This chapter draws out implications for a defining element of a positivist approach – prediction. Prediction is the primary way positivist scholarship engages the future as well as one of the elements of analysis that define it as “scientific” rather than historical or critical. Presentism demonstrates that while those who do not study history may be doomed to repeat it, those who do study the past are not guaranteed to predict it. The chapter lays out how the presentist move implicates what I call “Disciplinary Prediction,” the predominant way that IR approaches and imagines the future. This chapter evaluates what happens if we divorce the concept of prediction from temporal assumptions that presume continuity and regularity. Once prediction’s temporal scope is allowed to be more limited, contingent, and indeterminate, projects that de-emphasize linearity, actively theorize temporal recurrences, incorporate cycles, and allow for contingency, emergence, and flexibility become increasingly viable. Predictions based on critically informed scholarship also become much more imaginable, enabling a better theorization of the politics of critique as action.

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.

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.

Chapter 1 – The Humanisation of Global Politics – provides an overview of the books central claim of a growing humanisation of global politics. Humanisation denotes the growing reference to and the appearance of the individual human being in global politics. The chapter describes the apperance of the individual human being in global politics with reference to the three discourses on prosecution, protection, and killing the individual human being which the book studies. The chapter presents the research questions and the three arguments the book makes. The chapter also presents the books's contribution, and outlines the abductive research logic and the interdisciplinary approach as well as the books interpretative methodolgy. Finally, the chapter gives an overview of the books structure and the chapters of the book.

Chapter 8, The Individual Human Being as a Category – A Conclusion and an Outlook, returns to theory. To this end, the chapter weaves together the results of the case studies and the theoretical and methodological considerations. The chapter, serving as a conclusion to the book, simultaneously summarises the book, revisits the issue of interdisciplinarity, and presents its results. It also discusses the book’s contribution and value added. Most importantly, it demonstrates how the results of the empirical case studies are relevant for IR theory and what implications for IR theory, IL scholarship, and the study of global politics can be derived from these results. Finally, the chapter outlines future research based on the book’s results.

Chapter 2 – Humanisation in IR Theory and International Law – critically reviews the relevant IR and IL literature. The objective of this chapter is to identify gaps, strengths, and weaknesses of several approaches in both disciplines concerning the book’s objective, arguments, and research questions. In addition, it provides an answer to whether alternative approaches to the chosen framework provide a viable pathway to conceptualise the humanisation of global politics. Regarding alternatives approaches in IR, I discuss realist and liberal approaches, the literature on human rights and human security, and literature dealing with concepts such as self, identity, and agency. Regarding IL, I discuss, for similar reasons, the notion of mediation and how the individual human being, the international community, and the state relate to each other. And I offer a discussion of international law and the individual human being.

To assess the record of early International Relations (IR) scholarship, the conclusion briefly recaps its pioneers’ ambitions at the outset, then summarises their achievements and struggles, and finally discusses some wider implications for the study of IR.