Chapter four analyses the period between the French Revolution and the First World War. For the first time, Europeans believed that it was possible to reorder societies to create new futures. Politics was turned towards a future that was open to human action. These ideas generated paradoxical results. The revolutionary urge to reshape societies according a rational plan sparked twenty-five years of wars and uncertainty. The turbulence of these years generated two consequences. First, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the experience of unpredictability gave rise to an idea that international politics requires active and multilateral management. This pragmatic approach, born out of uncertainty, increased predictability in the international system. Second, it created a yearning for certainty. A number of ideologies and sciences emerged claiming that societies are governed by underlying laws that can be discovered and manipulated. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, determinist world views dominated modern thinking and would play a key role in the outbreak and conduct of the First World War.

Chapter one introduces the topics of the book, describes how I analyse them and outlines how the work is structured. It shows that there are many books on uncertainty as a philosophical issue but they do not deal with the problems and solutions of warfare. Conversely, there are many books on surprise and strategy in war but none that connect these problems to philosophical discussions on uncertainty, ontology and predictability. Many sociologists see our time as characterized by uncertainty but they overlook the dominance of ideologies of certainty and systems of predictability. I also argue that modernity is a civilization, not just a historical period; a theory that emphasizes that societies have always created predictability through law, norms and science but in different ways. Predictability and unpredictability should be seen as properties, existing in degrees, in different social systems. On the basis of this theory and drawing upon Machiavelli, Hume, Dewey and Luhmann, I argue that searching for certainty is not only dangerous but also unnecessary. We will always face shocks and surprises but through knowledge, collaboration and trust these will fade away with time.

Chapter two analyses world views, conceptions of time and practices of war from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This chapter provides a comparison and contrast with the time after 1650 and after 1800. Medieval world views emphasized certainty and predictability since everything was a part of Divine Providence and history proceeded along a given trajectory towards the return of Christ. However, there was considerable room for human agency that brought about change in the world. Without a free will, there would be neither sin nor grace. Contemporaries created rules and norms to make war more predictable and to hem in the workings of chance. During the Renaissance, thinking about predictability and the limits of human control advanced dramatically. Humanists used terms like Fortuna, Virtù and Decorum to conceptualize chance, human capability and the necessity of adapting to circumstances. The Protestant reformers argued that the world is essentially predetermined by God and humans have no freedom of choice. Paradoxically, this world view galvanized Protestants to political and strategic action in England, France, Germany and Scandinavia.

Making America Great Again, Again and Again focuses on a recent example of state behavior—US foreign policy during the Trump administration—to illustrate how these tools and concepts can enrich our understanding of the present moment. The Trump administration was viewed by many as historically novel and one whose actions might radically reorder the world, while others saw it as merely an extension of deep historical processes. How one positioned this present largely turned on their conception of past and future. By placing emergence and change as ontological constants, and centering this heterotemporality and discontinuity, we can better identify the temporal dynamics that characterized the Trump administration’s—and thus American—foreign policy. This chapter identifies four temporal dynamics that characterized the Trump administration—temporal othering, the production of simultaneity in a heterotemporal political environment, the accelerated pace and tempo of political action, and the (re)production of an indefinite present.

Chapter five, “The Time of War,” shifts the level of analysis from the system to interstate relations, focusing on the issue that arguably produced the discipline itself – war. It establishes that war is an intrinsically temporal concept, an event, and requires a number of contestable ideas to be resolved in a specific way in order to cohere in its contemporary form. It shows how ideas like heterotemporal coherence, temporal fluidity, and the production of temporal borders are constitutive elements of war that must be theorized. War requires a collective imaginary to even exist – otherwise, it is just a group of individuals engaged in lethal force. Attending to the temporal levels of analysis within and among these imaginaries as well as resisting the epistemological privileging of generalizability is vital to a better understanding of it. Our understanding of war is largely dependent on which presents are being analyzed, rather than the produce of timeless, objective mechanisms or objectively analogous situations.

Chapter three, “A Presentist Approach to International Relations: A Toolkit for Political Analysis” outlines aspects of a theoretical architecture for theorizing IR from a presentist perspective. Theorizing politics as a collection of ongoing “presents” is a profound shift. Systems and ideas may appear to possess stickiness across time, but this is not because of the reality of some objective, “real” past inserting itself into the contemporary moment. It is the interplay of specific pasts and futures in a specific present. This chapter lays out the central attributes of a conceptual orientation and ultimately offers a presentist “toolkit” for approaching international and global politics. This toolkit includes conceptual apparatuses emphasizing change, emergence, non-fixity, amplification, and heterotemporality. These tools offer a way to cast the political present as emergent, sociality as composed of interactions and events, and positions entities as the product of relations in temporal contexts, rather than entities existing across time.

This chapter contains four parts. To some, questions of time and politics may appear extraneous – they may be valid issues to study but not a central concern for contemporary IR, much less a necessary one. For them, it is just another area of study and deciding whether to pursue it is a matter of personal choice. The first section shows how international politics and time are already intertwined and argues that time impacts the main issues of concern for IR. The second shows how IR is “stuck in the past” – even as it furiously gestures toward the future – because it theorizes temporality and time as universal and linear, privileging the past, all while resisting thinking about the present. The third section briefly introduces what I call presentism, an alternative temporal imaginary for IR that explicitly values the present, thinks in time, and resists naturalizing the contemporary political dominance of universal, linear time. The final section outlines the rest of the book, identifying theoretical and conceptual implications, concretizing both by showing how it enables a different perspective on war, American foreign policy during the Trump administration, and IR’s primary theoretical architectures.

This chapter articulates the stakes involved for mainstream scholars and those interested in traditional international political concerns by using a presentist approach to critique the “theoretical programmes” that historically have dominated IR – realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism. Doing so provides a widely intelligible example that others can use to guide their own work, even if they have no interest in the particular theoretical architectures used here. Employing these tools makes new things visible, exposes different questions to ask and answer, and enables different ways of understanding what we believe we already know. Each of these examples illustrates how presentism’s approach is not an external critique but one that – if taken seriously – alters key assumptions and conclusions for concepts already considered central to IR’s systemic understanding of global politics. The chapter also draws out implications at the epistemological and ontological levels, defending ideas like temporally contingent epistemologies, ontological nonconsecutivity, and an ontology that fully embraces the present

“The Temporal Imaginary of International Relations” identifies specific characteristics of the way IR conceptualizes time and temporality, along with the way it understands past, present, and future. It outlines the dominant representations of time and temporality within the discipline and shows how they produce a specific understanding of international politics as well as shape IR’s epistemological and ontological commitments. Trying to develop claims that travel from the past to the present/future reproduces a metaphysics of time privileging the past as the “reality” out of which the present and future grow. This chapter then outlines the drawbacks and negative implications of this representation, such as its difficulty with emergent phenomena and the emphasis on continuity in politics, theory, and ontology. This understanding of time makes theory more conservative and less able to deal with the entities, properties, and/or structures that break with the past. Epistemologically, new events only grudgingly disrupt previous orthodoxies because durational applicability is privileged. Finally, the chapter concludes by briefly mapping the field of IR via temporal commitments, providing a taxonomy for thinking about the temporal assumptions and implications of current theory, with a more detailed and concrete engagement with IR theory in the following chapters.

Chapter six deals with the period after the Cold War. Social theory describes this era in terms of uncertainty. Such accounts overlook the prevalence of ontologies of certainty in politics, the steady advancement of technologies of predictability and how the current security situation was produced by acts of omission and commission. After 1991, liberal teleologies dominated Western strategy. The seeming ‘end of history’ and triumph of liberalism appeared to close off the future and justify strategies that sidestepped international institutions of predictability. Russia reacted by further undermining institutions and norms that created predictability. This downward spiral has culminated in the current security climate. Russian political world views of the period emphasize eternal political laws, conspiracies and a hostile world. The chapter analyses the starting phases of the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022. Paradoxically, Western societies are increasingly regular and predictable in numerous ways but reproduce discourses of uncertainty. These trends feed off each other – the more regular everyday life is, the more shocking and disturbing exceptions and surprises become.

This chapter concretizes the present as an ethos and sketches out elements of a future research agenda. It further develops the idea of the present as an analytical orientation, conceptual approach, and set of assumptions as well as offers a glimpse of a future where we take the present seriously when theorizing global politics.

Chapter seven has two tasks. First, it summarizes the argument and the broad themes of the book. Second, it discusses the character of modernity. My argument is that we should view modernity as a distinct civilization, rather than as a period. This civilization is caught in a complex interplay and tension between the confrontation with uncertainty and the strivings for certainty, unfortunately often conceptualized as ontological absolutes. Although ontologies of uncertainty and certainty are co-constitutive, our culture tends to see the world in either–or terms, which explains the tendency to oscillation between hubris and despair and the difficulty of pragmatic and balanced accounts to enter into mainstream world views. Third, I propose a modest remedy for these modernist tendencies: namely, drawing inspiration from non-dualist traditions and classical virtue ethics.

This chapter places the scholar and their scholarship in time, exploring their temporal positionality, responsibilities, and political relevance. If the past is a construct of the present, the position of the scholar shifts from that of an actor engaged in a value-neutral, transhistorical process of knowledge accumulation to that of an actor intervening in a particular present. Thinking about this positionality from a temporal perspective centers scholarly reflexivity, elevating questions of intellectual responsibility alongside analytical concerns.