Time and the Study of World Politics

The articles in this volume, and the many contributions to the Millennium Conference, ‘The Politics of Time in International Relations’ from which these articles were drawn, speak to the ongoing interest in issues of time and temporality in International Relations (IR) and associated disciplines. They also speak to the very broad range of ways in which time and temporality are seen to operate in international politics and the ways in which it (international politics) is studied and judged. I was deeply interested in and stimulated by my participation in the conference, and what follows is an attempt to situate my own specific concerns on issues of time and temporality, when I wrote Time and World Politics and subsequently, in the broader context of the developing literature on time and temporality in IR. Like most of the contributors to this volume, I see the attention paid to issues of time/temporality in IR as productive for research in the field. However, in agreement with at least two of the contributors, I am also aware that like any other production of academic knowledge, including supposedly ‘critical’ academic knowledge, there are always dangers and limitations inherent in that knowledge and its discursive and practical effects