Making War, Making Sense? Debating Jens Bartelson’s War in International Thought

What is it about?

This symposium engages with and reflects on Jens Bartelson’s War in International Thought, which received the International Studies Association (ISA) Theory Section’s 2018 Book Award.1 Staying on course with his previous work on sovereignty, political community, and the state,2 in his most recent project, Bartelson probes another central concept in the practice of, and academic discourse on, international relations – that is, war. As the contributions to this symposium reveal, Bartelson’s book promises to foster insightful engagements with the historical meanings and political consequences of knowledge production about war. It arrives as a timely intervention, particularly to the extent that the ever-more violent political conjunctures we face demands that ‘we’ as scholars and as political actors reflect on the relations between war and political-legal orders that have been constituted – both in practice and through the politics of scholarship. Above all, Bartelson’s book is an insightful and novel contribution that adds significantly to this conversation. Bartelson urges international relations theory to look beyond conventional analysis and probe the dominant historical meanings that can – silently and unwittingly – perpetuate political violence and war.

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