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What Is a “Root Narrative”?
Root narratives are worldviews defined by the interplay between abuses of power, the injustices they cause, and the searches for justice that come about to rectify them.
They provide “a way to imagine resistance against a form of social power that has been put to purportedly unjust uses” (Simmons, 2020, p. 15).
In elaborating root narratives, RNT aims to provide the story grammar that people use to narrate abuses of power (injustice) and how to rectify them (justice). In this way, root narratives are “justice languages” that people use not only to communicate their views on justice, but also to help shape the possibilities for achieving justice.
According to RNT, people “story” abuses of social power through four political “worldviews”:
- the Securitarian worldview
- the Libertarian worldview
- the Egalitarian worldview
- the Dignitarian worldview
Each worldview presents a distinctive critique of a specific abuse of social power. These critiques are represented through specific story elements.
Hero / Victim
(aka, the Protagonist Function)
All stories have characters you root for. These are often the “Hero” and/or the “Victim.” In RNT, these characters are often two sides of the same coin, taken together to form the “Protagonist Function” of the theory.
The “Victim” of the story represents the people who are hurt by the abuse of power, and the “Hero” of the story represents the people who are tasked with fighting and ultimately overcoming this abuse of power. While sometimes the “Victim” and the “Hero” represent different characters, they can also represent the same character in the story. Part of the story’s triumph, in other words, comes from the “Victim” becoming the “Hero.”
A particular root narrative can often be identified through the protagonist function. When you’re looking at a piece of text and trying to identify what root narrative it represents, you can do so by asking yourself “Who is being abused?” and “Who is expected to save the day?”
Villain
(aka, the Antagonist Function)
If your story has a Hero and a Victim, it also follows that it will have a Villain. This is the character that is considered to be the cause of the Victim’s suffering and the enemy that the Hero must defeat.
In RNT, the “Villain,” also known as the “Antagonist Function,” is the source of the abuse of power. To rectify the abuse of power and the injustice it causes, the Villain needs to be overcome.
To identify a root narrative using the antagonist function, you can ask yourself, “Who is the bad guy in this story?”
Stakes
(aka, what the characters are fighting over)
In every conflict, the parties are fighting over something. In RNT, that something is represented by the stakes at the heart of each worldview, and at the heart of each of the root narratives is a form of injustice.
While these stakes are represented in the theory with abstract concepts that refer to specific values (i.e., “Security,” “Liberty,” “Equality,” and “Dignity”), in real-life conflicts—which are complex, messy, and naunced—these stakes take many different concrete forms. To identify what the stakes are, it can be helpful to ask, “What is it that the protagonist values and wants to protect?”
When you pull these narrative elements together, you get the following sentence:
The abuses of the Antagonist Function must be overcome by the Protagonist Function.
This sentence is the basic story grammar of every root narrative, and it can be used as a tool to identify a root narrative when you come across a story about an abuse of power.
The following table shows which typified form each of the above story elements takes within the four root narratives.
The Story Elements of the Root Narratives
| Securitarian | Libertarian | Egalitarian | Dignitarian | |
| Hero / Victim | “The State” / “Innocent Civilians” | “The Law” / “Rational Citizens” | “People’s Movements” / “Virtuous People” | “Status Movements” / “Undaunted Outgroup” |
| Villain | “Dangerous Enemies” | “The Bad King” | “Selfish Elites” | “The Ignorant Masses” |
| Stakes | Security | Liberty | Equality | Dignity |
Of course, the forms that all these elements take in real-life stories can be varied and complex. The villain of a libertarian story might not literally be a “Bad King,” for example, but will be some person or entity who is wielding absolute authority in a way that infringes on the individual rights and liberties of everyday people.
A little later in this guide, we’ll go over the various ways these different story elements can get pulled together to produce examples of the securitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, and dignitarian worldviews.
A Note on “Narrative”
“Narrative” is a word that is used to describe the phenomenon of stories and storytelling. However, that doesn’t mean it is just about fiction (though fictional stories are narrative products).
In the field of peace and conflict studies (PACS), to talk about narrative is to talk about it as a constructionist process (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) by which our world—including our identities, our societies, our relationships, our ideas, our values, and our institutions—is not just reflected through stories, but also made and re-made by stories (Cobb, 2013; Monk and Winslade, 2013; Simmons, 2020). That is why it is so important to study story grammar—the patterns of how stories get told—in order to begin understanding the impact that stories (narrative products) and storytelling (narrative processes) have on our world.
When we hear the words “narrative” and “story,” it can sometimes be tempting to think of these things as trivial or unreal. Aren’t stories just stories, after all?
Narrative theories of human society (including conflict, peace, and justice) argue just the opposite. Stories aren’t just stories. They are, in fact, some of the most serious phenomena in the world, because humans cannot understand themselves and each other without recourse to stories and discourse.
In other words, in order for us to be who we are, we need narrative.
What’s the Relationship Between the Root Narratives?
One of the central paradoxes of storytelling is that the heroes of one story can very easily become the villains of another.
While each root narrative represents a distinct worldview based on a specific value that is being protected (i.e., “Security,” “Liberty,” “Equality,” and “Dignity”), they are also connected through the ways they come into conflict with each other.
It is this relationship that gives rise to the conflicts of power and justice at the center of RNT.
Each root narrative has at its core an abuse of power that it seeks to rectify. However, the efforts by the heroes of one root narrative to overcome the abuses of power of a villain often become new abuses of power for a different set of heroes and victims. The hero of a securitarian story can become the villain of a libertarian story; the hero of a libertarian story can become the villain of an egalitarian story; the hero of an egalitarian story can become the villain of a dignitarian story; and so on.
This is what makes RNT a theory of “radical disagreement” (Ramsbotham, 2010)—that is, disagreement at the level of basic political values and moral institutions. As peacebuilders, conflict resolvers, and social justice activists well know, striving to address injustice is so tricky precisely because one person’s or group’s struggle for justice can so easily be storied as the source of injustice for another.
RNT is a theory that strives to help people concerned with peace and justice to build better understandings of the “justice languages” so that they can become tools for transformation. The goal is not necessarily to break the cycle of root narratives. After all, justice is an essential part of a peaceful society, and as such, there is no escaping the need for root narratives.
Rather, the goal of RNT is to help us harness these justice languages for constructive, rather than destructive, ends, often by allowing us to be curious about which heroes, victims, villains, and stakes most animate us, and to consider how a different story might be told.
When the Hero Becomes the Villain
It is the relationship between each root narrative that allows us to better understand the different abuses of power at work in these worldviews.
An important feature of each root narrative is that it can be further broken down into three sub-narratives. These sub-narratives provide some permutation of the sentence at the core of each root narrative (“The abuses of the Antagonist Function must be overcome by the Protagonist Function.”).
One way of re-wording that sentence is to write the following:
“The Victim is abused by the Villain.”
It is with the above sentence that we can derive the basic story grammar for each sub-narrative of the securitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, and dignitarian worldviews. All we have to do is the following:
- replace “Victim” with the specific victim that represents the root narrative;
- replace “Villain” with a demonized version of the hero of one of the other root narratives;
- replace “abused by” with the abuse of power that is characteristic of the root narrative.
The following tables illustrate the abuses of power that the hero of each root narrative is up against. They also show how the hero of one root narrative can become demonized into the villain of another.
The Abuses Faced within the Root Narratives
| Root Narrative | Abuse of Power |
| Securitarian | “threatened by” |
| Libertarian | “coerced by” |
| Egalitarian | “cheated by” |
| Dignitarian | “disrespected by” |
Demonized Versions of the Root Narrative Heroes
| Secuitrian | Libertarian | Egalitarian | Dignitarian |
| “The State” becomes “The Bad King” | “The Law” becomes “Selfish Elites” | “People’s Movements” become “The Ignorant Masses” | “Status Movements” become “Dangerous Enemies” |
To understand more about how root narratives come into conflict with each other, and how we can address these conflicts more constructively, we first need to take a deep dive into the worldview at the heart of each root narrative.
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