ABSTRACT
The historicization and contextualization of the ‘international’ as a means to denaturalize or de-essentialize the sovereign subject who occupies a privileged position in time and political space may help us not only to expose the multiplicity of political processes that are marginalized by hegemonic temporalities, or hegemonic discourses about a ‘ahistorical’ international political structure, but also to expose the impossibility of historicization and narrativity outside of a discourse of time that enables us to talk about continuous and/or discontinuous progressions. The first part of this chapter articulates the notion of time as a problem in IR, and discusses the definition of time as discourse. In the second part, genealogy and discourse analysis are presented as complementary and compatible ‘tools’. It is argued that it is within and across the limits of a discourse that these practices of inclusion and exclusion may be revealed. Thus, some form of discourse analysis is not simply expected but also a necessary step in a genealogical exploration, especially when we expand the notion of ‘text’ beyond the written and spoken word to include events and social practices as well.
