Hidemi Suganami

Narrative Explanation and International Relations: Back to Basics

One of the central concerns of International Relations (IR), as well as International History (IH), is to explain how a given event came to occur. However, the importance and effectiveness of narrative as explanation is often neglected in IR. By focusing on the structure and role of narrative causal accounts, this article argues that drawing a distinction between IR and IH on the basis of their treatment of narrative is senseless. In the course of the discussion, a number of standard philosophical distinctions underpinning mainstream IR are challenged: in particular, reasons and causes, understanding and explanation, history and social science, and history and theory. It contends that the historical mode of knowledge production is indispensable to IR in addressing its substantive issues. However, it also warns that if IR is to take advantage of history in this way, it should also take seriously the epistemological and political critique of history and the narrative mode of representation. It ends by taking a critical glance at the works of Hollis and Smith, Lebow, and Edkins, and identifies a number of important meta-historical questions that need to be addressed in order to deepen our understanding of our ways of knowing world politics.

C. A. W. Manning and the study of International Relations

C. A. W. Manning, Professor of International Relations at the LSE (1930-1962), was a key contributor to the formation of the discipline in Britain. He wrote on Jurisprudence, which was his main strength; on the League of Nations, of which he was a keen supporter; on South Africa, concerning which he gained notoriety as the defender of Apartheid; on International Relations as an independent academic discipline, which, to him, was due to the sui generis character of international society as a formally anarchical but substantively orderly social environment. He was a Rationalist in Martin Wights sense, and early constructivist, who saw that the society of states as a social construct was subject to interpretation, reinterpretation, and reshaping.

Causal Explanation and Moral Judgement: Undividing a Division

By combining arguments about causal explanation in history found in the writings of Veyne and Dray, this article discusses one plausible line of reasoning which suggests that there is a type of causal explanation which historians offer to which their moral judgements are conceptually integral. It assesses the validity of this line of thinking and suggests that the reason why, in some cases, our moral judgements seep through to our causal explanations is not that certain concepts, such as, in particular, passivity and activity of the key actors’ acts, used in our causal narratives, necessarily involve moral judgements for their application, but rather that any explanation is an answer to a question and some causal questions turn out to be, or may plausibly be construed as, asking for our moral views. The ‘intrusion’ of moral judgement into causal explanation is not logically necessary, but may be contextually appropriate in some cases.

Reflections on the domestic analogy: the case of Bull, Beitz and Linklater

the argument from the experience of individual men in domestic society to the experience of states, according to which the need of individual men to stand in awe of a common power in order to live in peace is a ground for holding that states must do the same. The conditions of an orderly social life, on this view, are the same among states as they are within them: they require that the institutions of domestic society be reproduced on a universal scale.1

Meta-Jackson: Rethinking Patrick Thaddeus Jackson’s Conduct of Inquiry

In his The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, Patrick Jackson identifies four distinct ways of studying world politics: ‘neopositivism’, ‘critical realism’, ‘analyticism’ and ‘reflexivity’. According to him, they all fall under the broad umbrella of ‘science’ but they each stem from a distinct philosophical foundation. In his view, which foundation one subscribes to is a matter of faith, which leads him to advocate pluralism. He classifies the underlying philosophical foundations in terms of two criteria: ‘mind–world dualism’ versus ‘mind–world monism’ and ‘phenomenalism’ versus ‘transfactualism’. Through a step-by-step analysis of his complex text, I show that what divides (1) neopositivism, (2) analyticism and (3) critical realism and reflexivity (classed together) is not in fact their philosophical foundations but the nature of the questions they ask, each reflecting distinct human interests. Accordingly, while praising Jackson’s philosophical vigilance against the dominance of neopositivism, I conclude by pointing to a need to consider the political underpinnings of different modes of knowledge production.

Towards the politics of causal explanation: a reply to the critics of causal inquiries

Causal inquiry has been a controversial matter in International Relations (IR) scholarship in recent years. While many new „non-positivist‟ stances on causal analysis have been developed in recent years, many post-positivist and critical theorists in the discipline have remained unconvinced of the virtues of causal inquiry. Crucially, the political consequences of causal analysis seem to be a sticking point for many such critics. Yet, the politics of causal analysis are, we argue, complex and relatively poorly engaged with at present. Indeed, the arguments against causal analysis which rely on warnings concerning the political nature of causal analysis are inadequate and incomplete. We contend here that causal analysis is, indeed, political but that this does not mean that we should not engage in causal inquiry. On the contrary, we argue that this is what makes causal inquiry interesting and important in social science. A more nuanced and reflective approach to dealings with the politics of causal analysis is needed, and it is such a response that we provoke critics of causal analysis to consider.

Causation-in-the-world: A Contribution to Meta-theory of IR

This article examines critical realists’ key contention that ‘causing’, or the operation of causal powers, is real or mind-independent. Against their opponents (causal idealists), they point out the (seeming) empirical obviousness of the mind-independence of causal powers, causal idealism’s lack of ‘ontological grounding’, its ‘epistemic fallacy’ and so on. The validity or force of such arguments is ultimately dubious, however. Still, the understanding that causal powers are real is a necessary presupposition of scientific knowledge production and application and of our everyday thinking and practice; realists and idealists can converge on this point. Moreover, there is nothing in causal idealism as such that is incompatible with critical realists’ key insight that causal laws should be understood as stating the ways things work, producing observable regularities only in closed systems and that regularities are not an intrinsic feature of causal relations. I conclude by exploring the implications of this line of thinking for the study of world politics, endorsing a move from a search for parsimonious theories that explain regular patterns observable in the international system towards a historical study of global social relations, which pays attention to causal complexes, diversity of historical contexts and the contested nature of causal interpretations.

Two Days in the Life of ‘Dave’ Hume (1711–1776)

In what follows, David Hume first appears as ‘Dave’, a PhD student supervised by ‘Prof’. Dave is excited about the progress he has made over the summer and Prof asks some searching questions. Forty years later, Hume, now an Emeritus Professor of Psychology (EPP), gives a piece of advice to a Promising Young Academic (PYA) from the United States.

Questioning Kenneth N. Waltz (1924–2013)

Professor Hani Magus and Dr Umesh Harpy are in the midst of a viva. The candidate is Kenneth Waltz. His work turns out to be one of the most successful doctoral theses in the history of IR but the examiners are giving him a hard time. Some years later, the two examiners visit Professor Waltz, now a leading IR theorist, for an interview.

The English School of International Relations: Progress and its limits: system, society and community in world politics

The English School has been centrally concerned with the study of ‘progress and its limits’ (Mayall, 2000c) and repeated references to the three great traditions of international thought reflect this important fact. The Hobbesian or Machiavellian perspective represents the anti-progressivist approach to international relations which contends that states belong to an international system in which there is seldom relief from competition and conflict. States in this condition are principally orientated towards strategic action – to containing, outmanoeuvring or incapacitating actual or potential adversaries. Most are concerned with maximizing the ‘power to hurt’ and with protecting themselves from the harm opponents can cause (Schelling, 1966). Social learning occurs in the strategic domain most obviously through the accumulation of ever more powerful instruments of violence and the parallel evolution of doctrines about their most effective use. The Kantian tradition represents the progressivist tendency in international thought since its members believe in the existence of a latent community of humankind and are confident that all political actors have the capacity to replace strategic orientations with cosmopolitan political arrangements which are governed by dialogue and consent rather than power and force. Social learning is not restricted to the strategic domain but can unfold in the moral sphere as separate political communities come to identify more strongly with humanity as a whole and weave cosmopolitan principles into the conduct of their external affairs.