Beyond Strauss, lies, and the war in Iraq: Hannah Arendt's critique of neoconservatism

What are we to make of the neoconservative challenge to traditional international thought? Should we content ourselves, as many have done, to return to classical realism in response? Rather than offer another realist assessment of neoconservative foreign policy this article turns to Hannah Arendt. In a very different language, Arendt articulated a critique of the dangers of moralism in the political realm that avoids realist cynicism. She is also better placed to challenge the neoconservative vision of international affairs, ideological conviction, and their relationship to democratic society. Reading Arendt against Leo Strauss suggests that the fundamental problem with neoconservative ideology concerns its understanding of the place of philosophy in the public realm, the relationship between political thought and practice, ideas and action. She suggests why neoconservatives may be experts at selling wars but seem less adept at winning them

The limits of military sociology

Many readers of International Affairs will be familiar with Tarak Barkawi’s frequent skewering of IR theories and debates, from his demolition of liberal peace and so-called “schools” of critical security studies to his elevation of empire and critical war studies. In each intervention, Barkawi engaged directly with core IR debates and ruthlessly exposed their flawed premises, establishing a new agenda for research in the process. In doing so, he has shaped at least two generations of IR scholarship. The influence of Soldiers of empire could be of a totally different order. It will come less from the book’s main arguments than the quality of the scholarship and style of intellectual engagement. This book, Soldiers of empire, delivers on something far more urgent than a new agenda for research. It is a yardstick for those in our field interested in producing scholarship that is critical, but also of real substance and originality. That is, work that is historically rich, theoretically engaged, well-written, multi-and inter-disciplinary, and pays no heed whatsoever to the debilitating distinctions between IR subfields. However, as one would expect of a book of real substance, there are problems that will limit its intellectual reach. In this review forum, I focus on two

Decolonizing civil war

This essay argues that there is a need to decolonize the genealogy of civil war. David Armitage’s new book brilliantly reveals civil war’s generative power in shaping European and North American conceptions of politics, revolution, and the laws of war. But to make sense of the discourse of civil war we also need to account for the constitutive exclusions of those whose struggles elite Europeans refused to recognize as “civil,” those not recognized as part of a common brotherhood or as co-belligerents. The absence/ presence of women, slaves, and barbarous armies is vital to the historical conception of civil war

Critical dialogue: "economy of force" and "violence and restraint in civil war"

The aim of ‘critical dialogues’ in the journal Perspectives on Politics is to ask authors to ‘reach beyond their comfort zones and to constructively engage… perspectives that normal disciplinary markers often keep segregated from one another’. This is a critical dialogue between Patricia Owens, author of Economy of Force (Cambridge, 2015), and Jessica A. Stanton, author of Violence and Restraint in Civil War (Cambridge, 2016

Racism in the theory canon: Hannah Arendt and ‘the one great crime in which America was never involved'

Hannah Arendt’s monumental study The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, is a founding text in postcolonial studies, locating the seeds of European fascism in the racism of imperial expansion. However, Arendt also harboured deep racial prejudices, especially when writing about people of African descent, which affected core themes in her political thought. The existing secondary literature has diagnosed but not adequately explained Arendt’s failures in this regard. This article shows that Arendt’s anti-black racism is rooted in her consistent refusal to analyse the colonial and imperial origins of racial conflict in the United States given the unique role of the American republic in her vision for a new post-totalitarian politics. In making this argument, the article also contributes to the vexed question of how international theorists should approach important ‘canonical’ thinkers whose writings have been exposed as racist, including methodological strategies for approaching such a body of work, and engages in a form of self-critique for marginalising this problem in earlier writing on Arendt

Images of international thinkers

This article analyses photographic portraits of three international thinkers – Merze Tate, Margery Perham, and Susan Strange – to shed new light on the intellectual and disciplinary history of Internationa Relations (IR). Photographic portraits are ubiquitous, and feminist intellectual recovery projects lend themselves to photographic representation. But IR’s historians have neglected portraits. Drawing together two thriving IR subfields for the first time, visual studies and international intellectual history, this article demonstrates the theoretical and historical gains from analysing portraits of international thinkers. When read alongside other primary and secondary sources, portraits can enable new ways of seeing IR’s history and specific thinkers, offering a distinctive and powerful resource for new narratives about the professional, gendered, and racialised contexts of international thought

Lincoln and the Natural Environment

Review of: Lincoln and the Natural Environment, by James Tackach