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The book is so rich and dense with layers after layers of nuanced concepts that a commentary could be written for each chapter.
The book opens with a stunning question: “Is there an ‘international’ and where are its boundaries?” (p. 13) It goes on to describe in painstaking details, a new narrative of difference and similarity based on what Chernobrov calls the “drawing self.” The author brings the unconscious back into the psycho-social narrative of politics, suggesting that our perception of the “object” is not so much about their “otherness” per se, as much as derived from the subject's self-concept being affirmed or threatened by their perception of the other. The author explains how our most essential ontological need is for a reliable sense of identity, which is then continuously validated through affiliation—the essential need for belonging. We seek and find safety in experiences with those who affirm and validate our sense of continuity in time and space, both as individual and as part of collective identity.
Chenebrov asks If ‘international’ was an identity, what would it be? He argues that societies imagine distant events as either validating or disconfirming their self-concepts, and therefore, how they receive and perceive international events, is ontologically rooted in a need for safety in the continuity of their sense of self in time and space, and the reassuring sense that accompanies the experience of sameness (Kohut, 1977).
Chernobrov describes the “drawing self as that which unites the inner motivations and insecurities of a subject that lead it to perceive unfolding events and their agents in particular ways” (p. 7). To highlight this drawing self that both projects (and in my opinion also identifies), the author gives the example of what followed after the Charlie Hebdo tragedy of 2015 in France, where the newspaper satirists were murdered for depicting cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. The French rose in protest and united on the theme of “je suis