Time and the Production of Knowledge in IR.

What role does time play in the production of knowledge within international relations (IR) theory? How has the conception of time informed the temporality that IR scholars employ when they analyze international politics? Much has been written by scholars of IR regarding questions of epistemology, but there has as of yet been little debate regarding the role time plays in the valuing and privileging of particular ways of knowingâ€"theorizingâ€"international relations. Other disciplines, most notably sociology, have produced reflexive critiques examining the role that time plays in the formation and (re)production of knowledge about social reality. This essay seeks to engage these critiques from an IR perspective and identify how these projects can better shape and inform IR scholarship. This essay will be structured around three questionsâ€"what does it mean to critique representations of time in social scholarship, why does this critique apply to IR, and finally, what’s at stake in this analysisâ€"what could we do differently if we find these accounts compelling? In the first section, I will identify some critiques of the social scientific formulation of timeâ€"and the temporality that arises from itâ€"offered by theorists such as Barbara Adam, Pierre Bourdieu, and Andrew Abbott. Their work identifies how time is understood, how that understanding affects scholarship as practiced, and some of the implications that arise for sociological inquiry. I will then examine IR scholarship as practice, drawing parallels between IR and sociology (as well as social science), and apply these critiques to IR scholarship. In the final section, I will show what’s at stake and outline an approach that takes temporality seriously. This section will demonstrate how some of the problems IR has may not be inevitable consequences of the difficulty in theorizing complex international events, but rather are endemic to the epistemological values that arise from a temporality that is informed by the classical view of timeâ€"I will focus here on questions of causality and the role of events in IR theory. Given these implications, this paper will call for a reintroduction of temporality into the analysis of the IR scholar via what historical sociologists have referred to as the “narrative approach.” ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]