Theorizing Contingency in World Politics

Zhiqin Gao, The Ohio State University

Conventional wisdom in International Relations assumes that systemic change primarily results from the changing distribution of material or ideational factors. This structural determinist view is profoundly misleading. I argue that implicit and contingent causal relations underpin structures, and that the (re)configuration of these parametric conditions takes precedence over temporally and spatially bounded variables in explaining systemic changes in international politics. To develop this argument, I propose a theory of contingency that focuses on the conditions under which contingency events lead to systemic changes. The theory posits that historical processes become susceptible to contingency when initial conditions, together with exogenous and endogenous shocks, reconfigure the underlying pattern of causal relations in existing structures. I illustrate the plausibility of this theory using the history of European international politics during the long nineteenth century. I conclude with the following implication: deterministic theories yield problematic causal stories. Even though variables change across cases, many of these “variable-based” theories are effectively equivalent; what truly matters is whether the critical juncture conditions are met to produce a different pattern of causal relations.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 151. Contingency and Time in Historical Causality