Description
This panel seeks to discuss the layers of myths, narratives, and tales that are written onto our understandings of complex, nuanced, and messy events, issues, and bodies, both past and present. We hope to spark a conversation around how the (sometimes desperate) search for a singular and cohesive narrative within and across the diversity of IR can be seen as a way of attempting to write certainty onto uncertainty.
As we grapple with increasingly uncertain times – from witnessing genocide to the ever-present climate crisis – this panel seeks to uncover the ways in which states and societies attempt to mediate this fear of the unknown through the reliance on simplistic and cohesive narratives. Whether through falling back on tried and tested binaries such as good versus evil or civilian versus terrorist, or weaponising gendered stereotypes, the panel troubles the comforting tales that IR tells itself as a way of dealing with such a vast, and often contradictory, discipline.
