ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces Root Narrative Theory and sets it in the context of current debates about moral politics, radical disagreement, protracted conflict, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding. The chapter describes the challenges facing the international community and global governance as the United States withdraws from the global leadership role it assumed after the Second World War. This transformation points back to an earlier era in which it was necessary to invent and develop the institutions of peace and international cooperation. Root Narrative Theory is useful as a way to identify and measure ideology, taking the abuse of power as a point of departure. There are four major categories of root narrative, ‘the big four’, each of which corresponds to a form of social power and defines a broad area of ultimate values: security, liberty, equality, and dignity. The chapter foreshadows the easy to remember eponymic form of root narrative theory: Hobbes, Locke, Marx, Fanon.
