IR's Roads to Freedom: Rereading Jean-Paul Sartre's trilogy as an International Relations text

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre's trilogy Roads to Freedom is written against the backdrop of the crises between 1938 and 1940 that led to war and the Fall of France. In this article I argue that Roads to Freedom can be read as an IR text, and I concentrate on four areas. First, a refocusing on the international relations of the everyday. Second, the anatomy of a crisis from an existentialist viewpoint that can enrich our understanding of crises. Third how the interactions of the main characters reveal the ‘mediation of estrangement’ at the heart of diplomacy, first explored by Der Derian in his 1987 On Diplomacy. Fourth, it calls into question our emphasis in IR on the centrality of causes to understand a crisis. Rather, Roads to Freedom refocuses our gaze on the diverse effects in everyday IR. The argument of the article is interwoven with my own experiences reading the trilogy for the first time, and how it influenced my decision to study IR.