Patricia Owens is Reader in International Relations at the University of Sussex. She is author of Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (2007) and co-edits The European Journal of International Relations. She has held research fellowships at Harvard University, Massachusetts, Princeton University, New Jersey, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Southern California, and the University of Oxford.

• 1. Introduction: oikonomia in the use of force; 2. The really real? A history of 'social' and 'society'; 3. Out of the confines of the household?; 4. The colonial limits of society; 5. 'More than concentration camps': the battle for hearths in two late-colonial emergencies; 6. Society itself is at war: new model pacification in Vietnam; 7. Oikonomia by other means: counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq; 8. Conclusion: 'it's the oikos, stupid'.

'This is a genuinely groundbreaking piece of work. It presents a serious and sophisticated challenge to the broad spectrum of international theories and more generally to the domain of social science.' Kimberley Hutchings, Queen Mary University of London