Introduction: Everyday narratives in world politics

Political science and international relations scholarship increasingly places substantive emphasis on, to put it broadly, the power of discourse in shaping world politics. This Special Issue develops a research agenda that seeks to consolidate a set of data collection and analysis strategies that can be used in studying the way in which elite-driven discourses are legitimated and challenged – in other words, an agenda for studying everyday narratives in world politics. In doing so, the Special Issue makes a threefold contribution: it analyses how key themes with world politics are reproduced and narrated; it demonstrates the need to go beyond ‘methodological elitism’ in understanding narratives, legitimacy, and world politics; and it highlights some of the methodological and practical issues in researching everyday narratives. In this introductory article, we situate the Special Issue within a critique of constructivist methodology broadly conceived, conceptualise everyday sites of politics, and finally, provide an overview of the articles in the issue.