What Narratives Do

Narratives play a crucial role when it comes to who, how, and what is remembered from the history of international law. Why? What is the role? And what are the narratives? To begin with, Narratives can be understood as a discursive form in which meaning emerges and is stabilized at different levels of ordering.

For example, we tend to live our lives in light of a conception of where we are from and what kind of person we want to be, and that conception arises in large parts from the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, and to others. At this first level of ordering, narratives play an important role in conferring and stabilizing meaning with regard to who we are and who we want to be as individuals.

Narratives do the same for any collective, i.e. for any social group. Just consider the well-studied roles that narratives have played in the formation of nations, and of national identities. There would be no ‘imagined communities’ of nationals without narratives, and without the stories that members of communities tell about themselves.

Moving closer to the field of international law, any community of scholars maintains narratives about their community, what is important to them, and what it is they are doing: as such, narratives interact with disciplinary identities.

More specifically then, narratives are crucial with regard to who, how, and what is remembered from international law. This is what I will continue to focus on and unpack: the role of narratives in international law in the dynamics of remembering and in the construction of memory.