The aim of Andrew Hom’s book is set out clearly at the beginning: “to change the way we understand time, and in so doing to transform the way we approach IR as an intellectual and political project” (p. 3). Hom tackles this task in the first part of the book by setting out his theory of time as “timing” and unpacking one particular mode of timing—narrative timing. In part II, he uses the theoretical apparatus explained in the first part to critique established theoretical frameworks and methodologies in IR and to indicate the path toward intellectually and politically better ways of approaching the understanding of world politics.

Hom draws his theory of time as “timing” from Norbert Elias’s sociological account of time as the process through which change continua are put into a relation with each other in order to manage and make sense of experience. This is, crucially, an active and intentional process that precedes and underpins “times” in the substantive sense, such as Western standard time or stadial accounts of history. The latter, on Hom’s account, are key examples of “passive” timing, where the active process of timing has become reified and essentialized as what time simply “is” and against which other continua of change are measured. The “problem of time” is the outcome of predominant attachments to passive timing, which lead to consternation when these timing efforts fail. This creates the predicament in which failure is either understood as an anomaly, leaving intact the illusion of the substantive nature of time, or as a catastrophe in which all our certainties have been blown apart. Hom suggests that the realm of international politics is particularly prone to being seen as the realm of catastrophe because of its tendency to throw up change in ways that undermine political and theoretical attempts at timing.

Part II opens with three cases of timing crises in international politics: World War I, the invention of thermonuclear weapons, and the end of the Cold War. In each case he shows how “IR scholars worked and re-worked narratives about the international realm to grapple with changes that confounded their existing accounts” (p. 130). Hom goes on to focus more precisely on IR methodologies—analyzing neo-positivism, critical realism, interpretivism, and quantitative, historical institutionalist, and critical approaches. He explains that we can understand these IR framings as more or less successful uses of narrative timing devices. All of these timings conceal a particular “will” to time, but some essentialize time more than others. He sees interpretive and critical approaches (possibly also Bayesian statistical methods) as coming closest to operationalizing time as timing. However, even those approaches fail to the extent that they start to reify successful narrative timing devices as general timely truths; for example, by using ideal types or postulating ideas of “empty” time. The way forward, Hom suggests, is to move away from generalization and from the assumption that there is an “eternal” ideal of how particular features of IR should operate: “we should begin at the beginning, with problem-specific and pragmatic ‘timing’ standards calibrated for description, ideography, and inconsistency and embedded within a most provisional, prudent and open-ended vocational narrative” (p. 244). Hom calls this approach “reflexive realism” (p. 229).

Hom’s book attempts to make comprehensive sense of the way time figures in IR scholarship and in the experiential realm of international politics. More broadly, it contributes to debates about time/timing across the social sciences and humanities. It also makes a contribution to ongoing methodological and theoretical debates in IR on the nature of the international realm and how it should be studied. Hom presents a very detailed and persuasive account of time as timing and of narrative as a timing device, although his terminology is sometimes opaque. His application of this framework to IR as a mode of understanding the world is well substantiated. As someone with an interest in discussions of time and temporality in IR, I found the book full of food for thought and strong, occasionally acerbic insights, as in his critical interrogation of neo-positivism and critical realism: “literal impossibilities offer the best bet for getting a grip on practical realities” (p. 139).

Nevertheless, some aspects of the book’s analysis left me puzzled and unsure about the philosophical and political stakes in Hom’s call for IR scholars to “begin at the beginning.” Two issues with Hom’s philosophical argument need more attention. One is the assertion that “timing is everything” (p. 233). Hom means that it is everything because there is nothing intelligible external to timing efforts, and yet he writes, “Time itself is constituted by no less than the efflorescent totality of change continua that impinge upon experience and our efforts to organise and direct them” (p. 233). The concept of “change” plays an undertheorized part in this story; clearly, “change” is a temporal construct, and yet it is also treated as that which “impinges.” This is because we exist in a world in which everyone else’s (both living and dead) timing efforts are overlapping and interacting with our own. But is there not at least some residual notion of a temporality beyond timing at work here? Is the process of timing the only process that is going on, or are we simply defining all processes as timing whether they are willed or not? Can we understand the concept of will outside of temporality?

This brings us to a second, related philosophical problem. Certainly, the theory of time as timing is plausible, but if you are going to start here and subsume notions of “change” or “will” or “event” under the ruling concept of “timing,” then the implications for doing social science are already very clear. In this respect, Hom’s analysis of IR in part II of the book holds few surprises. If the world is all about timing, then all practices, including those of IR scholarship, can be understood as timing, and those approaches that do not premise their view of temporality on an idea of timing are going to be mistaken. A great deal rests, therefore, on readers’ views about whether Hom has definitively laid to rest the ghost of unwilled time.

I was already in sympathy with the interpretive, critical, and phenomenological traditions of social inquiry within which Hom’s recommendations for IR scholarship clearly fit. However, I am less sure about the extent to which his argument has added to those traditions. How does reflexive realism tell us something new about either the world of international politics or the ways in which it should be studied? Hom tells us to “begin at the beginning,” but his own analysis opens up the question of how we recognize a “beginning” when we see it or, indeed, as a “problem.” The call for contextual, ideographic analysis is not new; neither is the point that IR narratives embody political values and priorities. In this respect, Hom perhaps needed to be more explicit about the political stakes that are central to a “will to time” in IR research that meets reflexive realism’s standards of pragmatism, provisionality, and prudence.