World Political Change

Abstract

In this chapter, Mathias Albert and Thomas Müller explore how actors make sense of world political change. It under-stands change as a significant difference over time and emphasises the importance of narratives: It is through narratives that actors highlight differences between the past, present and future and imbue these differences with political significance. The chapter distinguishes three storytelling practices through which actors craft such narratives: periodization, historical regularities and future worlds. Studying three episodes of actors trying to make sense of world political change in the past 50 years, it shows that these storytelling practices are often used in combination and, moreover, are closely intertwined with practices of theorising and modelling what world politics is and how it works.