The previous chapters have sought to demonstrate that contemporary International Relations theorising has been informed by a rather narrow Humean discourse of causal analysis that has been closely entwined with the empiricist and positivist currents of thought in twentieth-century philosophy of science and social science. Chapter 5 has examined some of the alternatives to Humeanism by discussing the pragmatist and the philosophically realist frameworks. These frameworks have sought to challenge the basic precepts of the Humean philosophy of causation, and a handful of IR theorists, Suganami, Wendt, Dessler, Wight and Patomäki, drawing on them, have taken some steps towards rethinking causal analysis in IR. This chapter seeks to build on, but also to go beyond, the previous attempts to reconfigure the nature of causal analysis in IR. It seeks to develop a coherent non-Humean account of cause that both ‘deepens’ and ‘broadens’ the meaning of the term ‘cause’ and that, thereby, enables us to address some of the central theoretical problems that the rationalists and the reflectivists as well as the rethinkers have had with causation in IR.

The first section of this chapter will draw out the nature and implications of the so-called Humean problem-field in IR theorising by summarising the main problems of causal analysis amongst the different theoretical traditions in IR. We will, then, tackle the problems that characterise different IR theoretical approaches through advancing a two-pronged argument. First, drawing on the philosophical realism of Roy Bhaskar, I argue that we should give causation ‘deep ontological’ meaning.