“War and Time”

I revisit the conventional wisdom, associated with constructivism, on how to establish the causal effects of ideas in world politics. I show this conventional wisdom rests on an odd approach to causality that departs from the counterfactual framework generally used in the discipline. I offer a reformulation, and illustrate with reference to a previously widely held view about world politics that would now be roundly rejected – the view that war is inevitable. I trace the origins of this view and how it has changed, and the effects of this change on decisions to go to war. The analysis suggests that ideas have significant effects on world politics. To establish this requires rethinking theory and research design, which points towards productive overlap across two purported divides in the subfield: rationalist and constructivist approaches, and causal and constitutive modes of explanation.

Arjun Chowdhury is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. Chowdhury’s research explains why most states in the world have developed as 'weak states' that is, unable to monopolize violence or provide public goods to the satisfaction of their people, yet states persist as the central organizational unit of world politics. His book on this topic, The Myth of International Order (Oxford University Press, 2018), won prizes from the American Political Science Association and the European Consortium for Political Research.