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Adam R. C. Humphreys and Hidemi Suganami, "Causal Inquiry in International Relations" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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Marshall Po
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Stephen Sikevich
Hello. Welcome to the New Books Network. I am your host, Stephen Sikevich. In this episode I will be speaking with Adam Humphries and Hidemi Suganami about their co authored book Causal Inquiry in International Relations, published by Oxford University Press in 2024. Adam Humphries is Associate professor and Head of Department in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading. He joined the University of Reading in 2013, having previously been a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford. He was also a Fellow in Politics at Brezanos College in Oxford as well. His principal research areas are in international relations theory and meta theory, especially causation and causal explanation, realism and neorealism. Along with the English School and the relationship between theory and history, he also has research interests in British foreign and defense policy strategy and the ethics of war. Hidemi Suganami studied international relations at Tokyo, Aberdeen and London universities. His first academic appointment was at Keele in 1975, where he later became professor of the Philosophy of international relations. In 2004, he moved back to Aberthes, where he currently is the Aramis professor of International Politics. His publications include the Domestic Analogy and World Order proposals, published in 1989, on the causes of war, published in 1996 and co authored with Andrew Linglatter, the English School of International relations, published in 2006. Over a number of years he has been studying philosophical issues surrounding causation and explanation in international relations. Hidemi Suganami and Adam Humphries, welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hidemi Suganami
Thank you.
- [04:02]
Adam Humphries
Hi, thanks very much for having us. It's a great pleasure to come and talk about our book.
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Stephen Sikevich
Yeah, we always like to begin our interviews by asking our guests, tell us a little bit about yourself and what's the backstory behind writing this book. Hidemi, do you want to go first?
- [04:18]
Hidemi Suganami
Yes. Adam and I got to know each other about 20 years ago, I think, and although we are about 30 years apart in carrier terms, we were very like minded. We started from similar place in international relations, in particular in relation to international relations theory. And we were wondering about what is this thing called international information theory and how do we go about explaining things in world politics and how does the discipline, so called, of IR relate to or differ from history? And how good are the arguments put forward by people like Waltz, Kenneth Waltz or Henry Bull, who are regarded as the leading IR theorists? And I said 30 years apart. But it's quite interesting because Walt's man the State and War was my first book and I think Theory of International Politics was probably one of the most significant works for Adam. And these books were 20 years apart or maybe 30 years apart in terms of the influence. And some years ago we decided to work on smaller scales, work together in smaller scales. And 10 years ago we just came to the conclusion that we've got to write a book and the book has to be on causation and causal explanation in international relations. It took about A year or so to work out a proposal, and the Oxford University Press very kindly accepted it and told us to write it in a few years. It took twice as long to complete the book, and the book that came out was about 50% longer than it had initially. We had initially planned, and we hardly ever met each other to discuss anything, but we just communicated with email incessantly, and there must have been hundreds of emails exchanged and memos exchanged. And I'm quite proud of the fact that we were really, really close collaborators. There's not a paragraph that went into print without each of us reading it and then approving it, scrutinizing it, approving of it. So there we are. There's the case here. Hannah, move over to you.
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Adam Humphries
I was just gonna say, I mean, hide me as being quite modest. I mean, for me, 15, 20 years ago, near the beginning of my career, in a sense, I was working on international relations theory, trying to work out what these theorists were doing, trying to make sense of international politics and becoming kind of frustrated by what is a theory, what's it for, what is it meant to explain, and really wanting to get sort of to get to the bottom of that, you know. And for me, looking around, Hide, Amy was just the standout example of someone working on these questions that seemed to kind of be approaching them in a similar way that I wanted to. So he was kind of well established. I was kind of looking out who else is. Who else sort of approaches things like me. And in a sense, that's how we came to know each other and then came to kind of realize that there was this shared interest specifically in causation and causal inquiry?
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Stephen Sikevich
Yeah, this was a very interesting book, and it took a very interesting twist to discussions of international relations theory because it also engages quite a bit with what we would traditionally call philosophy. And is this kind of part of, like, the main aim of the book is trying to kind of, kind of give international relations scholars a sense that they have to address some of these philosophical issues? It's not something to be ignored. Is that part of the aim of the book?
- [08:06]
Hidemi Suganami
It is, but we did a lot of philosophical analysis or analysis of philosophical texts to undermine some of the philosophical arguments that have seeped through to international relations. It's almost like an exercise in philosophy to show the irrelevance of certain philosophical argumentation. And the book is in two parts. First part is called metaphysics, and the second part is called methodology, I think, but it's more like from metaphysics to methodology. That is to say, leaving Metaphysics behind and getting more positively involved, more centrally involved with methodology. And in doing that, we are philosophical in the sense of being very careful about the words we use, the meaning of the words we use, the logical connection between what we're saying and its implications, and so on and so forth. So it's philosophical in orientation, but it's not like us. So. And so is a great philosopher whose ideas we can use. You know, there are no books like that. But it isn't a book like that.
- [09:14]
Adam Humphries
No, I mean, I think one of the funny things about the discipline of international relations, so the collection of people who are trying to make academic sense of world politics is that it's always been a discipline that draws from other places. So people draw on kind of law, they draw on sociology, they draw on history, they draw on philosophy. It's always kind of parasitic on other disciplines and economics too. And so this sort of engagement with philosophy has always been there in international relationship. And then the question is, what can it do for us? And so I think one of the things we were trying to do in the book is to sort of make sense of, you know, to what extent can we usefully draw on philosophers in trying to think through some of these issues. And as Hidemius says, it's certainly not the case that we think, oh, just turn to the right philosopher and suddenly everything unfolds for you. I think actually we have a slightly kind of cautious or skeptical idea of how far purely philosophical inquiry can take us. But to sort of. To help people understand the parameters of that, I think that was one of the things for us.
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Stephen Sikevich
Now, of course, the major issue of this book which kind of gets into the philosophical engagement is the issue of causality or causal inquiry. Now, just for some of our listeners who are new to that term or they're confused on that term, could you just give us a brief description of what you mean by causality and causal inquiry as it relates to your research in the book?
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Hidemi Suganami
Okay, I'll have a first go. We don't actually use the term causality. It doesn't appear in the index anyway, and I don't remember using it. And that's because in philosophy, causality is related to a metaphysical view that everything that occurs has a cause. I remember being struck by the fact that when I was reading R.G. collingwood's essay on causation, he says, ah, there's this metaphysical principle, metaphysical idea that everything has a cause. And that's a big metaphysical assumption to make. And I thought, oh, that's very interesting. But I thought, better leave that behind. And so we focus our attention on the verb to cause or the noun a cause or causing or causal relations. So these are the words we use. And I don't think we ever use the word causality as such. And by causing, again, we don't mean anything complicated. We just mean what most people mean, or in philosophy, what we mean that is something bringing about something else or something necessitating or whatever contributing to bringing about something. And that something is what we call event in a broader sense. So causal relation is a relationship between the cause and effect, cause, event and effect. Event and causal inquiry. Well, that's an interesting one. In a most intuitive way, causal inquiry is inquiry into causes of events. But it can be conducted for a variety of purposes, most obvious of which will be to explain what brought about or contributed to bring about the event. That is puzzling. But it could be related to prediction, it could be related to prescription. And one of the key focus. One of the central issues that we deal with in this book is how these various statements, explanation, prediction and prescription, how these statements are interrelated with each other, and also how these various statements are related to empirical investigation. And that's what we call the logic of causal inquiry. That's what we articulate as the logic of causal inquiry. Adam, you might want to amplify.
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Adam Humphries
Well, maybe just one thing to add to that is that this vocabulary of causality, causation, causal inquiry is in some senses quite kind of technical, it's quite academic. But we understand causation as bringing about something, bringing about something else. And ideas about bringing about are just ubiquitous in terms of how we think about the world. I'm going to just give you one example that we use in the book. The claim that moisture rusts steel. That's a causal claim. It's a causal claim about the effect that moisture has on steel. But the verb cause doesn't appear in it. It's through this claim about rusting. But what that illustrates is that relations are bringing about one thing, having an effect on the other, are just kind of everywhere in the world and also everywhere in how we think about the world. So although we're using this sort of technical sounding vocabulary of causal inquiry, actually what we're talking about is absolutely ubiquitous.
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Stephen Sikevich
Yes. And how have scholars within the field of international relations generally been addressing this, this issue that necessitated the book here to try to address those issues?
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Hidemi Suganami
Fathom, do you want to go?
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Adam Humphries
Yeah. Okay. Okay. I mean, I think that in two main ways, which are quite different. So I think there is definitely an existing strand of thinking which one might characterize as mainly kind of philosophical and mainly interested in sort of metaphysical questions about is causation real? How do we make sense of it? So it's quite philosophical. And then there's another whole strand of literature which is in a sense, quite technical. It's about we're trying to discover causal relationships in the world, and the focus is on particular methods we might use in our empirical investigations in order to uncover causes. So you've got a kind of philosophical, metaphysical literature, and you've got a technical methodological literature. And I think, in a sense, our book is positioned in between those. I think, in a way, I don't know how conscious we were when we kind of came up with the idea of the book, but certainly as it kind of worked out, that's the gap we're trying to fill. Okay, so we're a bit skeptical about debates about metaphysics. We don't think that debates about the application technical methods really tell us exactly everything we want to know. And so the gap in the middle really is a gap about how can we be confident or when can we be confident that in our causal knowledge claims, what features of our causal knowledge claims can make us confident in them? And how can we, you know, what is the right way of thinking about when causal knowledge claims are or are not reliable?
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Stephen Sikevich
Now, when dealing with causation, causal inquiry, you also address the English philosopher David Hume, and what is his significance in these debates about causal causation, causal inquiry, causality?
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Hidemi Suganami
Hume's two books. Two books, they're called. What are they called? Treatise and Inquiry. These are not actually, surprisingly, perhaps not very useful for international relations scholars or any other scholars interested in finding out what caused or what causes what. That may go against a very common understanding about importance of Hume. It's because I say this because Hume wasn't interested in what causes what or investigating what causes what or what caused what. His subject was something else. And that was how have we acquired the understanding that there is such a thing as causal relationship when we don't actually see it? We don't have any direct observation of what is causing what. And yet how do we know that? How do we have this concept of causation? What is the origin of the notion of causal necessity? And nobody in IR or any other subjects where we're interested in finding out the causes would. Would be interested in that sort of question. So his actual question and answers are not really relevant to IR students and other people. Interesting. Causal inquiry Yet a superficial reading of his text makes us think that he is the so called regularity theorist of causation. He believes in the regularity view of causation. That's a very superficial reading, but it's not surprising to pick that up unless you really delve into his writing and the regaliative theory. Causation basically means that causation or causal relationship is basically a regular relationship, repeated relationship between two types of events. And so most people of course know that correlation is not the same as causation, and yet they think that there are some connection between them. And Hume is the founder thinker according to this interpretation of the regularity view. And as it turns out, when you read him very carefully, you realize that he's not actually saying that. He's not saying that causation is in the world really a regularity. Regularity view of causation is otherwise also known as causal idealism. Because according to this interpretation of Hume, causation is only an idea. All that there is in the world is regular sequence of events, repeated sequence of events. But as I say, he's not saying that. And if you read him carefully, you realize that he leaves that question alone. He doesn't side with either causal realism or causal idealism, but he remains agnostic about it. So the significance I found in reading or engaging with Hume is that it makes us realize that there is such a thing as agnosticism. The third position is possible. Agnostic position is possible about the reality or otherwise of causation. And reading him as a causal idealist and regularity theorist of regulatory, upholder of the regulatory view of causation is actually misleading. So that's the significance of his really engaging with this book.
- [19:52]
Adam Humphries
And if I can just add very briefly to that, I mean, David Hume is just one of those figures. I think for whatever reason that his ideas here just seem to be referenced by everybody. So kind of open almost any book that talks about causation in international relations or in fact many subjects, and somewhere Hume's ideas will somehow be referenced. And so he's become this kind of figure. But, but it's like, you know, like happens with some other thinkers. Somehow the account of his thinking that kind of is so ubiquitous becomes very divorced from an actual close reading of what he's actually saying. So in a sense, one of the things that Hidemi has been doing for many years and which kind of, you know, made its way into this book is to actually go back to some of those texts and say, okay, this figure is so often cited. But really precisely what are they actually telling us? Because in a sense, so often he's just cited. Without really engaging with the data, I'd.
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Hidemi Suganami
Like to amplify my response. In international relations, argument about causation hinged on the opposition between two positions, causal realism versus causal idealism. And in that particular context, it was very useful to appreciate that Hume transcends that division. He's not a causal idealist, he's not a causal realist, and he's an agnostic. So it sort of makes us move away from the obsession of international relation scholars with Hume, which tended to confine the discussion about causation within this dichotomous view. Dichotomous division.
- [21:32]
Stephen Sikevich
Yeah. What you were saying about how Hume is referenced a lot, but not. Doesn't seem to be really understood deeply. That reminds me of some of the debates I've had to deal with with Clausewitz and also what I've had to deal with with Hegel. I mean, they. They're referenced all the time, but yet their ideas are not really. It doesn't seem like they're really read or understood deeply.
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Adam Humphries
Absolutely.
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Stephen Sikevich
Now, we did get into the issue of realism and idealism. And another school of thought you deal with is critical realism, and more specifically its founder, Roy Baskar, who I believe he died 2010, I believe around that time about. Yeah, yeah. So what is the significance of Bashkar's critical realism to the debates that your book is addressing within international relations? And I believe critical realism has also contributed directly to international relations theory in many ways.
- [22:37]
Hidemi Suganami
Daskar is very interesting in that a lot of professional philosophers don't know about him or even haven't heard about him, whereas he has had a great influence in shaping critical realism in social science and social theory and particularly influential in international relations among international relations theorists. And he is almost treated like a guru. But again, I spent years reading just the one book and became more and more critical of the way he's formulating his argument. And chapter two, which has taken so many years to write, shows that his philosophical defense, philosophical argumentation in defense of causal realism and realism more generally is. Is not sound. There are a lot of weaknesses in it, and I have shown that, or we have shown that, beyond what the critical realists have been able to do by quoting Bhaskar. But that doesn't mean to say that he is completely useless. In fact, there are two things. One is that even though he does not succeed in producing a persuasive argument in defense of causal realism, some of the things he says are very important and very useful from methodological viewpoint. For instance, he says that there's a difference between open system and closed system, and we have to take that into account. And he also says experiment is very important in discovering causal relations. And then thirdly, he says that causal laws, what he calls causal laws, are very important. Sorry, what he calls causal laws are not empirical generalizations or statistical generalizations, but they are statement of what he calls tendencies, somewhat misleadingly, but what we call propensities. And from these three positions we say, yes, we have to be very careful in dealing with our material, because the environment we are studying with reference to particular causal process of interest may not be a closed system. And prudential guidelines should be that unless there is a very good reason to believe that it's already a closed system, we should treat it as an open system. In other words, there's a possibility of a lot of interference from confounders. And from his emphasis on experiment, we try to work out why is experiment useful. And we come to the conclusion that it's our ability to rule out competing explanations that is the key to supporting a particular causal hypothesis. And then, as I said already, he talks about causal laws as tendencies, but we tend to talk of statements of causal relations as statements of propensities. And propensities are not generalizations, but stating that A type event will lead to B type event under the right conditions. They are not generalization about what is likely to happen very regularly or always or anything of that kind. But it will happen only under certain circumstances, under the right conditions. So he is very useful in teaching us about these things about causal inquiry. I was going to say another thing about the importance of Bhaskar, but I just to temporarily focus that. I think it is to do with the fact that by combining reading of his text very closely with reading of Hume very closely, we dislodge ourselves from this Hume vs. Bhaskar divide that tended to shape the debate about causation in international relations a lot. But Hume is not a causal idealist, as people were led to believe. And Bhaskar is not a very successful causal realist as we are led to believe. So this juxtaposition between causal realism versus causal idealism is Bhaskar versus Hume. That kind of formula is not credible. So we can be free from that kind of orthodoxy. So that was the second important point.
- [27:08]
Stephen Sikevich
You have anything to add, Adam?
- [27:10]
Adam Humphries
Yeah, I mean, like with Hume a bit. I mean, part of what is interesting about Bhaskar and international relations is I think that he's become a bit of a figurehead, a sort of totem, as it were, as Hidemi has explained, for causal realism. And so you get this kind of Hume versus Bhaskar, the causal idealist versus the causal realists, this very sort of oppositional debate. Which side are you on? Who are you going to go? Who you sort of go with? And as his name explains it, you know, the purpose of our engagement with him is really to try and kind of undermine that very dichotomous way of thinking, which we don't think is very helpful. I mean, I suspect our book will be a little bit frustrating for both sides because on the one hand, we say that we don't find Bhaskar's argument convincing. You know, his argument for causal realism we find unconvincing. On the other hand, we do actually quite take quite a lot from him and from Critical realism, we really do. I think there is a sense in which a lot of what we end up saying is very much compatible with a lot of what Bhasagar is saying. We just don't find his central argument for causal realism convincing.
- [28:23]
Stephen Sikevich
Now, I know in Critical Realism they've been talking a lot about causal mechanisms, and I know that's been an influence in historical sociology, and I believe that has also crept into international relations theory. Do you have any thoughts on that, just off the cuff?
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Hidemi Suganami
Adam can talk about that.
- [28:43]
Adam Humphries
Yeah, let me say something about that. I mean, you're absolutely right that the sort of vocabulary of causal mechanisms has really made its way into international relations over the last 20 years. And I think the motivation for that is a sort of dissatisfaction with a kind of analysis that's perhaps superficial, characterises being sort of superficially focused on statistical patterns of association and not really getting in a more convincing way at the complexity of causal relations. And so the idea of causal mechanisms has become a bit of a sort of term that expresses dissatisfaction with certain existing approaches. Now, I think we would share that dissatisfaction. We don't particularly. We're a little bit skeptical about the term causal mechanism. I think one reason for that is because once we start thinking about causal mechanisms, it can easily make it sound as if we explore deep enough into the world, we will suddenly kind of find a level of reality at which mechanisms appear. If we just explore deeply enough, we will find mechanisms. But that's kind of misleading. I think the term mechanism should be understood as sort of a bit more metaphorical than that. We think that the sense in which it's sensible to think about finding mechanisms is that when we're searching for causes of events, we're trying to understand how they were brought about. Okay. And so if you say, well, how was something brought about? Another way of rephrasing that is, what is the mechanism by which it came about and which it was brought about? And so really, we think that, we argue in the book that the search for causal mechanisms is really an attempt to provide more information about how it was that something came about, not just to say A caused B, but to flesh that out, to provide more information. And a really important part of a causal explanation, we argue, is that it responds fully to the puzzlement of the inquirer. Somebody asks for an explanation because there's something that is puzzling to them. And so it's really important to kind of respond directly to that by providing sufficient information. And we think often the kind of the call for information about the causal mechanisms is really call for more information about how it was that something was brought about, rather than the misleading says that you sort of discover mechanisms at some sort of hidden, deep level of reality.
- [31:27]
Stephen Sikevich
What you just mentioned also reminded me of the philosophical debate between substances and processes. And I know processes have been used in international relations as well. Is there any thoughts you might have about that off the cuff?
- [31:47]
Hidemi Suganami
I think processes are very important and off the cuff. I was actually studying or interested in philosophy of social science a lot in my earlier days, and very interesting, Bhaskar was one of them. But certainly quite a lot of people were under the influence of realist thinkers. And they all said it's not enough to engage in covering law model type explanation, covering law model of explanation. What is needed is to uncover the concealed, hidden mechanisms, plausible mechanism that has to be exposed to give a full explanation, as if it is a kind of remedy to the inadequacies of the covering law model of explanation. And I was at one point quite persuaded by that. But I was very skeptical of. I mean, Adam has referred to the metaphorical nature of it, but I was very skeptical of this idea that if you dig deep enough, there is a thing called mechanism, as though it's a kind of physical entity. And yet most people accept that these are metaphors. And I have a lengthy footnote somewhere in the book where we have it trying to identify what Pascal was thinking when he was talking about mechanism. And he gets into all kinds of uncertainties and duplications and contradictions. So, yeah, you have to be very careful about the use of the word mechanism, I think.
- [33:15]
Stephen Sikevich
Do you have any thoughts, Adam, or.
- [33:17]
Adam Humphries
No? I mean, I entirely endorse what Hidemi has said. I mean, in a way, what we're interested in is causal processes. Like when we're doing causal inquiry, we're interested in the process by which one thing leads to another or has led to another. I think that in general, our approach, we are sceptical about a sort of inclination towards metaphysics or ontology. So I think we have a similar worry about kind of identifying processes as some sort of distinctive feature of reality. What I think we would certainly endorse is thinking processually about how one thing leads to another. And I think one way that's significant is it sort of gets at complexity. There's a very simplistic way of thinking about causal relations where one kind of thing always regularly leads to the other. And of course, that's where the kind of the Hume regularity theory or causation type ideas come in. And thinking processively gets at the complexity about how different conjunctions, different concatenations of events can sort of spread in all kinds of different directions, and that in different contexts things will happen differently. And so maybe the notion of process does sort of helpfully point a bit in that direction.
- [34:38]
Stephen Sikevich
Now, another philosopher you dealt with was von Fra. And what is his significance to you in terms of the topic of your research?
- [34:50]
Hidemi Suganami
That's entirely Adam's discovery and contribution. Before Adam answers the question, though, I'm very curious to find out from Adam, because we never had a conversation on this point. Did you side with causal agnosticism because you read him, or did you know about causal agnosticism in the first place and then his work just coincided with what you already thought?
- [35:15]
Adam Humphries
That's a good question. I think that what he was saying resonated with what I already thought, but that I certainly hadn't named it. And so in a sense, I think for me, the part of the power of van Fressen is he was sort of naming something. And going back to what you were saying earlier here, Damie, he's naming something that's sort of missing from the debate in international relations as well and in the broader social sciences. So to the extent that we've got this dichotomy, either you're a causal idealist like Hume allegedly was, or you're a causal realist like Bhaskar. The critical realists are, is if there are no other possibilities. And so what van Frassen gives us, I think, is the naming and the kind of explicit articulation of an alternative. We can simply remain agnostic on the question of whether causes really are part of the world as it exists independently of our thought. And we can, and I think, in his view, should remain agnostic because there's just no way of knowing.
- [36:20]
Hidemi Suganami
Right.
- [36:20]
Adam Humphries
We simply can't know what the world is like independently of our thought about it, because all we can know is what it is we're thinking about. Right. So he's sort of articulating an alternative possibility. And, I mean, I find that argument resonates with how I kind of instinctively think that I sort of want to try and distinguish between, you know, what are the things that we can make progress with intellectually and what are the things that we're better off putting to one side and saying, I'm sorry, I can't answer that. So that definitely resonated with me. But he also kind of filled this important space. When you get these very entrenched dichotomies in debates, intellectual debates, you need something to kind of break them open and say, look, there really is a third position. And so for me, we've got a chapter from Van Fressen in the book. And my point in kind of it's not that everyone should go and read Van Frassen. Exactly. I certainly don't think everyone going reading Van Fressen is going to improve the discipline of international relations or our understanding of international politics, but as a way of kind of breaking open a debate that to me was very stuck and saying, actually, there are other possibilities here and can we kind of reflect on those in a slightly fuller way? To me, that's kind of powerful and quite exciting.
- [37:40]
Stephen Sikevich
Oh, very nice. And also, feel free if you want to ask each other questions. Feel free. We're here to have, like, a nice little discussion about the book and the topic.
- [37:48]
Hidemi Suganami
So, yeah, I don't recommend people to struggle with Franferrassen. He's very difficult. And even though Isis was a co author, Adam has done a terrific job in summarizing Van Frassen's very complicated argument to the extent that is necessary to convey our thoughts about causation, causal inquiry in international relations. It's a difficult task.
- [38:15]
Adam Humphries
He is a difficult writer. I mean, I find him quite an exciting writer once you get inside his way of thinking. He's very difficult, but also in a way quite playful, I think, in the way he sort of points fingers at the positions he's arguing against. And I think quite a fun way. But, yes, it's hard work. I mean, it's also worth saying he's very much a philosopher of natural science. I doubt he even knows that the discipline of international relations exists, but he's really not interested in what substantively we're interested in. It's very much a debate about how to make sense of natural science. And so I think one of his limitations as a resource for those of us interested in international politics is that's just not his subject matter. And so, as I say, it's much more about kind of breaking open the constraints of our thinking than being a resource that I would recommend to people in international relations. Unless they're just there for pure kind of intellectual excitement.
- [39:15]
Stephen Sikevich
Yeah, that old distinction between the human sciences and the natural sciences that Wilhelm Dilfi was talking about, but then there was also the positivists that were trying to. No, no, no. Everything has to be almost like a form of physics, or as E.O. wilson kind of put it in his book consilience, everything has to be an outgrowth of biology, so to speak. So there's always these types of debates as well, which in some ways kind of creeps into international relations as well, I've noticed.
- [39:49]
Adam Humphries
Absolutely. And I think it's interesting just to reflect on Hidemi's point that that Bhaskar, very influential in the social sciences, but hardly features in kind of discussions of natural science at all, the sort of parallel debates among philosophers of natural science. Bhaskar just simply doesn't feature. And indeed, it's kind of interesting even to notice that this debate about causal realism, which is a big feature of debates in international relations and across lots of social sciences, which Bhaskar is so central to, that's very tangential in the sort of discussions that philosophers of natural science are having. They're not terribly interested in this question whether causation is real. It is not very relevant to the concerns of natural science. And so it's interesting these sort of different kind of geographies of thought in different disciplines.
- [40:42]
Stephen Sikevich
Hidemi, do you have any thoughts on that point?
- [40:46]
Hidemi Suganami
No, nothing to add.
- [40:48]
Stephen Sikevich
Okay. So kind of related to this issue of metaphysics and causality is the issue of what's commonly called in philosophy, epistemology, or more simply the study of knowledge. And how has this been addressed within the field of international relations? And how does this relate to your research in the book?
- [41:11]
Hidemi Suganami
I. I'd like to take this opportunity to air my view about that kind of talk in international relations. And I don't know whether students still do this and textbooks still talk in this way, but when I was teaching, I was mainly in charge of teaching them philosophy of explanation and research methods and so on. And there are a Lot of textbooks, methods, research textbooks, which said, oh, we have to have a sound ontology from which we can infer sound epistemology, from which we can work out what methodology or methods to follow. And therefore, to be able to qualify as a good scholar and to be able to produce good knowledge, you have to satisfy this trinity of ontology, epistemology and methodology. And I think plainly this is plainly nonsense, and students shouldn't be encouraged to talk like that before thinking hard about what ontology really is, epistemology really is, and methodology really is. And even though we don't say that in this book, I was certainly reacting against that kind of categorization and we are very skeptical of ontology anyway. But this book is a contribution to epistemology of international relations. That is, how do we make valid or perisive causal knowledge claims? And causal knowledge claims can only be made with reference to empirical evidence. So what is the relationship between the use of empirical evidence and reliable causal knowledge claims? So we are making some contribution to epistemology more generally. I think knowledge in international relations tend to be governed by or influenced by what we call the culture of generalization. And we are reacting against that in this book too. Maybe Adam would like to come in there about that culture.
- [43:16]
Adam Humphries
Well, let me say something just different. What you said just before that, which is, I think one of the things we have tried to do in the book is slightly to deflate some of the kind of the grand standing you get around. We need to talk about ontology, we need to talk about epistemology, and maybe to make that a bit more sort of practical and say, look, it's really important that we think about how we can be. What would make us confident in advancing a particular claim about how international politics works. How can we be confident in advancing a knowledge claim, but addressing it in that slightly kind of applied way, rather than using these kind of the vocabulary of ontology and epistemology, which I think, as Hidemi said, and I really agree, you get a sort of PhD student sort of thinking, oh my God, I've got to work out what my ontology is, what my epistemology is. And of course that's such an enormous undertaking that if you're not careful, you get stuck in working that out for three or four years and have made no progress with your actual, you know, actual substantive, you know, research projects. I think, I think a big part of our attitude is you always have to start by kind of just trying to articulate really clearly what is it that I'm trying To find out about the world, what is it that's puzzling me? What is it that I'm interested in? And we kind of build out from there. So rather than starting at the kind of grand level with ontology, epistemology, methodology, let's start at the concrete level. What are you trying to find out, you know, what kind of evidence is available to you? How can we draw on that in order to generate knowledge? Claims that are as persuasive as possible. Recognizing that in a field like international relations, it's always hard to be sure. Right. We've always got to be a bit tentative because it's hard. But in a sense, start from that local concrete level rather than from the level of these big concepts.
- [45:11]
Hidemi Suganami
I concur entirely. As I said in teaching research methods and so on to postgraduate students in my university, my emphasis throughout was what is your question? And can you answer that question with the empirical evidence that you can gather in the three year research? And these are much more important than going on about ontology, epistemology and methodology. Yeah.
- [45:35]
Stephen Sikevich
It reminds me how in philosophy there's always that debate about what is the first philosophy, end quote. Because from Plato and Aristotle it was metaphysics, but then with Descartes it switched to epistemology and so forth. And then of course, Kant took that even further, if you want to get into idealism, that he's the idealist par excellence. And it kind of seems like, at least in the field of international relations, you're kind of advocating for a completely different approach. That. Not that it's the first philosophy question isn't not important, but it's just that's not necessarily the first thing you need to work out in order to get everything else going. It's almost like you have to build yourself up to that, if that's really where your research requires it. Would that be a fair assessment?
- [46:25]
Hidemi Suganami
Yes. Yeah. Only bring philosophy in if it is relevant to your question, that is. Yep.
- [46:32]
Stephen Sikevich
Now. Now you talk about two types of or two kinds of causal statements, abstract and concrete. Can you explain the distinction between the two?
- [46:45]
Hidemi Suganami
Yeah. I was very proud to have actually realized at some stage in our study that philosophers tend to separate. Philosophers tend to talk about two different kinds of causal statements, but they called one of them singular, or they tended to call one of them singular, the other one general. And it occurred to me that the singular general contrast is not very helpful as a terminology or nomenclature, and it should really be called concrete and abstract. And I was only pointing out that their nomenclature is wrong. But Adam suddenly Sort of realized, ah, there is something very important here. And in fact, from there we developed a whole discussion about what is the real difference between two types of causal statements and how they relate to each other and so on. From then on we developed the logic of causal inquiry. So it was quite a great discovery. I didn't know the significance of it at the time, but Adam developed it to the full. So this is where Adam can come in and explain it further in more detail.
- [47:47]
Adam Humphries
Well, maybe. Let me just kind of give you an example of, you know, a concrete and an abstract statement to try and kind of to make, to make this real. So take the statement the short circuit caused the fire. So philosophers have often called a statement like that singular. We think what's relevant about it is that it tells us about a concrete event, the short circuit, which causes another concrete event, the fire. Then contrast that with another bit superficially very similar sounding statement, short circuits cause fires. Now that kind of statement is often described by philosophers as general, but in a sense, what's interesting about it is it clearly gives us a kind of powerful knowledge about the world. Finding out that short circuits cause fires seems really useful bit of knowledge, but it's not telling us about any specific short circuit or any specific fire. In a sense, what it's doing is abstracting from any particular short circuit, particular kind of fire, to give us a different kind of knowledge. What we call, what we say is knowledge of a propensity. And I mean, that's an example that philosophers often use. But one could take different kinds of examples. So an example from international relations, we could say the French Revolution caused the French revolutionary wars. That's a concrete statement that's about concrete events that happened in the past. And then revolutions cause wars is a sort of statement that abstracts from any particular revolution or any particular war and gives us a kind of knowledge that is in a certain sense more general. But where the term general is a bit misleading because it might make us think it's some kind of generalization, but it's not. It's a propensity statement. The claim revolutions cause wars tells us what will happen if this causal relationship is allowed to unfold unhindered. Maybe if I just flesh out that little point as well. Think of the kind of claim which we all get taught in school that gravity causes objects dropped near the earth's surface to accelerate downwards towards the center of the earth at around 9.8 meters per second squared. Something we all learn in school, right? And yet nearly every object dropped near the earth's surface doesn't actually accelerate downwards at about 9.8 meters per second squared because atmospheric resistance interferes. You know, so we're all familiar with, you know, seeing a feather or a leaf or something kind of floating through the sky, slept clear, you know, slowly sort of descending towards the ground, being buffeted by the wind that's not falling at 9.8 meters per second squared. Right. And the reason is because gravity is interfering. And so one of the things we're really trying to draw out in the book is to really make clear, you know, when confronted with an abstract claims such as revolutions cause wars, really important not to suppose that that means that every revolution is going to cause a war. It means that a revolution will lead to a war if nothing else interferes. Just as the statement that gravity causes objects drop near the earth's surface to accelerate downwards at 9.8 meters per second squared tells us that is what will happen if nothing else interferes. But of course, in reality, things often typically do interfere. And so in a sense, that is the reason why we think it's so important to distinguish between these two claims. To say the French Revolution caused the French Revolutionary War is to make a concrete claim about something that actually happened in the past to cause a relation that actually sort of played out. To say that revolutions cause wars is to say something about. Is to tell us about a relation that will play out if the conditions are right. It will play out if nothing else interferes. But that's a sort of conditional statement.
- [51:45]
Hidemi Suganami
Yes. It's very important not to mistake what is usually called general causal statement and what we're calling abstract causal statement. It's very important not to mistake them as though they were generalizations. They're not. It doesn't say revolution usually or always cause wars. It just happens when nothing prevents it from unfolding itself fully.
- [52:10]
Stephen Sikevich
This kind of reminds me of the debate and this was in medieval philosophers, but they were talking about primary causes and secondary causes. Now, the primary cause being like God, but he would work through secondary causes, like natural causes, like how did the storm happen? Well, God ultimately caused it, but he worked through natural processes to do that. Would this be kind of not exactly in the same way, but would something like this work in your views on causal inquiry?
- [52:42]
Hidemi Suganami
Not in my view, although that is a very interesting observation. I think what we are talking about is not so much the two parts that you talked about, that is God and nature, but intervention by in nature as well, human intervention which prevents the causal process, whether God intended or not to unfold Itself, fully. That's not.
- [53:05]
Stephen Sikevich
Yeah, I didn't mean necessarily. God literally, but like how one cause is working through another cause and then that kind of causes a process. Would something like that be in line?
- [53:16]
Adam Humphries
Yeah, I mean, so. So that thought that you might have a background cause which is then interfered with more locally I think is really important and makes a lot of sense. So if we can show that revolutions cause wars, we've uncovered something. We've uncovered a sort of a propensity or a tendency that sort of. Maybe you could think of it as kind of operating in the background. That's really important. And yet we know that in any concrete case it may not unfold like that because something else might interfere. So in that sense, we can separate the propensity and its specific unfolding or not in specific circumstances and talk about those at slightly different levels. I think that probably is the analogy to what you're saying.
- [54:00]
Stephen Sikevich
Yeah, yeah. Different levels of causality. And I know Bhaskar talked about this at times, that there were different levels of reality and each one had their own causal dynamics at play and so forth.
- [54:15]
Adam Humphries
Yes, but with the exception that. So with. With Bhaskar, the problem is that becomes a sort of claim about how the world is constituted, that it literally has different levels. I think the way I use the term level just now, I think it's more kind of metaphorical. It's not that there are different levels found in reality, but more that there are different levels at which we can focus our analysis in any particular sort of discussion.
- [54:44]
Stephen Sikevich
Now, you do talk about what you call deep logic. And this is like what kind of causal or causal reasoning that is proper for international relations. In your view, can you explain what this means?
- [54:58]
Adam Humphries
Should I say that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, what we have tried to do is really to try to articulate how it is that empirical evidence can support a causal claim such that that causal claim can be advanced with confidence. Okay. And we're trying to do that. We tried to do that. The reason for calling a logic is that we're not talking about. We're not talking at the level of sort of particular methods. We're trying to get at the sort of. The underlying way in which empirical evidence can support our causal claims. And the point is, so that we can advance them with confidence so we can be confident about the claims we make about the world. And we think that the relationship between these two kinds of statements is absolutely fundamental. And the reason is because empirical evidence obviously pertains to specific events which have occurred in the world. The Only kinds of events about which we can have evidence are events which have actually occurred. That's just a statement of the obvious. But abstract causal claims, propensity statements such as revolutions cause wars actually abstract from specific events about which we can have empirical evidence. So there is a bit of a puzzle that we sort of identified. Typically, when we are conducting causal inquiry, what we want to discover is these big kind of causal relationships. Revolutions cause wars. That's a pretty exciting discovery. And yet empirical evidence is about specific events, specific revolutions, specific wars. And so our account of the logic of causal inquiry is really an attempt to make sense of how empirical evidence can be brought to bear on these kinds of abstract or theoretical claims that we're often interested in. And I mean, it's. You know, our answer to that is a little bit technical, but we think it's completely, really, really fundamental to sort of understand that and to express it in simple terms. The point we make is that it's always necessary to provide evidence for a claim that is framed as a concrete claim about events which have occurred in the past. Right. And everything flows from there. Right. If we can do that, if we can provide persuasive evidence in support of a claim about the causal relationship between events which have happened in the past, we can build from that knowledge of causal theories. We can use it to generate predictions, we can use it to generate policy prescriptions. But everything flows from that kind of context. There's the concrete, contextual, dependent knowledge. And so that's what we were trying to articulate, really at the heart of the book.
- [57:49]
Stephen Sikevich
So it's kind of a balance of concrete and abstract, not necessarily one over the other. But of course, you want to start with the concrete, then move to the abstract. But ultimately you want to have, like, a balance of the two. Is that a fair assessment?
- [58:03]
Adam Humphries
So you're absolutely right in what you said that you always start from the concrete and move to the abstract in terms of how our knowledge develops. Right. So the way in which causal claims get established as knowledge claims is by moving from the concrete of the abstract. Absolutely. But we very much acknowledge that in practice, often what we want is knowledge of the abstract rather than knowledge of the concrete. That's not always the case. Sometimes people are conducting causal query because they actually want to know what caused some event that happened in the past. So their interest is on this concrete event and what caused it. But very often we're trying to provide support for theories, often with an interest in sort of advancing predictions or policy prescriptions. And so in that case, yeah. Move from the concrete to the abstract and to understand the relationship between them.
- [58:55]
Stephen Sikevich
Yeah. And that's kind of one difference I noticed between international relations and even historical sociology and history, because history is almost always focused on the concrete causes of a particular event. And they almost always say, well, no, you can't apply that to another context. But then historical sociology and international relations, they're kind of saying, well, they're trying to figure out like, well, no, in some ways you can. Even though each context has its own peculiar features, but there are some abstract processes or what have you involved.
- [59:33]
Adam Humphries
Absolutely. And just very briefly before, I mean, I'm sure Hidemi would like to come in. But, you know, really common idea is we can learn from history. Right. And the idea that we can learn from history suggests that what history has to tell us is not confined to simply identifying the causes of specific events in the past, but that by identifying the causes of events which happened in the past, we also generate a kind of knowledge which can in some way inform our understanding of the present. And the way I think we would articulate that is that by developing concrete causal knowledge, we also thereby demonstrate abstract knowledge which can there then be applied in other contexts?
- [60:15]
Hidemi Suganami
Yeah, that's very nicely put. I think there are sort of tendency to misunderstand these things. Historians would insist. Yes, I'm only looking at this case. I'm not interested in generalization. But whether they're interested in generalization or not, whatever concrete causal statement they make has an abstract implication. And it's because they're conflating abstractness with generality. They say, oh, I'm not in favor of generalization, thereby missing a very important point that what they're saying concretely has an abstract application or implication. And it is that what is implied in abstract way that we call theory, which can be applied, but not in the way that generalists think they can be applied, it isn't as if once we have a theory, we just apply it to the cases. We have to make sure that contextually the application of a theory requires that the circumstances faced are similar to the circumstances in which the propensity the theory is referring to unfolded itself fully. So it's a bit more complicated operation than just generalization leading to explaining particular cases. But on both sides, both on the historical side and the general side, they just sort of don't seem to realize that what is key here is the movement from the concrete to the abstract. Am I getting it right, Adam?
- [61:35]
Adam Humphries
Absolutely.
- [61:36]
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Stephen Sikevich
No, that was very interesting and that's kind of part of some of my research of trying to what's that connection between historical and theoretical and how you need that balance and that balance between the concrete and the. Or even like concrete to the abstract as Adam said, you know, and you have like the particular research on this particular historical context, but then you can use that as a means or a foundation for building up to that abstract. That would be my thought. Is that kind of similar to what you are arguing yeah, very much so, I think.
- [64:04]
Hidemi Suganami
Yeah.
- [64:06]
Stephen Sikevich
Now, there are three kinds of causal reasoning usually used, like inference, inference, sorry, deduction, and then abducto. Yeah, forgive me. And could you just briefly explain what these three forms of causal reasoning are and how do they apply to your research?
- [64:34]
Hidemi Suganami
I think Adam can explain this in more detail, but it's not so much the contrast between inference and deduction and obstruction, but induction, deduction and obstruction. And these are all ways of reasoning which is meant to articulate what causal inference is. And induction is often associated with the work by KKV as we call them. What are they? Keohen, King and Berber. There's a standard textbook and according to liter thinking, causal reasoning is a Causal inference is really like descriptive inference and it's a generalization and it's induction that is completely wrong. And then there's another kind of reasoning which says, yes, causal inference is like deduction. Well, that may be so in idealized perfect cases, but in reality that is not true. And the conclusion that we come to is that it is an abduction, meaning that causal inference from empirical knowledge to causal claim is pervasive. If we can rule out all competing explanations such that this is the best formulation that we can come up with. Now, Alan can amplify that even further, but that's roughly where we are at.
- [65:59]
Adam Humphries
Yeah, I mean, we said earlier that in a sense the book we've written is trying to fill a gap between on the one hand, those people who are interested in sort of philosophical, metaphysical debates, and on the other hand, people who are interested in sort of the technical application of particular methods. And part of the gap between those two things that we're trying to fill that we think is missing is actually sort of to try and think through what is the kind of reasoning that we use when we arrive at conclusions about what caused what, what is the reasoning we use? And so the three forms of reasoning that are sometimes proposed are inductive, deductive, and abductive, where abductive is much less discussed than the others. I mean, sometimes people would just say there are two. There's induction and deduction. And so we kind of try and go through those and say, well, which is the best fit for causal reasoning? And as Hidaembi says, this question is not much discussed. What is the structural causal reasoning? Actually, people don't really think of this very much. We think perhaps we should think about it a bit more. There is an answer which Kinkohane and Vrber give, which is that causal reasoning is mainly sort of inductive in other words, it looks a bit like generalization. So an example of inductive reasoning would be something like, oh, well, this one is white and this one is white, and this one is white and this one is white. So all swans are white. Right? That's sort of inductive. It's focused on description. Causal reasoning is nothing like that. It really isn't anything like that. When we try and reason that, oh, this thing led to that thing, what we're trying to say is we think it must have led to that thing because otherwise we can't make sense of how that thing came about. So when a historian is trying to identify, you know, trying to persuade you about, you know, what caused this war or this outcome, it's like, you know, I'm trying to persuade you that this must have played a part because otherwise we can't make sense of it. And that kind of reasoning is abductive. It's saying, look, the best sense we can make of how this war came about was that this event, assassination or whatever it was, contributed to it. This helped to bring it about, that it's hard to make sense of how it came about unless this was a key component of what brought it about. That kind of reasoning, the technical term for that is abductive. And we argue, and so we sort of try and just articulate that. We say it's not inductive, it's not deductive, it must be abductive, sometimes called reasoning, sort of inference to the best explanation. So the idea is we can be confident that one thing caused the other when this is the best account we can give of how that other thing was brought about. It's, I think, in a way, quite an ordinary common sense, everyday kind of reasoning. It's just not often named. And so I think for a lot of people, the name abduction or abductive reasoning is going to be very unfamiliar. But actually it's a very everyday, kind of quite prosaic process of reasoning.
- [69:13]
Stephen Sikevich
So what kind of impact are you hoping to have on international relations theory with this work on causal inquiry? Because it used to be that international relations was kind of attempting these grand, almost grand theory of everything, almost kind of like what you would see in physics and Alexander Wundt's work on constructivism, social theory of international relations, as kind of one example par excellence, especially in the last 30 years. But this is not quite what you're trying to do. What are you hope. Like, what impact are you hoping to have on international relations theory?
- [69:58]
Hidemi Suganami
First of all, I'd like to say that I'm not an international relations theorist and I don't think Adam is either. I am personally often associated with the so called English School of International relations. But all that I've done is to tell the people what they're saying. I'm just expositor and critical analyst of their views. And I'm not necessarily advocating that position. I'm not associated with any ism. I don't have a kind of flag to say I'm a constructivist or whatever it is. And I think that applies to Adam too. And what we are trying to achieve is not either strengthening or offering a new kind of ism in international relations theory, but basically to look very critically about various explanations, causal explanations and causal inquiry that have been produced in the past. So our intervention, if you like, is metatheoretical rather than theoretical. So I have no substantive theory to offer or defend or argue for. So in that sense it is metatheoretical, philosophical if you like, in that sense, critical, if you like. The impact we're trying to create is to tell the readers to be skeptical or critical about the pernicious influence of the culture of generalization. Don't buy into this notion that somehow you are inferior because you're not producing anything that is not generalizable. There's nothing wrong with looking at one episode at a time. As we said before, concrete is where we begin from which we can extract not generalization, but abstraction. And that abstracted causal theory can be useful under certain circumstances. But we have to be very careful about the logic of causal inquiry that we have articulated. That's roughly what we are trying to, in my view, that's what we're trying to propagate in the minds of the. The collective minds of international religion scholars.
- [72:00]
Adam Humphries
Yeah, I really agree with that. My view is that one curious feature about these sort of grand theories that you referred to, Stephen, is that very often they don't articulate causal claims very clearly. Actually. I mean, Alex Wen might be a bit of an exception to that. I think he is trying to articulate causal claims more clearly. But I think historically they often haven't been very clear. It's almost like these big kind of grand theories operate more as perspectives than as sets of causal claims. So there's a sort of way of thinking, oh, realists kind of focus on power and liberal institutionists, they kind of focus on institutions, and constructivists, they focus on norms. But to tell us what they focus on is not to yet to come anywhere close to articulating a causal claim and actually in some sense they don't come very close to articulating causal claims. So I think that one of the things that we would hope that the book does is to help people actually to articulate their causal claims more precisely, more carefully in that way, opening them up to better scrutiny, allowing us to be more confident about our causal claims, to understand better what kind of evidence is going to help us to test them, to establish their validity, and actually for that whole conversation to be a bit more out in the open and a bit more precise. And as far as I'm concerned, I'm not so bothered about choosing between the grand paradigms. I'm very much with em, yet that's not what we're trying to do, but to make the focus a bit more explicitly on the causal claims that sit within those and how we can kind of strengthen them. And that would be a good impact.
- [73:49]
Hidemi Suganami
I often notice PhD students giving a presentation on a project to say, I'm looking at this question from such and such a perspective, or you know, I'm a constructivist, I'm looking at from a constructivist viewpoint and so on. And I also witnessed this tendency that you treat these different isms as necessarily offering competing causal explanations. They're not necessarily so we really have to be careful about what it is that we are trying to rule out or what it is we have to rule out to be able to give support to the particular causal interpretation we are trying to put forward. I often thought that realism and liberalism often say similar things. They're not really incompatible in some cases. Long time ago, when people used to talk about democratic peace theory, they would say this is what realists would say and there are different interpretations of it. None of them will hold. And therefore my liberal understanding is correct, whatever it was. And as though by deleting these different theoretical traditions, you're protecting one particular theory. That's not what we are doing here. What we're trying to do is what is the causal question and what are the possible answers and which one can be deleted or ruled out on empirical evidence and therefore which is the one that we settle on? You know, that kind of much more minute movement is what we are making. I think you disagree.
- [75:22]
Adam Humphries
You know, I really do. And just to bring out what Hidemi has just said, you know, I think a weakness of some research, you see, in international relations is precisely this idea that you sort of say, oh, well, we've kind of, you know, we've got evidence against the realist interpretation, so the liberal interpretation must be right. Well, what about the possibility that they're both wrong. Right. They're both bad. What about the possibility the constructivist explanation is bad as well. And in a sense, what we need here is a slightly more structured way of thinking. You know, what are all the available competing explanations that have any kind of initial plausibility and on what basis?
- [75:58]
Hidemi Suganami
In a particular case.
- [75:59]
Adam Humphries
In that particular case? Yes, absolutely. In that particular case. And on what basis can we arbitrate between them? On what basis can we work out which is the most convincing? And it's not just a case of kind of, if you delete one, then the other is correct, or vice versa?
- [76:15]
Stephen Sikevich
Yes. I had a previous interview about this in regards to war, and my guest actually advocated for what he called a multi paramedic approach, where you actually look at the strengths of each paradigm and try to see how they relate to each other and of course also disregard, but also be honest about the weaknesses. Would this be something similar or akin to what you're attempting or what you would advocate for?
- [76:44]
Adam Humphries
Yeah, yeah, certainly. I think if we're trying to, if we're conducting causal inquiry, if we're interested in finding out, in discovering causal relations, it doesn't make sense to be constrained by paradigms. It certainly makes sense to look at the different paradigms and ask what they can offer us, but to be constrained by them, either to say, well, I'm working within just one of them, or to say these paradigms are all there is and there is no possibility of any other approach, I think both of those things would be wrong. So we try and use them, but we don't want to be constrained by them.
- [77:21]
Stephen Sikevich
So a kind of, to use the term, Hidemi, use a meta. Theoretical flexibility of sorts, where you're just trying to look at the different paradigms, look at what insights bring and then what it can apply to these different contexts, these concrete contexts. Is that kind of akin to what you were arguing?
- [77:43]
Adam Humphries
Hide me. So meta, theoretically, I would certainly advocate flexibility. I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me.
- [77:51]
Stephen Sikevich
Yeah, I was asking both of you, but Hidemi mentioned that this work was kind of theoretical and I'm.
- [77:57]
Hidemi Suganami
We really have to, we really have to get used to talking outside of the language which dominated intergenerational theory and so on. I, I said metatheoretical because I'm not a theorist. If you're interested in causal inquiry, you really have to do, to begin with, a question, what has caused what? And in this particular case, and what you then have to do is to think about all the possible and Plausible causal explanations, and they may fall into different paradigms, they may fall into different theories. But regardless of what theorists have told you about different explanations is try to work out what is the range of plausible explanations here of this particular case, now other cases of this particular case, and try to work out whether any of them has any empirical foundation. And you tend to find that there's no evidence to show this. And then you settle on the one that is your pet theory or pet pet argument in this case, because it is well supported by empirical evidence. Nothing else is well supported. And in this operation, language like theories and paradigms and contending viewpoints and so on needn't necessarily come in. It's a really kind of nitty gritty kind of operation, if that makes sense to you, Stephen.
- [79:19]
Stephen Sikevich
No, it does. No. You mentioned meta theoretical, and I. Oh, yes, I'm very interested in the meta theory debates in international relations. So I thought if you could make.
- [79:31]
Hidemi Suganami
Well, meta theory is slightly misleading term because I regard myself as a meta theorist in the sense that I engage with the English school, realism, liberalism, so on, and engage with them critically. I'm not advocating any of them, but I'm reflecting on them. But I'm also a metahistorian. That's to say, if somebody puts forward a historical interpretation of a case, I'm engaging with them not as a historian, but as a critic of that particular kind of explanation. So to me, meta theorists and meta historians are on the same side as against historians and theorists.
- [80:07]
Stephen Sikevich
Yeah. And that's an entire discussion of itself where we could even talk or even what is the meta level of inquiry, so to speak. And, Adam, do you have any thoughts on this question at all?
- [80:22]
Adam Humphries
I mean, I think a sort of a feature of our book which some people might find puzzling or even frustrating is that on the one hand, we're very engaged in these sorts of metatheoretical debates. Right. You know, we're very, you know, that is, in a sense, what the book is about. On the other hand, what we're substantively advocating is not that everyone should be doing meta theory. In a sense, we're advocating precisely the opposite. We're saying we're actually, in a way, trying to clear space for more focused, concrete causal inquiries that are not hamstrung by having to take positions on big metatheoretical issues. I mean, this comes back to our discussion of sort of ontology, epistemology and methodology, and the danger of sort of getting too focused on, oh, I've got to have a position on those questions in a way that distracts and detracts from actually making progress with our substantive causal inquiries. So I think it's really important that what we're trying to make space for is for people to make progress on those substantive causal inquiries in a way that is a little bit clearer and sharper in how people are able to articulate, okay, what am I going to have to do to establish this as a plausible knowledge claim? And so in a sense, I think our contribution is to help people be a bit sharper in identifying what they're going to need to do, but therefore to improve the substantive causal inquiries rather than to kind of launch a whole new series of meta theoretical debates.
- [82:03]
Hidemi Suganami
That's beautifully put. Yeah.
- [82:04]
Stephen Sikevich
Now, do you think international relations as a field is moving in that direction or do you think there's still a lot of work to do? What's kind of the state of the field in your view, in this regards?
- [82:17]
Hidemi Suganami
I'm retired for 10 years now, so I don't really know exactly where we're at, but I doubt very much that IR has moved on that radically. I'm hoping that our book will not be ignored because it has a message to impart there. I should imagine they're still talking about paradigms and theories and inter paradigm debates and which paradigm to go for and so on and so forth, which are in many ways counterproductive for actual research. What do you think, Alan?
- [82:51]
Adam Humphries
I think there has been movement, like as Stephen suggested, I think there has been movement away from the traditional paradigms. I mean, there was a. There was a special issue of the. I think it was the European Journal of International relations in what, 2013, it was called the end of IR theory. And they said that was the question they were asking, are we moving away from the traditional kind of theoretical paradigm discussions? And I think the answer to that is to some extent, yes, I think that's true. And I think that some of the new, more interesting sort of methodological innovations, some of which we look at in the book, particularly sort of design based approaches, sort of these sort of experimental, natural experiment, quasi experimental approaches, are I think, not really involved in paradigmatic battles. They are examples of people saying, you know, I'm interested in a particular puzzle and how can I be smart about designing a kind of piece of research that's really kind of going to get me interesting, powerful conclusions in a way that's not hamstrung by paradigmatic debates? So I think there is, in some bits of the field, I think there is kind of interesting movement in that direction, which I think that probably we would endorse. And certainly in the book we look at some examples of that and do endorse them as kind of good, kind of interesting, clever examples of how to design causal inquiries. And there's a whole chapter at the end of the book where we actually look at some specific examples of what we think are really good examples of. Of causal inquiry in international relations and what makes them good and how they could perhaps be further improved. But, I mean, I think that I said earlier that international relations was a field which draws from all over the place. It draws from law and economics and history and philosophy and whatever, sociology, whatever. And I think that international relations is a very sort of fragmented discipline. There's a lot of different conversations going on. I think that my reflection on it would be that one of the very frustrating dynamics in the discipline is sort of pointless arguments about causation, where on the one hand you've got people who want to say. Who associate causation with a particular kind of approach and say, oh, no, no, that's not for me, I don't have anything to do with that. And on the other hand, people who kind of criticize any research that's not causal is not being worth having. And I think all those kinds of discussions in IR are really very, very unhelpful. And that one of the things we've got to realize is that causal relations are everywhere. And we just can't make sense of the world without thinking of it as kind of containing these causal relations which are absolutely fundamental for us to discover. And I think that everyone actually agrees on that, whether they're kind of critical theorist or someone who uses statistical methods or whatever. Actually, we all sort of agree on that. We can. It's always impossible not to think of the world in that way. And so I think it's in a way incumbent on us to try and make a bit more effort to say, actually it's good for all of us to have a shared understanding of how we can generate causal knowledge. And in a sense, that's what the book is trying to achieve. I mean, there's a long way to go, but that's where we're trying to get to.
- [86:02]
Hidemi Suganami
It's interesting what you said just now. I observed almost every week in postgraduate research seminars the claim that we're not doing causal questions, we are not doing causal questions, as though what they were doing really wasn't causal questions at all. And I think that was a sort of easy way out. If they're not asking Causal question as a central research question. There are lots of claims that they're making which are causal in nature in the broad terms. And they're making it quite casually, without really thinking hard about are we justified in making this claim which is causal in nature? And what we're trying to do in the book is to make them to thinking a bit more carefully about what they're saying. Are they causal in nature? If so, what sort of procedure have to be followed? Or if so, what sort of evidence has to be brought to the fore to support the view? In a sense, the being a little bit too casual and using this kind of defense, you know, we're not doing causal. They are.
- [87:05]
Stephen Sikevich
Now, do you think the influx of history and historical sociology into international relations theory will help move it in the direction that you would like? Because in that case you do have to try to pay more attention to the concrete historical context is a lot in that research.
- [87:26]
Hidemi Suganami
I think that one of the sad thing that has happened to international relations is that it had to in Britain, in any case, it had to defend its integrity, existence or identity in contraindistinction to other things like politics. But history is another international relations department and history department don't talk to each other very often. And historians will say I'm not interested in international relations because they're generalizers. And international relations people will say I'm not historians because they're only looking at a particular case and that's not knowing. But if what we are saying is true, I think there are in many cases history is really important, or historical methods, or what historians typically do in making a causal inquiry is very important to intracellions and there is no barrier between them. So yes, I welcome the move towards history and historical sociology in ir.
- [88:22]
Adam Humphries
Yeah, I mean, so do I. But with one small but important qualification, which is the sort of the re emergence of history and historical sociology in international relations, which I think is generally to be welcomed, has come along with a sort of determination among many of its advocates to say exactly as Sidaymi suggested, we don't do causal inquiry. We do history, not causal inquiry. And I think that is unfortunate because I think that the use of the historical method as a basis for generating causal knowledge is actually really, really important for the discipline of international relations. And so that division, I think, is unhelpful.
- [89:05]
Hidemi Suganami
When they say we're not doing causal inquiry, do they mean we're not doing the kind of thing that is labeled neopositivist? Is that what it is?
- [89:16]
Adam Humphries
Yes. And I think in terms of disciplinary politics, they're saying, don't judge us by your standards. We should be able to judge ourselves by our standards, which we understand better. And I mean, I think that's very understandable. But I think there's an unfortunate consequence of sort of creating perhaps slightly artificial barriers where they're not really beneficial.
- [89:35]
Stephen Sikevich
Yeah, the whole positivism, anti positivism and post positivism, that's a whole entire discussion in of itself. And yeah, maybe we could have you guys back on again and we could discuss that in more details. But yeah, this has been a very fascinating discussion. And yes, we definitely could talk about all this all day, but are there any final thoughts, maybe cover anything in the book or in the field that we didn't get to in the main discussion?
- [90:05]
Hidemi Suganami
Well, for me, Adam and I have worked on it for such a long time that I personally have nothing to add to what the book has said. And I'm very grateful for the opportunity like this to be able to have it aired and discussed. And I'd welcome any opportunity to discuss various questions raised here with anyone interested in this area of causal explanation, causation or theory and international relations theory where it is going.
- [90:35]
Adam Humphries
Yeah, I would absolutely endorse that. I mean, thank you, Stephen, for your engagement with the book. And I think we're really grateful to those people in international relations who have engaged in different ways and I think that the topic is really interesting. When I've talked about the book, we get all kinds of different responses from all kinds of different angles and it does feel very fruitful and kind of interesting. We clearly don't have the final answer on these things. I hope we've written something that is kind of interesting for people and kind of thought provoking. Yeah, thank you for your engagement with it.
- [91:09]
Stephen Sikevich
Well, we always like to end our interviews by asking our guests, what are you working on now?
- [91:15]
Hidemi Suganami
Adam, you should answer that one.
- [91:16]
Adam Humphries
Well, I mean, I've just taken over as head of school in my university, so I pretty much become a full time manager. But in terms of. Yeah, I mean, there are lots of follow on projects from this book that I would be that I'm interested in. But one project that I'm working on with my excellent colleague Joey o' Mahony is a project trying to sort of think about the relationship and differences between international relations as a field and a field like epidemiology. And what's interesting about epidemiology, I think, is that they have this explicit idea of causal criteria, criteria we can use for identifying when A pattern of association we have identified in the world is actually a causal pattern. And so one of the questions we're asking is can we learn from the criteria they have come up with in epidemiology and learn from that, apply that to international relations, maybe with some differences because the disciplines are not the same, but is that a resource we could use? So that's a project I'm working on at the moment.
- [92:16]
Hidemi Suganami
Make sure to send me a draft copy and I will comment.
- [92:18]
Adam Humphries
I will do absolutely multiple drafts.
- [92:21]
Stephen Sikevich
Yeah. So when you. Oh, I'm sorry.
- [92:24]
Hidemi Suganami
For my part, I have spent 50 years doing what I have just called metatheory of international relations. I'm taking retirement from it and 50 years of over concentration in international relations have prevented me from learning what was happening in Japan in cultural terms. Evolution of culture, contemporary culture in Japan for the last 50 years. I've completely missed out. So I'm sort of catching up with it now, reading the literature, poetry, history, political discussions and so on. And as to whether that will lead to any publication, I don't know. But this was the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and there are a lot of interesting debates and books which came out discussing literature, novels and so on, written by people who took part in the war and people who were about to die in suicide pilot attack and so on. And yet the war came to an end the day before they were about to fly and there's a huge trauma because they're all getting ready to die and then the next day they're told you don't have to do this and they can't make sense of their life. And it's very interesting to re engage myself with the history and culture of Japan. So that's what I'm trying to do.
- [93:35]
Stephen Sikevich
Yeah, that's a very interesting debate because I'm from a Polish cultural background and of course Poland and the Polish communities are still debating about the significance of World War II and its impact on Poland and also the Polish diaspora around the world. So that's a very interesting.
- [93:53]
Hidemi Suganami
So if I were ever to go back to teaching international relations, I'll probably do War on Literature, kind of course be interesting.
- [94:02]
Stephen Sikevich
Well, whenever you finish those works or if you ever want to just come on and have another discussion, you're more than welcome to come back on the podcast.
- [94:10]
Hidemi Suganami
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I really enjoyed it.
- [94:14]
Adam Humphries
Yeah, thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Stephen.
- [94:16]
Stephen Sikevich
Hidemi Suganami and Adam Humphries, thank you for joining us on the New Books Network.
- [94:22]
Hidemi Suganami
Thank you.
- [94:23]
Adam Humphries
Thanks.
- [94:24]
Stephen Sikevich
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. I am your host, Stephen Sikevich. Until next time.
- [94:35]
Adam Humphries
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Stephen Sikevich
Increase your wealth. Customize and save.
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Adam Humphries
We save. That may have been too much feeling.
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Hidemi Suganami
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