ABSTRACT
This chapter points narrative theory at the notion of anarchy in contemporary academic international relations literature. Initial sections demonstrate anarchy’s status as a foundational concept underlying all mainstream social-scientific approaches to international relations; extract its meaning from canonical texts such as Waltz’s neorealist Theory of International Politics; note the subtle variations in anarchy’s neoliberal and constructivist definitions; and unpack its implications, such as that the domestic and the international are qualitatively different realms, that normatively driven progress is possible only in the former, and that academic international relations is an autonomous field of inquiry dedicated to the latter. In a key move, the chapter then approaches anarchy as a factual narrative of the international arena, analyzes it using White’s tropological framework, and illuminates its hidden nonempirical content: a combination of mechanistic, tragic, and conservative tropes. Anarchy surfaces as a poetic creation and a form of discursive power. The chapter concludes by hinting at alternative ways to figure forth the international stage and at how they would alter conventional wisdom about the disciplinary autonomy of international relations scholarship or about the possibility of international progress.
