Description
From foreign and security policy, to political institutions, marginalized subjects, and war and peace, international studies scholars have become increasingly cognisant of the influence of narrative on global politics. Thanks to their ability to constitute (auto)biographical, historical, and temporal sensibilities, stories help identities form, actors act, policies legitimate, history unfold, and political scientists make sense of it all. Yet despite such advances, international studies has been comparatively less attentive to the links between politics and literature. This panel advances a ‘literary IR’ by exploring the impact of literature on political analysis, and by asking what treating political analysis itself as literature might entail and disclose. Authors put classics of modern literature, including fairy tale, science fiction, and existentialist drama in conversation with core international studies concerns like war, history, revolution, gender, climate change, and the discipline itself. These discussions are united by an interest in the narrative elements hidden in political phenomena as well as novel ways in which thinking about narrative function and form can help us understand and deliberate on politics in productive ways.
