Description
The disciplinary effort within International Relations has led to many major theoretical advances in the study of war, yet mostly on the questions of what causes the outbreak of war. From the security dilemma and democratic peace theory to poststructuralist concepts of self/other relations, the discipline of IR offers a whole range of explanations of what may lead to war but tells us less about why war matters in the first place. First, the paper reviews the perspectives on war within IR and identifies four perspectives: (a) war as collective loss, the most common motivation to study the causes of war and its prevention, (b) war as revelation of private information and actual power distribution, (c) war as acceleration of inevitable change in international relations, and (d) war as transformation of international relations. Second, the paper seeks to develop the marginal, but crucial transformative perspective on war. It explores how organized violence may impose fundamental rule changes within political collectives, creating the conditions for wide-ranging international transformations. Thereby, the paper contributes to the nascent debate within critical war studies and ties the debate to wider IR literature.
