How do our concepts of the world shape how we understand the world?
POWERFUL: “There’s nothing more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it,” according to Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones. Working from that, NUPI's Halvard Leira and Oliver Kessler discuss how traditional stories of international relations continue to dominate the International Relations discipline, despite having been debunked and busted as myths in a recent article.
In the project CHOIR (A Conceptual History of International Relations), financed by the Research Council of Norway, an international team of researchers explore basic concepts of international relations and how conceptual history can help us understand the world around us better. Two of the participants in the project (PI Halvard Leira and Oliver Kessler of the University of Erfurt) have published articles on this topic in leading international journals.
In “Stories we live by: the rise of Historical IR and the move to concepts”, published in Cambridge Review of International Affairs, the authors start by quoting Tyrion Lannister (of Game of Thrones fame) to the effect that “There’s nothing more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it”. Working from that, they discuss how traditional stories of international relations continue to dominate the International Relations discipline, despite having been debunked and busted as myths. To a large part, this is caused by reading the past thorough current concepts, concepts which were unavailable (and indeed inconceivable) in the past. One possible solution, presented in the article, consists in taking conceptual history seriously and exploring how past concepts might open up new horizons of understanding of the past, present and future.
In the companion article “The future is just another past”, published in Review of International Studies, Leira and Kessler utilise the insights from conceptual history to problematise a simplistic futurology which simply extrapolates the future from the present. They start by demonstrating how core concepts of international relations have changed significantly over the last two centuries. Based on this discussion, they highlight how conceptual history can help us grasp a future where concepts are changing rapidly, albeit evolutionary, and the challenges inherent in understanding a future beyond a potential conceptual revolution.