Description
This article explores the relationship between temporality and identity. Temporality examines how the past, present, and future relate and interplay with each other. Examining identity formation and transformation through a temporal lens helps reveal how and why some identities, values, and norms have become more salient than others—an area that existing literature on identity in IR fails to address. Drawing on Heidegger, Ricoeur, and historical studies on temporality, I analyze the effects of temporal structures on identity-making through narratives. Doing so I come up with an analytical framework that demonstrates how self-identity is contingent to the collective social memory which is brought to live through the narratives of self in the frame of time. My analytical framework is useful for understanding rising powers’ preferences and interests because they are tied to their aspirational identities. Conventional explanations for the rise and fall of great powers argue that all rising powers are alike, because of their structural position and the presumed similarity of status ambitions. By bringing in the concept of temporality into the conception of identity, I challenge the conventional approach to rising great powers, arguing that each is different, because temporality constraints countries’ imaginations space. What countries think they are, is closely connected with where they think they are and where they are going.
