Description
The notion of luck is occasionally invoked to evaluate and make sense of chancy and uncontrolled events in international politics. However, the concept of luck has thus far received relatively little focus in IR scholarship. Even when luck and its cognate concepts are acknowledged, they tend to be discussed in isolation and treated as ephemeral and marginal rather than as focally important to how we understand, explain, and morally evaluate international politics. The elision of luck means that IR’s interrogations of peace, war, and justice often obscure, bracket, or neglect rather than foreground an important element of political theory, discourse, and practice. My research seeks to address this gap by centring on the concept of luck and by exploring how a more sustained engagement with the concept and its cognates might shape how IR conducts its business. In this paper, I probe 1) where and how luck has been engaged in IR literature, 2) where it has been bracketed or denied, and 3) what consequences these have for IR and its interrogation of international politics. Through this work, I draw attention to a family of concepts that is too valuable to remain so curiously latent throughout much of our discipline.
