IR theory, history and retrieval in a time of genocide

This article foregrounds the ethical nature of the relationship between temporality and history in International Relations (IR) theory, in the context of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. The article contends that a retrieval of history is a defining feature of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. However, both mainstream and more critical IR frameworks, including those critical of how IR theorises temporality, struggle in different ways to account for subaltern historical consciousness, thus casting history as teleological, and as something to be repaired, caught up with or left behind. In response, the article introduces a conceptual distinction between repair and retrieval. Repair functions within a progressive temporal logic, seeking to redress past harms in order to improve the present and advance into a more just future. Retrieval, by contrast, inhabits a different temporal horizon: it re-enters the past to reclaim suppressed histories, materialities and political possibilities that continue to animate subaltern life-worlds and subaltern political demands. The article argues that the logic of retrieval better reflects the historical consciousnesses of peoples subjected to state and imperial violence, particularly in this time of genocide. Through an engagement with Palestinian struggles for decolonisation, it shows how subaltern temporalities contest dominant narratives of irretrievability and assert the enduring presence of worlds otherwise deemed lost in history. This ethical reorientation towards history and temporality challenges IR theorists to reconceive theory not simply as explanation or projection, but as a response to historical demands for decolonisation that remain unresolved and ongoing.