The narrative of “revisionism” assumes a moral and progressive international order for the dissatisfied power to challenge

As examined throughout the remainder of the article, the dominant story of a historically Western-centric IR has been that of an essentially moral and progressive world order formulated and sustained by the West (or, before then, an Anglo-American world), on the one hand, and that of a non-West that jeopardizes the stability and advancements the West has enabled, on the other. These ‘ordering narratives’ of morality and progress are forms of metanarratives which encompass social actors including IR scholars, having become ‘lodged in the theoretical core of social theory’ (Somers and Gibson 1994, 63). Ingrained and largely unchallenged, they offer a story of international revisionism and the status quo which comes with a dual logic. Like all narratives, they bring order by steering and regulating debate around the rise and fall of great powers. However, as metanarratives, they also establish truths about international order itself—about what it is, how it came about, the condition it is in and where it is going. Notions of international order bind and give meaning to the concepts of revisionism and the status quo and, as shown in due course, must be central to the process of extricating those concepts from the narrative constraints that have been imposed. By reinterpreting the concepts of revisionism and the status quo as narratives, we show how they bring a particular way of sense making, with inherently performative, rather than merely descriptive, functions. The power of narratives lies in their effects, and the aim here is to reveal the formations and consequences of the narratives we explore. We examine the scholar as narrator operating through the creation and deployment of powerful conceptual IR narratives that not only represent, but also select and restrain, our knowledges of the world and the identities and motivations of the actors within it. We further show how these narratives transcend the discipline, connecting to and permeating political practice (see Winkler 2019; Gustafsson et al. 2019). The following section details how scholarly debate on revisionism and the status quo has been historically organized by conceptual narratives, enabling IR theorists to advance and sustain stories of international revisionism principally as a form of non-Western disruption of a Western status quo that has benevolent and moral foundations and represents civilizational progress.