Violence in international relations: The first and the last word
| Author | Colin Wight |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117819851168 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Part One: Structure and Order |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117819851168
International Relations
2019, Vol. 33(2) 172 –194
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117819851168
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Violence in international
relations: The first and the
last word
Colin Wight
The University of Sydney
Abstract
This article examines change and continuity in the function, role and moral judgement of violence
in international relations. In terms of change, the conclusions are mostly pessimistic if the aim is
the complete eradication of political violence. The control of violence, on the other hand, and
the ability to hold those who employ it to increasing moral and legal standards is perhaps one
of the most significant changes in international relations from 1919 to 2019. However, this does
not mean that violence has been replaced or even transformed. Violence is constitutive of the
political. It is the first and the last word in politics. This is the continuity of violence. Violence, of
which war is only the most visceral expression, has not been transformed or replaced, but rather
it has been displaced into legal systems, institutional orders and new forms of conflict. Inter-state
war may be in decline, but intra-state conflict is rising. To develop this argument, the article
argues that change can only be understood as change against a horizon of continuity.
Keywords
change, continuity, dominance, violence, war
Introduction
The decisive means for politics is violence … He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his
own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics, for the quite different tasks
of politics can only be solved by violence.1
A deep concern about the prevalence of war and the search for peace played a significant
role in the inception of the academic discipline of International Relations (IR). To use a
much-loved feminist trope, International Relations was founded on the desire to control
the masculine war and promote the feminist peace.2 The idea that feminist values
Corresponding author:
Colin Wight, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, Sydney, NSW, 2481 Australia.
Email: colin.wight@sydney.edu.au
851168IRE0010.1177/0047117819851168International RelationsWight
research-article2019
Article
Wight 173
promote peace is one of the factors Steven Pinker identifies in his magisterial work The
Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.3 Pinker’s book makes the
audacious claim that violence in the world has declined and suggests explanations as to
why this has occurred. Despite the protestations of his critics, I believe Pinker to be
broadly correct if one focuses exclusively on the trends.
However, there are dimensions to continuity and change that Pinker’s purely quantita-
tive analysis cannot help us unpack. In particular, his focus on trends cannot help us to
understand the interplay of continuity and change when exploring the role, place, func-
tion and ethical judgement of violence in international society. Pinker’s analysis might
tell us that incidences of violence have declined, but it cannot grasp the nuances of how
violence has been reconfigured, or how our attitudes to it have changed. As this special
edition of the journal marks the centenary of the academic study of International
Relations, it is an opportune moment to reconsider the function, role and place of vio-
lence in international relations.
In this article, I aim to explore these qualitative dimensions and set them alongside
Pinker’s more quantitative analysis to illuminate the mutually constitutive relationship
between politics and violence, the nature of contemporary violence in the international
system,4 and to make several theoretical points about continuity and change in interna-
tional relations. Change is a constant in social life. Rather than seeing continuity and
change as opposites, we should think of them as inextricably linked. The two processes
are not opposed but are co-dependent. Change can only be understood as change within
a horizon of continuity. Outside of this horizon, what we consider to be change is only
difference.
My conclusions will be mostly pessimistic if the aim is the complete eradication of
political violence. The control of violence on the other hand and the ability to hold those
who employ it to increasing moral and legal standards is perhaps one of the most signifi-
cant transformations in international relations from 1919 to 2019. However, decreasing
levels of violence and the increased ability to exercise control over violence will never
lead to a political realm devoid of violence. Where there is politics, there is both actual
violence and the possibility of violence. A world without violence would be a world
without politics, and such a world is implausible. Politics is the terrain of competing
ontologies. Politics is about competing visions of how the world is and how it should be.5
If there were no ontological differences, there would be no politics. Every ontology is
political.6 What we are and whom we might become have always been the most funda-
mental of political questions. A world without politics would be a world in which there
were no disagreements about these fundamental issues. Violence, or its possibility,
accompanies politics, not as something additional to it but as the ultimate ground upon
which otherwise intractable political disputes are resolved. In politics, violence always
has the last word.
War is not a synonym for violence. War may indeed be the continuation of politics by
other means,7 but the reverse is also true: politics is the continuation of violence by other
means. It did not have to be this way. The problem of politics could have been resolved
through nonviolent means, but they were not. The political question was how to bring
order to the state of nature. The chosen answer was to concentrate violence and its own-
ership in the state. Not all political violence is war. Terrorism is a form of political
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