Fairy Tales and International Relations

A Folklorist Reading of IR Textbooks

Kathryn Starnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367889531
• eBook ISBN: 9781315521954
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a critical engagement with contemporary IR textbooks via a novel folklorist approach. Two parts of the folklorist approach are developed, addressing story structures via resemblances to two fairy tales, and engaging with the role of authors via framing gestures. The book not only looks at how the idea of 'social science' may persist in textbooks as many assumptions about what it means to study IR, but also at how these assumptions are written into the defining stories textbooks tell and the possibilities for (re)negotiating these stories and the boundaries of the discipline.

This book will specifically engage with how the stories in textbooks constrain how it is possible to define IR through its (re)production as a social science discipline. In the first part, story structures are explored via Donkeyskin and Bluebeard stories which the book argues resemble some structures in textbooks that define how it is permissible to tell stories about IR. In the second part the role of authors is explored via their framing gestures within a text, drawing on a number of fairy tales. By approaching the stories in textbooks alongside fairy tales, Starnes reflects back onto IR the disciplining practices in the stories textbooks tell by rendering them unfamiliar.

Aiming to spark a critical conversation about the role of textbooks in defining the boundaries of what counts as IR and by extension the boundaries of the IR canon, this book is of great interest to students and scholars of international relations.

1
Introduction

My curiosity about International Relations (IR) textbooks began as a frustration with my undergraduate textbook (Baylis and Smith 2001). I was frustrated because I found little outside the reflectivist and constructivist approaches chapter elaborating on these theories. I felt the book distracted me from the most interesting questions and I wondered if I just was not interested in the ‘real’ IR. Near the end of my degree I realized it was not that I did not like the ‘real’ IR, but that there were different stories about IR and I needed to find stories challenging ‘the mainstream’. I sought advice on where I might find such a postgraduate programme, and determined I should go where the stories told me I should go: Aberystwyth. Aberystwyth, the story said, was the discipline’s birthplace and site of its rebirth in the Third Debate.¹ I later realized my attempts to question ‘mainstream’ IR stories were also shaped by oversimplified stories of IR. My subsequent teaching experience showed me that my frustration with textbooks was not unique. Other textbooks I encountered told similar stories, and although my students had different questions, some were similarly frustrated.

I later discovered a rich literature on the Third Debate, feminism and postcolonialism. The question I found most compelling was not what was missing from my introduction but why and how it was missing, given the diversity of literature beyond that at the introductory level. It seemed significant that the stories I found most compelling were about starting points and foundational assumptions, but these conversations were sparse in my introductory textbook. It seemed as if these conversations were reserved until I was familiar with particular histories, voices and aims for the discipline – namely of a discipline born and formed in response to interstate wars. If Third Debate stories held the negotiation of disciplinary boundaries as such an important task, then why was this conversation not the most significant conversation in textbooks? I felt this conversation should guide me in making choices about IR, rather than adding to my picture of IR after these choices were already made on my behalf.

While attempting to develop my frustrations into a research project it became clear my concern was not just which stories textbooks told, but how textbooks told stories and how these stories impact on the discipline’s construction. I was less concerned about the story’s content and the (contested) veracity of that content than I was with the ‘how’ of how textbooks presented that story because I wanted to know how one story, even one widely contested, could still be treated as the story even by authors who contested that story elsewhere. This led me to fairy tales. My leisure reading of contemporary folklorists (e.g. Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter) influenced my understanding of how reiterated stories can shape the content of the story, how we think about what it means to tell a story, and what constitutes a story. These authors’ stories were about the politics of retelling and defining, and it was this political conversation I found missing from textbooks. In exploring folklorist work, I became more acquainted with the concept of the canon as something that is constantly changing, negotiating which stories get to count. This idea of negotiating the canon, and the idea that the content of the stories we tell may be constrained by how we are allowed to tell those stories, struck me as pertinent to IR textbooks.

IR has many stories about its birth, history and evolution. Furthermore, IR has a well-documented history of revisiting and (re)writing these stories. The theme of ‘social science’ has played an integral role in these stories, especially stories about IR’s evolution via ‘Great Debates’. To formulate a question about my frustrations above, I came to focus on the recurring theme of ‘social science’ in IR’s stories, and in particular the ways in which it had been self-consciously asserted as a defining principle and simultaneously questioned as a series of un-explicated assumptions constraining how it was possible to define the discipline. ‘Social science’ seemed to haunt IR stories. I thus set out to answer the question: To what extent does the idea of ‘social science’ persist in constructing IR textbooks in our contemporary context?

This question addresses textbooks with the contested construction of the discipline as a ‘social science’ in mind. While there have been textbook studies, none have been explicitly concerned with the politics of how textbooks define IR and the role of ‘social science’. This question takes seriously the degree to which the discipline is constructed as a ‘social science’ in introductory textbooks, often the first encounter a student may have with the discipline. Indeed, some of the most far-reaching IR literature is likely to be textbooks, tasked with introducing IR, and beginning the process of producing the next generation of scholars. As Moore and Shepherd have argued, the ritualizing myths textbooks reiterate tell us what IR is about and silence our scepticism that IR is not just about being realistic about war (2010, 300). While textbooks are only one part of producing scholars, they are significant because of their role as the bearers of introductory stories and their power as canonical texts. This question thus takes seriously the notion that textbooks are a unique part of the discipline’s canon, not only participating in defining and delimiting what counts as the discipline, but doing so with a distinct bearing on the continued delimitation of the discipline for future scholars.

The influence of textbooks cannot be divorced from the context in which they are used. Their recommendation or requirement on course reading lists, and at times their influence on the structure and content of courses, is significant. This significance has been taken up in several ways, including the diversity of paradigms on reading lists (Hagmann and Biersteker 2014), the parochial and American/Anglo-centric location, both of reading lists and the construction of the ‘centre’ of the discipline (Jones 2003; Tickner and Wæver 2009) and the significance of teaching theory in IR (Guzzini 2001; Matthews and Callaway 2015). A number of undergraduate textbooks have been written by instructors who cite a frustration with their teaching, particularly with their ‘well-worn’ ways of introducing the discipline, as Weber (2010, 3) phrased it. The unease of these instructors leaves them attempting to renegotiate those ‘well-worn’ stories. Meanwhile, student movements questioning the parochialism of curriculums, lack of diversity in instructors and legacies of colonialism in campus iconography continue to grow. This signals that instructors and students are concerned with the politics of pedagogy and textbooks and their marginalizing practices.

At the undergraduate level, particularly in introductory survey courses in the UK and North America, textbooks may form the bulk of ‘required’ readings, sometimes even providing the structure of a course’s narrative and the terms on which the topics are engaged. While the literature above does indicate some concern with these texts, it is notable that dissatisfaction persists, not just cited in recent textbooks (Edkins and Zehfuss 2014), but in conversations at conferences. It is these unpublished informal conversations I want to ponder for a moment. While there is the familiar refrain that many course instructors doubt students read their carefully selected ‘further reading’ lists designed to augment core textbooks, another claim is that requests to change core textbooks are met with resistance from students and universities alike, often on grounds of cost and the difficulty of editing long-approved course descriptions that match existing texts. Textbooks on undergraduate courses influence the narrative of courses, even to the extent that they may dictate which terminology or theory is used in the syllabus to ‘match’ the textbook. The reluctance to change a text can thus have significant bearing on what is taught. Nonetheless, I hear numerous reasons why ‘the problem’ of textbooks persists: publishers print what sells, re-printing updated editions is cost-effective, the biggest markets (North America and the UK) dictate textbook content. These are all-important issues, and they are partially why this book will not be a ‘textbook review’. Attempting to determine what (if anything) makes a ‘good’ textbook is far more complicated than textbook content. The first step, in my view, is to understand the role textbooks play in the IR canon, to explore them as sites of the discipline’s construction. This allows us to think more extensively about the role of textbooks, their use in the classroom, and the significant policing of textbook boundaries by treating textbooks as political sites. However, considering these wider questions about the use of textbooks must include the variety of contexts in which they are used. I return to this theme in Chapter 7.

About the stories in this book

For this project, I have read around 60 textbooks aimed at the UK and North American market. I focused on these textbooks because they are seen to dominate the textbook market. I am particularly interested in the marginalizing practices that keep this story of domination in place, or how the story these textbooks tell is constructed as the centre. I say ‘story of domination’ because I think the centring of these textbooks has real effects. I want to emphasize that this centring is not natural, and my engagement with these textbooks is not generalizable to other contexts. Instead, I think that how some textbooks tell stories reinforces rules about textbooks and IR that strictly define what it means to contribute to IR, and it is only looking at the history of these stories that reveals they are not natural. My decision to read 60 was aimed at reading as many as possible, including the ‘popular’ and those lesser known.

To identify an undergraduate, introductory IR textbook, I relied primarily on the textbook’s own classification as such. In most instances the book was one of many editions and I attempted to use the most recent edition available. I read the textbooks from cover-to-cover, rather than focusing on specific portions of the text, or systematically selecting paragraphs. While this was time consuming, it gave me a rich understanding of how these textbooks interact with each other, how they are similar, and which textbook narratives are unusual. However, this did impact on the number of textbooks that appear in this book. A significant challenge in this project was deciding which textbooks to include and how to balance a need for a contextualized reading of their stories with the kinds of general claims about textbooks that might seem useful for understanding which stories dominate and how. This is not a comprehensive review. Such reviews have largely been unable to comment on how textbooks tell stories about IR and how this constructs a specific image of the discipline because their results focus on how accurately textbooks represent a particular image of IR. I discuss this in more detail in Chapter 2, and I make a case for a more in-depth reading of how textbooks construct and negotiate canonical boundaries. That is not to say that I do not identify some trends. The examples I feature are chosen because they show how these storytelling practices are at work in North American and UK textbooks, and I include other examples in footnotes. This approach requires in-depth reading. One of my main critiques of existing approaches is that they do not offer space to consider how textbooks develop sustained narratives around IR, instead focusing on large quantities of decontextualized examples. While this approach has merit in some instances (detailed in Chapter 2), it did not offer a suitable way to approach my question.

When it came to which texts featured in my analysis I was loathe to exclude the most familiar textbooks. However, two compelling factors guided which textbooks featured in my writing. The first was a return to the question of how these textbooks are (re)producing certain stories and boundaries. I wanted to show how particular practices of production were operating. Many of these practices were overwhelmingly similar, so I chose examples that allowed me to demonstrate those practices in the greatest detail and with the fewest detours. This, I hope, will enable readers to apply the approach more broadly, rather than relying on those few readings I feature. This is a political decision on my part, a decision to invite the use and abuse of the approach developed in this book (elaborated further in Chapters 2 and 3). To further enable this, I have focused on detail, looking at context, structure and symbolism in textbooks. I have chosen to focus on how this process occurs, rather than forensically documenting particular instances of a practice in textbooks. Such a report on textbooks would undoubtedly become quickly outdated while the practices it sought to make noticeable would continue in future editions largely undetected.

These issues of representativity and generalization are at the heart of the folklorist approach. What does it mean to introduce, to define, to tell the main stories? I think the stories in the following chapters are powerful and they warrant investigation on the grounds of their ubiquity in US and UK introductory textbooks, even while these stories have been debated, rewritten, dismissed and revived in the literature elsewhere. To that end, the fairy tales I have chosen also have a context. I am not in the business of identifying urtexts or the origins of fairy tales. However, the particular iterations of Donkeyskin and Bluebeard stories I explore are recorded and studied in a particular context. They reference specific symbols and make use of implied citations relevant to a specific history – one that is largely European, often white, and frequently bearing a distinctive stamp of gender norms. Understanding these stories and their often subversive power to contest some of these contexts as natural means being aware of this history. Indeed, it is precisely the tradition of questioning ‘rules’ and assumptions surrounding fairy tales that I tap into for this analysis. I will remark on this regularly in my analyses and I urge anyone wishing to take up the approach to look for the stories relevant to the context they want to investigate and to be aware that the history of stories must be a part of our reading.

One history of IR

One particular story helped to formulate the conception of ‘social science’ that I use. This story provides a context for looking at textbooks in terms of the discipline’s stories of its birth and history via the Great Debates and is told in Hoffmann’s article ‘An American Social Science: International Relations’ (1977). Hoffmann reflects on the state of ‘the discipline’ 30 years after what he identifies as its inception. The piece is remarkable for several reasons: the first is Hoffmann’s account of the historical and cultural context of the discipline’s birth, a context he argues was significant in how the discipline was established, its key aims, and how the discipline formed to approach those aims. This context and its legacies serves as a provocation for why the stories of what the discipline should be about, and how the discipline should achieve its central aims, is key to how and the extent to which the discipline is constructed as a ‘social science’. I begin with Hoffmann because he tells a compelling story about the unusual way the concept of ‘social science’ developed around the discipline and explains its centrality in stories about IR.

Hoffmann begins with the birth of IR as a discipline attempting to distinguish itself from political science. He contends the development of a formal discipline stalled, even in the aftermath of World War I (WWI), until Carr’s seminal Twenty Years Crisis laid the foundations of a discipline transported to the United States by Morgenthau. Hoffmann explains that three lessons from Carr’s work took hold in the United States, and details these lessons as emphasizing:

the springs of empirical analysis (less a desire to understand for its own sweet sake, than an itch to refute); about the impossibility, even for opponents of a normative orientation, to separate the empirical and the normative in their own work; and about the pitfalls of any normative dogmatism in a realm which is both a field for objective investigation and a battlefield between predatory beasts and their prey.

Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations was instrumental in bringing realism to America. Introduced by Carr, it picked up on these lessons. Hoffmann explains, Morgenthau ‘wanted to be normative, but to root his norms in the realities of politics, not in the aspirations of politicians or in the constructs of lawyers’. To achieve this, Hoffmann argues Morgenthau tied his sweeping analysis to ‘two masts, the concept of power and the notion of the national interest, he was boldly positing the existence of a field of scientific endeavour, separate from history or law’. Hoffmann contends Morgenthau’s controversial work had a striking impact and Politics Among Nations found receptive ground in America due to three factors: ‘intellectual predispositions, political circumstances, and institutional opportunities’. It is these three factors, identified and expanded by Hoffmann that I want to explore.

The intellectual predispositions Hoffmann identifies frame the conception of what constitutes a ‘social science’ that he argues was critical to the birth and establishment of the discipline. Hoffmann explains this intellectual predisposition ‘account[s] for the formidable explosion of the social sciences in general in this country, since the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Canon as a link between fairy tales and textbooks
• 3 A folklorist approach
• 4 Donkeyskin stories: the permissible
• 5 Bluebeard stories: the forbidden
• 6 Author framing and canon negotiations
• 7 Conclusion
• Index