ABSTRACT
In this concluding chapter, the co-editors return to the key themes and underpinning questions posed in the book and offer some considered thoughts about why global politics needs heroes and heroism. The chapter argues that heroic narratives still tend to be rooted in characteristics associated with masculinity and the warrior, but that a wide variety of people seem to be able to occupy the heroic subject-position. In addition to the hero, the chapter identifies the enemy, the victim, and the anti-hero as important characters in heroic narratives that provide insights into the type of heroic action that a political community needs to sustain itself. Heroes and heroic narratives personify and embody the abstractness of political communities, and those communities are built around a range of common causes, including but not only nationalism. The chapter discusses the ways that heroic narratives define the boundaries of political communities, as well as the specific form of political capital wielded by heroes, which allows them to draw a community’s attention to or away from a common cause. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future directions for research at the intersection of heroism and global politics.
