Description
This paper theorizes narrated (in)gratitude, understood as public storytelling in which someone is said to have expressed, or failed to express, thanks, as a discursive lever in international politics. Focusing on the Ukraine war, I argue that whether gratitude actually occurs matters less than how it is told and retold. Narratives of gratitude and ingratitude recast roles (aggressor as “civil,” victim as “entitled,” benefactor as moral judge), displace agendas (from accountability and law to tone and manners), discipline allies (by attaching support to demonstrations of deference), and invite resistance (by reframing aid as shared security rather than charity).
Methodologically, the study employs qualitative discourse analysis and within-episode process tracing across “episode packets” that pair principal utterances (speeches, readouts, interviews, leader posts) with elite media framing, official uptake, and counter-frames. Two core cases structure the analysis: (1) flattery narrated as civility in accounts of interactions between Russian and Western leaders, and (2) the “ungrateful ally” trope applied to Ukraine, contrasted with Ukrainian rhetoric of dignity, equality, and common values. Each episode is read for narrative mechanisms such as role recasting, agenda displacement, disciplining, and resistance, and for the ends they prepare or justify, including legitimation, conditionality, reputational punishment, and agenda control.
The paper contributes to affective and postcolonial IR by shifting the unit of analysis from gratitude as private feeling or ritual act to gratitude as a narrative object with political effects. It offers a portable mechanism set and a transparent, fully qualitative template for studying how stories about manners reorder wartime coalitions and the moral economy of legitimacy.
