Bring up the bodies: international order, empire, and re-thinking the Great War (1914–1918) from below
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231156347 |
| Author | Meera Sabaratnam |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231156347
European Journal of
International Relations
2023, Vol. 29(3) 553 –575
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661231156347
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JR
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Bring up the bodies:
international order, empire,
and re-thinking the Great War
(1914–1918) from below
Meera Sabaratnam
SOAS University of London, UK
Abstract
What does international order look like when analysed from its margins? Such a
question is the obvious consequence of efforts within International Relations (IR)
to take empire, colonialism and hierarchy more seriously. This article addresses this
question by examining one of IR’s most important touchstones – the Great War –
through the experiences of peoples in southeast Africa. It argues that to do this, we
should use the methodological approaches of histories ‘from below’ and contrapuntal
analysis. When looking at the Great War from the vantage point of southeast Africa
(contemporary Mozambique), the key patterns of interaction organising the international
look different to those emphasised in traditional accounts of international order and
hierarchy. Notable features are the significant continuities and intersections between
structures of war and colonialism, the racialisation of death and suffering, the effects
of white imperial prestige as a strategic preoccupation and the deep historical roots of
anti-colonial resistance. Reading upwards and contrapuntally from these histories, the
paper argues for a redescription of international order as reflecting not predominantly
a balance of power or a normative framework for the organisation of authority, but a
dynamic matrix of structural violence. Reading order from below in this way helps us
better capture how the international is implicated in the production and reproduction
of everyday life for many people, as well as in more dramatic political transformations
such as those generated by experiences of war and resistance to colonialism.
Keywords
War, violence, international order, contrapuntal analysis, histories from below
Corresponding author:
Meera Sabaratnam, SOAS University of London, London, WC1H 0XG, UK.
Email: ms140@soas.ac.uk
1156347EJT0010.1177/13540661231156347European Journal of International RelationsSabaratnam
research-article2023
Article
554 European Journal of International Relations 29(3)
Introduction
For many in the field of International Relations (IR), the Great War (1914–18) remains a
foundational reference point that defines both its origins and its purposes. In terms of
origins, as is widely taught, it was in memory of those fallen in the War that the Chair and
then first Department of International Politics was endowed at the University of Wales in
Aberystwyth in 1919. Relatedly, the purpose of the field became, at least as the liberal
tradition has located it, to manage world affairs between Great Powers both peacefully
and progressively. This connects to an intellectual mission defined by the investigation
of the nature of international order and the causes of change within it. In this regard, the
War has also become a central pedagogical object for discussion of what happens in the
event of a breakdown of the balance of power and the failure of diplomacy (e.g. Nye,
2001). In many ways, then, the Great War is a critical episode for the field’s self-under-
standings of its origins and purposes.
Yet, as revisionist accounts of the field have shown, this narrative has consistently
mystified and obscured the centrality of imperial governance, race war and capitalism as
central preoccupations of the field and public debate before and after 1918 (Ashworth,
2013; Barder, 2021; Long and Schmidt, 2005; Owens and Rietzler, 2021; Thakur and
Vale, 2020; Vitalis, 2015).1 Seen this way, the disciplinary field is about ‘how to run the
world from positions of strength’, as EH Carr once put it (cited in Haslam, 2000: 252),
in which an imperial peace enables the carving up of conquered and subordinated spaces
in a more orderly fashion (Barkawi and Laffey, 1999; Du Bois, 1915). Opening up these
questions is instigating, at least in some quarters, a much wider re-think of what interna-
tional order consists of and who or what IR is for.
This revisionist turn also opens up questions about the disciplinary object itself: the
Great War. As Barkawi has argued, despite the centrality of war to the field of IR, there
has been a curious lack of theorising about what war actually is, and in particular its co-
constitution with politics and society (Barkawi, 2011, 2013). Wars themselves are often
reduced to individual data points rather than dynamic processes which reorder spaces,
peoples and polities. Barkawi’s (2017) own seminal contributions reinterpret the Second
World War and its significance through the dynamics, experiences and perspectives of
the British Indian Army, upending received wisdom about how and why armies fight,
and how imperial dynamics shape and are shaped by their military affairs. Given the
centrality of the Great War to the field of IR (e.g. Lebow, 2014; Levy and Vasquez,
2014), reinterpreting it as a fundamentally imperial constellation (Gerwarth and Manela,
2014) also has the potential to contribute significantly to a re-thinking of how we under-
stand international order itself, and particularly its supposedly peaceful character. This
article takes the imperial context of the Great War as a starting point for the re-descrip-
tion of international order via the experiences of some of its colonised subjects.
How might we do this? I argue that IR’s recent historical turn (captured in de Carvalho
et al., 2021) has yet to exploit fully the methodological resources offered to it by both post-
colonial and social histories. In this paper, I propose that the approaches dominant in IR’s
historical turn can be complemented by a ‘contrapuntal’ approach which further engages
with ‘histories from below’. The argument is that while the historical turn has certainly
widened and de-provincialised the lenses through which to understand international order,
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