Narrative Global Politics

This volume harnesses the virtual explosion of narrative writing in contemporary academic international politics. It comprises a prologue, an epilogue, and sixteen chapters that both build upon and diversify the success of the 2011 volume Autobiographical International Relations. Here, as in that volume, academics place their narratives in the context of world politics, culture, and history. Contributors explore moments in their academic lives that are often inexpressible in the standard academic voice and which, in turn, require a different way of writing and knowing. They write in the belief that academic IR has already begun to benefit from a different kind of writing—a stylae that retrieves the "I" and explicitly demonstrates its presence both within the world and within academic writing. By working within the overlap between theory, history, and autobiography, these chapters aim to increase the clarity, urgency, and meaningfulness of academic work. Highlighting the autoethnographic and autobiographic turn in critical international relations, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars in international relations, IR theory and global politics.

This book systematically explores how different theoretical concepts of myth can be utilised to interpretively explore contemporary international politics. From the international community to warlords, from participation to effectiveness – international politics is replete with powerful narratives and commonly held beliefs that qualify as myths. Rebutting the understanding of myth-as-lie, this collection of essays unearths the ideological, naturalising, and depoliticising effect of myths. Myth and Narrative in International Politics: Interpretive Approaches to the Study of IR offers conceptual and methodological guidance on how to make sense of different myth theories and how to employ them in order to explore the powerful collective imaginations and ambiguities that underpin international politics today. Further, it assembles case studies of specific myths in different fields of International Relations, including warfare, global governance, interventionism, development aid, and statebuilding. The findings challenge conventional assumptions in International Relations, encouraging academics in IR and across a range of different fields and disciplines, including development studies, global governance studies, strategic and military studies, intervention and statebuilding studies, and peace and conflict studies, to rethink ideas that are widely unquestioned by policy and academic communities.

This book presents an innovative approach to research in International Relations by examining 12 theoretical contributions to the field as competing narrative bids. It demonstrates the pervasive nature of storytelling and considers narratives as a means of causal explanation in the human sciences. By introducing four classic literary plot structures with their respective characters, events, moods and denouements, the book divides IR literature into tragedies, romances/epics, comedies and ironic/satirical stories. For each plot type, its characteristic features, logic and appeal are first reprised through some well-known prose examples before being employed in the analysis of major IR texts. King Lear, for example, helps bring out the tragic logic of Politics among Nations, and Sleeping Beauty demonstrates the romantic appeal inherent in The End of History. Twelfth Night is used to approach The Transformation of Political Community as a comedy, and A Modest Proposal paves the way for the examination of Bananas, Beaches and Bases as irony/satire. Rather than assess the absolute merits and shortcomings of the competing theories, the book discusses the relative strengths and weaknesses of stories that adhere to different plots in giving meaning to actors and events in the international arena. Discussing a broad range of theories, this text will be of interest to scholars and students of International Relations and World Politics, including various subcommunities such as specialists in peace research and Feminist IR.

Narrative Politics explores two puzzles. The first has long preoccupied social scientists: How do individuals come together to act collectively in their common interest? The second is one that has long been ignored by social scientists: Why is it that those who promote collective action so often turn to stories? Why is it that when activists call for action, candidates solicit votes, organizers seek new members, generals rally their troops, or coaches motivate their players, there is so much story-telling? Frederick W. Mayer argues that answering these questions requires recognizing the power of story to overcome the main obstacles to collective action: to surmount the temptation to free ride, to coordinate group behavior, and to arrive at a common understanding of the collective interest. In this book, Mayer shows that humans are, if nothing else, a story-telling, story-consuming animal. We use stories to make sense of our experience and to imbue it with meaning-our self-narratives define our sense of identity and script our actions. Because we are constituted by narrative, we can be moved by the stories told to us by others. That is why leaders who call a community to action seek to frame their invocations in a story in which tragedy and triumph hang in the balance, in which taking part in the collective action becomes a moral imperative rather than a matter of calculated self-interest. Drawing on insights from neuroscience and behavioral economics, political science and sociology, history and cultural studies, literature and narrative theory, Narrative Politics sheds light on a wide range of political phenomena from social movements to electoral politics to offer lessons for how the power of story fosters collective action.

Showcases a range of empirical studies that highlight the potential, inclusivity, and durability of the strategic narrative approach to International Relations

Communication is central to how we understand international affairs. Political leaders, diplomats, and citizens recognize that communication shapes global politics. This has only been amplified in a new media environment characterized by Internet access to information, social media, and the transformation of who can communicate and how. Soft power, public diplomacy 2.0, network power – scholars and policymakers are concerned with understanding what is happening. This book is the first to develop a systematic framework to understand how political actors seek to shape order through narrative projection in this new environment. To explain the changing world order – the rise of the BRICS, the dilemmas of climate change, poverty and terrorism, the intractability of conflict – the authors explore how actors form and project narratives and how third parties interpret and interact with these narratives. The concept of strategic narrative draws together the most salient of international relations concepts, including the links between power and ideas; international and domestic; and state and non-state actors. The book is anchored around four themes: order, actors, uncertainty, and contestation. Through these, Strategic Narratives shows both the possibilities and the limits of communication and power, and makes an important contribution to theorizing and studying empirically contemporary international relations. International Studies Association: International Communication Best Book Award

A cutting-edge contribution to the aesthetic turn in international relations scholarship, this book exposes the role of poetic techniques in constituting the reality of international politics. It has two symmetrical goals: to illuminate the nonempirical fictions of factual international relations literature, and to highlight the real factual inspirations and implications of contemporary international relations fiction. Employing narrative theory developed by Hayden White, the author examines factual and fictional accounts of world affairs ranging from the anarchy narrative, central to mainstream international relations research, to novels by Don DeLillo and Milan Kundera. Chapters analyzing factual literature flesh out its unacknowledged inventions, while those dedicated to fiction explain its political roots and agenda. Throughout, the distinction between factual and fictional representations of international relations breaks down. Social-scientific narratives emerge as exercises in rhetoric: the art and politics of persuasion through language. Artistic narratives surface as real pedagogical lessons and exercises in political activism. The volume challenges the autonomy of academic international relations as an exclusive purveyor of serious knowledge about world affairs and calls for active engagement with literary art. It will be of interest to scholars of International Relations, Political Theory, Historiography, Cultural Theory, and Literary Studies and Criticism.

Broken Narrative provides an extensive reflection on history, politics, and contemporary art, revolving around the cornerstones of the artistic practice of Albanian artist Armando Lulaj. The core of the book is formed by and extended interview of Lulaj by Italian artist and writer Marco Mazzi. This inquiry starts in the year 1997, a year of social and political upheaval in Albania, of anarchy, controversies and emigration, of toxic seeds of neoliberalism sprouting in an already wounded country, and continues to the present day, where politics, hidden behind art forms, has practically destroyed (again) every different and possible future of the country. This book also sketches out a connection between the recent Albanian political context and contemporary art by considering the realities of Albania as essential for an understanding of the dynamics of international power in contemporary art and architecture, and the role of politics therein. Broken Narrative comes in a bilingual English-Japanese edition, in part as homage to the subtle esthetics of Japanese poetry, which has inspired many of the Lulaj's works, while equally evoking the subversive films of the Red Army, active in Japan at the turn of the 1960s and '70s. Broken Narrative contains a double preface in English by Albanian scholar Jonida Gashi and in Japanese by photographer Osamu Kanemura. Armando Lulaj was born in Tirana in 1980. He is a writer of plays, texts on risk territories, filmmaker, and producer of conflict images. He's research is orientated towards accentuating the border between economical power, fictional democracy, and social disparity in a global context. His main topics of interest remain power, corruption and institutional critique. Lulaj has participated in many international exhibitions and film festivals. His works are part of various important private and public collections. Armando Lulaj is one of the founders of DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art. Marco Mazzi (1980) is an Italian photographer and writer living and working between Florence, Tokyo, and Tirana. Mazzi studied Contemporary Literature at the University of Florence and has also studied Japanese avant-garde art and visual poetry in Japan. In 2008, Mazzi founded the non-profit organization Relational Cinema Association within the University of Waseda in Tokyo. Mazzi was photographer-in-residence at The Department of Eagles (Tirana, Albania) during the conference Pedagogies of Disaster and for the project Lapidari, and he was the stage and still photographer for Armando Lulaj's Recapitulation (2015), commissioned by the 2015 Venice Biennale' s Albanian Pavilion.