Description
The origins of the discipline of International Relations is deeply steeped in bias – bias that the continental European powers had against the new worlds they were ‘discovering’, bias that enables issues of high politics to be paramount in our policy making agendas, bias that ensures national security is the primary concern of all decision and disciplinary concerns; the western bias, the realist bias, the conflict bias, the gender bias – as the world evolves to include more variables the disciplinary core has to come face to face with tenuous demands. Whose international relations then becomes a complicated question.
A possible solution for this conundrum lies in the narrative approach. As a methodology to unpack how the world around us is brought to life, the narrative approach remains under utilised in the discipline of International Relations, used primarily as a means to conduct foreign policy analysis where the narratives are seen as sites of meaning making. However, the approach delineates the narrators as the meaning makers. That is to say by utilising the narrative approach in its other form, one that gives space to self-insertion and reflexivity we can overcome the issue of subjective biases. When given the chance to self-inspect, reflect, and respond the narrators of the world can lay bare their cognitive inclinations – rendering what was once subconscious bias- to self-aware context. A reflexive interpretivist narrative approach can help us in locating the narrator in the worlds they narrate, thereby acknowledging how they shape the worlds they are researching and how they are shaped by the world as the researcher.
