Timing is Everything: Toward a Better Understanding of Time and International Politics

Abstract

What is time? And why does it matter to international politics? Despite evidence that time is central to political life, international-relations theories often taken it for granted. Important efforts to address such oversights critique influential disciplinary assumptions and expand our perspective on temporal experience. But they do not substantially deepen our understanding of time, let alone its relationship to politics. International-relations theory retains entrenched habits of thinking and speaking about time that isolate inquiry, constrain dialogue, and reify time as a stand-alone object detached from social relations and processes. This theory note therefore reconstructs international relations' temporal imagination. Instead of relying on pre-existing, static concepts of time, it develops a framework from the basic activity of timing: practical efforts to establish relationships between various changes according to a standard that enables orientation, direction, and control. Timing theory explains the political origins of time and the power of our most familiar ideas about it. It also resolves key problems attending other temporal research. Finally, it offers scholars more dynamic ways to analyze the temporal politics of important phenomena like war and identity. It thus highlights how, in both practice and theory, international politics is very much a matter of timing.

Towards a political concept of reversibility in international relations: Bridging political philosophy and policy studies

“…The a posteriori and a priori distinction of the temporal dimension of reversibility is helpful for a further specification of the concept. This distinction can be related to contemporary discussions in IR about time and the basic distinction in the Greek notions of chronos and kairos (Hom, 2018a(Hom, , 2018bHutchings, 2008), that is, between the notion of time as linear and chronological (also termed 'homologous empty time'; see Anderson, 1983), and time as seen through the language of contingency and the unexpected, surprising event (as exemplarily problematised by Plutarch in his Moralia (1936), 'The Obsolescence of Oracles'). While in its a posteriori dimension, reversibility can look back in hindsight at consolidated consequences and can assess (even though not in total as they are always in a process of still unfolding) their conciliation with contingency/ perspectivity and negation/refutability, and if necessary rectify and mitigate their impact, it sits with chronos.…”

Power and International Relations: a temporal view

“…A burgeoning literature has emerged on time’s role in IR theory (Hom, 2018; Hom and Steele, 2010; Hutchings, 2007, 2008; Krebs and Rapport, 2012; McIntosh, 2015). McIntosh (2015: 466) cogently observes that a hidden source of fragmentation within IR theory is implicit assumptions that different paradigms make about time:…”

At the outer limits of the international: Orbital infrastructures and the technopolitics of planetary (in)security

“…After all, implicit within geological nomenclature is the notion of finitude: all stratigraphic units have a beginning and an end, a lower and upper temporal boundtheir delimiting is, in Andrew Hom's terms, an act of purposive 'timing'. 21 The very idea of an Anthropocene is predicated not on positive visions of human influence on the Earth but on its negative, potentially irreversible, effects. 22 Often, planetary survival is deemed threatened on account of a combination of political myopia, moral neglect, and corporate venality, as captured more specifically by, for instance, the alternative designation of the 'Capitalocene'.…”