Conclusion
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, theoretical, or disciplinary doxa when studying the temporal domain of global politics.