Description
‘War’ is a perennial issue of world politics. Building upon the insight that war is a socially constructed phenomena (Bartelson 2017; Butler 2016; Wilhelmsen 2017), one to be ‘explored… not explained or counted by IR theory’ (Barkawi 2023, 292), this paper asks what role language plays in making modern international conflict. Putting forward the early stages of an ongoing research agenda, the paper confronts the disturbing fact of wars continuance in world politics, despite elaborate normative, legal, moral, and even aesthetic rejections of this form of transboundary encounter, developed over centuries (if not longer). Taking these injunctions seriously, the project explores how the ‘language of war’: the elective framing of international issues within militarized metaphors – ‘trade wars’, ‘hybrid wars’, ‘drug wars’, etc. – enacts particular processes which participate in the outbreak of armed (international) conflict. Specifically, the project imagines that the language of war not only reflects but actively shapes the predispositions and decisions leading to conflict. By framing international disputes in this way, language establishes a symbolic landscape that makes recourse to violence appear permissible, advantageous, and then necessary. It argues that the metaphor of war operates through, and indeed pervades, the ‘ordinary security language’ (Leader Maynard 2022) which attends the modern international state system. By explicitly deploying such framings, which are easily brought to the surface, the language of war – inadvertently, at first – enacts a cycle of radicalisation between domestic constituencies, international diplomacy, and (political) elites. In this way, the paper begins to ask how we can talk ourselves into war.
