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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. This text develops a unique response to these interconnected puzzles.

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.

AbstractFor a discipline as philosophically and temporally sensitive as International Relations, it is curious that Martin Heidegger, widely considered the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, has only recently begun to receive disciplinary attention. It is also noteworthy that as IR begins to grapple with right-wing extremism, it has not addressed Heidegger's fascist politics. Conducting a close reading of his account of existence in time, this article argues that from his magnum opus to his final diaries, Heidegger prefigured many existentialist discussions, but his particular conceptualisations of time, temporality, and authentic Being lent political life a dangerous edge. Scrutinising both the conceptual and practical consequences of Heidegger's thought, this article traces key tensions in his claims that, to realise true Selfhood, we must overcome social time on the road to death. This antagonism encourages overly individuated and aggressive habits of thought and action that reject the possibilities of co-existence. We can see this in how Heidegger's obsession with authenticity over time pushed him deeper into Nazism, and in the ways that his existential vernacular resounds through today's right-wing renaissance. Juxtaposing authenticity, then and now, helps draw out the distinctively temporal dynamics of Heidegger's existentialism as well as the existential politics of our time.

Recently, more and more International Relations (IR) scholars have begun to recognise time explicitly as a political phenomenon and an important element of IR theorising. Spanning different approaches and substantive concerns, their efforts suggest that IR is taking a 'temporal turn'. This is most evident in the field's critical wing, which has expanded our perspective on time and challenged temporalities associated with sovereign politics and mainstream theories. However, critical treatments of time also manifest four discursive habits – two targets of criticism and two alternatives – that reproduce hidden tensions and contradictions detrimental to the temporal turn. First, scholars incoherently denounce timeless visions of politics. Second, attacks on linear time obscure a variety of hegemonic temporalities and reproduce assumptions that critics wish to challenge. Third, advocates of heterotemporality amass woolly alternatives, foreclosing analysis and dialogue. Finally, times of rupture recapitulate a liberal-idealism that depoliticises temporal enquiry just when it could be pushing the politics of time further. These habits hamstring conceptual development and critical IR's ability to contribute distinctive perspectives to a field growing increasingly interested in time. To redress this, the paper identifies and sharpens critical IR's temporal tensions, shows how they encourage particular visions of time and politics, and suggests initial steps towards maximising the critical potential of time.

What is time? And why does it matter to international politics? Despite evidence that time is central to political life, international-relations theories often take 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.

Rather than focusing on a particular commemoration, this article draws attention to the issue of when we say what we say. It argues that when scholars take "big" anniversaries of major international political events as the occasion for critique, they concede important conceptual and practical ground to an overlooked yet hegemonic symbolic order that constrains political possibility. Regardless of content, timing such discussions to round numbers accumulating from "given" and "historical" dates like 1917 or 9/11 reaffirms a statist and state‐systemic — an inter/national — politics of commemoration. After briefly introducing a way to analyze temporal phenomena using the concept of timing in the first section, the rest of the article elaborates the functional and political implications of discussions organized around inter/national calendars. The second section summarizes links between hegemonic timing and the modern inter/national imaginary. The third explicates the cosmopolitical importance of calendars and anniversaries, showing how modern dating systems privilege particular historical legacies, constitute political identities, and hypertrophy the importance of round numbers. The fourth section examines the ontopolitics of these timing practices and identifies five consequences of inter/nationally–timed critique. The article concludes by suggesting alternative calendars supportive of a more thoroughgoing temporal challenge to our hegemonic politics of commemoration.

Various reflections on the 'Arab Spring' evince a common view of the relationship between change and time that imbues events with a sense of intrinsic peril. Based on a framework developed from Norbert Elias's concept of timing, this article elaborates the relationship between time and the 'Arab Spring' by unpacking and explaining three rhetorical tropes prevalent in academic responses to the revolts. The first two construct a problem to which the third proffers a solution. First, analysts treat time itself as a problematic force confounding stability and progress. Second, they deploy fluvial metaphors to present dynamic events as inherently insecure. Third, they use temporal Othering to retrofit the 'Arab Spring' to the familiar arc of liberal democracy, which renders the revolts intelligible and amenable to external intervention. These moves prioritize certainty and order over other considerations and constrain open-ended transformations within a familiar rubric of political progress. They also constitute an active timing effort based on a conservative standard, with important implications for our understanding of security and for scholarly reflexivity. The article concludes with three temporal alternatives for engaging novel changes like the 'Arab Spring'.

Various reflections on the 'Arab Spring' evince a common view of the relationship between change and time that imbues events with a sense of intrinsic peril. Based on a framework developed from Norbert Elias's concept of timing, this article elaborates the relationship between time and the 'Arab Spring' by unpacking and explaining three rhetorical tropes prevalent in academic responses to the revolts. The first two construct a problem to which the third proffers a solution. First, analysts treat time itself as a problematic force confounding stability and progress. Second, they deploy fluvial metaphors to present dynamic events as inherently insecure. Third, they use temporal Othering to retrofit the 'Arab Spring' to the familiar arc of liberal democracy, which renders the revolts intelligible and amenable to external intervention. These moves prioritize certainty and order over other considerations and constrain open-ended transformations within a familiar rubric of political progress. They also constitute an active timing effort based on a conservative standard, with important implications for our understanding of security and for scholarly reflexivity. The article concludes with three temporal alternatives for engaging novel changes like the 'Arab Spring'.

AbstractTo date, studies of international politics have little space for time. In this article, I argue that time is constitutive of the international system by offering a genealogical historical sketch of the coeval rise of territorial state sovereignty and Western standard time (consisting of seconds, minutes, and hours). Sovereignty is rightly a foundational concept of both the international system and the field of International Relations (IR), but the emergence of the contemporary method of reckoning time during the Enlightenment also supported the project of political modernity, and is thus critical to IR. The genealogical motive of the sketch is to understand what have become naturalised, global social conventions as historically contingent, cosmopolitical phenomena that resulted from significant socio-political efforts and conflicts. I locate 'sites' where modern sovereignty emerged and explicate contemporaneous processes, factors, and events implicated in the rise of modern time at those sites. In doing so, I outline how particular modes of understanding space and time were bred in Western Europe, spread around the world via colonialism, and embedded during the eras of global war and post-colonialism. I conclude by contrasting current challenges to territorial state sovereignty with Western standard time's untrammelled global hegemony.

AbstractWhat, this essay asks, is the relation between contemporary IR scholarship and the existentialist intellectual and cultural tradition? How is our discipline informed and animated by existentialist thinking? Is existentialism a heritage to be recovered, claimed, and embraced by IR scholars, or a shadow to be escaped? And what resources does it furnish us for thinking through the kind of issues that IR scholars are called upon to grapple with today? These questions are not purely theoretical. There are practical and political reasons, not only for considering them, but for considering them now. Living through what has been termed an unfolding 'Age of Anxiety', we find ourselves confronted by existential questions and existentialist ideas at almost every turn. It is, however, unclear how substantive or meaningful this apparently existentialist moment truly is. Does existentialism have something to say to contemporary IR, or does it flatter to deceive? We think the time is ripe to take stock of existentialism as it relates to IR and global politics. This is the purpose of this article and of the collection of essays it introduces.

Wartime dominates the 21st century. The term is ubiquitous in contemporary politics, providing an intuitive trope for narrating foreign relations, grappling with intractable policy problems, and responding to shocking events. Such pervasion makes it easy to forget that wartime is a relatively recent political invention. It began as an instrumental and somewhat stylized concept that authorized exceptional violence by promising to contain it within strict temporal boundaries. Yet in the same era that wartime achieved international prominence, war itself became an increasingly ordinary and extended dimension of politics. Today, 'wartime' refers to a number of unconstrained and often self-perpetuating violent practices that have changed global politics and national security policies in deep and enduring ways – nowhere more so than in the United States. To introduce the special issue, this article presents wartime as a neglected and paradoxical topic at the heart of International Relations. It sketches the concept's historical emergence, from innovative Presidential discourse through expansion in World War II and the Cold War, to 21st century entrenchment in daily life and habits of foreign relations. We also make the case for why US wartime marks an especially apt example of a global phenomenon, and one worthy of increased scrutiny within International Relations (IR). Finally, we provide synoptic summaries of the articles that comprise the special issue, showing how they work together to interrogate key aspects of 21st century wartime. We conclude with reflections on how the study of wartime may be extended to better understand its impact on historical and contemporary global politics.