Is all ‘I’ IR?

Introduction

Scholars of International Relations have attended to various iterations of the question I pose in the title of this article, interrogating or defending the right of narrations of the self to enter a discourse that has routinely been sanitised. There are journals, teachers and writers who have asked if invoking the first person necessarily dilutes the study of politics in a way that is problematically self-indulgent. Nevertheless, concerns about the invocation of the ‘I’ have not been unanimous. Following modernity’s injunction that there are separate private and public spheres, feminist scholars in particular have insisted that the personal is political and that these spaces ought not to be thought of as mutually exclusive.

While this line of questioning about the right of personal narratives to enter IR clearly attests to the need to problematise a dichotomistic discourse and one that provokes further violence against already subjugated groups, it has taken up too much of the focus of the discussion about narrative in general and autoethnography in particular. Although narrative has only recently gained traction in IR and much of the scholarship utilising this approach is in the first person, narrative as method also includes works that take various other written forms. Because concerns about invoking personal accounts in IR scholarship paint a picture that is not representative of the different forms of narrative as method, and because well-written narratives open up new spaces in political science, I argue that this is not the question IR scholars should be asking when we talk about narrative. As is true of other approaches, the use or non-use of a method is not the primary and definitive question about the quality of the scholarship. This is partly because we cannot view either ontology or methodology as a precursor to the other since they exist in a state of interplay. The question we should ask is not if all of our personal stories, in whatever form they are written, can fit into an IR framework, but what constitutes narrative scholarship that promotes a rethinking of the foundational epistemologies of IR scholarship? In other words, how do we critique narrative approaches to IR? In the same way that we can look at empirical studies and critique the method for reasons ranging from the number of research participants to the lack of analysis of pre-existing literature, are we able to hold narrative up to a defined set of criteria and ask if and how it serves IR?

Before continuing, I should emphasise that narrative as method, in and of itself, does not necessarily make a specific methodological commitment. It is entirely possible to write a narrative account that reads as ideologically conservative. However, there are certain methodological commitments that authors of narrative ought to make. Regardless, there are those projects that approach narrative-styled writing in IR as merely a forum for insular and dubious truth claims. As Patrick Thaddeus Jackson discusses in The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, critical theory cannot simply exist as a set of beliefs about global ordering structures. There must be an additional methodological evaluation in order for critical theory to function as truly ‘reflexivist’ or self-aware scholarship. ¹

If that seems like a departure from the normative discussions surrounding critical theory, this is no surprise. Unfortunately, for the development of critical IR theory in general and narrative as method in particular, considerations of methodology have often been taken up by scholars whose commitments have not been to scholarship that illuminates and rejects power differentials, but rather to scholarship with a commitment to the world as it is. Jackson writes:

One of the challenges with identifying reflexivist IR scholarship, however, is that almost all of the authors I have mentioned would resist being labeled as sharing a methodology in the first place. The peculiar dynamics of the field (and, perhaps, of the social sciences as a whole) have resulted in a situation where the very idea of being explicit and self-conscious about one’s procedures of gathering and evaluating empirical data has largely been annexed to neopositivist procedures of hypothesis-testing, and dissidents seeking to do non-neopositivist empirical work have spent considerably more time criticizing the methodological approaches that they do not adopt than they have spent articulating an alternative methodology. ²

In line with Jackson’s critique, the consideration given in this article to narrative as method functions as an explicit commentary on the importance of taking seriously a self-aware and critical methodological approach. While narrative writing can do otherwise, the commitment to a reflexive methodology allows narrative to offer a transformative approach to IR in a way that non-reflexive methodologies do not.

This article alone will not develop exhaustive criteria for assessing narrative, but it is my hope that it will encourage further discussion about not only how to examine the quality of a narrative, but also the importance of doing so. In light of the methodological commitments I argue that narrative approaches should make, I suggest two areas of questions that both authors and readers of narrative should pose when examining narrative projects: 1) Does the narrative disrupt notions of congruity in political thought? Does it bring to light contradictions that may otherwise be ignored? 2) Does the narrative make room to incorporate those who have been otherwise excluded from political science discourse? The answers to these questions, taken together, convey whether and to what extent individual narrative projects exemplify an approach to IR that is critical and reflexive methodologically, epistemologically and ontologically.

While this article discusses numerous works of narrative, substantive focus is placed on Elizabeth Dauphinee’s The Politics of Exile and Sorayya Khan’s Noor. Therefore, I begin with a brief discussion of these two works which elucidates the importance of narrative. Following this discussion, I engage with the two criteria for examining narrative projects. Before concluding, I consider aesthetic criticism and some of the benefits and pitfalls of using aesthetic considerations as exhaustive criteria for examining the quality of narrative projects.

‘Literature’ as IR: Why Use Narrative?

In The Politics of Exile, a book that explores a scholar’s journey to uncertainty, Dauphinee weaves a complex story of platonic love and friendship. The main character in the text, a socially isolated scholar, finds an unlikely companion in a man who readers begin to suspect may have committed war crimes. ³ The scholar, or the character who Naeem Inayatullah calls Dauphinee’s ‘avatar’, ⁴ seems wilfully ignorant about what Stojan, the perpetrator of war crimes, has done. As the scholar listens to Stojan’s story over some period, it becomes progressively clearer that Stojan was involved in the Yugoslav Wars of Secession. When the time comes for Stojan to share the burden of his confession with the scholar, the scholar is unable to reconcile her love of Stojan with her scholarly work. In this text, Dauphinee does the academically unthinkable – she makes explicit a persistent ontological fracture. At the end of the text, readers are left with an unwavering level of incertitude.

In a similar way, Sorayya Khan’s Noor finishes on a tentative note. In Noor, Khan tells a rich tale of the conflict that broke out between East and West Pakistan in 1971. Through the exploration of an extended family living under one roof, Khan examines the ways in which war returns home from the battlefield. Moreover, Khan provides us with an illustration of the inadequacy of the villain-or-hero metanarrative through her description of a loving patriarch named Ali who readers learn essentially kidnapped the woman who grew up believing he was her father. While Ali lovingly raised Sajida and is depicted as an active and devoted grandfather, he has gained these roles under false pretences. Sajida must choose whether to accept a life built on a lie. ⁵

Naeem Inayatullah introduces Dauphinee’s book by discussing an argument he had with his wife, Khan, about what to call the style of writing and, more importantly, why Dauphinee is unclear with her readers about The Politics of Exile’s genre placement. Khan asks why Dauphinee has published her book as an academic text rather than a novel. Inayatullah responds that in The Politics of Exile Dauphinee goes beyond a novel by answering such questions as these: ‘how does one present fieldwork so that it highlights rather than hides the process of obtaining information? How does one fathom the other’s point of view? How does one tell the other’s stories when they conflict with one’s own?’ ⁶ These are all pertinent questions to ask when meditating on the role of narrative. I am not sure if I agree, however, with the distinction Inayatullah draws in this questioning between academic and non-academic texts. Dauphinee certainly answers the questions posed by Inayatullah in a way that highlights the importance of narrative to IR, but is there such a contrast, even if it is minute, between the scholar and the novelist? The line is blurry to be sure, which is, perhaps, an impetus for some of the concern that has arisen about using narrative in IR in the first place. Unlike other methods (not all and not all the time), the boundaries of what constitutes narrative IR are unclear. Both The Politics of Exile and Khan’s Noor vacillate between fact and fiction. For instance, while the scholar in Dauphinee’s text resembles Dauphinee herself, the character is not an exact replica of the author. At times, the text can be called autoethnography, but this signification does not apply all the time to the descriptions of the scholar-character’s experiences. Likewise, Noor was written after Khan interviewed Pakistani veterans of the 1971 civil war, but none of the characters in Noor are exact replicas of the soldiers Khan interviewed. ⁷ As in The Politics of Exile, there are layers of historical events overlapping with fictional accounts in Noor. Even more, in both Dauphinee’s and Khan’s books, there is either the distinct possibility of historical plausibility or the distinct possibility that no historical ‘truth’ can ever exist. As readers, we can see stories that are, more or less, reflections of events that have happened or could happen. ⁸ Both Dauphinee and Khan illustrate the absence of either a purely fictional or a purely factual account – all of our stories exist in a space that occupies some of both. Dauphinee and Khan exemplify Petra Munro Hendry’s claim that ‘a story can be true to life without being true of life’. ⁹

Accepting that the partition of fact and fiction is fraught may bring us further in dispensing with the idea that narrative is tantamount to depoliticised stories, but this deconstruction leaves us in a bit of a methodological void for analysing post-positivist research. For those of us who use or promote narrative approaches to IR, there is work to be done in considering how to read radically different narratives and how to discuss their necessity and/or contribution to IR. The question I deal with in this article is not a question about the merit of narrative, though that is certainly encapsulated within the discussion. Rather, I focus on a question that has not been sufficiently discussed – how do we critique narrative? How do we critique an approach to IR that is often presented in strikingly diverse styles? As IR scholars, are there criteria to assess a technique ¹⁰ that is not meant to be sterile and has sometimes even become therapeutic for writers and readers alike? If the boundaries are blurry and the stories often based on personal accounts of experiences, how do we question what constitutes ‘good’ narrative? What follows are two suggestions for how to critique narrative in general and autoethnography in particular.

The First Criterion: Does the Narrative Disrupt Notions of Congruity in Political Thought?

Oded Löwenheim, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, bikes to work each day. After years of commuting to campus using the fastest, most linear route, Löwenheim began using his mountain bike as a tool for what he calls ‘decommuting’. ¹¹ As he travels to campus, Löwenheim visits sites in Israel and Palestine with contentious histories. His choice to narrate the stories from his ‘decommutes’ serves to illustrate a life full of internal contradiction. The stories Löwenheim includes in The Politics of the Trail ‘tell about my confusion and doubts and expose the contradictions within me and the people I met’. ¹² Invoking the ‘I’ allows Löwenheim to express to readers his privilege and situatedness in Israel and Palestine by explaining that he is Jewish, white, male and a professor. Where writing in a sterile manner would cover up these identities, writing in the first person allows Löwenheim to be forthright about complexity and violence. All of these intertwining aspects of his life give him, unlike many others (most noticeably Palestinians), the ability to pass through contested spaces with comparative ease. Moreover, Löwenheim’s narration allows him to call into question the normative, static orientation of many of the identities that are invoked in discussing the history of the land on which he travels. While this is, again, something that he is able to do because of a relative level of privilege, it is still an important point of discussion. Israelis and Palestinians have been constructed as categories of binary opposition. Although there is a very real, very current conflict over disputed territory, there are also everyday occurrences that fracture these narratives of opposition. ¹³

Narrative does here what other methods cannot: it disrupts the congruity for which IR scholars often strive in political thought. Narrative shows us that the puzzle pieces that we have been struggling to jam together actually may not fit perfectly. There may be irreconcilable corner pieces that provoke us, while other pieces may merely lie quietly, without calling attention to their non-conformity.

In The Politics of Exile, Stojan tells the narrator a series of stories that complicate her carefully articulated scholarly beliefs. From years of study in IR, the scholar has come to believe in a world with not only a level of certainty, but also one in which she can make sense of the violence. Through study and analysis, the scholar has been able to arrive at conclusions. Nevertheless, as Stojan tells the scholar about the events that unfolded in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the scholar cannot mediate between her own work, the tragic tales and her feelings for Stojan. ¹⁴ This exemplifies what Hendry calls ‘an epistemology of doubt’. ¹⁵ At one point, the scholar ventures into a church and discusses her discomfort with a priest.

The priest looked up at me and gave his diagnosis: ‘Your problem is not just that your friend did this, but that you love him. You can’t accept the possibility that you love a man who could do what he did.’ I looked at him, and realized that if such a thing as perfect truth were possible, the priest had just spoken it. I hadn’t shed a single tear while I wrote my shredded manuscript on Bosnia, despite the fact that I had written about deaths like these. I didn’t cry, because I hadn’t loved them. ¹⁶

Dauphinee encourages us to consider how love complicates political certainty. She narrates the ways in which we can experience conflicting emotions and how this dismantles the idea of a black and white ethics. This is not to say that the scholar’s love for Stojan excuses his responsibility, but to call for a theory of IR that accounts for the violence that is committed by our friends, families, neighbours and us. Moreover, Dauphinee’s text, like Löwenheim’s, calls into question the ability to construct a self that is free from internal contradiction.

In many ways, The Politics of Exile and The Politics of the Trail are reminiscent of what Gloria Anzaldúa describes as the Coatlicue State, ¹⁷ or a state of being that fuses conflicting identities. ¹⁸ For Anzaldúa, the Coatlicue State represents a coming to terms with living in contradiction and existing in a state of thoughtfulness about oppressions and violence. Whereas an unspoken rule of much IR scholarship is to develop smooth, continuous theories that tie up loose ends, narrative has the ability to sit with wounds and fractures, going further with uncomfortable questions that may otherwise be ignored.

The Second Criterion: Does the Narrative Make Room to Incorporate Those Who Have Been Otherwise Excluded from Political Science Discourse?

The ‘we’ of IR is a precariously constructed group of scholars built on a perceived mutual interest in intellectual referents. IR scholarship is defined by boundaries that characterise not only what falls within the definition of IR, but also who falls outside. The walls around our discipline serve to keep certain histories and struggles silent. Within IR, there are those individuals and groups who have been unable to speak, let alone listen. The choice of syntax and jargon often used in IR has created an insular community that precludes the participation of a large portion of the population. By incorporating obscure language into our scholarship, we ensure that only a certain subset of the ‘international’ will be able to engage in the dialogue. Moreover, the disciplining of styles leads to a self-confirming community because it ensures that only those who accept the walls that have been built will remain within the confines of the field.

In an article that otherwise explores the ways in which narrative can be incorporated into academica, Mary Patrice Erdmans claims: ‘The job of the scholar is to interpret the experiences of people and represent these experiences to an academic audience.’ ¹⁹ On the surface, this seems axiomatic, but if we ask who this serves, it becomes clear that this line of thought about the role of scholars is insular. To claim that scholars alone should contribute to knowledge development or that only scholars are capable of interpreting experience both privileges and isolates academic thought. However, Erdmans also problematises many of the commonly held beliefs about the role of scholars in knowledge production and even points out that one of the arguments for narrative methods, which she lists as ‘oral histories, life stories, personal narratives, and authoethnographies’, is that they break down the duality often created between the subject and the object of study. ²⁰

Incorporation of the ‘I’

When IR scholars write from a place that buries the author, we commit violence not only against ourselves as murdered authors, but also because of the silence we institute around explaining our situatedness. Although I contest the notion of objectivity outright, we certainly are not and cannot be objective analysts of the situations on which we research and write. Most of us have chosen our niche topics of study for personal reasons, which begs the question: how do our lived experiences change what and the way in which we research? To act as though we can take ourselves out of our scholarship is absurd. As Roxanne Lynn Doty claims:

Zero-degree writing is not neutral, but a style emanating from the body of the writer, an extraordinarily powerful style that is often almost successful in mystifying the fact that it is a style that harnesses desires and intensities in the quest for theoretical progress. The identity of the writing subject as scholar becomes a faceless, formless authority positioned at a removed distance from the human element at stake in what is being written about. ²¹

Doty calls for the awakening of the self in IR through radically altering the forms of writing that are accepted in our field. She provokes authors in IR to write in a style that retrieves voices that have otherwise been lost to the sanitised disciplining in IR.

Narrative approaches, and specifically autoethnography, allow the incorporation of the author in IR. As Erdmans writes: ‘The first-person voice creates the conditions for reflexivity and makes power relations more visible. The “I” helps the reader see the colonizer writing about the colonized, men writing about women, and the ethnic-racial majority writing about the ethnic-racial minority.’ ²² In contrast with the sterile writing that has been normalised in IR, autoethnography creates space for authors to be forthright about contentions and contradictions. This is not to say that all narrative projects should be autoethnographic projects or even that all IR should necessarily be narrative. However, narrative projects do call for scholars to question and make apparent their subjectivity in the scholarship. In some circumstances, these questions may not make their way into the final drafts of papers or presentations, but scholars should absolutely engage with the questions before, during and after researching and writing.

Alexandra Hyde’s use of autoethnography in a piece published in the recently launched Journal of Narrative Politics allows her to be forthright about the roles accident and failure have played in her research. ²³ While certainly constitutive elements of human existence, experiences of accident and failure are often left out of descriptions of research. One might say that these two factors ‘humanise’ researchers more than what is generally considered acceptable in academic writing. To say that a researcher accidentally stumbled upon a course of study goes against academic norms. Furthermore, to admit to failure may as well be a cardinal sin in the academy. Nonetheless, in ‘Omissions and Admissions’, Hyde does both of these things. She admits to coming to an interesting conclusion from reading an essay rife with errors of digital coding that rendered most of the text non-existent, and she confesses an inability to respond verbally to a soldier’s stories. ²⁴ Had Hyde omitted her description of these experiences, she would have implied a facile ethnographic experience and would have severely limited reader insight into her process. Moreover, Hyde’s inclusion of these details signifies an acknowledgement of fallibility, which is integral to good research. When we assume our research will unfold exactly as planned, that we will never be sidetracked, or that our assumptions are incontrovertible, our research loses its purpose.

Incorporation of Other Fields

Narrative approaches are not new, but they are quickly gaining traction in IR. In 2004, which is widely considered the onset of the ‘narrative turn’ in IR, Doty presented ‘Maladies of our Souls’ as a lecture. In 2010, it was published as an essay. ²⁵ In the same year, Morgan Brigg and Roland Bleiker wrote ‘Autoethnographic International Relations’, where they explore the researcher as a ‘source of insight into politics’, ²⁶ and Inayatullah edited a volume on autobiography in IR. ²⁷ Since 2010, narrative approaches to IR have increased in prominence and popularity, gaining recognition in journals, scholarly books and conferences. In September of 2014, the Journal of Narrative Politics launched its first volume.

While narrative approaches have only recently gained a solid level of recognition in IR, they have been used in critical scholarship for some time and have been mainstays of other social science disciplines for decades. As Wanda Vrasti argues, it is important that IR take seriously the history of different methods that have been used in other fields. ²⁸ In particular, Vrasti discusses the troubling incorporation of ethnography into IR in a way that she categorises as selective. Rather than looking closely at the origins in anthropology and addressing the colonial history of the method, Vrasti claims that IR has ignored the problematic aspects of ethnography. ²⁹ However, the use of ethnography precedes its incorporation in both anthropology and IR and dates back to a time when ‘western officials and intellectuals’ were trying to look at ‘primitive’ populations. ³⁰ The historical intentions behind ethnographic research are highly contentious and require scholars to engage in meditation about their motivations before engaging in such scholarship.

In addition to taking seriously the issues that have been encountered in other fields, narrative is also uniquely able to incorporate and celebrate a diverse range of stories that have been topics of discussion outside of IR for some time. An example of such a text is I, Rigoberta Menchú. Menchú, who wrote about violence perpetrated against her indigenous Guatemalan community, was taken to task for the veracity of her claims after David Stoll, an American anthropologist, published a book disputing that Menchú personally witnessed some of her accounts. ³¹ The debates that unfolded in anthropology and Latin American studies made explicit a desire among those aligning with Stoll to define in stark terms what constitutes truth. However, the accusations made against Menchú are problematic because they define claims to histories spatially while ignoring the possibility that memories can have lasting impacts even on those who were not physically present. While I, Rigoberta Menchú may not represent a notion of historical events that fits within standards passed down from Western scholars, it is a welcome addition to narrative because it unsettles notions of truth in a way that is productive. Moreover, Menchú’s narrative expands the boundaries of IR to incorporate a people whose approach to knowledge has often been passed over in this field.

Because narrative approaches have been discussed in other fields more fully than they have been discussed in IR and because IR scholars can learn a great deal from the various successes and failures different scholars have had in their approaches, it is important that scholars who research or utilise narrative in IR take seriously a broad range of literature. Vrasti contends that this is not ‘gate-keeping, but a call for interdisciplinary rigour’. ³² This is a time when looking only within the limited scope of IR could lead us away from the most interesting questions and/or scholarship at best and, at worst, has the consequence of erasing sites of contestation rather than illuminating them.

Incorporation of Those Who Have Been Left out of IR

There are multiple characters in Noor who have been erased from normative IR: Ali, the complicated veteran whose dynamism contrasts with the standard depictions of soldiers; Sajida, who holds rights to more than one ethnogeographic community; and Noor, a child whose wisdom is surpassed by none. Kahn’s incorporation of complex figures who are often represented in IR as one-dimensional characters contributes to the discussions in IR in a novel way. When we read Noor, we see the reverberations of war at home. We see how ethical dilemmas exist outside of and without the aid of the academy. We see how describing people in flat terms misses the complexity of lived experience. ³³ Noor, and other effective narrative projects, tell the stories that have been overlooked in our discipline.

One of the most poignant pieces of narrative that I have read is Jennifer Riggan’s ‘Biopolitical Departures: A Love Story’. ³⁴ In the same way that Noor draws readers into a story where everyday moments meet the complexities and chaos of war, Riggan’s piece traces the autobiographical tale of two embattled countries (that were once one) and lovers caught in between. Riggan effectively shows the entanglements of people who, like Noor’s Sajida, align with more than one ethnogeographic community in her discussion of Amiches – Eritreans who were raised in Ethiopia. ³⁵ Moreover, she illustrates the complexities of immigration, love and biopolitics in a way that is palatable to scholars and non-scholars alike. Writing of a long and arduous experience in which she and her husband attempted to immigrate to her home, the United States, from his newly constituted country of Eritrea, Riggan explains how her body and proof of infertility became the only option through which they could leave together. Riggan writes: “For an exemption to the prohibition on leaving the country to be made, the state had to gather information about and through the body. For the state to make an exception for us, I had to be willing to submit my body fully and completely to the state, to welcome the state, its techniques, technologies and technologists.” ³⁶ This excerpt, like the rest of Riggan’s story, is rich with inclusions and nuances that are often overshadowed or oversimplified in IR.

Critiquing the Aesthetics of Narrative

When presenting this article at the annual Millennium conference, my discussant suggested that the questions I offer as way of critique fall under an ethical distinction. He pushed me to consider whether authors of narrative should also consider the aesthetics of their project. I agree with the assertion that what I offer as way of critique are largely ethical questions. However, I am uncertain about the role aesthetics should play in narrative projects.

While Dauphinee, Khan, Löwenheim and Riggan engage with important subject matter, their pieces are also beautifully written. The language is illustrative and engaging, captivating readers in a way that the standard, sterilised language that is common in IR scholarship does not. What does it mean that the texts I have chosen to engage with as examples of works that push us on ethical grounds are also well written? Is there something about the aesthetic quality that makes these works better scholarship?

We already know that style is important to writing. Simply because IR disciplining pushes writers in one aesthetic direction does not mean that we do not care about aesthetics at all. Regardless, some works of narrative are more appealing to readers than others.

On the consideration of the importance of aesthetics, I point to Hyde’s previously cited piece. From the first sentence of Hyde’s prose, it is clear that she has a unique and engaging style of writing. She draws the reader in when describing how an ‘accident of digital coding’ erased large portions of a text she was reading on her iPad. The erasure, unknown to Hyde, looked like a radical style of writing rather than a technological defect. As Hyde explains: ‘Those sparse pages were not blank at all, not empty, not absent, not holes (and not blank actually, but white). Rather, the spaces around the words seemed to write as much as the words themselves; the spaces suddenly seemed more whole and the words less absolute.’ ³⁷ Hyde’s phrasing in this excerpt is poetic and when I first read these two sentences on an uncomfortable, overnight flight from Toronto to London, I could not help but smile. ‘What a lovely writer!’ I thought to myself. However, a few pages on, Hyde shares some of her actual poetry. I think it is unlikely that the poetry Hyde included in the Journal of Narrative Politics would make it to publication in a journal of English language or literature, which is not to say that there is not something worthwhile about Hyde’s poetry. On the contrary, the enjambments throughout Hyde’s poem ‘The Dead Iraqi and Other Tales’ create a sort of lurching quality for readers that is not typically achievable in prose, but one that is effective for inciting affect. Nevertheless, can we compare the aesthetics of Hyde’s poetry to that of Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath or Robert Frost? If not, does this matter for the purpose of Hyde’s project? If we return to the ethical questions posed of narrative and engage Hyde’s poetry in this critique, her project adheres to the qualities that are necessary of well-written narrative. Therefore, while her poetry may not stand up to the aesthetic standards of writing that are expected of poetry for other means, her poetry is ‘good’ narrative.

Conclusion

The texts discussed in this article are not necessary and worthwhile contributions to IR simply because they are written in narrative and/or autoethnographic styles, but because of the way they challenge normative assumptions about war, ethics and scholarly situatedness. Each of these texts is written in a way that embraces complexity and a level of uncertainty. While we can and should celebrate the narrative turn and the ways that it has opened IR to inquiry that was not previously possible, IR scholars should approach narrative projects in the same way as other methods. Namely, narrative does not and should not escape critical examination because of either the content or the delivery. Moving forward, the questions that we must ask of specific narrative projects, lest narrative become a forum for insulating authors from critique, are: how might the narrative disrupt congruity in political thought and does the narrative incorporate those who have otherwise been left out of political science discourse? Through asking these questions and incorporating them into the dialogue about narrative, IR scholarship can make explicit how it has contributed in violent ways and why politics must be understood as dynamic and sometimes contradictory.