A Century of Anarchy?

Hendrik Simon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and Lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt. He was Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Advanced International Theory/University of Sussex (2017), at the University of Vienna (2018, 2016), at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History Frankfurt (2015-16) and at the Cluster of Excellence 'Normative Orders' (2011-12). Publications include The Justification of War and International Order. From Past to Present (OUP 2021; co-edited with Lothar Brock); and 'The Myth of Liberum Ius ad Bellum. Justifying War in 19th-Century International Legal Theory and Political Practice', 29 European Journal of International Law (2018).

• Setting the Scene 1: Introduction: A Century of Anarchy, a Right to War? 2: Thesis and Antithesis: Why States Justify War Part I. Justifying War in the Nineteenth Century: A European Discourse 3: On the Threshold of Modernity: From Revolutionizing to Reordering War 4: Birth of an International Order 5: Between Might and Right: Justified Wars and Multiple Normativities 6: The Promise of 'Peace through Law' in the Shadow of War Part II. Emergence of a Myth: A German Sonderweg? 7: Recht zum Krieg: A Clausewitzian Tradition 8: A Hegemonic Discourse? On Mainstream(s) and Myth(s) 9: Antinomianism: The Kaiserreich's Politics of Justifying War 10: Old Order, New Order: Historiography between Anarchy and Progress Conclusion 11: War, Normativity, and the Birth of Modern International Order

Is what we got used to call the international community sliding back into anarchy as it prevailed in the era preceding the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand-Pact, and the establishment of the UN? In his impressive study Hendrik Simon demonstrates that this would be a wrong conclusion both with a view to our understanding of "the long 19th Century" and of what perhaps may be called the dialectical trinity of war, order, and peace in general. Simon's study opens up a new way of looking at the history of, and the issues at stake in, more recent aspirations to come to grips with the interplay between war and order.