'Ned Lebow's new volume is a truly innovative, horizon-expanding and eye-opening work on 'causation' that draws political inferences from the history of visual art. The originality of the approach will stimulate new thinking about world politics, and the straightforward prose style and rigorous method of argument will raise the level of discourse in IR and meta-theory debates.' Fred Chernoff, Harvey Picker Professor of International Relations, Colgate University, New York
'In Constructing Cause in International Relations, Richard Ned Lebow deepens his inquiry into contingency and determinism of his earlier work on counterfactuals. His approach allows for contingent and contextualized generalisations, even forecasts, and yet steers clear of visions which simply qualify determinism as probability without really touching the underlying problems of either Humean or efficient causality. Written in a lucid and jargon-free manner, Lebow's book is not to be missed by anyone interested in causal mechanisms and interpretivist process-tracing, in fact by anyone who looks for a more solid methodological underpinning of qualitative analysis in general.' Stefano Guzzini, Danish Institute for International Studies and Uppsala Universitet, Sweden