Explanatory Games in International Relations

Explanation plays a central role in international relations (IR). However, as different conceptions of explanation inform our conduct of practices in IR inquiry, such centrality is far from being a settled matter in the discipline. These conceptions tend to be subsumed under broad dichotomies—such as explanation vs. understanding, constitutive vs. causal explanation, and positivism vs. interpretivism—which, in turn, generate a sense of a perennially divided discipline, obfuscating in this process the explanatory pluralism that characterises IR research. In this paper, I argue that different approaches to explanation coexist in IR, with different explanatory games being played by scholars in various fields of international inquiry. Explanatory games are characterised by constitutive rules, rules of representation, rules of inference, and rules of scope, all of which provide the basis for tailoring explanations. Scholars play the game that works best for their explanatory puzzles, following a specific set of rules that validate their form of explanation and thus achieve their research goals. Ultimately, explanation in the discipline is inherently plural. Examining this explanatory pluralism, therefore, requires investigating the rules of our explanatory games.