5 - The Time of War

Summary

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.