Adam R. C. Humphreys and Hidemi Suganami, "Causal Inquiry in International Relations" (Oxford UP, 2024)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Sep 20, 2025 · 1h 30m

Causal Inquiry in International Relations (Oxford UP, 2024) by Adam R. C. Humphreys and Hidemi Suganami defends a new, philosophically informed account of the principles which must underpin any causal research in a discipline such as International Relations. Its central claim is that there is an underlying logic to all causal inquiry, at the core of which is the search for empirical evidence capable of ruling out competing accounts of how specific events were brought about. Although this crucial fact is obscured by the ‘culture of generalization’ which predominates in contemporary social…