Hidemi Suganami studied International Relations as Tokyo, Aberystwyth, and London Universities. His first academic appointment was at Keele University in 1975, where he later became Professor of the Philosophy of International Relations. In 2004, he moved to Aberystwyth, where currently he is Emeritus Professor of International Politics. His publications include: The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (CUP 1989); On the Causes of War (Clarendon Press 1996); and, with Andrew Linklater, The English School of International Relations (CUP 2006). Over a number of years, he has been studying philosophical issues surrounding causation and causal explanation in International Relations.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

With respect to the subject-matters of substantive empirical research, it may plausibly be argued that some are ‘more exciting’ (‘relevant’, in need of urgent attention) than others in IR at the current juncture of world politics. For example, challenges of the climate catastrophe, ever-intensifying global economic inequalities, refugees and migration, xenophobic populism, terrorism, violence against women in conflict zones, to name but a few.

However, with respect to where Adam Humphreys and I, specifically as the co-authors of the book, Causal Inquiry in International Relations, see most exciting research/debates happening in our field, the answer needs to be given in relation to what we see as having happened in the relevant literature – on (meta)theory and methodology of IR – for the past several decades.

One notable feature of IR as an academic discipline is its familiar tendency to give an account of its evolution through a series of ‘great debates’. However, these ‘debates’ have tended to produce more heat than light and the discipline is often characterized as ‘divided’. Some see the divisions as fundamental. Consider, for example, Bull’s contrast between ‘traditional’ and ‘scientific’ approaches, often misleadingly equated with the difference between ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ methods; Hollis and Smith’s contrast between those who seek ‘explanation’ and those who explore ‘understanding’, or Wendt’s distinction between ‘causal explanation’ and ‘constitutive explanation’; and the so-called ‘third debate’, which is said to be between ‘positivists’ and ‘post-positivists’, or between ‘rationalists’ and ‘reflectivists’. There have also been important attempts to overcome such divisions, for example, by ‘broadening and deepening’ the concept of causation (as found in Milja Kurki’s Causation in International Relations) or to reduce the inter-factional intolerance by drawing attention to the irreconcilable, yet supposedly equally legitimate, philosophical foundations on which contending approaches are claimed to be built (as found in Patrick Jackson’s The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations and also in the conclusions of Kurki’s book). But these works in turn remain unpersuasive in some of their most fundamental claims. It appears that, instead of progressing through a series of ‘great debates’ over the past decades, IR has reached an impasse in the (meta)theory field and it has accumulated different ways of talking about itself, often based on certain purportedly fundamental conceptual distinctions treated as ‘given’.

In choosing to focus on ‘causal inquiry’ as our book’s subject-matter, Adam and I, of course, do not advocate that everyone doing research in IR should engage in causal inquiry, but we do observe that causal claims – or statements to the effect that a set of events brought about another set of events – where ‘events’ are understood broadly to include conditions, situations, structures, and so on – are frequently made, and often even by those who claim not to be doing causal research. Our key aims were to engage in debunking various received wisdoms with respect to causation and causal explanation which have accumulated over the decades in IR, and social science more broadly, to articulate what we present as ‘the deep logic of causal inquiry’, which holds irrespective of the method of data collection and analysis adopted, and to warn of the various difficulties encountered in causal research in IR and of the problems of making unwarranted claims based on the findings obtained. Among the wide range of criticisms we provide, one of the most fundamental is what we call ‘the culture of generalization’ underlying many IR works in the causal field.

It would not be appropriate for us to claim that our work is emblematic of ‘the most exciting research/debates happening’ in IR, but it has the potential to stimulate such a debate since the book confronts and undermines many of the received wisdoms in IR about causal inquiry – both in conducting it and in talking about what it is and how to do it.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

The ‘shifts’, in my case, are mainly in the questions I have focused on rather than what answers I have found persuasive. When beginning to study International Relations at Tokyo University in the late 60s, the curriculum was woefully underdeveloped; and there were not many worthwhile books to read. I took intellectual refuge in the study of international law, and through that, I came across the writings of Hans Kelsen, one of the greatest names in international law and jurisprudence in the twentieth century. He draws a clear distinction between the ‘science’ of (socially given) norms, such as positive international law, and the ‘science’ of facts (natural or social), the latter of which, according to him, seeks causal knowledge of empirical events/phenomena.

My interest in the former led me, when I began my postgraduate studies in IR, and, subsequently, undergraduate teaching of that subject, in the UK, to uncover what came later to be known as the writings of the ‘English School’ (ES), whose primary purpose was to identify the social norms, broadly understood, of inter-state relations and then to explore their functions and history. This has led me to engage in critical exegetical analysis of some of the key contentions of the ES, and especially to explore the relationship between international law and state sovereignty, often misunderstood, with undesirable political consequences. On this particular topic, I am indebted to C.A.W. Manning, a legal theorist who became a founding member of the ES. He also showed me the need to study ‘philosophical aspects of International Relations’, pointing, among other things, to the importance, for those intrigued about IR’s identity as a body of knowledge, to acquaint themselves with the philosophy of social........

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