This book offers a critical engagement with contemporary IR textbooks via a novel folklorist approach. Two parts of the folklorist approach are developed, addressing story structures via resemblances to two fairy tales, and engaging with the role of authors via framing gestures. The book not only looks at how the idea of social science may persist in textbooks as many assumptions about what it means to study IR, but also at how these assumptions are written into the defining stories textbooks tell and the possibilities for (re)negotiating these stories and the boundaries of the...