The discipline of IR has, throughout its history, been something of a ‘divided discipline’. During recent decades it has become widely accepted that one of the fundamental dividing lines in the discipline runs between those who do ‘causal’ and those who do ‘non-causal’, or constitutive, theorising. As the disciplinary politics in IR have become deeply informed by this divisionary logic, the debates between the positivists and interpretivists, the rationalists and the reflectivists, have become highly emotionally charged.

There is no better illustration of the animosity between the causal and the non-causal theorists than that evident in Keohane's dismissal of reflectivist theorising in his Presidential Address to the International Studies Association in 1988 and David Campbell's reply to such dismissals in the epilogue of the second edition of Writing Security. While Keohane dismissed the reflectivists for lacking a systematic scientific approach to IR and a clear research programme, Campbell argued that IR as a discipline is defined by a game of ‘border politics’, where the gatekeepers of the mainstream have sought to police the disciplinary field so as to render forms of inquiry either legitimate or illegitimate. While rationalists have tended to dismiss the reflectivist approaches as unscientific, Campbell attacked ferociously the parochial and imperialist nature of mainstream IR and its efforts to suppress critical work, either by denouncing it as anti-scientific or by co-opting identity issues within mainstream variable-based ‘causal analysis’. Crucially, the questions of causation have been important for both Keohane and Campbell.