George Lawson IR436 - Theories of international relations: narrative (week 20) Lecture slides Original citation: Lawson, G. (2012) IR436 - Theories of international relations: narrative (week 20). [Teaching Resource] © 2012 The Author This version available at: Available in LSE Learning Resources Online: May 2012 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. This license allows the user to remix, tweak, and build upon the work even for commercial purposes, as long as the user credits the author and licenses their new creations under the identical terms

IR436 Lecture George Lawson

What is narrative? Stone: elegant story telling; order and coherence; agency and causation White: poetic ‘emplotment’; aesthetically appealing stories; order vs. ‘surplus meanings’ Roberts: turning mess into connected sequences IR examples: Carr, Morgenthau, Allison

Why narrative? Idiographic: from the particular to the general, i.e. ‘joining the dots’ Historicism: interpretation and explanation; complexity and coherence; micro and macro Suganami on narrative: narrative as agency, contingency and cause

Sewell: ‘happenings’ as ‘events’ Image Placeholder Image: Historic painting of a clash between soldiers while surrounding buildings are on fire. Subscription resource: No Edited: No This image was removed due to copyright being held by another party.

History as theory History has social logics Events are stabilised All social science uses emplotment Therefore, we all tell superior stories QED: ‘Embedded theory’ and ‘encompassing theory’ are not so different after all

Image Placeholder Image: A Blue-footed Booby (bird). Subscription resource: No URL: booby.jpg Edited: No This image was removed due to copyright being held by another party.

Robinson and the ‘real mural’ Image Placeholder Image: Woman walking in front of a mural above a stone wall. Subscription resource: No Edited: No This image was removed due to copyright being held by another party.

What is the ‘proper perspective’? The other side of the street Next to the mural The centre of the street (N.B. careful of the traffic) Tacking between the detail and the abstraction Andrew Abbott: (relatively) fixed events as configurations, e.g. revolutions Configurations (i.e. enduring, regular, stable interactions) as ‘social facts’ ‘Social facts’ help us tell ‘good enough stories’, i.e. ‘causal narrativity’

Take a deep breath … Deepening and broadening: IR as polo mint and/or jammy doughnut Theory and ‘stuff’: remember that the Owl of Minerva only flies at dusk What is theory? Red and yellow and pink and green Enjoy your symptoms! Image Placeholder Image: A Polo mint. Subscription resource: No URL: images/Media/Pix/pictures/2004/07/27/PoloL ee2.jpg Edited: No This image was removed due to copyright being held by another party. Image Placeholder Image: A jam doughnut missing a bite. Subscription resource: No URL: /jam-doughnut_ c.jpg Edited: No This image was removed due to copyright being held by another party. SGOvD webmaster Free-photos.biz