Narrative and critical imaginations in international relations

In all three sections -- conducted with three different groups of students throughout the three consecutive semesters I taught Methodology II - there was quite an equilibrium in the number of students who were able to articulate without resorting to academic jargon and those who had to resort to concepts and theories in order to explain their research choices and make themselves clear to the others. Whereas most students within the second major trend mentioned that they did not see a direct connection between their life experience and choosing IR as profession or a specific subject as research theme; students who were more successful in articulating what they thought to be their “I” in “IR” even mentioned that narrating to colleagues their reflections was more helpful than shameful and that it was a fruitful exercise in motivation to pursue their research projects. Some students mentioned that they have realized that studying and thinking IR was more a way of coping with specific parts of their life stories than anything else. A number of them even connected the idea of the “international” with the aim of being away from home.

In one of the sections, one student mentioned that after putting herself into this guided reflection, she could think of IR as something closer to her and beyond the image of academia and the “science” of analysing international politics. A few of them also connected their choice for IR and their current research theme as a way of being professionally successful -- and, curiously enough, “being successful” was sometimes portrayed as a synonym of working and making a life abroad.

As one might expect, there was a number of students adopting a more skeptical -- sometimes genuinely indifferent -- attitude regarding the role of narrative in academic research.

Nonetheless, during the three sections of these same two activities involving students' engagements with narrative IR, most students reported in various ways how they became more aware of their situation (some would call “positionality”) as IR students and, thus, could start perceiving the tasks of thinking and writing IR as “worldlier” experiences after performing these exercises in Narrative IR.

Concluding Remarks

This article was aimed at exploring some of the epistemological and methodological -- and, I would add, ontological -- implications of taking narratives seriously in the study of international and global affairs. Said's insights regarding the worldliness of texts helped to highlight the connection between text and context, and to understand the gap that scholars resorting to narrative approaches are trying to fill.

Conceiving IR as a field of knowledge and of IR theory itself as a “ensemble of stories” we tell about the world [Weber 2001: 129-130] appears as the fundamental assumption for those engaged with the discursive aspects of world politics and with narrative approaches in IR. In this sense, as Michael Shapiro argued almost three decades ago, what seems to be at stake in the narrative turn is “a change in the self-understanding that constitutes the field of social and political analysis”, in which “part of what must be rejected is that aspect of the terrain predicated on a radical distinction between what is thought of as fictional and scientific genres of writing” [Shapiro 1989: 7, quoted in Wibben 2011: 46].

The attention to how narratives make the world of international relations and, relatedly, the more emphatic turn to narrative approaches in IR thus address the politics of representation in the field in more than one dimension: i.e., what/who we understand to be within the realm of international and global studies (what is the world of international affairs); the terms under which episodes, voices and practices are deemed relevant in different world-framings within the discipline; and, more generally, how rethinking all these aspects in terms of representation reorients and complicates not only the way we understand global politics but also the very practice of narrating the international and the global as politically relevant. Among other things, such movement might open up spaces for reimagining IR (and its objects of knowledge) from other locations besides the great centers of knowledge production and decision-making -- one necessary step towards the search for decolonizing IR and other fields.

The last section of the paper tells the experience of teaching an IR Methodology course by using a narrative approach and focusing on questions regarding the place of the “I” in IR. Although results were mixed in terms of the number of students willing to connect with the activity and the task of thinking the connections and disconnections between their life experiences and their trajectory as IR students as well as their place as subjects in the world(s) of international and global relations, the overall outcome of the activity -- from both the student groups' reports on the activity and my own point of view -- was the possibility of opening spaces for reflections on positionality, theories and disciplines -- and borders between disciplines -- as knowledge stories/narratives in themselves, and academic research and writing as autobiographical endeavors. Opening up spaces for such themes and exercises in the classroom can pave the way for the “pluriversal” IR some scholars have been advocating for (see: [Blaney, Tickner 2017]), as it makes room for unauthorized voices and world frames to emerge -- may they be of small groups of young students in Brazil or of other subjects and groups in different parts of the so-called Global South.

eurocentrism international relation narrative

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