Abstract
Keywords
This symposium engages with and reflects on Jens Bartelson’s War in International Thought, which received the International Studies Association (ISA) Theory Section’s 2018 Book Award. 1 Staying on course with his previous work on sovereignty, political community, and the state, 2 in his most recent project, Bartelson probes another central concept in the practice of, and academic discourse on, international relations – that is, war. As the contributions to this symposium reveal, Bartelson’s book promises to foster insightful engagements with the historical meanings and political consequences of knowledge production about war. It arrives as a timely intervention, particularly to the extent that the ever-more violent political conjunctures we face demands that ‘we’ as scholars and as political actors reflect on the relations between war and political-legal orders that have been constituted – both in practice and through the politics of scholarship. Above all, Bartelson’s book is an insightful and novel contribution that adds significantly to this conversation. Bartelson urges international relations theory to look beyond conventional analysis and probe the dominant historical meanings that can – silently and unwittingly – perpetuate political violence and war.
War in International Thought provides a historical ontology – ‘a genealogy on steroids’, as Bartelson himself describes it 3 – of war by probing how historical conceptions of war have conditioned the behaviours of political actors in international politics, and foremost that of states. He highlights that understandings of the state and the international system have been in part dependent on historically generated narratives about war and its place as a determining factor of international order. As Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton summarise, Bartelson traces ‘a history of how thinkers imagine political and international orders against the possibility of war’. 4 From works of early modern historians to the classics of international law, to the 19th century ruminations, Cold War accounts and to contemporary discussions of military interventions, Bartelson explores the prevalent conception of war in international thought as ‘ontogenetic’: war as ‘a productive force in human affairs that ought to be harnessed for the right political purposes, such as the creation of order and peace’. 5 He focuses on the performative consequences of making sense of war in this particular way, and attends to its ‘looping effects’ – that is, ‘the ways in which this concept [war] is used . . . affect which phenomena can thus be subsumed by telling what war is and what war does and what war is not and what war does not’. 6 The focus on the ‘looping effects’ of ontogenetic war and ‘creative tampering with the linguistic conventions that govern the use of its concepts’ 7 go on to constitute the central themes of the contributions by Antoine Bousquet and Marta Bashovski. 8 It also invites important engagements by Aida Hozić and Barkawi and Brighton, who attend to the challenges as well as the limitations of this conceptualisation, grappling with both the ‘tension between the world of ideas and empirical world’ 9 and the consequences of omitting ‘global, international, imperial’ 10 histories and sociologies of war.
The 2018 Book Award received by Bartelson’s book is conferred by the ISA Theory Section each year to acknowledge and honour cutting-edge, innovative research and scholarship on International Political Theory. 11 To be nominated for the award, a brief letter is written and submitted, elaborating why the book in question deserves consideration. The award committee is co-chaired by the Theory Section chair and the recipient of the previous year’s book award. It includes three other members. For the 2018 Award, a total of 37 books were nominated. The committee then undertook a two-tiered judging process. This comprised longlisting from all of the nominated books, then reducing the number to a shortlist for close consideration. Nineteen of the nominated books were included in the longlist. Five were finalised for the shortlist. The main criteria for judging during the final decision process were: (1) originality and innovation; (2) rigour; and, (3) significance for advancing the field of International Political Theory.
While assessing the respective books against these criteria seems straightforward, it often proved challenging. Over the past three decades, as scholars before us have articulated, International Political Theory has transformed in multiple ways. 12 So much is this the case that it leaves the field with a central question: what constitutes theorising ‘the international’ today? The logic between what is inside and outside – that is, between what lies in the realm of local and domestic politics and what is distinctly international or global – has in a sense fallen away, having been repeatedly deconstructed. 13 This has meant that international theory meanwhile now occupies a greater, more dispersed and potentially more nuanced space. Theorists search across more and more disciplines to appreciate world politics in a fuller light. Increasingly too, grand narratives are eschewed – the global is illuminated anew, from the standpoint of the local. This brief summary cannot do justice to the growing complexities of the field. But these issues alone highlight a range of questions. What is the particular nature, role and function of contemporary ‘international’ theory? How much can and should be expected of conceptual inquiries? And, who gets to define what is and is not International Political Theory? One committee member noted that international theory is often presented as ‘a battle between monists and pluralist[s]’. But in actuality it is a much more significant debate and field than this duality reflects. With so many theories and the increasing spirit of theoretical pluralism in international inquiry, there is ‘no such thing as IR theory in the singular, but rather, there are many types of theory’. 14
For the purposes of the book award, the committee took the view that International Political Theory unquestionably now exists well beyond the traditional depictions that once dominated the discipline. Pluralism – in terms of, for example, the purpose of theoretical inquiry at stake; the subjects examined, from the local, national to global and transnational; and, the approaches employed to conceptualise or theoretically recast the political and the international – was embraced. Doing so was a conscious choice. It was made with an appreciation of – and an explicit interest in confronting – the inherent politics and ethics that are involved in defining disciplinary parameters: of claims about what constitutes, as well as who writes and how they theorise ‘the international’ today.
War in International Thought: Central Contention and Contributions
While examining an evidently long-entrenched core concept and practice in both international theory and world politics – war – the critical inquiry forwarded in War in International Thought can be seen as part of the changing theoretical landscape that international studies finds itself now in. Bartelson’s contributions lie not only in his historical, conceptual, and to an extent practical, inquiry, but also in his critical ethos. This book, following from his earlier contributions, is a call to deconstruct the conceptual mainstays – such as sovereignty and statehood – from which International Political Theory historically emerged.
In War in International Thought, Bartelson traces the history of war and the politically and internationally constitutive effects of the historical meanings attributed to state warfare. He does this, as introduced earlier, through examining how war has been, since pre-modern times, understood as a ‘necessary precursor’ 15 of creating political order. Bartelson’s central contention and argument is that the centrality of war – as both a historical concept and as practice through (European) history – is not a natural or inevitable phenomenon in global affairs, but rather has been historically constructed through self-actualising beliefs about its meaning and necessity. Significant in this respect is that preponderant historical understandings of war as productive of order have conditioned the behaviour of states, and also, consequently, the legitimacy of statehood and sovereignty. Offering a sweeping historical analysis and theoretical genealogy, Bartelson traces the history of war and of thinking about war through numerous periods, including the Enlightenment wars, imperial wars and colonial conquests of the 19th century, the 20th century World Wars, the ensuing Cold War and on through the wave of humanitarian and military interventions since the 1990s.
The inquiry and argument contribute to advancing theoretical understandings across international studies in several ways. The most direct of these emerges specifically from the innovation and strength of Bartelson’s argument. However, there are implicit ways as well. These can be read into Bartelson’s approach and take shape from conversations the book will undoubtedly inspire – and indeed has already through this symposium.
Foremost and most explicitly, as Marta Bashovski summarises, is that ‘the ontogenetic understanding of war . . . help[s] explain how underlying presuppositions about the nature and function of war have shaped prevailing views of the contemporary state and international system’. 16 Bartelson’s re-statement of Charles Tilly’s well-known aphorism is poignant in this regard. In a sense, it is true that ‘war made the state and the state made war’, yet as Bartelson illuminates: the statement does not tell the whole story. War was not an inevitable historical reality, but widespread beliefs about the productive value of war helped to make it seem as such. Cast in this light, Bartelson also picks up on earlier strands of his theorising and furthers his own deconstruction of the naturalisation of sovereignty. 17 Demonstrating that statehood was enabled and legitimised, and sovereignty reified, through historically fashioned narratives of war, his inquiry implicitly articulates a conception of world politics beyond the idea of both sovereignty and statehood as static and unchanging. Yet, and in spite of such contingency, the meanings given to war over time have ultimately formed a Weberian ‘iron cage’, 18 perpetuating – even through times of dramatic social and political change – the modern international system. Hence, the so-called ‘looping effects’ of ontogenetic war indeed loop-back through the state and into the creation of war all over again. Through Bartelson’s analysis it would thus seem that the war-state ‘loop’ – even though constructed and hypothetically contingent 19 – is closed.
Bartelson’s inquiry does more than reveal the tangible effects of prevailing beliefs about war. His book can be seen, as contributions by Marta Bashovski and Aida Hozić underline, through the lens of a reflection on the productive nature of the theories and concepts scholars and practitioners create and employ. To set this contribution in context, key here is that his argument reveals the productive roles – and, as Bashovski addresses, the subjectivity – of key figures and thinkers through history. It was the subjectivity of individuals – the lawyers, political theorists, historians, and analysts – that made war the perpetuating phenomenon that it has identifiably become. Thinking, imagining and theorising about war has been performative, ‘feeding into the very world’s scholars have tried to describe or explain’. 20 In his concluding reflections, Bartelson briefly turns the light back to his own approach. He attempts to build bridges with feminist and postcolonial scholarship, which have been candid in calling for greater reflexivity and self-awareness on the part of scholars about their own (complicity in) discourses of violence, war and the supposed political ‘orders’ that such overt and structural harms have created. 21
Nonetheless, Bartelson’s contribution – foremost, to exposing the history and constitutive role of the concept of war, yet also its paradoxical contingency – is particularly insightful and a timely intervention on its own. Bartelson’s historical ontology ultimately illuminates how thinking about war through history has shaped the course and character of world politics. The originality and innovation, the methodological precision and the convincing nature of the argument were the key reasons Bartelson’s book won out. At the same time, and as the symposium contributors remind us, while critical inquiries such as Bartelson’s are typically motivated to reveal that which is concealed – exposing fixed ideas and practices as contingent – ultimately no inquiry is free of foundations. And it is the foundations implicit in Bartelson’s approach that this symposium begins to pick apart. A final contribution can consequently be seen to exist in these spaces, in the margins and silences inherent in scholarly inquiry and in ensuing conversations. At stake for a historical ontology are not only the macro-categories through which war and the state legitimised each other, but also how the institutions and people and everyday lives that were bound and affected by such ontologies functioned (or were appropriated) to legitimise them as well. Significant in this respect is, for instance, the importance of the materiality of violence and war, the everyday experiencing of war, the roles of bodies in war and of ‘what war bodies tell us’ 22 about the meaning of violence, of gendered understandings of war and the enduring legacies of colonial and racial injustice. 23 The symposium contributors begin to probe these spaces and initiate these conversations. We have no doubt, given the strength and insight of Bartelson’s work, that these are just the beginning.
Symposium Themes and Structure
Each essay in the symposium emphasises the important contributions of the book, while also carefully considering the line of inquiry and argument. All contributors focus on how the book adds novel insights that recast how war has been understood in the history of international thought and, in turn, the making of the state and the modern international system. Such analysis, the symposium collectively suggests, is valuable as it brings war – as both a core concept and foundational practice in world politics – into view in a new, critical light.
Several themes resonate across the symposium. Foremost, as discussed above, is arguably the book’s central contribution: the significance of appreciating war as a historical and ontological construct – that is, war as a mode of making meaning and ‘practicing’ international politics that has enabled and legitimised statehood over time. All contributors note that this is important in both a scholarly and applied sense: it prompts scholars as both theorists and political actors to reflect on, and in turn to be reflexive about, the core concepts used to study, teach and practice world politics. Tracing how historical meanings of war ‘loop back’ to recreate fixed ways of thinking about the state and its purpose highlights the significance of the frames scholars and political actors in international studies habitually employ. The concepts scholars use and the narratives they often unknowingly create have constitutive political effects, such as in the case of war as a conditioning behaviour that has ‘made’, and become integral to the idea of, the sovereign state. The value of uncovering such teleologies and the constitutive power of scholarly classifications is an aspect of Bartelson’s inquiry with which all contributors agree – and praise.
Symposium contributions also critically engage, to varying extents and in distinct ways, the politics and ethics at stake in the new knowledge Bartelson has produced. Contributors focus on the exclusions and silences that carry through in top-down approaches to historicising war. They point to and reveal the inherent subjectivity of knowledge production (Bashovski; and Barkawi and Brighton) – something Bartelson implicitly seeks to uncover as well. But herein lies the concern. Contributors worry that his failure to situate himself – his own ‘absent presence’ as Barkawi and Brighton put it – may in this respect place him ‘in the same position with respect to the study of war as those he critiques’. 24 Contributors also contemplate the consequences of ensuing theorising, in terms of the scholarly standpoint and the politics of the ontological purview at stake (Bashovski; Hozić; and Barkawi and Brighton). They highlight how attendant gender and racial/colonial silences constitute and replicate the very hierarchies that have both created and perpetuated war as a core feature of (European) history, statehood and international society (Hozić; and Barkawi and Brighton). At stake as well are the everyday experiences and the ensuing problematic structural legacies that a historical sociology from higher up fails to face (Bousquet; and Barkawi and Brighton). The overall suggestion here is that while critical theories – such as Bartelson’s – bring to light the concealed and the vanquished, they can further conceal as well. Critical approaches can only be enhanced if they too lay their subjectivity bare. We as scholars need to own-up to our assumptions, our lines of sight, our silences, and our inevitable limits. 25
To begin the symposium, Antoine Bousquet advances an ‘ecological’ approach to understanding the complex nature of war and how war has been through time perpetuated materially. Bousquet probes and extends Bartelson’s argument, showing how historically war was made sense of not only through linguistic and discursive agency (and thus the production of social meanings), but also simultaneously through a complex web of tangible, material practices, including mapping and cartography, boundary-drawing and the physical fortification of territory, as well as the development of weaponry. Such practices strengthened the state’s ontological conditioning to war by weaving together beliefs about war with the ‘bodies, objects, ideas, practices and affects’ that have likewise been conditioned by the durability of armed conflict. 26 As powerful as ‘ontogenetic’ conceptions of war have been, war can also be understood as much more than the cultural meanings it has acquired.
Marta Bashovski then focuses on the importance of recognising and unravelling the conceptual histories of core concepts employed in international theory and specifically how these relate to the construction of war and security. She advances two interwoven points that complement and re-position Bartelson’s argument. First, Bashovski stresses that the co-constitutive looping processes through which concepts such as war are defined and practiced are precisely where the core of politics lies. Classifications condition what is possible for political actors to perceive of and think and do. Second, and consequently, Bashovski scrutinises individual and collective subjectivity in relation to the politically productive work of scholars. Drawing from Bartelson’s ontology of war, she examines both the immanent possibilities and limits of deconstructing the political meanings with which our scholarly selves – no matter how reflexive or contingent – are inevitably bound.
Continuing with the question of subjectivity, Aida Hozić forwards a powerful contribution that asks a range of critical questions of Bartelson’s approach and inquiry. Concentrating on the issue of identity, she brings the analysis into focus through the silenced voices and marginalised perspectives of the communities that have been structurally and overtly affected by war, yet whose experiencing of war typically belie conventional analyses. Until the underpinning logics of race/colonialism and gender are seen as inherent parts of how war has been understood and normalised through (Western, European) state practice, Hozić argues that such a critical historical ontology may likewise be complicit in replicating the same structures of power and exclusion, knowledge and hierarchy from which international relations – and the history of state warfare – has emerged. The key point ensuing from Hozić’s contribution is thus the need to recognise the significance of identity and specifically the Euro-centric and gendered positions that have permeated conceptual histories of war – and also our associated scholarly purviews.
In the final engagement, Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton offer a contribution that further interrogates the generative, performative functions of understanding war through such a conceptual history. While recognising that Bartelson’s inquiry opens up to critique a foundational concept in international thought and world politics, they suggest the inquiry could have been taken further still. To do so, they focus on how lived experiences – the contingent everyday ‘histories and sociologies’ 27 – that both precede and ensue from war exceed the constitutive effects of war’s conceptual ontology. Reflecting that war shapes the fates and histories of peoples, Barkawi and Brighton argue that the everyday violence manifest through war is as constitutive of war and what war means in terms of political order as are historically conditioned, instrumental state-centric meanings.
Finally, Jens Bartelson concludes and book-ends the symposium. He offers a contemplative response to all engagements. In part a re-statement of his case, Bartelson acknowledges the limits of historicising war through his ontological lens while also clarifying the focus and scope of his book and its argument. He pays tribute to the question of subjectivity and the ethical implications implicit within his line of inquiry, particularly in terms of what he perceives of as ‘the limits of human freedom’: 28 that is, that the humanly compulsion to name and classify ourselves in relation to the world around each of us presents the inevitable risk of essentialising despite the contextual nature of the world being described. The paradox here is that it is this very point – contingency, and expressly in relation to the nature and function of war, its historical descriptions, meanings, and, in turn, its practice – is precisely what Bartelson’s contribution itself skilfully brings out of the shadows and into the light.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Asli Calkivik and Emma Hutchison co-author this introductory essay in their capacity as co-chairs of the ISA Theory Section Book Awards Committee for 2018. Asli Calkivik also concurrently served as Chair of the ISA Theory Section. Dr Hutchison was the previous recipient of the ISA Theory Section Book Award, having been awarded the prize for her book, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions After Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). The authors would like to acknowledge feedback and support from all members of the 2018 ISA Theory Section Book Awards Committee, namely Marta Bashovski, Aida Hozić and Russ Kerr.
Editors’ note
This is the second symposium published as part of Millennium’s partnership with the ISA Theory Section, through which the journal publishes a symposium on the winner of the Theory Section’s best book award. The editors are grateful to Asli Calkivik and Emma Hutchison for their thoughtful and creative coordination of the symposium and fruitful collaboration, to Tarak Barkawi, Marta Bashovski, Shane Brighton, Antoine Bousquet, and Aida Hozić for their contributions, to Jens Bartelson for his engagement with their reflections, and to the symposium’s two reviewers for their useful comments.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1.
Jens Bartelson, War in International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Meera Sabaratnam’s book, Decolonising Intervention: International Statebuilding in Mozambique (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) received an honourable mention in the same category.
2.
Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jens Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jens Bartelson, Visions of World Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). In this symposium, Aida Hozić contextualises the contribution of War in International Thought in relation to the conceptual advancements Bartelson has forwarded across the span of his career.
3.
Jens Bartelson, ‘A Reply to My Critics: War and Historical Ontology’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48, no. 1 (2019).
4.
Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, ‘Concepts and Histories of War’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48, no. 1 (2019).
5.
Bartelson, War in International Thought, 15.
6.
Ibid., 23. Bartelson adapts Ian Hacking’s conception of ‘looping effects’ – that is, the idea that the concepts, categories and classifications through which people describe themselves are performative in so far that they unconsciously ‘loop back’ defining and limiting that which they are supposed to represent or explain. See Ian Hacking, ‘The Looping Effects of Human Kinds’, in Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Approach, eds. Dan Sperber, David Premack and Ann James Premack (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 351–91.
7.
Bartelson, War in International Thought, 23.
8.
Antoine Bousquet, ‘In Defence of Ontogenesis and For a General Ecology of War’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48, no. 1 (2019); Marta Bashovski, ‘The Looping Effects of IR’s Concepts: Bartelson on Ontogenic War and the Politics of Classification’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48, no. 1 (2019)
9.
Aida Hozić, ‘Jens Bartelson’s “As If” World and the (Im)Possibility of Critique in International Relations Theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48, no. 1 (2019).
10.
Barkawi and Brighton, ‘Concepts and Histories of War’.
11.
The book award is one of the four awards that the Section gives out each year, with the remaining awards including the Best Edited Volume, Best Pre-PhD Paper, Best Post-PhD Paper as well as the Distinguished Scholar Award. To be eligible for nomination for the awards, the research in question needs to be published during the two calendar years before the International Studies Association Annual Convention at which the award is given.
12.
For a series of articles that scrutinise the changing nature of International Political Theory, see the Special Issue, ‘The End of International Relations Theory?’, eds. Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen and Colin Wight, European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 3, 2013. The book that received an honourable mention in this category, Meera Sabaratnam’s Decolonising Intervention: International Statebuilding in Mozambique (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), is also an excellent contribution to not only the changing theoretical landscape in global studies but also to re-theorising the international.
13.
R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
14.
15.
Bartelson, War in International Thought, 16.
16.
Bashovski, ‘The Looping Effects of IR’s Concepts’.
17.
Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty.
18.
We borrow this analogy and phrasing from a committee member’s insights.
19.
Bartelson keeps with the work of Ian Hacking to articulate how the co-constitutive nature of belief about war and the state – the ‘looping effects’ – are in fact susceptible to ‘creative tampering’, which means a break in the loop by breaking with the discursive modes of dominant knowledge production of war. For Hacking’s work on the constitutive ‘looping’ effects of the classifications we use to describe social reality and self-identity, see, for instance, Hacking, ‘The Looping Effects of Human Kinds’; and, Ian Hacking, ‘Making Up People’, in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought, eds. T.C. Heller, M. Sosna, and D.E. Wellbury (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 222–36.
20.
Duncan Bell, ‘Writing the World (Remix)’, in Historiographical Investigations into International Relations, eds. Brian C. Schmidt and Nicolas Guilhot (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 15–50, at 39.
21.
Bartelson draws on contributions such as Neta C. Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Vivienne Jabri, Discourse of Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Vivienne Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). For an important contribution on the need for reflexivity in international studies, see Inanna Hamati-Ataya, ‘Reflectivity, Reflexivity, Reflexivism: IR’s “Reflexive Turn – and Beyond”’, European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 4 (2013): 669–94.
22.
See Swati Parashar, ‘What Wars and “War Bodies” Know about International Relations’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26, no. 4 (2013): 615–30.
23.
For research in this direction see for instance, Himadeep Muppidi, The Colonial Signs of International Relations (London: Hurst & Co., 2012); Parashar, ‘What Wars and “War Bodies” Know’; Christine Sylvester, War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis (London and New York: Routledge, 2013); Joanna Tidy, ‘War Craft: The Embodied Politics of Making War’, Security Dialogue 50, no. 3 (2019): 220–238.
24.
Barkawi and Brighton, ‘Concepts and Histories of War’.
25.
See Bashovski, ‘The Looping Effects of IR’s Concepts’ and Hozić, ‘Jens Bartelson’s “As If” World’.
26.
Bousquet, ‘In Defence of Ontogenesis’.
27.
Barkawi and Brighton, ‘Concepts and Histories of War’.
28.
Bartelson, ‘A Reply to My Critics’.