Description
This paper explores the normative dimensions of the role of narrative in IR. Dilemma: The scholar can “call out” actors projecting false narratives for malevolent purposes, but narrative itself need not be true in politics. Snyder (2024) argues: ‘a liberal has to tell a hundred stories … A communist has one story, which might not turn out to be true. A fascist has just to be a storyteller’. The purpose of a storyteller’s narrative – their political imagination given form – is to convince, mobilise, affirm. Their audience does not seek empirical verification of the narrative because they do not need it. The ontological status of narrative is unrelated to its truth-content. Trump has arrived as an effective storyteller by trial and error. Koschorke (2018: 4) argues this is a wider pattern: ‘As in a vortex, mixed within [a narrative] are elements of truth, semblance, hearsay, ignorance, error, lies.’ We analyse the first six months of Trump’s foreign policy narratives and identify the normative frameworks actors home and abroad use to respond. This contestation allows us to open new questions missing in the critical IR scholarship since the ‘narrative turn’.
