The Looping Effects of IR’s Concepts: Bartelson on Ontogenetic War and the Politics of Classification
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829819873952 |
| Author | Marta Bashovski |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book Forum |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829819873952
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2019, Vol. 48(1) 79 –89
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829819873952
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1. Jens Bartelson, War in International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017).
2. Ibid., 15.
The Looping Effects of IR’s
Concepts: Bartelson on
Ontogenetic War and the
Politics of Classification
Marta Bashovski
Campion College at the University of Regina, Canada
Keywords
ontogenetic war, looping effects, Bartelson, ISA Theory Section
Introduction
Jens Bartelson’s War in International Thought is in many ways an exemplary text.1 The
book offers a sophisticated historical reading of the function of a particular understand-
ing of war – ontogenetic war – on modern subjects’ dominant views of the production
and reproduction of political and legal orders. Dating back to at least the thought of
Heraclitus, an ontogenetic conception takes war to be a ‘productive force’ that can be
utilised in the creation or rehabilitation of order.2 Tracing the reappearance of presup-
positions about ontogenetic war through a wide range of texts dating from the early 17th
to the late 19th century, Bartelson’s examination of ontogenetic war links the work of
early modern and modern historians, military strategists, cartographers, lawyers, and
contemporary mainstream and critical International Relations (IR) scholars. Bartelson
demonstrates that, despite dominant early modern and modern conceptions of war as the
enforcement of laws by stronger agents on weaker ones, and as a contest between moral
and legal equals, respectively, the ontogenetic understanding of war reappears in
Corresponding author:
Marta Bashovski, Campion College, University of Regina, 3737 Wascana Parkway, Regina, Saskatchewan,
S4S 0A2, Canada.
Email: marta.bashovski@uregina.ca
873952MIL0010.1177/0305829819873952Millennium: Journal of International StudiesBashovski
research-article2019
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