War and Time

• In Event: Narratives, Ideas, and Ideologies in International History

Abstract

I revisit the conventional wisdom, associated with constructivism, on how to establish the causal effects of ideas in world politics. I show this conventional wisdom rests on an odd approach to causality that departs from the counterfactual framework generally used in the discipline. I offer a reformulation, and illustrate with reference to a previously widely held view about world politics that would now be roundly rejected – the view that war is inevitable. I trace the origins of this view and how it has changed, and the effects of this change on decisions to go to war. The analysis suggests that ideas have significant effects on world politics. To establish this requires rethinking theory and research design, which points towards productive overlap across two purported divides in the subfield: rationalist and constructivist approaches, and causal and constitutive modes of explanation.

Author

• Arjun Chowdhury, University of British Columbia