This panel advocates for the greater use of archival research in International Business (IB) as a rigorous and underutilized approach for phenomenon-driven inquiry. As IB scholarship increasingly seeks to engage with complex, real-world challenges, there is a need for methods that provide deep contextual and temporal insight. Archival research offers unique access to organizational processes such as internationalization, strategic decision-making, and historically embedded dynamics that are often inaccessible through “conventional” empirical approaches. By enabling scholars to uncover hidden, silenced, or overlooked aspects of global business activity and to trace their evolution over time, archival methods support stronger theorizing and richer contextualization. The panel addresses persistent misconceptions that reduce archival research to generic secondary data and clarifies its distinct epistemological and methodological foundations. It highlights how reflexive engagement with archives, and critically informed syntheses of historical narratives, can contribute to theory development rather than mere description. Overall, the panel positions archival research as central to a more methodologically pluralistic, contextually grounded, and impactful IB scholarship.