Description
War is commonly understood in its physical manifestations as the politically organized use of violence. This research, however, advances a different claim: war is discourse. Drawing on the intellectual tradition of critical theory and its influence on International Relations, it argues that war is a social phenomenon constituted through systems of meaning that produce regimes of truth, subjects, and objects.
The paper begins by establishing working definitions of discourse and war, and then develops a war-as-discourse framework based on five discursive practices: ordering, legitimation, othering, warfare, and transformation.
This analytical framework is presented in each of its components from a theoretical perspective and then operationalized through a case-study analysis. The case study serves as an illustration of the value of war-as-discourse as an analytical perspective focussing on the 2025-2026 US-Israel war against Iran. By analysing texts and military operations, it reconstructs the production of discourse that made the war possible, sustained it, and brought it to what, currently, is presented as the end of this episode of violence.
Building on these reflections and the analysis of the case study, this essay contributes to the contemporary critical debates on the ontological reconceptualization of war, providing both a preliminary theoretical framework and a practical illustration of its analytical potential.