IR and the Art of Storytelling

IR as a discipline has to some extent engaged in self-reflection. A num­ber of scholars have explicitly focused on the history of IR and its over­lapping epistemologies with regard to International Political Sociology and Historical International Relations.

Unsurprisingly, the concept of ‘security’ has served as an attractor for various myths and narratives. Early examples are Morgenthau’s ‘anthro­pocentric worldview’, the neorealist assumption of ‘mutual threats’, and the calls for ‘hegemonic stability’ or ‘relative and absolute strategic gains’ (Freyberg-Inan 2004; Freyberg-Inan et al. 2009). Ann Tickner’s femi­nist critique of Hans Morgenthau’s classical realism has been seminal in carving out to what extent a male bias has pervaded Realist approaches,

thereby resulting in the creation of certain dichotomies centred around categories such as hard vs.

Another more recent wave of myth production has taken place in paral­lel to the rise of mainstream constructivism. The well-intended focus on ‘norms’ and the development of various concepts for the study of norms that privilege forms of liberal, voluntary ‘diffusion’, ‘learning’, and ‘trans­fer’ has tended to outshine constructivist IR theory’s epistemological biases. Norms have been presented as something entirely good, universal, and neutral, as, for example, Grovogui’s (2006) postcolonial rereading of human rights demonstrates. Indeed, almost two decades of constructivism have taken norms as a ‘taming force for good’, as the perseverance of early models such as the ‘norm life cycle’, the ‘spiral model’, approaches of ‘pol­icy learning’, or the assumption of an eventual ‘spill-over effect’ illustrates. Current debates on critical norms research now seek to challenge some of the inherent normative biases of earlier constructivism and develop a more pluralist/localised understanding of norm travel/diffusion with regard to the contestation of norms (Wiener 2009), their adaptation and localisa­tion for various contexts (Acharya 2004), and the problematique of norms as an educative, subjectivating force (for a critical norms research agenda: Engelkamp et al. 2014a, b).

We have also witnessed how the more recent postcolonially inspired debate on travelling IR concepts and alternative approaches to the international system beyond the West is developing (Acharya 2011; Acharya and Buzan 2007; Tickner and Blaney 2013). Its repercussions might challenge the foundations of IR in an equal manner as some of the earlier debates did. A central feature certainly lies in reconstructing IR’s affection with Eurocentric notions, which is driven by the inter­est to unveil how Eurocentrism as a powerful myth actually works—for instance, in creating a functional order based on dichotomies between ‘the West and the rest’ (Seth 2011), by mechanisms of universalisation and homogenisation, by a distinct understanding of central IR categories such as ‘actor’, ‘power’, ‘state’, ‘sovereignty’, or ‘democracy’ (Hobson 2012), or by deeply inscribed racialised or colonial orders (Vitalis 2015; Muppidi 2012). This also concerns the ways in which Western IR concepts travel, how they become diffused or localised, and how processes of hybridisation or contestation tend to happen.

While these trajectories of myth production have been influential dur­ing IR history up until now, my aim is not to take them as an intellec­tual foundation for conceptualising a ‘better’ IR theory that would unveil and eventually overcome such forms of myth production, as this would be a truly over-rationalist and hypocritical claim. Accept it or not—myth production is here to stay and will be an everlasting constant of theory development and paradigm shifting. Following the pluralisation of IR approaches, we can witness a multiplication of myths, and in fact new IR myths might just be lurking around the corner: be it myths deriving from the ‘practice turn’ in terms of how researchers approach and (re-) produce ‘the field’ as such, or be it IR’s obsession with borrowing methods from social anthropology (Vrasti 2008). Rather, from a post-positivist point of view, the aim would be to develop a kind of critical consciousness in order not to be misguided by IR myths, but rather to identify, retell, rewrite, and reshape them in a highly pluralist manner (cf.

In doing so, IR can be conceptualised as a kind of ‘storytelling’, struc­tured by certain narratives, tropes, protagonists, scripts, and tensions. This points to a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of methods and methodology that asks for the ‘meta-plots’ within IR stories and IR myth production. Without doubt, as IR theorists we have become famil­iarised with stories about ‘good regimes’, a ‘balanced world order’, or the ‘civilizing power of norms’ as part of our training in ontologies and episte­mologies. We might indeed have been active in multiplying those scripts, while the meta-plot, made up of a positivist world view and the demand to be overly ‘scientific’, remains largely unquestioned (cf. Jackson 2010).

Thus practising auto-ethnography as a form of critical standpoint epis­temology might in fact reveal some of the stories we have ‘grown up with’ and have been retelling and rewriting during stages of our research careers (for a broad range of autobiographical accounts by IR researchers, see Inayatullah 2011). In so doing, this kind of self-reflexive experiment could also serve as a starting point for methodological debates and discoveries that pave the way to an understanding of methods not as facilitating and value-neutral bridges between subjectivity and objectivity but as a perfor­mative and political practice, for which we as engaged researchers (or ‘pub­lic intellectuals’) carry responsibility (Aradau and Huysmans 2014, 598).