Forget IR Theory

Abstract

Stories, so we are told by prevailing social science wisdom, are not part of international relations (IR) scholarship. Stories belong to the realm of fiction, not the domain of fact. And yet, stories freely whizz in and out of IR. Indeed, if we look more carefully, IR appears as nothing but a set of narratives that provide us with meaning and coherence. Consider how critical scholars increasingly portray the locus classicus of IR – the state, that is – not only as an institution, but also, and primarily, as a series of stories. These stories, Michael Shapiro points out, are part of a legitimisation process that highlights, promotes and naturalises certain political practices and the territorial context within which they take place. Taken together, these stories provide the state with a sense of identity, coherence and unity. They create boundaries between an inside and an outside, between a people and its Others. But by virtue of what they are and do, state-stories also exclude, for they seek ‘to repress or delegitimise other stories and practices of identity and space they reflect’.³

Tell me, draftsman of the desert,

Surveyor of the sinking sands:

Is the unrestraint of lines

Really stronger than the blowing winds?²

This is a revised version of an essay that originally appeared in Alternatives: Social Transformation and Humane Governance, no. 4, Dec. 1998, pp. 471–97. Some aspects, most notably the linguistic dimensions of the interaction between language and global politics, are explored in more detail in my Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).