ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the topic of the book and justifies its relevance. The book claims that our understandings of international relations are fundamentally metaphorical in nature: in their descriptions and explanations, both theorists and practitioners rely on imaginative associations with other fields to make the distant and complex action in world politics comprehensible. The chapter outlines the structure of the book: Part I deals with conceptual metaphor theory and its application to the international context and Part II analyzes in turn ten competing metaphors for international relations. It also outlines the structure of the analytical chapters: each starts with sketching associations that go together with the source domain of the metaphor, moves on to providing examples of expert usage and concludes by studying the possible entailments of the specific metaphor. Finally, the chapter introduces the argument for flexible and maximally enabling metaphor usage.
