Concepts and Histories of War
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| Author | Tarak Barkawi,Shane Brighton |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829819873962 |
| Subject Matter | Book Forum |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829819873962
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2019, Vol. 48(1) 99 –104
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829819873962
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1. Jens Bartelson, War in International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018).
Concepts and Histories
of War
Tarak Barkawi
London School of Economics, UK
Shane Brighton
Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Keywords
instrumental war, generative war, Bartelson, ISA Theory Section
Jens Bartelson’s latest book, War in International Thought, argues that assumptions
about war have played a key role in the evolution of European international thought
from the 17th century.1 He traces the histories and effects of a concept of war, or fam-
ily of concepts, in international political and legal thought, and in cognate areas of
inquiry in history, geography, sociology and, of course, International Relations (IR).
He shows how presuppositions about war undergirded conceptions of political and
international order. Bartelson offers a novel and important account of how an imagi-
nary of war, as a potentiality of collective violence, structures international and politi-
cal thought. For Bartelson, war achieves these effects precisely because its meaning
is underspecified, and deprived of historicity, as in IR visions of the international as a
Hobbesian state of war. Bartelson has written a history of how thinkers imagine polit-
ical and international orders against the possibility of war. In this response, we affirm
much of his analysis but seek to provincialise it within a wider field of critical inquiry.
To do so, we lay out the central terms of his position and some of its limits as we see
them. We go on to make a key distinction between ‘instrumental’ and ‘generative’
concepts of war and outline how this situates Bartelson’s argument within the study
of war.
Corresponding author:
Tarak Barkawi, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email t.k.barkawi@lse.ac.uk
873962MIL0010.1177/0305829819873962Millennium: Journal of International StudiesBarkawi and Brighton
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