History in the plural: Reconfigurations of past–present–future

Abstract Narratives of the making of the international have a specific configuration of past–present–future that constitutes the unitary character of historical time and continues to reproduce spatio-temporal hierarchies. The article argues that the historical turn in IR has addressed spatio-temporal hierarchies through different timing strategies but has not sufficiently problematised the concept of History specifically with respect to unitary historical time. The article focuses on the problem of a unitary historical time; building on works that have underlined how the past, the present, and the future are not fixed entities given to us by an objective ‘truth’ but rather performatively constructed through different politics of time, it aims to develop an analytical vocabulary to further explore how to write history in the plural. How to write history in the plural will be explored through three different readings of the Haitian Revolution, underlining ‘timeliness/untimeliness’, dialogues between presents and pasts and futures, and past and multiple presents aiming to expand our analytical vocabulary in discussing the historical time of the international.