Anachronism and International Relations theory

International Relations (IR) theorists have increasingly embraced global history to correct disciplinary myths and develop more inclusive theories of world politics. While this expansion promises to broaden the theoretical foundations of the field, we argue that it increases the risk of structural anachronism—the embedding of later-developed knowledge into the very construction of the historical record. Drawing on insights from historical methods, archival sciences, and the philosophy of history, we show how two retrospective processes—information-destroying, which shapes what is preserved, and information-obscuring, which governs how that information is organized—flatten ideational variation in the historical record and distort the evidentiary foundations on which scholars depend for testing and building theories of world politics. These distortions impact both positivist and interpretivist approaches to global history, leading scholars to make false positives, project coherence onto fragmented pasts, and underestimate the degree of historical change. As a result, efforts to globalize IR may reproduce the disciplinary myths and conceptual blind spots it aspires to overcome. We illustrate these dynamics through recent research on war and international order, and conclude with a paradox for IR theory’s relationship to history: As theory evolves, it can obscure the past by altering the very record it seeks to explain. This paradox calls for greater reflexivity about the epistemic costs of theorizing from structurally distorted records.