Competing Metaphors for International Relations

This book examines how the thinking towards international relations of political leaders, researchers, the media and the public is fundamentally metaphorical in nature: the abstract and far away constantly made concrete and familiar through the imaginative rationality of metaphors. It delves into ten competing structural metaphors: international relations as natural selection, as family dynamics, as balancing operations, as building and constructing, as games and play, as business and trade, as