Narrating future war: Reimagining enmity during the collapse of bipolarity

This article examines the discursive processes of forming and becoming to better understand how narratives shape what matters in international relations. Focusing on elite debates on future war, the article explores how political agents within the US defence establishment reimagined the international system during the demise of the hegemonic interpretative framework that had shaped the postwar order. While events are often seen as driving political agents’ interpretations of structural change in the international system, the direction of causality can be inverted. The article argues that the reconstruction of enmity during the collapse of bipolarity should be understood as an assemblage of existing narrative elements into a new security story. This solidified only after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was used to validate the discursive route already taken by key players. As the article concludes events shape but do not determine how conceptions of what matters in international politics evolve and how future war is narrated and reimagined.