IR Theorists, the World and Fiction: Making Sense of Some Recent Criticism of Game of Thrones
Not an IR Theorist By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** A few quick notes on this recent article in Foreign Policy , about "IR Theory and the Game of Thrones", in response to some bits and pieces of it that are noteworthy mostly in a negative sense. The author of the article is Paul Musgrave, a professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is setting out to criticise IR Theory (International Relations Theory) as well as Game of Thrones for some of the same things, including (mostly) their narrow reading and consequent misrepresentation of European history as a never-ending battle royale amongst sovereigns, the soverign-like and aspirant sovereigns. This is an interesting undertaking, reason number one being that IR Theory is a set of largely deductive theories about the way the relationships of states might function, and if deductive sounds like a difficult word here,...