War as disease: biomedical metaphors in prevention discourse
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Author | Johanna Rodehau-Noack |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/13540661211055537 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661211055537
European Journal of
International Relations
2021, Vol. 27(4) 1020 –1041
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661211055537
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War as disease: biomedical
metaphors in prevention
discourse
Johanna Rodehau-Noack
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Abstract
Previous research has examined biomedical metaphors in discourses on military
intervention, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism. Starting from the observation
that such metaphors also occur in the contemporary conflict prevention discourse,
this article inquires into their intellectual origins and implications for the understanding
of war and prevention. Drawing on archival analysis, it finds that they manifest in two
ways in prevention discourse. In the cataclysmic notion, war is likened to an epidemic
or plague. This metaphor was popularised by Christian pacifists in the 19th century
and carried forth into 20th-century prevention documents. The more recent risk
factor notion is couched in terms of enabling conditions for threats to the body politic.
By engaging imagery on immunity and public health, it draws parallels between social
and political organisation and functions of the body. The article argues that while
both notions of biomedical metaphors of war in conflict prevention discourse are
firmly rooted in modernist thinking, this intellectual legacy manifests differently. The
cataclysmic notion associates war and disease with barbarism and thus paints prevention
as a civilisational objective. The risk factor notion, on the contrary, represents war as a
technico-scientific problem and thus shifts the focus towards governing and controlling
war through knowledge and technology. Furthermore, both notions converge in the
idea of a body politic that is to be protected and in the implicit assumption of world
order in which war-as-disease is a temporary deviation from the ‘healthy norm’, while
peace-as-health is the desired and default state of affairs.
Keywords
War, conflict prevention, metaphors, disease, discourse, modernity
Corresponding author:
Johanna Rodehau-Noack, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London
WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: j.rodehau-noack@lse.ac.uk
1055537EJT0010.1177/13540661211055537European Journal of International RelationsRodehau-Noack
research-article2021
Article
Rodehau-Noack 1021
Introduction
In 1814, Mary Godwin, who would later become known as Mary Shelley, the author of
Frankenstein, eloped with her future husband Percy Shelley. While they travelled across
continental Europe, she kept a journal that would be published three years later as part of
the Romantic travel diary History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a part of France,
Switzerland, Germany, and Holland.1 During the trip, they passed through a small French
town that had been occupied by Russian troops only a few months prior as the Sixth
Coalition of allies drove back Napoleon’s army. Upon seeing the ruinous damage to the
people and the land, Shelley and Shelley (1817: 18–19) note,
We now approached the scenes that reminded us of what we had nearly forgotten, that France
had lately been the country in which great and extraordinary events had taken place. Nogent, a
town we entered about noon the following day, had been entirely desolated by the Cossacs [sic].
Nothing could be more entire than the ruin in which these barbarians had spread as they
advanced; perhaps they remembered Moscow and the destruction of the Russian villages; but
we were now in France, and the distress of the inhabitants, whose houses had been burned, their
cattle killed, and all their wealth destroyed, has given a sting to my detestation of war, which
none can feel who have not travelled through a country pillaged and wasted by this plague,
which, in his pride, man inflicts upon his fellow.
What Shelley observes in Nogent makes her think of the devastation in the aftermath
of a plague. In this way, she draws a comparison between disease and war in that she uses
the former as a metaphor for the latter. This association through the figurative expression
of the ‘plague’ becomes increasingly common in the discourse of peace advocacy of the
1800s. In the 20th and 21st centuries, representations of war as disease find their way
into the policy discourse on conflict prevention, which, as this article shows, is rife with
medical allusions and comparisons.
Metaphors for war abound, with the image of war as a strategic game perhaps being
the most pervasive and well-researched one as it is frequently leveraged in military stra-
tegic thought (e.g. Lakoff, 1991; Sahlane, 2013; Von Clausewitz, 1982: 116–117).
Against the rise of terrorism and remote warfare in the last two decades, a set of meta-
phors relating to therapeutic intervention arose, which have already received significant
attention in academic inquiry into military intervention (McFalls, 2010), and especially
counter-terrorism (Beyribey, 2020; Mongoven, 2006; Schwarz, 2015) and counter-insur-
gency (Bell, 2012), as well as in the discourse on so-called failed states (Manjikian,
2008).
This article focuses on a specific discourse located primarily in international organi-
sations and commissions around the agenda of preventing war and armed conflict. For
the purpose of this analysis, I understand conflict prevention as the policy agenda that
aims to avert the emergence, escalation, continuation and recurrence of war and violent
conflict (Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (CCPDC), 1997: xviii;
United Nations (UN) and World Bank, 2018: 77). After efforts at preventing violent
conflict on an international level were hampered by the bloc confrontation of the Cold
War, UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali’s 1997 report An Agenda for Peace is often
attributed with initiating the current prevention agenda (Carment and Schnabel, 2003;
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