Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T13:40:17.192Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Fictional IR and imagination: Advancing narrative approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2014

SUNGJU PARK-KANG
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In the field of International Relations (IR), narrative approaches and an alternative way of writing seem to have gained growing attention in recent scholarship. Autoethnography and autobiography can be taken as primary examples. The article aims to advance this growing scholarship by proposing the concept of fictional IR. The idea is concerned with how to use the imagination in IR. I suggest that fiction writing can become a method for dealing with lack of information and contingency surrounding it. Fictional IR is more than reading and using fiction as a reference source or vehicle for analysis. It can incorporate the employment of fiction writing in IR scholarship. One of the benefits could be to articulate sensitive and complicated problems in a more flexible and imaginative way, making the most of the power of story and imagination. It should be stressed that the focal point is to write fiction; it is not to write about fiction. To support this suggestion, the article offers a short fictional-factual story. By using imagination, creating characters, combining data with fictional narrative, or with one's own experience, I believe that more original and empathetic IR writing is possible.

Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , April 2015 , pp. 361 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For example, Review of International Studies published forum articles on this subject in 2010. Other important examples include, to name a few, Wibben, Annick T. R., Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach (London: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar; Inayatullah, Naeem (ed.), Autobiographical International Relations: I, IR (London: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar; Weber, Cynthia, I am an American: Filming the Fear of Difference (Bristol: Intellect, 2011)Google Scholar; Dauphinee, Elizabeth, The Politics of Exile (London: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar; Ling, L. H. M., Imagining World Politics: Sihar & Shenya, A Fable for Our Times (London: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar; Löwenheim, Oded, The Politics of the Trail: Reflexive Mountain Biking Along the Frontier of Jerusalem (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is also important to note the following developments: the recent launch of Journal of Narrative Politics (2014) and the initiatives of new IR journals, such as Critical Studies on Security (2013) and Critical Military Studies (forthcoming 2015), that receive fiction or poetry in their special sections.

2 For ‘writing about fiction’, see among others, Weldes, Jutta (ed.), To Seek Out New Worlds: Science Fiction and World Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neumann, Iver B. and Nexon, Daniel H. (eds), Harry Potter and International Relations (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006)Google Scholar; Moore, Cerwyn, ‘On Cruelty: Literature, Aesthetics and Global Politics’, Global Society, 24:3 (2010), pp. 311–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hutchison, Emma, ‘Unsettling Stories: Jeanette Winterson and the Cultivation of Political Contingency’, Global Society, 24:3 (2010), pp. 351–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Sylvester, Christine, Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 307–13Google Scholar.

3 Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 1Google Scholar.

4 Shepherd, Laura J., Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 10, emphasis addedGoogle Scholar.

5 Richardson, Laurel, ‘Writing: A Method of Inquiry’, in Denzin, Norman K. and Lincoln, Yvonna S. (eds), The Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd edn, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2000), p. 925Google Scholar.

6 Brinkmann, Svend, ‘Literature as Qualitative Inquiry: The Novelist as Researcher’, Qualitative Inquiry, 15:6 (2009), p. 1388CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Ramsden, Maureen A., ‘The Play and Place of Fact and Fiction in the Travel Tale’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 36:1 (2000), p. 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Brinkmann, ‘Literature as Qualitative Inquiry’.

8 Denzin, Norman K., ‘The Facts and Fictions of Qualitative Inquiry’, Qualitative Inquiry, 2:2 (1996), pp. 230–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hollowell, John, Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

9 For more on the discussion of fact and fiction, see among others, Davis, Lennard J., Factual Fictions: The Origin of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Fishkin, Shelly Fisher, From Fact to Fiction: Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Denzin, Norman K., Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Banks, Anna and Banks, Stephen P. (eds), Fiction and Social Research: By Ice or Fire (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 1998)Google ScholarPubMed; Rosenblatt, Paul C., ‘Interviewing at the Border of Fact and Fiction’, in Gubrium, Jaber F. and Holstein, James A. (eds), Handbook of Interview Research (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2002), pp. 893–909Google Scholar.

10 Ellis, Carolyn and Bochner, Arthur P., ‘Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity’, in Denzin, Norman K. and Lincoln, Yvonna S. (eds), The Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd edn, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2000), pp. 733–68Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., pp. 740–1.

12 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Women and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995 [orig. pub. 1987]), p. 14Google Scholar. The work of feminist IR scholar Elshtain seems to confirm the above observation made by Ellis and Bochner about personal-political-academic writing.

13 Doty, Roxanne Lynn, ‘Autoethnography – Making Human Connection’, Review of International Studies, 36:4 (2010), p. 1048CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Löwenheim, Oded, ‘The “I” in IR: An Autoethnographic Account’, Review of International Studies, 36:4 (2010), p. 1029CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Brigg, Morgan and Bleiker, Roland, ‘Autoethnographic International Relations: Exploring the Self as a Source of Knowledge’, Review of International Studies, 36:3 (2010), p. 791CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Doty, ‘Autoethnography’, p. 1049.

17 For more on the discussion of ‘self-indulgence’, see Sparkes, Andrew C., ‘Autoethnography: Self-Indulgence or Something More?’, in Bochner, Arthur P. and Ellis, Carolyn (eds), Ethnographically Speaking: Autoethnography, Literature, and Aesthetics (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2002), pp. 209–32Google Scholar.

18 Brigg and Bleiker, ‘Autoethnographic International Relations’, p. 790.

19 Dauphinee, Elizabeth, ‘The Ethics of Autoethnography’, Review of International Studies, 36:3 (2010), p. 803CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., fn. 9.

22 Ibid., p. 817.

23 Löwenheim, ‘The “I” in IR’, p. 1031.

24 Meanwhile, Iver B. Neumann, who holds two PhDs in Politics and in Social Anthropology, offers his reflection on Löwenheim's piece as follows: ‘I cannot see why it should be referred to as autoethonographical, not least because there was no writing … going into the data collection.’ He instead calls it ‘a successful exercise in IR autobiography’. Neumann, Iver B., ‘Autobiography, Ontology, Autoethnology’, Review of International Studies, 36:4 (2010), p. 1055CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 For example, along with the works mentioned earlier in a note at the beginning, see Zehfuss, Maja, Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Park-Kang, Sungju, ‘Utmost Listening: Feminist IR as a Foreign Language’, Millennium, 39:3 (2011), pp. 861–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sylvester, Christine, ‘TerrorWars: Boston, Iraq’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 7:1 (2014), pp. 11–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 I would say that there is an epistemological risk that one might take ‘the self’ as something highly autonomous, independent, and individualistic. In other words, the self could be read as a very much separated and singular being, as part of a Western-centric ideology of modernity. See also Doty, ‘Autoethnography’.

27 Dauphinee, ‘The Ethics of Autoethnography’, p. 812.

28 Löwenheim, ‘The “I” in IR’, p. 1027.

29 Freedman, Diane P. and Frey, Olivia (eds), Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines: A Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 2Google Scholar.

30 Inayatullah, Autobiographical International Relations, p. 6.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., p. 8.

33 Ibid., p. 15.

34 Ibid., pp. 103–17.

35 Ibid., p. 30.

36 Ibid., p. 161.

37 Ibid., p. 196.

38 Doty, Roxanne Lynn, ‘Maladies of Our Souls: Identity and Voice in the Writing of Academic International Relations’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 17:2 (2004), p. 378, emphasis in originalCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Inayatullah, Autobiographical International Relations, p. 383.

40 Ibid., p. 5.

41 Ibid., p. 7.

42 Apart from autoethnography and autobiography as scholarship, I would add that the self has frequently haunted academic publications across the disciplines. Consider acknowledgements or prefaces of books (and sometimes articles). They usually reveal authors' struggles to publish, ‘personal’ stories, research networks/interlocutors, families and even lovers, all of which could constitute the above auto-scholarship to some extent.

43 Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile, p. 1.

44 Ibid., p. 208.

45 Dauphinee, Elizabeth, The Ethics of Researching War: Looking for Bosnia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 1Google Scholar.

46 Shapiro, Michael J., Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 15Google Scholar.

47 Edkins, Jenny, ‘Novel Writing in International Relations: Openings for a Creative Practice’, Security Dialogue, 44:4 (2013), pp. 281–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For other discussions of the book, see the 2013 special issue of Security Dialogue, in which Edkins contributed this article.

48 In other fields, ethnographers and sociologists seem to have blurred the writing boundaries much earlier and more frequently. Feminist ethnographer Kamala Visweswaran explicitly states that ethnography is fiction and fiction is ethnography, and furthermore offers a short story. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). For imaginative/fictional writings and experimental ethnography, see among others, Behar, Ruth, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Richardson, Laurel, Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Ellis, Carolyn, The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004)Google Scholar. In IR, Christine Sylvester attempts to employ a fiction writing style based on her fieldwork in Zimbabwe. Producing Women and Progress in Zimbabwe: Narratives of Identity and Work from the 1980s (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2000), pp. 1–16. Cynthia Enloe offers a ‘feminist archaeological’ account of her childhood in relation to militarisation and femininity, in an unconventional way of writing. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 309–17. Marysia Zalewski's book shows another possibility. Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse (London: Routledge, 2013).

49 Ling, Imagining World Politics, p. xxvi.

50 Ibid., p. xxii.

51 Ibid., pp. 3, 95, 182, among others.

52 Anthony Burke, ‘Narrative, Politics and Fictocriticism: Hopes and Dangers’, The Disorder of Things, available at: {thedisorderofthings.com/2013/03/14/narrative-politics-and-fictocriticism-hopes-and-dangers} accessed 28 March 2013.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Muecke, Stephen, ‘The Fall: Fictocritical Writing’, parallax, 8:4 (2002), p. 108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Muecke, Stephen, No Road (bitumen all the way) (South Fremantle: Fremantle Art Centre Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

57 Kerr, Heather, ‘Sympathetic Topographies’, parallax, 7:2 (2001), p. 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Brewster, Anne, ‘Fictocriticism: Pedagogy and Practice’, in Guerin, Caroline, Butters, Philip, and Nettlebeck, Amanda (eds), Crossing Lines: Formations of Australian Culture (Adelaide: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1996), p. 92Google Scholar.

59 Burke, Anthony, ‘Life, in the Hall of Smashed Mirrors: Biopolitics and Terror Today’, Borderlands, 7:1 (2008), available at: {www.borderlands.net.au/vol7no1_2008/burke_hall.htm} accessed 3 August 2013Google Scholar.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62 Stephen Chan, ‘The Legend of Sursum Antigone and Under Tao One’, nthposition (2012), available at: {www.nthposition.com/thelegendofsursum.php} accessed 15 August 2013. For more of his fiction, see {www.nthposition.com/author.php?authid=324} accessed September 2011 and August 2013.

63 Jackson, Richard, Confessions of a Terrorist: A Novel (London: Zed Books, 2014)Google Scholar. I am grateful to Stellan Vinthagen for this reference.

64 Available at: {thedisorderofthings.com/tag/methodology-and-narrative-forum} accessed March and April 2013.

65 For more on narrative and IR, see among others, Wibben, Feminist Security Studies; Suganami, Hidemi, ‘Stories of War Origins: A Narrativist Theory of the Causes of War’, Review of International Studies, 23:4 (1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stern, Maria, Naming Security – Constructing Identity: ‘Mayan-Women’ in Guatemala on the Eve of ‘Peace’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Suganami, Hidemi, ‘Narrative Explanation and International Relations: Back to Basics’, Millennium, 37:2 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For narrative studies, see among others, White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Polkinghorne, Donald E., Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Lanser, Susan S., ‘Toward a Feminist Narratology’, in Warhol, Robyn R. and Herndl, Diane Price (eds), Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 674–93Google Scholar; Currie, Mark, Postmodern Narrative Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kearney, Richard, On Stories (London: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar; Czarniawska, Barbara, Narratives in Social Science Research (London: Sage Publications, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Andrews, Molly, Squire, Corinne, and Tamboukou, Maria (eds), Doing Narrative Research (London: Sage Publications, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bal, Mieke, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (3rd edn, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

66 Mills, C. Wright, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [orig. pub. 1959])Google Scholar; Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006 [orig. pub. 1983])Google Scholar. See also White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

67 Rosenberg, Justin, ‘The International Imagination: IR Theory and “Classical Social Analysis”’, Millennium, 23:1 (1994), pp. 85–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Adler, Emanuel, ‘Imagined (Security) Communities: Cognitive Regions in International Relations’, Millennium, 26:2 (1997), pp. 249–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Muecke, ‘The Fall’, p. 109.

69 Allison, Graham T., Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971)Google Scholar.

70 Ibid., p. vi.

71 Ibid., pp. v, 35, 39, 109, 112, 252.

72 Ibid., p. 35.

73 Ibid., p. 273.

74 This does not mean that there is no contingency when data is available or trustworthy. For instance, different evaluations and interpretations of the same data are always possible, which can constitute another level of contingency. The point is that this contingent aspect becomes highly operative when there are problems with data.

75 DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the official name of North Korea.

76 Suh, Dae-Sook, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

77 Wendt, Alexander, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 222CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Cha, Victor, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), p. 16Google Scholar.

79 Der Derian, James, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (2nd edn, New York and London: Routledge, 2009), p. xxxviiiGoogle Scholar.

80 Ibid.

81 Inayatullah, Naeem, ‘Pulling Threads: Intimate Systematicity in The Politics of Exile’, Security Dialogue, 44:4 (2013), p. 333CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 David Barry Gaspar and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘Afterword’, in Endore, Guy, Babouk (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991), p. 191Google Scholar.

83 Wibben, Feminist Security Studies, p. 43. Wibben makes a case for a narrative approach from a feminist perspective.

84 See also Park-Kang, Sungju, ‘Pain as Masquerades/Masquerades as Pain: Korea and a Woman Spy’, in Sylvester, Christine (ed.), Masquerades of War (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2015)Google Scholar.

85 Singer, David J., ‘Data-Making in International Relations’, Behavioral Science, 10:1 (1965), p. 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 Cox, Robert W., ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’, Millennium, 10:2 (1981), p. 128CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Sylvester, Christine (ed.), Experiencing War (London: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar; ‘War Experiences/War Practices/War Theory’, Millennium, 40:3 (2012), pp. 483–503; War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis (London: Routledge, 2013).

88 UNSC, ‘S/PV. 2791’, New York (16 February 1988); ‘S/PV. 2792’, New York (17 February 1988).

89 Richardson, Laurel and Lockridge, Ernest, ‘Fiction and Ethnography: A Conversation’, Qualitative Inquiry, 4:3 (1998), p. 331, emphasis in originalCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

90 Keohane, Robert O., ‘Beyond Dichotomy: Conversations Between International Relations and Feminist Theory’, International Studies Quarterly, 42:1 (1998), p. 196CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Thies, Cameron G., ‘A Pragmatic Guide to Qualitative Historical Analysis in the Study of International Relations’, International Studies Perspective, 3:4 (2002), pp. 351–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bennett, Andrew and Elman, Colin, ‘Complex Causal Relations and Case Study Methods: The Example of Path Dependence’, Political Analysis, 14:3 (2006), pp. 250–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91 Keen, Suzanne, ‘A Theory of Narrative Empathy’, Narrative, 14:3 (2006), p. 208, emphasis addedCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 Crowther, Jonathan (ed.), Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 392, emphasis addedGoogle Scholar.

93 Coplan, Amy and Goldie, Peter (eds), Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. xxxiii, emphasis addedCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 Most notably, Sylvester, Christine, ‘Empathetic Cooperation: A Feminist Method for IR’, Millennium, 23:2 (1994), pp. 315–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.