Stories of world Politics: Between History and Fiction

Abstract

The discipline of International Relations is defined by a fundamental tension between history and fiction. On the one hand, historical approaches are crucial in tracing the origins of international order, contextualising key concepts, and uncovering marginalised voices. On the other, the discipline is invariably caught in its own mythologies, which shape what is “real” and “true” in global politics. Instead of treating the ambiguous distinctions between history and fiction as problems to be definitively resolved, this Special Issue takes up these tensions as generative for understanding, manoeuvring, and even disrupting and (re)imagining the field of IR. Examining these dynamics from several perspectives – from the writing of history to the political force of fictional imaginaries – the articles in this Issue show that the relation between history and fiction is a constitutive force of the international, in both theory and practice. Bringing together historical and critical perspectives, the Issue elucidates how ideas of history and fiction, reality and storytelling, facticity and imagination shape and are in turn shaped by world politics. Historical approaches to IR, we argue, can do much more than adjudicate between these amorphous categories. Here, we pursue the possibilities.

The stories that we, scholars of International Relations, tell about the world in our analyses cement—or indeed, disrupt!—powerful imaginaries of international politics. The seemingly "self-evident" truths of International Relations, which are and have been challenged by decades of critically-minded work in the field, cannot be dismissed easily as fictions. Not unless we understand that fictions (like "reality") are historically situated and historically productive. In putting together this special issue on “Stories of World Politics: Between History and Fiction”, we were motivated by what seemed to us to be an underestimation or misestimation of stories in International Relations—their reduction to mistruths to be defeated with historical facts, or conversely, an under-imagination of what else history and fiction do or can offer the field. Having formerly worked together as Editors at the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, our own desire to prompt scholarly discussion of the ambiguously connected categories of “story” and “history” in International Relations was prompted by the important historical work published in this journal in recent years (see, for instance, Çapan and Grzybowski 2022; Crilley, Manor and Bjola 2020; Hagström and Gustafsson 2019; Kustermans et al. 2022; Lemke et al. 2023). In this first section of this introduction, we point toward the questions and discussions this issue invites and pursues. We present our underlying motive to further imagine the intellectual and political possibilities that stories, histories, and their shifting relationship offer to the field.

The recourse to history as both an object of analysis and a methodological tool in IR does not follow a linear disciplinary journey (see de Carvalho, Costa López and Leira 2021; Lemke et al. 2023; MacKay and LaRoche 2017). Rather, Historical International Relations has often emerged out of a constitutive tension between history and historical methods, on the one hand, and IR’s disciplinary identity, on the other. The use of history is, on some level, inherent and complementary to the theory and practice of international politics. In this respect, historical approaches are crucial to contextualising contemporary international order, making sense of the causes and contingent trajectories of world political phenomena, and historicising core concepts that often look too abstract in IR (e.g., Bell 2001; Buzan and Lawson 2014; Çapan 2016; Hobson 2012; Vergerio 2019). At the same time, however, IR has its roots in particular disciplinary mythologies. The stories we tell about the field, which are then passed down to undergraduate initiates as some form of received wisdom, often rely on a narrativised (and carefully edited) version of its history. IR is therefore narrated in relation to particular founding figures, origin stories and dates, and universal theories that are abstracted and removed from the contexts and intellectuals that produced them. From this perspective, Historical IR has come to the fore by virtue of its debunking or “myth-busting” function. Historical work has been essential in exposing and challenging the discipline’s reliance on problematic narratives and conceptual foundations, which were at best inaccurate misrepresentation of historical reality (e.g., Buzan and Lawson 2014; Costa Lopez et al. 2018; de Carvalho et al. 2011; Zarakol 2022), and at worst deliberate omissions meant to exclude particular groups of people from the writing of the discipline—that is, from imagining world politics into being (Grovogui 1996; Krishna 2001; Odida 2022; Owens & Rietzler 2020; Rutazibwa 2020; Sabaratnam 2023; Shilliam 2010).

This Special Issue takes seriously these tensions as a background condition that has always been inherent to the work of Historical IR. Across a variety of contributions reflecting on issues spanning from the writing of history to the political value of popular culture and fictional imaginaries, the articles in this issue show that the relation between history and fiction is a constitutive force of the international, in both theory and practice. Fundamentally, this relation is informed by dominant ideas about what is “real” or “true” in world politics (see also Babík 2019). These have long been defining matters in the conduct of historical inquiry, negotiating the tensions between the idea that a seemingly objective historical reality exists and can be recovered and the awareness that the writing of history can be a tool of power (Trouillot 1995; in IR, see Auchter in Lemke et al. 2023; Lawson 2012). The question of truth has also been central to scholars working in critical traditions. As contributions in Critical IR have often highlighted, the assumption of a singular, uncontested truth is a political tactic that often serves the purpose of controlling, delegitimising and suppressing marginalised voices, rather than providing a shared understanding of global political community (e.g., Krishna 1993; Mabee 2022). In this sense, the possibility of making claims that are true, objective and epistemologically superior has been questioned at the outset of the Critical IR agenda (see Doty 1993; Price and Reus-Smit 1998). While work in Historical IR might be involved in re-writing a better history of the discipline, replacing “myths” with “facts”, critical scholars might themselves be wary of these moves as endless performances of epistemic power. In the discipline of IR, therefore, ideas of history and fiction, reality and storytelling, facticity and imagination are deeply interconnected, both in historical and critical work.

In foregrounding the relations between history and fiction in IR, this Special Issue seeks to move away from clear-cut distinctions between the two. Rather, we want to emphasise how any understanding of the relation between these terms is a political and historically-contingent matter in itself. IR, as we have suggested, is a discipline that is defined by a fundamental nexus between history and fiction, simultaneously caught between the historical reality of world politics and the abstraction and mythification of its dynamics. On the one hand, the hierarchisation of history and fiction—where the former occupies the dominant position—is a powerful and useful move, as demonstrated by scholarship focused on “mythbusting” dominant disciplinary narratives or recovering marginalised voices and agencies in the history of world politics. On the other hand, such hierarchisation might risk neglecting the role of storytelling, fiction and imagination in shaping and informing the history of international relations. For instance, popular culture and literary texts have often been key in shaping shared imaginaries of the international (Caso and Hamilton 2015; Weldes 2006) and informing the disciplinary study of International Relations (see Edkins 2013; Kirby 2017). Mythical imaginaries of racial superiority, at times crystallised as scientific ‘truths’, have historically fueled colonial violence and oppression (Bell 2020; Manchanda 2020), yet storytelling has also been used as a tool to expose dominant structures of power/knowledge and inspire political resistance (Edkins et al. 2021; Hartman 2008; Inayatullah and Dauphinee 2016; McKittrick 2020). Presuming a hierarchised distinction between history and fiction in International Relations, in other words, means ignoring how the fictions, narratives and stories of world politics have been essential in uncovering alternative “truths”, drawing the limits and possibilities of global violence, and ultimately writing the history of international relations. As scholars and subjects of world politics, the porous distinction between the historical and the fictional should concern us as a central site for the inscription of what counts as “International Relations” and, as such, as a political matter in itself.

We who have been educated in and are also educating in International Relations would be mistaken to seek comfort in reinscribing the “coloniality of truth”, to borrow from cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter (2003), even in the valiant pursuit of correcting or “busting” harmful myths of the field. Wynter (in conversation with Bedour Alagraa) argues for thinking “about education as initiation into a world full of symbols and descriptions about who we are” (Alagraa and Wynter 2021). In the realm of IR, we might consider how (and who) our discipline initiates into stories about world politics. This Special Issue offers a provocation to consider what may be possible if we (researcher-educators) avoid the slippage into a reinscribed posture of objective fact-finding and education in how international politics really” is and how it came to be so. Avoiding this slippage requires more than an acknowledgement of interpretive power in writing history (see also, in this issue, Costa Lopez). To glimpse what else may be possible, we must take several points seriously: the historical contingency of history/fiction distinctions and hierarchies; the political power of fiction; and the reality-shaping force (that is, the disciplining force) of our disciplinary imaginaries.

This Special Issue takes stock of and builds on historical work that is less driven by epistemic and ontological anxiety about Truth than it is by a curiosity about the relationship between history and fiction in IR. We want to highlight that the subfield of Historical International Relations has played and can continue to play a critical role in challenging our sedimented epistemic imaginaries and the disciplining force of IR by asking different kinds of questions. Instead of starting with whether a given narrative about international politics is more history or fiction, or with the aim of undoing the latter with the former, we might ask: how do these two amorphous categories relate to each other in our specific research?; how does this relation matter?; and crucially, how do we know our answer to the first two questions?

In the remainder of this introduction, we outline the contributions to this Special Issue, and their implications for how we approach stories of world politics, between history and fiction.

“Stories have their own historicity”

We start the Issue with two articles that directly reflect on how scholars of Historical IR might navigate the politics of history and fiction in their work to better understand the past, the present and the possibilities of the future. First, Julia Costa Lopez offers an alternative approach to the writing of Historical IR that recentres the specific task of navigating historical materials and writing history. In lieu of the habit of choosing from “an available menu of metatheoretical options and approaches” (Costa Lopez 2023, 2) to negotiate between history and fiction, Costa Lopez argues that this negotiation must necessarily be guided by the practical work of researching and writing history. The article shows this process in practice to make sense of and narrate the relatively limited sources available on the formation of the early Iberian Empire. Specifically, Costa Lopez skillfully manoeuvres questions of fracticity, emplotment, and genre. In doing so, Costa Lopez illuminates what is lost when we rely primarily on systematisations to negotiate history and fiction—the specific and situated politics of how the two relate. We might say that the metatheoretical options we (over)rely on are also “stories that we live by,” and that they occlude as much as they reveal.

The second article, by Halvard Leira and Oliver Kessler, turns to conceptual history to revisit the values of the “stories that we live by” in Historical IR. The authors begin with the diagnosis that, while Historical IR has productively challenged the narration of prevailing concepts in IR (like the state, sovereignty, modernity) through greater historical sensitivity, the pursuit of better” narratives is repeatedly frustrated by the old stories’ persistence—it seems as though “nobody can defeat them” (Leira and Kessler 2024, 3). This situation can be a prompt for scholars of Historical IR to imagine their own task differently, beyond “defeating” stories through empirical evidence. The authors suggest turning to conceptual history as an alternative avenue for approaching stories in and of IR and questioning their historicity. Examining the “stories we live by” in the field of IR through conceptual history can “tell us something about how in the past the future was imagined, which stories were forgotten, and thus about the contingencies that made our present stories possible” (Leira and Kessler 2024, 4). By questioning conceptual change and even ruptures, Historical IR can show the contingencies that made our present prism for understanding the past and present possible. “Stories have their own historicity” (Leira and Kessler 2024, 3), and this can invite different imaginings of our present and future.

Security stories, securing stories

The next two articles, especially when read together, invite reflection on the security politics of the stories that animate the field of IR, from colonial archives to contemporary experts. They turn our attention to how security stories are sustained and how they might be unsettled. Xymena Kurowska’s article develops the concept of “epistemic security” as a form of ontological security. To elucidate the workings of the concept, the author draws on magical realism” as a “ritualised script” of realist IR theory expertly” reproduced in dominant Russian academic discourse. In turn, the development of the concept shows how stories about the self and others more broadly are ritualistically secured in contemporary International Relations through epistemic security and the stories of “guardian experts”.

While the stories that animate the field can, and most often have, secured different modes of power, Alice Finden’s article grapples with research methods that promise to unsettle the security ‘truths’ of colonial powers and postcolonial states. The historical turn” broadly has brought attention to genealogical understandings of the colonial present” . At the same time, working with colonial archives—and with other archives of violent histories formative of our current world (see, for instance, Hall 2020)—raises a unique set of questions. Especially pertinent to our Special Issue are questions regarding how to engage with materials that perpetuate the “coloniality of truth” (Wynter 2003). Through her research with Egyptian participants who counter-mapped a British colonial map of Cairo according to their own gendered experiences of the city, Finden elucidates how a specifically decolonial feminist approach to counter-mapping can provide one promising methodological path toward unsettling security “truths”.

Science fictions

The stories we live by in IR, the next two contributions suggest, can also be disrupted by other stories. While historical approaches to IR sometimes assume that the fictions of the field must be defeated through “history-as-data” (Lemke et al. 2023, 9), fictional and “semi-fictional” engagements with history too can provide disruptive archives.

Hebatalla Taha looks to semi-fictional sources (memoirs, popular science books, even rumours) from the Arab world that reflect everyday engagement with the atomic age after the bombing of Japan. These stories, she powerfully argues, constitute an affective archive which, shaped by experience and sentiment, both precedes and disrupts dominant frames of deterrence and proliferation. As Taha indicates through an opening quote from Mahmoud Darwish—the national poet of Palestine—the violence of nuclear weapons “enabled scientific imagination to write the scenario of the end of the world” (Darwish 2013, 84–85; Taha 2023, 1). In turn, how people around the world made sense of, experienced, and imagined the global nuclear condition are both stories of world politics and stories that can disrupt its official archives and imagined trajectories.

Taking theoretical cues from postcolonialism and pragmatism, Aleš Karmazin analyses how fictional works as pop-cultural artefacts can deepen our understanding of “how the past is reproduced, how it informs thinking about the future and if the present may destabilise the past” (Karmazin 2023, 4). These are questions that effectively expand the concerns of Historical IR. Specifically, Karmazin analyses Remembrance of Earth’s Past, also known as The Three-Body Trilogy, by Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin, in relation to Chinese politics and the politics of developmentalism as a historical trajectory more broadly. While popular culture is often looked to in IR “as a proxy for political or ideological structures,” (2023, 2) Karmazin shows how (science) fiction can also articulate valuable internal and immanent critiques of them. In this case, the Trilogy draws out the limits of China’s developmentalist modernisation. The “popular culture-world politics continuum” (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009, 157; Karmazin 2023, 5), the author shows, can elucidate processes of meaning making that constitute and disrupt the historical.

Fictions of Man, the state, and war

The Issue’s final two articles focus on the political role of historical fictions in shaping Western liberal national and international imaginaries. Together, these articles vividly articulate how the blurred boundaries between narrative and history, and facticity and fiction, operate as the political scaffolding on which global racial hierarchies, modern militarism, and gendered and colonial notions of the state are built. David Morgan-Owen, Aimée Fox and Huw Bennett consider how storytelling and historical fictions about conflict are mobilised in the UK to produce sanitised and glorifying visions of Britain’s military history and the use of armed force today. Their analysis identifies three key strategies through which historical fictions are embedded in political “truth-telling” narratives: telling stories”, namely, the act of curating public narratives about Britain’s military past in museums and commemoration events; hiding past”, which involves the selective obfuscation of specific historical moments and evidence, especially in relation to Britain’s colonial past; and “knowing war”, which constructs the state’s stories about past conflict as the only truthful and authoritative knowledge about war. Reflecting on the uses and abuses of historical fictions of war and conflict, the authors turn to presentism as a historical method for unpacking the politics of historical fictions and interrogating the social and global hierarchies they sustain.

Concluding the Special Issue, Alister Wedderburn discusses the role of early modern expeditions to the Arctic in constructing England’s global (self-)image through its violent relation to the New World”. The article builds on the work of Sylvia Wynter, who sees Columbus’s voyages and the colonisation of the “New World” as key to the establishment of a global, racialising and hierarchical understanding of the human” (which Wynter calls Man”). Wedderburn highlights the importance of the Arctic as an often overlooked site in the historical formation of colonial understandings of humanity. Engaging with English sailor Martin Frobisher’s journeys to the Arctic through expeditionary narratives—a form of travel writing that sits uneasily between fact/fiction distinctions—the article shows how the English encounter with the Inuit called for a more explicit negotiation of the boundaries of Man, Blackness, and civilisation. While these discussions were important for moulding England’s identity as a superior imperial power, their conclusions regarding the status of the Inuit were often ambiguous and incoherent. Violence soon emerged as a preferred tool to address such uncertainties definitively. Through the analysis of forms of historical fiction that long predate the first European settlements in the New World”, Wedderburn further illuminates the genealogy of colonial categories that still structure the histories and mythologies of global politics many centuries later.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Niyousha Bastani

Niyousha Bastani is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Evasion Lab and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. She is interested in the global politics of race, care, education and psychology. She holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge. Email: [email protected]

Italo Brandimarte

Italo Brandimarte is a PhD Candidate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research explores the connections between the technoscientific dimension of war and security and their lived experiences, especially in relation to racial and colonial violence. His interests primarily span the fields of Critical War and Security Studies, postcolonial and decolonial thought, and Science and Technology Studies. Italo’s work has appeared in the European Journal of International Relations and International Political Sociology. Email: [email protected]