War in International Thought

Jens Bartelson is Professor of Political Science at Lunds Universitet, Sweden. He is the author of Visions of World Community (Cambridge, 2009), The Critique of the State (Cambridge, 2001), A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge, 1995), as well as of articles in leading journals in international relations, international law, political theory, and sociology.

• Preface; 1. Towards a historical ontology of war; 2. The state of war; 3. Fortifying the state; 4. Wars of law, laws of war; Conclusion: the return of the repressed?; Bibliography.

'War is not only enforcement of legal or moral norms, or a 'contest of arms'. It is also a powerful tool of worldmaking. In this insightful study Jens Bartelson gives a historical account of the worlds that ambitious men from the early seventeenth century to the present have tried to put in place by war - worlds of state power, but also of imperial ordering and cultural and racial hierarchy. Every international order we know is built on violence - but every violence has been accompanied by its distinctive view of order. By historicizing war's order-creating force, Bartelson not only provides a new reading of its role in international history, but invites us to examine critically the worlds proposed to us by the many forms of today's international violence.' Martti Koskenniemi, University of Helsinki