The dominant Western narrative based on Enlightenment norms and universal progress is being challenged today in ways that few anticipated just a few years ago, and this has left scholars and policy analysts scrambling to understand what is going on. Debating Worlds makes a trailblazing contribution to this effort by focusing on narrative and narrative contestation.

Narrative has been a standard construct in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, and recent studies in narrative economics signal its growing importance in other areas of the social sciences usually dominated by formal modeling and quantitative methods. Debating Worlds promises to bring this narrative turn more fully into play in political science and international relations.

The collection of authoritative, accessible case studies by eminent scholars about national narratives in Russia, China, India, and elsewhere alone makes the volume important. But by juxtaposing them, the editors invite readers to reflect on more general questions including: What do we mean by “narrative”? Do narratives simply reflect political forces, or do they shape them? What is it about narratives that gives them a special role in the study of nations and other collectives? Debating Worlds provides hints about answers, but in the end the notion of narrative remains fragmented and elusive.

This is hardly a problem for the authors of this volume alone. The term “narrative” in academic and public discussion is often used so loosely that it means little more than general discourse. In their introduction, Daniel Deudney, John Ikenberry, and Karoline Postel-Vinay try to rein things in somewhat by noting, “Narratives are stories that people tell themselves about the world they live in, their role in it, and what they should be doing” (p.4). There is little to disagree with in this, but it leaves unanswered questions about why narratives play a special role in social and mental life.

A first step in addressing this is to recognize narratives’ unique form. Aristotle set the stage for discussing this by noting that the fundamental property of narratives is plot. This idea has been elaborated by many others who have argued that genuine narratives are structured by a beginning, middle, and end. As Postel-Vinay notes in her chapter, this is behind the power of narratives to grasp disparate historical events into a meaningful whole, and Jean-Francois Drolet and Michael Williams Drolet add that narratives “are much more than recounting. They are processes of emplotment” (p.143).

Other scholars have elaborated these ideas in various ways. The literary scholar Peter Brooks (Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, 1984), for example, has outlined the “strange logic” (p.22) of plot, a logic in which the significance of some events becomes clear only in retrospect as the story unfolds. This logic is distinct from logico-deductive thinking and assigns meaning to events on the basis of how they fit into a story. It also gives narratives an internal coherence and structural integrity that gives them the “cultural autonomy” (Jeffrey Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology, 2003) to act as an independent force that can shape political processes rather than just reflect them.

With this as background, a few other notions can inform discussions of narrative contestation. The first is a distinction between narratives that have a concrete ending such as the story of the Battle of Gettysburg, on the one hand, and aspirational narratives, on the other, where the sense of an ending comes in the form of a general telos. A more perfect union, for example, is a telos mentioned by America’s founders that remains an aspiration rather than an accomplished fact. In his chapter, Rana Mitter makes a related point when discussing a specific narrative about China’s underappreciated role in World War II, on the one hand, and a general “China Story” with a telos of the country’s being “a strong and consequential actor” (p.162), on the other. In describing the latter, he notes the “linear and teleological element” (p.162), which are standard properties of an aspirational narrative.

A second useful distinction is that between “specific narratives” and “schematic narrative templates.” The former contain specific information about concrete dates, actors, and events. For example, a Russian specific narrative about the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) typically includes items such as the German invasion in 1941, the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43, and the Battle of Berlin in 1945. In a similar vein, Mitter notes that China’s specific story about World War II included “10 million or more dead, 100 million refugees, and the holding down of half a million Japanese troops” (p.174).

Schematic narrative templates, in contrast, are theoretical entities posited by investigators when trying to make sense of general patterns across specific narratives. These are schematic in that they include little information about concrete dates and events. For example, an “Expulsion-of-Alien-Enemies” narrative template for Russia (Jeremy K. Yamashiro, James H. Liu, Robert Jiqi Zhang, Memory and Cognition, 2022) begins with its being at peace and not bothering others, followed by a brutal unprovoked attack by an alien enemy that causes untold suffering and almost destroys Russia as a civilization, and concludes with its acting heroically and alone to defeat and expel the enemy. This plot line underpins the specific narrative of the Great Patriotic War but also of many other events such as military invasions by Mongols, French, and Germans, as well as the invasion of alien ideas, especially those from the West that threaten Russia traditional values and divine mission. Mitter’s chapter on China can be used again to illustrate this point, with “the China Story” playing the role of a narrative template.

In his chapter, Michael Cox implicitly touches on a distinction between specific narratives and schematic narrative templates in his discussion of Soviet efforts to inculcate a new official narrative in the USSR based on Marxism-Leninism. This story positioned the Communist Party was the leading actor in the Great Patriotic War. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, this specific narrative seemed to have collapsed as well, and in its place a new version emerged that placed the Russian people rather than the Party in the role of the main hero.

This radical transformation occurred at the level of specific narratives, but not at the narrative template level. Cox’s analysis suggests this when he notes that Putin’s account of Russian history now draws on traditional history of the eighteenth century rather than on Lenin’s ideas of the twentieth. This points to the continuing power of deeply entrenched narrative habits that have guided Russia for centuries and suggests that the Soviet and post-Soviet accounts of the Great Patriotic War came in the form of new wine (vodka?) in an old narrative template bottle.

A major contribution of Debating Worlds is its focus on how national and other collective narratives are fundamentally shaped by contestation. In this regard, it might make sense to speak of national counternarratives in most cases. This is reflected, for example, in Cemil Aydan’s comment that instead of emerging out of intellectuals’ self-absorbed study of the past, the modern Muslim narrative of the globe was shaped by a “highly politicized context … [in which] the experience of imperial globalization fostered the emergence of a basic theme and outline” (p.90).

At a more general level, the notion of contestation is used to understand global debates. Daniel Deudney, for example, writes of the “great schism” between narrative of “scientific-technological modernity” (STM) and voices resisting it that give rise to “the worldwide conversation about the overall human situation” (240). And Jeremy Adelman operates at a similar abstract level when he examines the narrative of neoliberalism and the “counterpoint” narratives from around the world now challenging it.

Debating Worlds promises to influence studies in political science and international relations for years to come. Its focus on narrative generates new insights in case studies, and it also opens the door for expanding the conceptual and methodological toolkit used by these disciplines. Unlocking the full potential of this promising line of inquiry, however, will require more clarity on what defines narratives and gives them their unique role in political processes. One can only look forward with excitement to the next stage of the discussion the volume has initiated.