Critical Approaches

Chapter eight tackles the vanguard of IR time studies, where critical scholars have successfully placed time and temporality at the front of the agenda but done less to elaborate and interrelate their diverse conceptual innovations. Covering four critical discourses of time—“savage” and neoclassical times, accelerating time, and temporalities of rupture—this chapter uses timing theory to assess pivotal assumptions at the heart of critical IR. While they propose to problematize time, critical scholars still reify various concepts and selectively deploy the problem of Time against hegemonic political logics. In each case, timing theory offers a more thoroughgoing and coherent account of critical temporalities. In particular, it shows that past times signal long-running timing successes bound up with power, that fast times need not lead to alienation, and that ruptures can never be ends in themselves unless underwritten by the sorts of politics that many critical scholars refute. Instead, ruptures must be understood as moments requiring fraught new forms of timing, unless we rely on silently shared assumptions and a form of liberal-idealism that depoliticizes critical times just when we should be pushing the politics of time and timing further, a task better met by the open timing standards of reflexive realism.