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: http://learningresources.lse.ac.uk/120/ 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. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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IR436 Lecture 20 2011-12 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’

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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

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Robinson and the ‘real mural’

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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!

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