What This Book Is About

The conceptualisation of myth has a long, complex, and contested history. The etymological and conceptual roots of myth reach back to Ancient Greece, but much of the ‘modern construction of myth’ (Von Hendy 2002) is influenced by eighteenth-century Romanticism’s rediscovery and reinvention of the concept and its subsequent adoption, adaptation, and critique in works of theology, philosophy, psychology, literature, linguis­tics, social anthropology, and politics [for overviews, see Flood (2013), Lincoln (1999), Scarborough (1994), Segal (2004), and Von Hendy (2002)].

The authors in this book make a virtue of this conceptual complexity. On a theoretical and methodological level, they explore how myth-centred approaches can enhance our general understanding of international politics and world society. on an empirical level, they use these differ­ent concepts to analyse specific contemporary myths with regard to the agential-strategic, social-constructionist, and productive-performative sides of myth making and usage, as well as to myths’ ideological, naturalis­ing, and depoliticising and/or their constitutive, enabling, and legitimis­ing functions in different fields of international politics.

The double finding of an ideological and a constitutive side of myths runs through the book like a golden thread. This finding is not a contradic­tion—indeed, despite all conceptual differences and nuances, twentieth­century theories of myth in different disciplines share a general ‘persuasion that “myth” is the socially significant product of humanity’s irrepressible urge to construct meanings’ (Von Hendy 2002, 333).

This points to another common denominator of this book: myths are not understood as deviant exception, but as integral part of international politics and the related academic knowledge production, and they are dif­ferent from dominant logocentric understandings of knowledge. In this sense, the book challenges conventional understandings of international politics by showing how powerful narratives and commonly held beliefs provide the non-logocentric ‘glue’ for the contemporary sociopolitical order, but possibly also the ‘dissolvent’ that may help altering it. It also encourages rethinking ideas that are widely unquestioned by policy and academic communities and shows what functions and effects these com­monly held beliefs have in political and academic imagination and practice. Finally, the book 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.