What is time and how does it influence our knowledge of international politics? For decades International Relations (IR) paid little explicit attention to time. Recently this began to change as a range of scholars took an interest in the temporal dimensions of politics. Yet IR still has not fully addressed the issue of why time matters in international politics, nor has it reflected on its own use of time — how temporal ideas affect the way we work to understand political phenomena. Moreover, IR remains beholden to two seemingly contradictory visions of time: the time of the clock and a longstanding tradition treating time as a problem to be solved. International Relations and the Problem of Time develops a unique response to these interconnected puzzles. It reconstructs IR's temporal imagination by developing an argument that all times - from natural rhythms to individual temporal experience - spring from social and practical timing activities, or efforts to establish meaningful and useful relationships in complex and dynamic settings. In IR's case, across a surprisingly wide range of approaches scholars employ narrative timing techniques to make sense of confounding processes and events. This innovative account of time provides a more systematic and rigorous explanation for time in international politics. It also develops provocative insights about IR's own history, its key methodological commitments, supposedly 'timeless' statistical methods, historical institutions, and the critical vanguard of time studies. This book invites us to reimagine time, and in so doing to significantly rethink the way we approach the analysis of international politics.

What is time and how does it influence our knowledge of international politics? For decades International Relations (IR) paid little explicit attention to time. Recently this began to change as a range of scholars took an interest in the temporal dimensions of politics. Yet IR still has not fully addressed the issue of why time matters in international politics, nor has it reflected on its own use of time -- how temporal ideas affect the way we work to understand political phenomena. Moreover, IR remains beholden to two seemingly contradictory visions of time: the time of the clock and a longstanding tradition treating time as a problem to be solved. International Relations and the Problem of Time develops a unique response to these interconnected puzzles. It reconstructs IR's temporal imagination by developing an argument that all times - from natural rhythms to individual temporal experience - spring from social and practical timing activities, or efforts to establish meaningful and useful relationships in complex and dynamic settings. In IR's case, across a surprisingly wide range of approaches scholars employ narrative timing techniques to make sense of confounding processes and events. This innovative account of time provides a more systematic and rigorous explanation for time in international politics. It also develops provocative insights about IR's own history, its key methodological commitments, supposedly 'timeless' statistical methods, historical institutions, and the critical vanguard of time studies. This book invites us to reimagine time, and in so doing to significantly rethink the way we approach the analysis of international politics.

International Relations and the Problem of Difference has developed out of the sense that IR as a discipline does not assess the quality of cultural interactions that shape, and are shaped by, the changing structures and processes of the international system. In this work, the authors re-imagine IR as a uniquely placed site for the study of differences as organized explicitly around the exploration of the relation of wholes and parts and sameness and difference-and always the one in relation to the other.

Tang provides a coherent and systematic exploration of social evolution as a phenomenon and as a paradigm. He critically builds on existing discussions on social evolution, while drawing from a wide range of disciplines, including archaeology, evolutionary anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, the philosophy of social sciences, and evolutionary biology. Clarifying the relationship between biological evolution and social evolution, Tang lays bare the ontological and epistemological principles of the social evolutionary paradigm. He also presents operational principles and tools for deploying this paradigm to understand empirical puzzles about human society. This is a vital resource for students, practitioners, and philosophers of all social sciences.

International Politics and Institutions in Time is the definitive exploration, by a group of leading international relations scholars, of the contribution of the historical institutionalism tradition for the study of international politics. Historical institutionalism is a counterpoint to the rational choice and sociological traditions of analysis in the study of international institutions, bringing particular attention to how timing and sequence of past events, path dependence, and other processes impact distributions of global power, policy choices, and the outcome of international political battles. This book places places particular emphasis on the sources of stability and change in major international institutions, such as those shaping state sovereignty and global governance, including in the areas of international organization, law, political economy, human rights, environment, and security. Featuring work by pioneering scholars, the volume is the most comprehensive collection to date on historical institutionalism in IR. It is projected to be of interest to multiple audiences including the international relations community, to historians, especially as that field is experiencing its own 'international' and 'global' turns, as well as sociologists and economists who work on institutions and international affairs.

Since the end of the Cold War, analysts of international politics have given much greater attention to issues of change. It has become increasingly clear to specialists from many fields that any understanding of large-scale political change must encompass far longer timescales than has been usual in the study of world politics, and must incorporate multi-disciplinary perspectives. This book evaluates and draws on relevant theoretical approaches from other disciplines such as sociology, economics, geography, history, anthropology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary theory and the mathematical study of complexity. Using an epistemological framework, Dark sets out a theory of long-term world political change: the theory of 'Macrodynamics'. This is then applied to historical, anthropological and archaeological data to explain the changing forms of political organization, from the earliest human societies to the late twentieth century. The resulting analysis is a reinterpretation of the processes of global political change in the past and present. This, in turn, opens new areas of enquiry in the study of international relations and has profound implications for how we understand the changing world of today.

Introduction -- Realism, balance-of-power theory, and the counterbalancing constraint -- Realism, balance-of-threat theory, and the "soft balancing" constraint -- Liberalism, globalization, and constraints derived from economic interdependence -- Institutionalism and the constraint of reputation -- Constructivism and the constraint of legitimacy -- A new agenda