Description
How do we make sense of the world? How does storytelling help shape, order, and give direction to our lives? These questions have a significance for all actors – whether the individual, the nation-state, a regional or transnational body – and how one understands what one’s role is in the world and what one’s objectives are in shaping the social structure that one is a part of. This paper explores the use of storytelling and how it has important implications for world politics. As per this point the paper focuses on US foreign policy and its ‘war’ against transnational terrorism in the post-9/11 context and the more recent construct of the ‘Chinese threat’ to global order. The choice of the United States is due to its significant role in shaping an evolving world order. In conjunction, how does storytelling facilitate an understanding of Washington’s role in the world? How does Washington rhetorically construct what the country stands for and what its interests are? And what are the (evolving) implications of this construction for its foreign interactions and practices?
