Narrative Explanation and International Relations
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Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11922293 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hidemi Suganami (Aberystwyth University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 327-356 |
| Publication date | 2008-11-24 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Millennium Journal of International Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0305-8298 • E-ISSN: 1477-9021 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829808097643 |
| OpenAlex | W2086933173 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 69 |
One of the central concerns of International Relations (IR), as well as International History (IH), is to explain how a given event came to occur. However, the importance and effectiveness of narrative as explanation is often neglected in IR. By focusing on the structure and role of narrative causal accounts, this article argues that drawing a distinction between IR and IH on the basis of their treatment of narrative is senseless. In the course of the discussion, a number of standard philosophical distinctions underpinning mainstream IR are challenged: in particular, reasons and causes, understanding and explanation, history and social science, and history and theory. It contends that the historical mode of knowledge production is indispensable to IR in addressing its substantive issues. However, it also warns that if IR is to take advantage of history in this way, it should also take seriously the epistemological and political critique of history and the narrative mode of representation. It ends by taking a critical glance at the works of Hollis and Smith, Lebow, and Edkins, and identifies a number of important meta-historical questions that need to be addressed in order to deepen our understanding of our ways of knowing world politics
Epistemology · International relations · International relations theory · Linguistics · Mainstream · Narrative · Narrative criticism · Narrative history · Narrative network · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · Social science · Sociology · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law · Philosophy
(R)eimagining Resistance
Causal Inquiry in International Relations
Narratives in International Studies Research
A New Case for the Study of Individual Events in Political Science
‘Having Your (Digital) Cake and Eating It’
Narrative and Critical Imaginations in International Relations
Das causas na Ciência Política
Digital narratives in the South China Sea dispute
Narratives of Global Order and Re-Ordering from the Global South
Charting a Different Narrative in India–Southeast Asia Relations
History, International Relations and the Ottoman Empire
Social Modeling and Simulation for National Security
The Scandinavian International Society by Laust Schouenborg
Life narrative and the possibilities of self
Os eternos movimentos (in)disciplinares entre a História e as Relações Internacionais
Cuba y la OEA
Thinking and Talking About War
Hegemonic orders and the idea of history
The eternal divide? History and International Relations
Novel writing in international relations
Assessing Jean Lartéguy’s The Centurions for the past, present, and future of irregular warfare
Narratives modes and foreign policy change
Militarizing politics, essentializing identities
Transformed beyond recognition? The politics of post-neutrality
Symbolic stories of family in the language of peace
Worlds of our remembering
Critical Security History
Interpretivists in the English School
What Should We Expect of a Liberal Explanatory Theory
Interpretation, judgement and dialogue
Narrative and nuclear weapons politics
Towards the politics of causal explanation
Theory, history, and the global transformation
The insecurity of doing research and the ‘so what question’ in political science
Laughing off a Zombie Apocalypse
Change in International Society
Reification in IR
Women or Leaders? Practices of Narrating the United Nations as a Gendered Institution
Collective Memory and Problems of Scale in International Relations
Where to draw the line? Climate change-conflict-migration-terrorism causal relations and a contested politics of implication
On the Hume/Bhaskar contrast in philosophical metatheory of international relations
Power and cause
Causal claims and causal explanation in international studies
Causality, democracy support and the cult of the factish gods
Narrative time and International Relations
Causation, complexity, and the Concert
A call for hermeneutical perspectives on climate change and conflict
Narratives and the romantic genre in IR
Comparing IR plots
Enemies of the people’
Conspiracy and foreign policy
Young Soldiers' Tales of War in Nagorno-Karabakh
Narrative power
Stories we live by
Explanation, geopolitics, and liberalism
Fictional IR and imagination
Causal Explanation in Brazilian International Relations
O Anticomunismo Brasileiro e o “Front”
Conceptualising autocracy promotion as commercialisation
Narrating success and failure
The untold story
Interpreting the Uninterpretable
The heuristic application of explanatory theories in International Relations
Towards a social-relational dialectic for world politics
Last things
How is rape a weapon of war? Feminist International Relations, modes of critical explanation and the study of wartime sexual violence
Realism, empiricism and causal inquiry in International Relations
Contested stories of commercial security
"A room of one's own(?)" in battlespace - women soldiers in war rooms
| Unique citing works | 69 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 4,31 |
| Citation span | 2010 - 2026 (17) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 68 |