ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the discursive understanding of narratives: how the idea of narrative has been incorporated into the grammar of International Relations. Narratives are "equipments for living", tools to understand, negotiate and make sense of situations we encounter a mode of reasoning and a mode of representation, a way to conceive of and also tell about the world'. Most contributions that engage with the concept of narrative in IR, or what Dauphinee calls narrative IR', have derived from strong criticisms of how the discipline understands what knowledge is and the appropriate ways of telling those knowledge stories'. Narrative as a concept is intrinsically connected to critical epistemological claims within IR that aim at reclaiming the importance of everyday life to understanding global processes, usually based on more ethnographically inspired research. Forms of collective writing and of narrative self-awareness are proposed as methodological ways of minimising the risks associated with turning academic narrative into a master narrative.
