In this book's Introduction, I emphasized historical sensitivity as a core feature of the New Constructivism. But what is history in IR? Why does the New Constructivism have to be historical?

Beginning in around 2000, a historical ‘turn’ witnessed a proliferation of reflections on the relationship between IR and history, including assessment of IR's historical consciousness, advocation for a dialogue with international historians, lobbying against interpretive closure of historical events, rediscovery of the historical orientation of the English School, identification of narrative as an inherent feature of explanation, reconsideration of the assumptions about temporality embedded in different IR theories, examination of IR's historiography, and outlining of the potential of historical sociology, to name just a few contributions. Most of the debate's participants supported a historical turn. As Duncan Bell observes, ‘History, in its various manifestations, plays an essential, constitutive, role in shaping the present’; in mainstream IR, he goes on, ‘this has often been disregarded’.

The debate continues. But what, precisely, is at stake in the debate over history in IR? And why does it matter for the New Constructivism? What is at stake is the type of knowledge IR scholars should aim for, and, indeed, the relationship between theory and practice in international affairs. The surge in interest in history is part of the wider movement in the social sciences away from neo-positivism – a broad philosophical position on human knowledge and its creation that views deductive analysis of empirical sense-data as the sure road to scientific truth, as opposed to knowledge gained through argumentation, belief, faith, and so on, often equated with nonscience.Neo-positivism's dominance has clear disciplinary consequences, one of which is to relegate history to a storehouse of context-free ‘data’ and historical knowledge to second-class status.