Description
This paper places analytic attention on the discursive processes of forming and becoming to better understand how strategic ontologies shape what matters in international relations. It explores how political agents within the US defense establishment envisioned future war during the end of the bipolarity and with what effect. Using the example of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the paper shows that events in the international arena can drive forward the development of a new security plotline precisely because political agents assign causal properties to them. As the paper argues, interpreting events such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as the marker of a new era of uncertainty in international security that necessitated maintenance of US military superiority is the result of an agentic process that shifts the balance in favour of one narrative or another. Events shape but do not directly channel how narratives evolve.
