Rethinking causal explanation in interpretive international studies

Abstract

This article develops a model for causal explanations amenable to interpretive International Relations (IR) research. A growing field of scholars has turned toward causal inquiry while stressing the importance of shared understandings, identities, and social practices for their explanations. This move has considerable potential to strengthen the contributions of interpretive approaches to IR. However, the article identifies shortcomings in the causal models on which this research is based which work to limit this potential. The article provides a detailed discussion of these limitations and offers an alternative model of causal explanations for interpretive IR. The proposed model builds on a clear differentiation between constitutive and causal analysis and supplies an explicit argument for how they can be combined to generate causal explanations. This paves the way for a more well-defined notion of causal explanation than has commonly been the case in interpretive IR. In doing so, it also offers a more coherent and detailed account of the points at which interpretive explanations intersect with more mainstream approaches and where they differ. Finally, the paper outlines an application of the model through a discussion on an updated form of interpretive process tracing (IPT).

The Institutional Ingredients of Polycrisis Management: Unpacking European Council’s Handling of the Energy Crisis

“…PT and interpretivist/ethnographic approaches have much in common, particularly in how they seek to analyse contextualized social processes, as actions of and interactions between sense-making actors and their effects (Falleti & Lynch, 2009;Robinson, 2017). This explains recent attempts to integrate the two approaches under various labels like social PT, interpretivist PT, or practice tracing (Adler-Nissen, 2016;Norman, 2021;Pouliot, 2014).…”

Dealing with Political Violence in Conflicted Democracies: Transitional Justice in Lebanon and Kenya from a Comparative Perspective

“…In light of the research variables, I consider both positivist and interpretivist epistemological approaches in this thesis. To maintain a causal logic but at the same time enrich it with an interpretative element, I conduct the case studies through a version of process tracing that includes "open causality" (Guzzini, 2017) by adding an interpretive perspective to it (Norman, 2015;Norman, 2021). Such approach, known as interpretive process tracing (IPT), is a way of being open for newly emerging factors and questions -adding possible "emerging factors" to the dependent variablerather than just conducting tests of pre-defined hypotheses, as well as a means of connecting both "what" and "how", as explained in the chapter Methodology (4.3).…”

“…To materialise the conjunction of the "what" and the "how," I conduct case studies through process tracing for causal explanation (O'Mahoney, 2015) but enrich it with an interpretive perspective. Such approach is known as interpretivist (Guzzini, 2012)/interpretive (Norman, 2015;Norman, 2021) process-tracing (IPT), which combines descriptive and interpretive approaches. The descriptive part in the case studies is characteristic of historical process tracing, since I follow a timeline of events in order to analyse the phenomenon of interest.…”