Telling Stories of International Relations

Abstract This is a lightly edited version of the presidential address I delivered at the sixty-fifth annual convention of the International Studies Association in San Francisco, USA, on April 4, 2024. In this essay, I explore the stories that we tell about the international, and relations, and the possibility of telling different stories—and perhaps the need to tell different stories—in the future. I begin by weighing the international, and exploring what is at stake when setting up a focus on international relations, as distinct from other kinds of relations. I then shift focus to relations. A focus on relations, rather than entities or things, encourages us to consider how these relations are developed, nurtured, ruptured, and restored, and to examine both the conditions and affordances of these processes. Finally, I take on the question of how to tell different stories in the future. I hope to show that questions of futurity are necessarily questions of justice and questions of ethics, and that we as a scholarly community must ask ourselves what we owe, and to whom, in our work if we are going to honor our obligations to our past and future selves and others.