From Intellectual to Socio-History: Researching Everyday Geopolitical Imaginaries

Abstract International Relations (IR) historiographic imaginary is largely one of elites and elite practices, as reflected in dominant approaches to geopolitical imaginaries. IR’s prevailing historiographic imaginary privileges “intensified” politics—wars, diplomacy, and crises—and in doing so marginalizes mundane and non-elite worlds. Enriching IR’s historiographic imaginary requires a socio-history of the international that foregrounds the everyday. Drawing on French socio-histoire and feminist historiographies, this approach draws attention away from “intensification” to the “densified” social, cultural, and economic relations that constitute the everyday-international. Such invitation expands IR’s historical imaginary beyond “high politics” to include ordinary traces and artefacts that reveal how people “make history” in diffuse and often invisible ways. Building on the notion of social imaginaries, I briefly illustrate how IR’s historiographic imaginary may expand to more vernacular and cultural representations of the international circulating through media, art, games, or literature. Embracing everyday sources—such as colonial board games, advertisements, or ephemera—opens a historical window onto the socio-historical textures through which the international is lived and reproduced.