Anachronism in International Relations Theory

• In Event: Historical Roots of Modern International Politics

Abstract

International Relations (IR) theorists often generalize about world politics to describe and explain patterns of behavior across multiple time-periods. Theories on war, cooperation, and the international order produce hypotheses about general systemic forces that are applied to cases sometimes centuries apart, like the Thirty Years War and World War II. Yet developing and testing these theories requires combining observations from different time-periods within the same temporal field, running the risks of anachronism—of attributing some phenomenon to a factor that did not exist or was inconceivable at the time. In this paper, we argue that the practice of constructing general theories about world politics produces anachronistic explanations that project of contemporary understandings of world politics onto the past. Generalizations cause scholars to impute understandings of the material world that actors may not have had at the time, and to underestimate how variation in actors understanding of world politics affected their behavior, especially when it involves ideas we now deem false but were once deemed true. We illustrate this with reference to studies of the non-Western world, showing how scholars project recent understandings of time and war on to historical periods in which they were absent, and in turn, how these scholars consign non-Western beliefs to ‘myth’ and falsity. The paper contributes to theoretical debates on the relative importance of material and ideational forces in world politics, as well as the importance of periodization in qualitative and quantitative research.

Authors

• Arjun Chowdhury, University of British Columbia

• Miles Evers, University of Connecticut