Novel Writing Approach for the Discipline of IR in Sri Lanka: a Sense of Narrative Fashion

Abstract

Most academic disciplines in the social science are typically bound to their conventional disciplinary nomenclature and methodological protocols. The discipline of International Relations (IR)is no exception in such trends as it has been progressing with its own disciplinary pedagogies over time. In this context, it is uncertain whetherthe discipline of International Relations hasadequate potential to explain the social world which is subject to constant changes and numerous storylines. More specifically, today’s social world is full of traumatic events, uncertainties, and unprecedented events which are emotional in nature and pervasive. In some ways, it has become a venue for numerous testimonials coming from different groundrealities such as war victims, terrorism and natural disasters. Thus there is growing concern among academics to look for alternative ways which IR can adopt in order to create rich accounts for aforesaid scenarios. Therefore it is pertinent to the discipline of IR to look for a new writing approach that can capture the social world morediscursively by adding a sufficient emotional account with a greater human sense. At the same time, it is also important to reveal the unseen and unheard aspects of such circumstances which are poorly examined by the conventional linear fashion of writing in IR. Hence, this study primarily explores how the discipline of IR generally and IR in Sri Lanka specifically can benefit through the adaptation of such a narrative writing approach into the discipline. In this way, three prominent seminal works by Elizabeth Dauphinee,RustomBharucha and HelenSword have been consulted in order to further demonstrate the utility of the proposed approach to writing in IR.