“…It also underpins a number of recent innovations in philosophically informed discussions of causality in IR that are not rooted in SR. These include Patrick Jackson’s (2011) demonstration that neopositivism is not the only properly ‘scientific’ approach to empirical and causal inquiry in IR, Ned Lebow’s (2014) concept of ‘inefficient causation’, and the investigations, in a recent collection on ‘Problems of causation in world politics’ (Humphreys, 2017a), into how causal understandings play out in contemporary world politics (see Betts and Pilath, 2017; Guzzini, 2017; Kurki, 2017), and into alternatives to the philosophically discredited covering-law model of explanation (see Humphreys, 2017b; Jackson, 2017; see also Grynaviski, 2013; Suganami, 2008). A puzzle therefore emerges: are critical realists right to contend that moving causal inquiry in IR beyond the search for regularities requires a philosophical revolution involving the widespread adoption of SR (Kurki, 2006; Patomäki and Wight, 2000)?…”