Abstract
As the description of the Covid-19 pandemic as “unprecedented times” became a cultural trope for crises both protracted and acute, a meme arose wishing for the opportunity to live again in precedented times. That the act of yearning to live in precedented times can go viral tells us a lot about our relationship to temporality and history. If unprecedented times are risky because of their unpredictability, then precedented times are to be preferred for their navigability. Given the relationship between International Journal and historically-informed scholarship in International Relations (IR), it will perhaps come as no surprise that this longing for precedence can also be a scholarly attitude. This idea bears a simple assumption of the linearity of time and the ability of us “now” to learn from the precedent of “then.”
However, in The Time of Global Politics, Christopher McIntosh argues that the crisis of the present owes its existence in part to our failure to think carefully about time. A major contribution to the temporality studies community in IR, this book sets an ambitious scope of critique and then develops a conceptually rigorous alternative. “International Relations is stuck in the past,” McIntosh argues, and “while the field is unavoidably shaped by the present and its apparent novelty, it refuses to directly engage it, placing IR in a loop of constant crisis” (1). He identifies two problematic relations to time that produce this crisis. The first tendency—which he sees most often in the work of “qualitative researchers, foreign policy experts, and even critical scholars”—occurs when the primary temporal effort is to “emphasize the role of history in shaping our present,” while the second tendency—typified by positivist methods—“is an attempt to excise entirely the apparent novelty of the present by generating knowledge that transcends context” (2). In both cases, McIntosh alleges, the time of the present evaporates in search for explanations grounded in past time or timelessness. To firmly ground scholarship in the present is instead to reject the Newtonian metaphysics of social science that privileges the linearity of clock-time (37), instead considering the present as a space of emergence and relationality that we inhabit (68ff). Rather than a moment in time following from the past, this spatial understanding of the present is a necessarily contingent construction of its constituents.
The Time of Global Politics is a masterclass in weaving together the threads of social theory and IR theory, engaging both canonical theories and emergent debates. The book begins with its argument for why time must matter for political analysis, before turning to the field of International Relations to explore how dominant conceptions of time constrain which theoretical claims can be investigated. In chapter three, McIntosh introduces his “presentist toolkit,” which explores the key conceptual tools that describe a complex present. Chapters 4–6 put this toolkit to work at three levels familiar to theorists of IR: theoretical debates, system, and unit. Given the height of the abstraction established in the framework-building chapters, this step down helps demonstrate the applicability of the presentist toolkit—first for theorists of IR, then for those interested in the system-level phenomenon of war, then finally for the unit-level analysis of Trumpist American foreign policy. The concluding reflections of the book explore the implications of the presentist toolkit for scholars. Recalling his dual objects of critique—timeless positivists and historical post-positivists—McIntosh demonstrates how a turn towards the present is not only open to scholars of different methodological and theoretical persuasions, but indeed entails specific shifts in scholarly practice depending upon where one stands in the field. Even for those readers who are not convinced by the final chapter to take up the task of “Present Studies” as a field of inquiry, the preceding reflections of how positivists and post-positivists alike stand to benefit from a more rigorous imaginary of the present opens a wide range of points of engagement. Throughout the work, McIntosh strikes a balance between nuanced engagement with conceptually rich material and accessible writing that clearly demonstrates the centrality of time and temporality for scholars across the field of International Relations.
The work contributes most directly to the theorists of time and temporality in IR, marking a substantial intellectual contribution to the community and demonstrating for its next generation a model of how to engage effectively with a wide disciplinary audience. Less a comment on the merits of the critique of positivism than one that follows an implication of its accuracy, the critique of post-positivism will likely be more readily read and engaged with than that of positivism. Scholars of historical International Relations, especially those critically-oriented and committed to contingency, emergence, and intersubjectivity, will find in The Time of Global Politics a thoughtful guide to probing the core assumptions of time that guide their engagement with political analysis. Released as it was in unprecedented times, McIntosh has offered a theoretically-rich work of great benefit to our present.
