One Time, Many Times

Abstract

This review article surveys recent work on time and temporality in international relations. It begins with an overview of Kimberly Hutchings’s influential history of ideas exploring the relationship between chronos (quantitative experience of time) and kairos (qualitative conceptualisation of time). Building on the architecture of Hutchings’s argument, it surveys more recent scholarship that supplements, extends and complicates her insights in two ways. First, while Hutchings focuses on the way in which theorisations of kairos shift over time, the development of a unified global chronotic imaginary was itself a contested process, frequently interrupted by kairotic considerations. Second, while Hutchings is interested in western conceptualisations of kairos, recent work has shifted the analytical focus to those subject positions marginalised by such kairotic imaginaries.