Description
This paper excavates the warist foundations embedded within canonical International Relations (IR) theory, arguing that foundational IR mythology has normalised military violence as inevitable, manageable, and occasionally redemptive. Through a critical reading of twentieth-century IR's constitutive narratives, I demonstrate how the discipline has reproduced an ethos of 'warism' by systematically privileging military solutions and martial logics within international thought and practice, even those meant to diminish the prevalence of international war. Challenging the conventional positioning of warism and pacifism as opposing poles on a single spectrum, I propose instead that contemporary International security architectures function through a 'pacifist-warist' apparatus. This paradoxical formation simultaneously condemns and enables violence, restricting warfare to sovereign states whilst legitimising their monopoly on organised killing. Drawing on critical and post-structuralist approaches, I trace how institutions such as international law and collective security, which were designed to constrain war, have instead codified its acceptability under prescribed conditions. Through the analysis, pacifism emerges not as a simple rejection of war but as a critical stance against the normalisation and neutralisation of international organised violence through norms, discourses and structures that claim to manage violence while fundamentally authorising it.
