Introduction

Abstract

To suggest that powerful narratives shape the theory and practice of international relations or that an analysis of communicative exchange has a role in the study of world politics is hardly avant-garde nowadays. Yet, as this book intends to show, terms such as ‘discourse’ or ‘communicative rationality’ have not always been used as self-confidently in the discipline of International Relations (IR) as they are today. While this book was inspired by a fascination for how the linguistic turn has made inroads into theoretical and empirical engagement with international relations, it intends to do more than just explore the impact of language on the discipline. This study has been written with two broad goals in mind: first, it speaks for the value of discourse in IR research, by exploring its current status in the discipline and suggesting the roads that discourse-based scholarship in IR could take in the future. Second, it exemplifies the fruitfulness and importance of discourse approaches to IR by discussing the effects of language and communication on a particular norm-setting process: the drafting exercise leading to the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1989. With this drafting process and its resulting international treaty, we have witnessed the emancipation of a subject in international politics — the child — that has long been neglected both as an agent as well as a research ‘issue’.