Historical Institutionalism

Chapter seven covers historical institutionalism (HI), a new 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, it uses HI accounts of institutions 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.

Telling Time

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.

Methodologies

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 an empirical and realistic approach to social scientific inquiry.

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.

Critical Approaches

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.

Disciplinary History

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. 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.

Timing

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.

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.

Why Timing Matters

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 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. 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 subject 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.”

Quantitative Approaches

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” 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.