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"A cutting-edge contribution to the aesthetic turn in international relations scholarship, this book exposes the role of poetic techniques in constituting the reality of international politics. It has two symmetrical goals: to illuminate the non-empirical fictions of factual international relations literature, and to highlight the real factual inspirations and implications of contemporary international relations fiction. Employing narrative theory developed by Hayden White, the author examines factual and fictional accounts of world affairs ranging from the anarchy narrative, central to mainstream international relations research, to novels by Don DeLillo and Milan Kundera. Chapters analyzing factual literature flesh out its unacknowledged inventions, while those dedicated to fiction explain its political roots and agenda. Throughout, the distinction between factual and fictional representations of international relations breaks down. Social-scientific narratives emerge as exercises in rhetoric: the art and politics of persuasion through language. Artistic narratives surface as real pedagogical lessons and exercises in political activism. The volume challenges the autonomy of academic international relations as an exclusive purveyor of serious knowledge about world affairs and calls for active engagement with literary art. It will be of interest to scholars of International Relations, Political Theory, Historiography, Cultural Theory, and Literary Studies and Criticism"--

AbstractGeorge F. Kennan belongs among the most revered American foreign policy thinkers of the last one hundred years. He was also very protective of his future legacy, going to extraordinary measures to control it. These included authorising a single historian, John Lewis Gaddis, to write his biography,George F. Kennan: An American Life(2011). Is Gaddis's account definitive? On the tenth anniversary of Kennan's death, this article investigates this question as part of a broader critical reflection on methods and presuppositions governing traditional historiography. It answers in the negative by illuminating the various fictions of Gaddis's ostensibly factual representation. These surface especially in contrast toThe Kennan Diaries(2014), whose minimalist chronological structure makes the non-empirical content brought by Gaddis to his image of Kennan by virtue of narrativising it all the more visible. The larger implications of this finding are significant, particularly in the present geopolitical context of Russia's renewed expansionism. Should the US foreign policy community (re)turn to Kennan for guidance in its attempts to understand and respond to Moscow's current behaviour, what kind of diagnosis and prescriptions he has to offer depends on which Kennan one chooses to consult, giving historians behind his representations genuine political power.