ABSTRACT
The concluding chapter takes stock of the book’s overall achievement: excavating the poetic fictions of factual international relations literature while demonstrating the real factual inspirations and implications of international relations fiction. In light of this achievement, the chapter suggests that mainstream international relations specialists have more in common with novelists than they realize and that factual and fictional accounts of world affairs be subsumed under the shared rubric of narrative. It then characterizes the narrative style of mainstream international relations scholarship as a distinctive blend of mechanistic, tragic, and conservative tropes and as an expression of Western hegemonic power. In challenging this power, critical theorists have a major ally in the art of the novel, particularly in historiographic metafiction, whose drive to problematize political reality and lay bare its rhetorical plasticity coincides with their efforts to denaturalize the world order and expose it as a product of dynamic social forces. The chapter closes with a call for a new fiction of international relations: scholarship utilizing novel forms subverting standard tropological protocols of academic international relations discourse.
