Introduction

Using the Doomsday Clock as an organizing symbol, the introduction makes the case for time’s relevance to a range of global political phenomena, clears important conceptual ground, and sets the stage for the theory and analyses to follow. It notes a number of empirical and disciplinary areas where time and temporal assumptions play important roles but argues that International Relations (IR) mostly fails to take time seriously as an object of analysis in its own right. It then sketches two dominant and seemingly contradictory cultures of time operating across politics and IR: Western standard time, or the time reckoned by reliable clocks and calendars; and the problem of Time—a much more venerable and vindictive image of time as antagonistic to human and social life, sometimes couched in fluvial metaphors. The problem of Time tradition sets up politics in practice and in theory as efforts to tame Time with sound knowledge and effective action, often linked to Western standard time symbols. Before summarizing the rest of the book, the introduction argues that the prevalence of these two contradictory time cultures in IR opens up important questions about the field’s relationship to time and its means of engaging global politics.