3 - A Presentist Approach to International Relations

Summary

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.