TY - BOOK AU - BASTANI Niyousha AU - BRANDIMARTE Italo TI - Stories of world Politics: Between History and Fiction PY - 2024/// KW - STORIES KW - POLITICS KW - HISTORY N2 - The discipline of International Relations is defined by a fundamental tension between history and fiction. On the one hand, historical approaches are crucial in tracing the origins of international order, contextualising key concepts, and uncovering marginalised voices. On the other, the discipline is invariably caught in its own mythologies, which shape what is “real” and “true” in global politics. Instead of treating the ambiguous distinctions between history and fiction as problems to be definitively resolved, this Special Issue takes up these tensions as generative for understanding, manoeuvring, and even disrupting and (re)imagining the field of IR. Examining these dynamics from several perspectives – from the writing of history to the political force of fictional imaginaries – the articles in this Issue show that the relation between history and fiction is a constitutive force of the international, in both theory and practice. Bringing together historical and critical perspectives, the Issue elucidates how ideas of history and fiction, reality and storytelling, facticity and imagination shape and are in turn shaped by world politics. Historical approaches to IR, we argue, can do much more than adjudicate between these amorphous categories. Here, we pursue the possibilities UR - https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2024.2368418 ER -