Explanation plays a central role in international relations (IR). However, as different conceptions of explanation inform our conduct of practices in IR inquiry, such centrality is far from being a settled matter in the discipline. These conceptions tend to be subsumed under broad dichotomies—such as explanation vs. understanding, constitutive vs. causal explanation, and positivism vs. interpretivism—which, in turn, generate a sense of a perennially divided discipline, obfuscating in this process the explanatory pluralism that characterises IR research. In this paper, I argue that different approaches to explanation coexist in IR, with different explanatory games being played by scholars in various fields of international inquiry. Explanatory games are characterised by constitutive rules, rules of representation, rules of inference, and rules of scope, all of which provide the basis for tailoring explanations. Scholars play the game that works best for their explanatory puzzles, following a specific set of rules that validate their form of explanation and thus achieve their research goals. Ultimately, explanation in the discipline is inherently plural. Examining this explanatory pluralism, therefore, requires investigating the rules of our explanatory games.

中文翻译：

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国际关系中的解释性游戏


解释在国际关系（IR）中发挥着核心作用。然而，由于不同的解释概念影响着我们在国际关系研究中的实践行为，这种中心性远不是该学科中的一个固定问题。这些概念往往被纳入广泛的二分法中——例如解释与理解、构成性解释与因果解释、实证主义与解释主义——这反过来又产生了一种长期分裂的学科的感觉，在这个过程中混淆了解释性的多元化。这是 IR 研究的特点。在本文中，我认为不同的解释方法在国际关系中并存，国际研究不同领域的学者们玩着不同的解释游戏。解释性博弈的特点是构成规则、表示规则、推理规则和范围规则，所有这些都为定制解释提供了基础。学者们玩最适合他们的解释性难题的游戏，遵循一组特定的规则来验证他们的解释形式，从而实现他们的研究目标。最终，该学科的解释本质上是多元的。因此，要检验这种解释性的多元化，就需要研究我们的解释性游戏的规则。