–4, 146, 148–50, 157–8, 183–4, 207–8, 213–14, 237–8, 242–4, see also critical realism explanation  21, 38–9, 66, 72–3, 75–6, 82–3, 96, 240 abductive 145–9, see also critical realism as narrative  83, 85, 88–9, 100–1, 144–5, see also narrative covering law model of  41, 97, 153 deductive-nomological (D–N)  96–7, 162–3, 167, 236–7 explanatory/heuristic value of timing theory  14, 19–20, 54–5, 62–5, 71, 81, 84–5, 89–90, 106, 199 historical  99–101, 152–3 mechanistic  98–9, 191 structural-rational (S–R) accounts of  97–8 Fearon, James  56–7, 99 feminism  14, 131, 152–3, 242n.6 finitude: ordinary  11–12, 37, 120–1, 160–2, 242–3 ultimate: mortality  11, 14, 37, 85n.6, 120, 160–1, 161n. 4, 175–6 Fioretos, Orfeo, see institutionalism: Historical Institutionalism (HI) foreign policy  4–5, 7, 40–1, 42f, 77–8, 92–3, 98, 117–18, 121–6, 125n.11, 137–8, 240n.3 Fraser, J.T.  29, 65–6, 85n.7 future: accelerationism  217–20, 228–9 ‘analogue’ vs ‘digital’ time  218

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Index  293 control, prediction of  4, 6, 35–6, 39–40, 48–9, 51–2, 64, 69, 73–6, 81, 106, 112, 124, 126–8, 135–6, 138–44, 155, 161–4, 168, 170, 173–5, 179–80, 182–3, 203–4, 214–15, 226, 235–6 eschatology  121, 217, 227 Futurism  41, 42f, 219–20, see also Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso utopian vs dystopian visions of  63–4, 63n.10 Gaddis, John Lewis  18, 125–8 game theory  45n.28, 77–8, 101n.28, 135 Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD)  5–6, 72–3 geopolitics  1, 7–8, 62–3 gestalt (temporal)  19–20, 37n.19, 48–9, 85, 91, 100–1, 154 globalization  9, 58, 192, 217, 219 Great War, see World War I (WWI) Gunnell, John  2–3, 11, 76–7, 133n.1, 137n.8, 237–8 hegemony, hegemonic politics  17, 22, 50, 208–9, 211–14, 216, 220–1, 223–7, 227n.21, 230–1, see also critical International Relations (IR) Heidegger, Martin  46n.31, 63–4 Heraclitus  14, 72, 243 Herz, John H.  117–22 historical institutionalism (HI), see institutionalism history: and time  5–6, 13–14, 17–18, 21, 45, 50–1, 57, 59, 62–3, 69, 71–2, 93, 100, 190 ‘end of ’  49, 104–5, 126–7 grand narratives of  8, 17–18 ‘social history of time’  60 Hitler, Adolf  3 Homer 93–4 horology  22, 35, 234, see also time-reckoning; institutionalism: horological humanitarianism, human rights  92–3, 190–2, 195 Hutchings, Kimberly  29, 212–16, 236 ideal types  153–4, 239–40 ideography  19, 77–8, 89, 100, 236–9, 243–4, Ikenberry, G. John  104–5, 127–8 Inayatullah, Naeem  209–12 inhabitable world  21, 57–8, 82–3, 87–9, 101–3, 107, 142, 160, 162–3, 195, 210–11, 214–15, 223, 243–4 institutionalism  5–6, 19, 79–80, 115–16, 185–6, see also neoliberalism Bretton Woods institutions  192, 195, 201–4 ‘founding moments’  22, 50–1, 164nn.8, 10, 187–8, 198, 200–1, 203 historical (HI)  8, 22, 185–99, 203–7, 208, 234

horological  197–9, 205, see also horology institutional change and timing  187–8, 192, 197–8, 201–2, 204 institutions as timing regimes  185, 200–1, 207 path dependence  22, 33, 45n.28, 72–3, 171–3, 187–8, 191, 194–5, 199, 201–2 rationalist (RI)  186, 190–2, 194, 196–9, 204–5 sociological (SI)  186–7, 190, 196–7, 205 ‘temporal focal points’ (TFPs)  197–9 international law  17, 112, 191, 194–5 international order  7, 124 ‘liberal’  20–2, 74, 104–5, 127–8, 185–6, 164n.7, 191, 194 international political theory  5–6, 213–14 international relations (IR) as a vocation  2–3, 20–1, 76–7, 84–5, 106–7, 111, 134, 134n.3, 144, 149–50, 230–1, 236–9 international society  36, 45–6, 126–7, see also English School international system  40–1, 79–80, 101–2, 126–7, 190 bipolarity  123–4, 126–7 multipolarity  16–17, 125–6 interpretation  21–2, 39–42, 51–2, 82–3 interpretivism  21, 133, 155, 157f, 158, 233–4, 238–40 ‘humanized’ time  87, 151, 190, 195, 233 insider accounts  151–5 Iraq War (2003–2011)  101–2 Islamic State  84n.5, 104–5 Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus  133, 133n.1, 137, 237–8 Jervis, Robert  73–4, 125 kairos  29, 42f, 100, 212–17, see also aion; chronos Kant, Immanuel  31, 31n.11, 50–1 Kegley, Charles W.  125–8 Kennan, George  76, 119n.9 Keohane, Robert O.  79–80, 131, 136–41 King, Gary  136–41, 174–5 Kratochwil, Friedrich  46n.32 laboratory (scientific)  21, 134–6, 143, 146–7, 165 Levine, Daniel J.  102n.29, 228 Linklater, Andrew  34n.14 Lundborg, Tom  212–17, 221–4, 226–7, 229n.23 Machiavelli, Niccolò  12, 14–15, 71–2 Manulak, Michael W., see institutionalism: ‘temporal focal points’ (TFPs) Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso  41, see also Futurism

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294 Index Marx, Karl  12–13 Marxism  102–3, 194–5 McIntosh, Christopher  64–5, 67, see also presentism Mead, George Herbert  46n.31 Mearsheimer, John  125–6 Meinecke, Friedrich  68 Mink, Louis O.  83–4, 84n.3 Morgenthau, Hans J.  117–22 mortality, see finitude: ultimate mythology, see time gods narrative  19–22, 48–9, 83, 85n.7, 86–7, 89–90, 90n.14, see also explanation: as narrative and timing  19–23, 82–7, 90–1, 101, 105f, 185 as cosmography  87–8, 88n.10, 212 ‘Janus-faced’  86, 89–90, 101, 107, 142 meta-  91–3, 121, 124, 127–8, 130–1, 134, 134n.3, 142, 144–5, 149–51, 159–60, 208–9, 237–8, 243–4 narratology  20, 82–3, 85–7, 96, 155, 183, 223, 233 techniques of timing: ‘cleaving experience’, experiential cleavage  93–4, 99–102, 134n.4, 167, 179, 192–3, 198, 210–11, 217–18, 224–5 ‘concordant discordance’  94–6, 100, 104–5, 134, 141–2, 146–50, 154–6, 167–9, 179, 193–6, 210–11, 218, 226 ‘creative filtration’  92–3, 98, 101–2, 128–9, 134, 140–1, 146, 153–4, 164–7, 179, 191–2, 217–18, 224–5 ‘synoptic theme’, thematic standard  91–2, 96, 99–102, 134, 138–40, 145–6, 151–3, 174, 179, 190–1, 210–11, 218 temporality  20, 82–3, 85–6, 88–90, 136, 142, 151, 155–7, 182–3, 228–9, 236–7 theory of action  83–7, 89–90, 92, 111, 130, 134n.3, see also Ringmar, Erik ‘timing meter’  101–6, 138, 151–2, 170, 182, 233, 242 Neal, Andrew  79 neoliberalism  79–80, 124–5, see also institutionalism; “neo-neo debate” ‘neo-neo debate’  5–6, 19–20, 54, 79–81 neopositivism  21, 72–3, 133, 136–42, 145–6, 149–50, 151–2, 154–5, 157, 157f, 159–60, 162, 164, 179, 182, 185, 192–3, see also quantitative research neorealism, see realism (political) Newton, Isaac  15, 67–8 Niebuhr, Reinhold  117–20, 122 nuclear weapons  1, 69, 76–8, 121–3, 126–7, 191, 224, see also apocalypse: nuclear; thermonuclear revolution

parrhesia 79 peace  28, 112, 115–16, 122, 192 and war  10–11, 43–4, 76–7, 99, 112–13, 177–8, see also Cold War: peaceful end of ‘democratic’  78, 103, 126–8, 142, 169n.20, 174–5, 181n.37 ‘Hague peace era’  192, 194 ‘perpetual’  18, 50–1, 115 Pierson, Paul  33 Plato  11, 115, 143–4 Pocock, J.G.A.  71–2 postcolonialism  36, 74, 208, 209n.1 decolonization  38–9, 169n.20 Pouliot, Vincent  155 power politics  115–16, 118, 162n.5, 195, 230 great powers  8, 106–7, 115, 166n.14, 194, 240n.3 presentism 64–5, see also McIntosh, Christopher Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), see game theory ‘Problem of Time’  2, 11–17, 21–2, 38f, 61–3, 67–72, 82–3, 85–7, 89–90, 90–1, 104–6, 113–14, 120–3, 125, 130–1, 135, 142–3, 155–6, 167, 182–3, 189,  238 fluvial metaphors, time as ‘flux’  14, 38f, 42f, 45n.28, 47–50, 58n.2, 62, 69–70, 89, 92, 101–2, 104, 114–15, 119–20, 125–6, 135, 143–4, 190, see also time-reckoning: ‘time flowing/passing’ IR’s two ‘cultures of time’  11–17, 18–21, 27–9, 45–6, 45n.28, 54, 67–72, 81–3, 88–90, 185, 188, 207, 232, 234, see also Western standard time solutions to  17–23, 30n.9, 67, 90–1, 95, 114, 126, 140, 149–50, 160–1, 164, 167–8,176, 179–80, 190, 205, 213–14, 224–5, 243 time as chaos  4–5, 9, 11, 17–18, 30n.10, 38f, 50, 65–6, 69, 85–6, 95, 134, 144 time as malevolent force/deity  45, 49–50, 62–3, 68–70, 70f, 85–6, 89–90, 148–9, see also time gods progress (scientific)  75–6, 124, 127, 136, 151, 237–8 ‘pure event’  29, 215, 221–2, 222n.14, 227–8, 230, see also aion quantitative research  21–2, 159–60, 162, 170, 183–4, 208, 234, see also neopositivism Bayesian approaches  21–2, 176–82 event history models (EHM)  175–6 frequentism  160–1, 170–1, 173–84, 239f general linear model (GLM)  160, 163–76, 179–83

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Index  295 ‘null hypothesis’  167–9, 173–4, 176, 178n.33, 179 statistical analysis  159–63, 172–5, 183 Qin, Yaqing  46n.30, 61–2, 61n.7 randomness, chance  12, 14–15, 71–2, 75–6, 90, 95, 95n.21, 99–100, 136–7, 154, 159n.2, 161, 166–71, 173–4, 178–80, 183–4, 189–90, 193, 203, 213–14, 240 random vs systematic variables  140–2, 167n.15, 168, 171, 176–7, 180–1 realism (political)  17, 117, 123, 130–1 classical  77–8, 121–3 neorealism  5–6, 38–9, 79–80, 85n.7, 124–30, see also ‘neo-neo debate’ reflexive  22, 227–31, 243–4 redemption  87–8, 99–100 reflexivity  66–7, 150, 152–3, 230–1, 238, 242–3, see also realism: reflexive reification of time  22, 29–30, 44–7, 60, 64–5, 67, 70, 70n.13, 82–3, 85–6, 97, 101–3, 105–6, 141–2, 179–82, 202, 228–30, 242–3 Rengger, Nicholas  241 repetition, routinization  2, 35–7, 41–2, 48–9, 48n.35, 49, 51, 58–60, 70, 70n.13, 90, 98–9, 101–2, 104, 139, 205, 212, see also temporal habitus revolutions (political)  4, 39–40 French Revolution  4, 57 Russian Revolution  4 Ricoeur, Paul  31, 31n.11, 37n.18, 47n.33, 59–60, 59n.3, 84n.4, 85, 87–90, 87n.8, 94–5, 163 Ringmar, Erik  83–5 Rosa, Hartmut  218–19 Rosenau, James  73–6 Rostow, Walt Whitman  102–3 ‘savage time’  209–12, see also critical International Relations (IR); ‘temporal othering’ Schrodt, Philip A.  180–1 science fiction  134, 139–40, 158, 233–4 ‘time travel’  139–40, 139n.9, 140n.11, 142, 154, 210–11, 210n.3 Sears, Louis Martin  114–15 security, securitization  7, 15–16, 20n.29, 28n.3, 38f, 39–41, 45–6, 58, 74, 79, 92–3, 95, 168, 191–2, 226–7, 235 Seton-Watson, R.W.  114–16 Shakespeare, William  12–13, 13n.20 Shapiro, Michael J.  57–8, 66–7 social vs natural sciences  7–8, 21, 28, 30n.9, 41, 46–7, 80–1, 114, 124, 126–8, 135–8, 140, 143–5, 148–9, 156, 158–60, 162, 236–8, 240–1

sociotemporality  29, 65–7, 166n.13, see also Fraser, J.T. Stevens, Tim, model of  29–30, 55, 65–7, 85n.7, 160n.3, 166 stability, see continuity ‘synoptic theme’, see narrative: techniques of timing Syrian civil war  15–16, 104–5 temporal habitus 57–8, see also repetition, routinization temporality  7, 10–12, 29n.6, 31–2, 47, 56, 58, 62–3, 67–8, 155, 183–4, 216 as subjective experience of time  19–20, 30–1, 33, 51–2, 59–60, 60n.5, 64–6, 82–3, 86, 92 ‘hetero-’  172–3, 178, 209n.1, 213–14, 216, 223n.15, 236, 240, 240n.2 ‘hierarchical’  29, 50, 54, 65–7, 85n.7, 166, see also sociotemporality narrative, see narrative: temporality ‘temporal othering’  39, 166n.13, 209–10, 209n.2, 211n.6, see also colonialism; ‘savage time’ ‘temporal turn’ in International Relations (IR)  8–9, 27, 74, 160, 172, 180–2, 208 terrorism  16–17, 104–5, 141, see also war on terror 2009 ‘Christmas attack’  40–1 2016 ‘Bastille Day attack’ in Nice  40–1 thermonuclear revolution  21, 70–3, 111–12, 121–3, 130, 177–8, 195, 239–40, see also Cold War, nuclear weapons, Doomsday clock time gods  11–12, 12n.19, 14–17, 34–5, 42f, 47–50, 49–50, 89–90, 148–9, 241 see also ‘Problem of Time’ Father Time  12n.19, 85–6 ‘time’ in human (symbolic) language  2–3, 19–20, 27–8, 32–5, 43–7, 49–52, 55, 59–61, 67, 69, 82–3, 101 utterances of ‘time’  32, 44–5, 47–9, 51–2, 55–8, 60–1, 70–2, 70f, 86, 101, 104–6, 105f, 111 ‘timeless time’, timelessness  6–8, 28–9, 64, 79–80, 97–8, 135–6, 142, 150, 155, 157–60, 170, 187, 210–12, 216–17 time-reckoning: ‘closed’ view of time  40, 103–4, 136, 171–2, 218, 230, see also ‘open time’ Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)  58–9, 206 cyclical time  9–10, 12, 17–18, 29, 43–4, 51, 54, 62–3, 79–80, 87–8, 99–100, 178, 213–14 ‘empty time’  45, 67–8, 102–3, 128, 167–9, 183, 212, 214–16, 222–3, 226–8, 230–1, 242–3, see also aion

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296 Index time-reckoning: (cont.) ‘objective’ ‘neutral’, or ‘physical’ dimension of time  2, 9–10, 19–21, 27, 30–1, 31n.11, 43–5, 58–60, 67–8, 70–1, 86, 88–9, 102–3, 113–14f, see also temporality; reification of time ‘open time’  22, 27–8, 51, 58, 100, 227–30 ‘punctual’ ‘quasi-punctual’ time  28, 97, 99–101, 169, 179, 186, 192–3, 236–7 time as (linear) progression  17–18, 21–2, 28–9, 36–7, 41–4, 42f, 45n.28, 51, 54, 58–9, 62–3, 87–8, 94, 99–100, 103, 170, 180–1, 183–4, 188–90, 194, 213–14, 218, 221, 223–4 ‘time flowing/passing’  2, 4–5, 8, 11–12, 14, 43n.25, 50–1, 56–7, 62, 67–9, 71, 85, 88–9, 91, 101, 128, 130–1, 151, 166, 189, see also ‘Problem of Time’: time as ‘flux’ ‘time of the world’, universal time  10, 60–1, 103, 198, 214, 214n.8, 219, 229 ‘unirectilinear time’  28, 88–9, 94, 169–70, 173–4, 176, 183–4, 188–90, 216–18, 234 timing: active vs passive  19–22, 27–8, 36–8, 38f, 40–3, 70–1, 77–83, 81–3, 97, 105f, 135–6, 157f, 169–70, 174–5, 180–2, 201–3, 206, 211, 216, 220, 226, 228–30, 238–9, 239f activities  2–3, 19, 27–8, 34–5, 43–4, 46–7, 56, 59–62, 67, 69–71, 82, 89–90, 181–3, 235–6 as human construct  2–3, 12–13, 30, 38–40, 43–5, 56, 66, 69, 76, 80–3, 86, 90–1 as ordering  9–10, 12, 17, 21, 30n.10, 35–7, 37n.18, 40, 48–50, 56, 62, 70, 79–81, 85, 87–91, 151, 163, 211 as relationship between change continua 19, 35–7, 48–9, 51, 60–1, 61n.6, 72–3, 80–3, 87, 92–4, 96, 101–4, 130–1, 134–6, 139, 154, 177–8, 201–3, 222–3, 232–3 see also change: and timing as synthesis  19, 35, 37–44, 46–52, 56–7, 60–1, 63–4, 68, 75–6, 79, 82, 85, 87–91, 94, 136, 140–2, 201–2, 212, 214–15 breakdowns, responses to  19, 27–8, 37–43, 38f, 49, 68–71, 76–7, 89–90, 126, 219 brittle vs supple  27–8, 40–3, 42f, 51, 65, 78, 79, 81, 102–3, 155–6, 171–2, 180–1, 200–1, 204–5, 237–9, 239f crises, failures  21, 40, 47–8, 63–4, 70–1, 163, 164–5, 206, 219 devices  30, 57–9, 67–8, 77–8, 82–3, 86, 90–1, 133, 195 idiomatic  27–8, 32–4, 43, 51, 198–200

‘illocutionary’ ‘locutionary’ ‘perlocutionary’  56–7, 86 indexicals  47, 56–9, 57n.1, 66–72, 70f, 81, 87, 89–90, 210–11, 214, 219, 222–3 in International Relations (IR) theory  2–3, 5–8, 13–14, 17–19, 27–32, 62–3, 65, 79–83, 106–7, 232–6, 240–4 see also ‘Problem of Time’: IR’s two ‘cultures of time’; ‘temporal turn’ in International Relations (IR) narrative, see narrative: and timing new, re-timing  23, 38–40, 40n.22, 68–71, 77–8, 130–1, 203–4, 235–6 see also timing: breakdowns, responses to politics of  14, 22, 32–4, 36, 48–53, 60–5, 71–81, 183–4, 197, 214, 216, 226–7, 234, 236, 242–4 retrofit, revision  38–40, 38f, 116, 202–4, 206 standards  35, 38–40, 48–51, 63–4, 79–83, 90–1, 106–7, 202–3, 216, 237–40, 243–4 successful, effective  19, 36–7, 42–3, 47–51, 60, 69–71, 77–80, 90–1, 96, 101–3, 107, 135, 140, 149, 169, 171–2, 183, 201–2 theory  19–22, 36–7, 47–8, 51–6, 52n.38, 59, 64–7, 71–3, 77–8, 81–3, 87, 106, 181–2, 185–6, 200–1, 204–5, 211–12, 219, 222, 226–7, 229, 232–3 Trump, Donald  7, 39–40, 239–40 ubiquity of time  5–6, 28–30, 55, 60–2, 67–8, 75–6, 232 Verba, Sidney  136–41 Vietnam War  3 Walker, R.B.J.  27n.1, 62–3, 67 Waltz, Kenneth N.  55, 79–80, 98, 123 war and time  3, 9–11, 19, 41, 43–6, 56–8, 73–4, 99, 119–20, 123–4, 141, 162 ‘permanent’ war  4–5, 58, 104–5 war on terror  191 see also terrorism ‘9/11’  4, 10–11, 15–16, 39, 56, 72–3, 92–3, 101–2, 146n.16, 213, 223–4, 226–7, 239–40 Weber, Max  153 Western standard time  9–17, 28, 30, 36–7, 41–3, 42f, 51, 57, 65, 67–70, 70f, 81, 88–90, 97, 102–3, 171–3, 178–80, 182–4, 189, 197 see also ‘Problem of Time’: IR’s two ‘cultures of time’ Whitehead, Alfred North  46n.31 ‘will to time’  27–8, 50–2, 87, 149–50, 211–12, 216

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Index  297 Wohlforth, William C.  123–4, 127–30 World War I (WWI)  3, 16, 21, 72–3, 111–17, 130, 165, 177–8 Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo  15–16, 33–4, 100–1, 166n.14

World War II (WWII)  7, 192 Holocaust  72–3, 146n.16, 195, 224 Yom Kippur War  40–1, 73–4