The Cambridge Review of International Affairs is pleased to publish the fourth instalment of Volume 7, consisting of a Special Issue on ‘Stories of World Politics: Between History and Fiction’ made possible by our Guest Editors, Niyousha Bastani and Italo Brandimarte.
We leave it to the Guest Editors’ introductory article, ‘Stories of World Politics: Between History and Fiction’, to outline the central themes and questions raised by the nine contributions featured in this Special Issue. We recommend that readers consult this short article before delving into the other contributions, as it provides an excellent summary of the aims and motivations behind this Special Issues, in addition to the main crosscutting findings arising from it. It emphasises how, to date, the relationship between history and fiction has been underestimated in International Relations scholarship, even though scholars continue to question what is ‘real’ or ‘true’ in world politics. As all the articles demonstrate, it is thus important to consider the role that the fictions, narratives and stories of world politics have played in uncovering alternative ‘truths’ if we are to challenge the hierarchisation of history and fiction, whereby the former occupies the dominant position and leaves little space for the importance of storytelling and imagination in shaping international relations. The Special Issue echoes CRIA’s commitment to promoting historically-informed scholarship, with the Guest Editors—both of whom are former CRIA Editors-in-Chief—outlining how their focus was prompted by recent work in Historical International Relations and the subfield’s role in challenging our ‘sedimented epistemic imaginaries’ by asking new types of questions.
The fourth issue of volume 37 also includes three book reviews. Mujeeb Kanth reviews Shellen Xiao Wu’s Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China. Andrea Ghiselli reviews Dylan M. H. Loh’s China’s Rising Foreign Ministry: Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy. Finally, Andrew Latham and Anna Moan review Bleddyn E. Bowen’s Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space.
We thank all contributors to the issue, especially our Guest Editors, Italo and Niyousha, for choosing CRIA as the platform to present their research. We also wish to extend our thanks to our reviewers for their dedication and contributions to the journal, as well as to our editorial team.
As always, we welcome proposals for special issues (directed to the Editors-in-Chief). The journal is especially interested in contributions that can foster rich theoretical debates over global issues, critically engage with ‘historical IR’, and which centre topics, communities and experiences left at the margin of the discipline. We warmly encourage the submission of work by scholars who are marginalised in global structures of knowledge production or underrepresented in the discipline of International Relations. We also hope to attract more review articles that place three or more books in their scholarly context by drawing out common themes and debates. Review articles should be directed to the Features Editor, Say Jye Quah. Further details and submission guidelines may be found here.
We look forward to receiving your submissions and remain open to any questions you may have.
Co-Editors-in-Chief
Cambridge Review of International Affairs
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).