Andrew R. Hom's "International Relations and the Problem of Time"

Andrew Hom is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh and an Associate Editor of the journal, International Relations. He is the co-editor of Moral Victories: The Ethics of Winning Wars (2017) and Time, Temporality, and Global Politics (2016).

Hom applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, International Relations and the Problem of Time, and reported the following:

Had I known I would have the opportunity to take the page 99 test for International Relations and the Problem of Time, I would have made sure that something dramatic happened on that page, as when scientists invented the Doomsday Clock – the ticking symbol of dread – to reckon with the nuclear revolution and other forms of apocalypse (it is 100 seconds to midnight, by the way). Or at least that someone would deliver a memorable quote – like ancient references to “Time the Destroyer”, or when a Minister in the UK Parliament accused the Conservative government of “using time as a weapon” in debates about foreign policy.

Alas, while earlier and later portions of the book cover such episodes, page 99 is invested in the less striking but equally important work of carefully building up conceptual tools to help us see just why and how time matters in world politics. It discusses mechanistic, historical, and structural-rationalist explanations in the study of International Relations (IR), comparing them based on how (and how much) they filter experience into a manageable amount of evidence or data; how they “cleave” or establish the bookends of the explanatory sequence; and how they turn surprising or discordant moments into those turning points, tragic flaws, and twists of fate that lead political processes in puzzling directions. This discussion comes near the end of chapter three, which introduces temporal concepts from narrative theory to IR.

Hold on a second (you may object), history – ok, but mechanisms, structures, and rationality don’t sound very much like “timey wimey” issues?

Yet these ways of explaining political phenomena are central to IR, which would be unrecognizable without references to history, the “structure of international anarchy”, assumptions about rational state behaviour, or accounts of how certain inputs mechanically produce reliable outpus. And one of the main goals of the book is to show that while many discussions may not appear temporal, and most scholars have not concerned themselves with time, IR concepts and modes of knowledge depend very much on hidden ideas about time. Following on from this, the book also shows just how IR theories and methods perpetuate particular ways of imagining and relating to time.

To accomplish this, Part One of the book develops a novel account of time as not just having political consequences but as a social and political phenomenon all the way down. Departing from other philosophical and theoretical treatments, which tend to assume some metaphysical or natural content to time, my book argues that all concepts of time and temporal symbols refer to underlying timing practices. Here timing means not just ‘when’ something happens but to much larger and more creative efforts to stitch together social relations and complex processes so that life unfolds in one way rather than others, and produces this outcome instead of that. References to time and temporality, then, refer not to objective features of the universe but to human efforts to time – a basic, pervasive, and widely overlooked aspect of social and political life.

Because it begins from such a different starting point, Part One also defends timing theory against prominent alternatives, before developing more precise analytical tools (as on page 99) to help us identify and unpack IR’s temporal foundations. Part Two then demonstrates this and discusses the consequences for how we think about world politics, covering disciplinary history, philosophies of social science, quantitative methods, studies of international institutions, and critical theory. It concludes by arguing that once we fully grasp the importance of timing and time for international politics, IR looks very different from conventional wisdoms about quantitative-qualitative, theory-narrative, general-particular, empirical-interpretive, or scientific-critical divides.

Learn more about International Relations and the Problem of Time at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue