Maja Zehfu
Biographic Data
| ID | 308789 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maja Zehfu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maja |
| FAMILY NAME | Zehfu |
| SIGNATURE | ZEHFU M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4651-4229 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 163 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
On the horizon: The futures of IR
This Special Issue celebrates the 50th anniversary of Review of International Studies . Since 1975, the Review has published over 200 issues and over 1300 articles. The journal has played a key role in shaping the discipline of International Relations (IR), leading, or critically intervening in, key debates. To celebrate 50 years of Review of International Studies , we have curated a Special Issue examining the challenges facing global politics f…
Time, the state system and the double chronopolitics of managing ‘migrants: Implications of the Windrush scandal
This article examines the double chronopolitics of managing migrants through tracing how the spatialised state system positions migrants as ‘out of place’. Taking its cue from the 2018 Windrush scandal in the United Kingdom, which revealed that the state had declared long-term legal residents illegal, the article interrogates the moral order engendered by the imaginary of the state system. It shows how thinking time unsettles hierarchies that the…
From Security-Space to Time-Race: Reimagining Borders and Migration in Global Politics
In an apparent departure from responses to the so-called 2015 'migration' crisis, Ukrainians displaced by the war have been welcomed relatively unbureaucratically by European states. Yet, despite this, they are positioned as a problem to be solved, a disruption to the normal order and state system. This article asks what this problematization of 'migrants' reveals about the dominant system of thought that assigns people to place and how it might …
We Can Do This: Merkel, Migration and the Fantasy of Control
At the height of the so-called 2015 refugee crisis, Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, is thought to have opened the country's borders to a million refugees. She was celebrated as an international leader and the refugees' savior, while the country was seen as having a welcome culture. Retrospectively, however, her refugee policy is construed as a mistake. Both interpretations agree that Merkel opened the border. Deployi…
Conclusion: What can we do to change the world?
Jacques Derrida is one of the most important contemporary philosophers. His strategy of ‘deconstruction’ involves showing how arguments rely on assumptions that at the same time undermine them. This has profound political implications. In September 2011 Occupy Wall Street set up in Zuccotti Park, in New York’s financial district, in order to protest against economic inequality, greed, and the influence of corporations on government, in particular…
Global Politics: A New Introduction
Military refusers and the invocation of conscience: Relational subjectivities and the legitimation of liberal war
During the Iraq War, some US soldiers refused (re)deployment. While liberal states appear to protect individuals’ right not to fight against their moral convictions by allowing the right to conscientious objection, those whose objections do not align with the regulations have to break the law in order to follow their convictions. This article explores how the legitimation of liberal war is challenged when we listen to the stories such refusers te…
The Political Import of Deconstruction-Derrida's Limits: A Forum on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part I
Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference 'Whither Marxism?' hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida's analyses provoked a la…
Writing war/ethics: Departures and Directions
War fascinates and appals. Despite its evident violence, it continues to be produced as good. This article reflects on the responses to my War and the Politics of Ethics in this special issue by thinking through the challenges of writing war/ethics. It sets out the implications of starting from where I did and then explores the directions suggested by the contributions to the volume as well as a wider body of work that has emerged in the area. Th…
Culture: Knowledge of the People as Technology of Ethics
This chapter explores how people came to be recognized as central to what the West calls counterinsurgency wars and how cultural knowledge came to be seen as central to war-fighting in line with the vision of ethical war. It examines the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual as setting out how, in practice, culture matters and how it can be made useful to operations. Cultural knowledge therefore had to be made available to the militar…
War and the Politics of Ethics
Contemporary Western war is represented as enacting the West's ability and responsibility to help make the world a better place for others, in particular to protect them from oppression and serious human rights abuses. That is, war has become permissible again, indeed even required, as ethical war. At the same time, however, Western war kills and destroys. This creates a paradox: Western war risks killing those it proposes to protect. This book e…
(Nuclear) war and the memory of Nagasaki: Thinking at the (impossible) limit
On the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the world remains marked by violent conflict and the possibility of nuclear war. This seems an apt moment to ask whether the bombings have left a trace in our thinking. This article thus explores how particular articulations of their memory or, alternatively, failures to articulate such a memory, conjure up our world: how they represent and account for violence and how, if at all, …
Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, and Postcolonialism
Killing Civilians: Thinking the Practice of War
Much discussion of the ethics of war revolves around civilians’ alleged special claim to protection, expressed in the principle of non-combatant immunity. This article shows that its supporters do not give persuasive reasons for why civilians should be protected from deliberate harm ahead of combatants. The principle moreover problematically relies on the significance of intention. Intriguingly, the principle is defended in the face of recognisin…
Culturally sensitive war? The Human Terrain System and the seduction of ethics
Since around 2005, efforts have been made within the US military to highlight the significance of culture or the ‘human terrain’ for counterinsurgency operations. The US Army responded to the asserted ‘cultural knowledge gap’ by establishing an experimental programme called the Human Terrain System (HTS), which involves deploying social scientists alongside combat forces. While HTS was received favourably in the US mainstream media, it has been f…
Contemporary Western War and the Idea of Humanity
In the post-cold-war period Western military force has been deployed in the name of protecting humanity despite the obvious paradox of trying to achieve such protection through means that undermine this very aim. This has generated much debate about the merits of (humanitarian) intervention. In this paper I aim not to take a position in this debate but, rather, to examine its terms. I seek to draw out what is assumed, implied, and obscured by thi…
Targeting: Precision and the production of ethics
War necessarily involves destruction. The development of precision-guided munitions seems to have made it possible to produce intended damage with increasing efficiency and to reduce ‘collateral’ damage. This has given rise to the expectation that fighting with such weapons reduces the extent of destruction and, crucially, that it is therefore becoming increasingly possible to protect non-combatants during war. This article examines this idea by …
Hierarchies of Grief and the Possibility of War: Remembering UK Fatalities in Iraq
In her recent work, Judith Butler offers a critique of war that revolves around the related issues of what she calls the grievability of lives and the framing of violence. This article explores aspects of the remembrance of UK military personnel killed on Operation TELIC in Iraq, drawing on Butler’s powerful arguments about the way in which some lives are produced as more grievable than others. It explores a particular set of obituaries from Oper…
Remember the Cold War
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany
German memories of the Second World War are controversial, and they are used to justify different positions on the use of military force. In this book, Maja Zehfuss studies the articulation of memories in novels in order to discuss and challenge arguments deployed in political and public debate. She explores memories that have generated considerable controversy, such as the flight and expulsion of Germans from the East, the bombing of German citi…
The Tragedy of Violent Justice: The Danger of Elshtain's Just War Against Terror
In Just War Against Terror Elshtain articulates emotions whilst ridiculing others who allegedly privilege emotion over reason. This critique focuses on her use of the notion of `tragedy'. Distinctions are crucial to Elshtain's argument, especially that between combatants and civilians; they are based on the significance of intention. Elshtain seems uneasy, however, about a particular consequence of waging war: civilian deaths. She seeks refuge in…
Subjectivity and Vulnerability: On the War with Iraq
Panel Participants
Generalising the international
Ironically, since 11 September 2001, world politics seems to have taken a turn towards certainty. This article is an intervention that demonstrates how the illusion of the sovereign state in an insecure and anarchic international system is sustained and how it might be challenged. It does so through a Derridean analysis of Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society . The article examines how International Relations (IR) thinking works; it teases out th…
Remembering to Forgive? The 'War on Terror' in a 'Dialogue' between German and US Intellectuals
Hierarchies of Grief and the Possibility of War: Remembering UK Fatalities in Iraq
In her recent work, Judith Butler offers a critique of war that revolves around the related issues of what she calls the grievability of lives and the framing of violence. This article explores aspects of the remembrance of UK military personnel killed on Operation TELIC in Iraq, drawing on Butler’s powerful arguments about the way in which some lives are produced as more grievable than others. It explores a particular set of obituaries from Oper…
Constructivism and Identity: A Dangerous Liaison
Constructivism is regarded as increasingly important in International Relations. More often than not the approach is related to the issue of identity. constructivism and identity are, however, in a dangerous liaison. This article argues that Alexander Wendt's constructivism needs identity as a central concept but that this very concept threatens to undermine the possibility of his constructivism. It is further suggested that this problem has some…
Targeting: Precision and the production of ethics
War necessarily involves destruction. The development of precision-guided munitions seems to have made it possible to produce intended damage with increasing efficiency and to reduce ‘collateral’ damage. This has given rise to the expectation that fighting with such weapons reduces the extent of destruction and, crucially, that it is therefore becoming increasingly possible to protect non-combatants during war. This article examines this idea by …
Culturally sensitive war? The Human Terrain System and the seduction of ethics
Since around 2005, efforts have been made within the US military to highlight the significance of culture or the ‘human terrain’ for counterinsurgency operations. The US Army responded to the asserted ‘cultural knowledge gap’ by establishing an experimental programme called the Human Terrain System (HTS), which involves deploying social scientists alongside combat forces. While HTS was received favourably in the US mainstream media, it has been f…
Contemporary Western War and the Idea of Humanity
In the post-cold-war period Western military force has been deployed in the name of protecting humanity despite the obvious paradox of trying to achieve such protection through means that undermine this very aim. This has generated much debate about the merits of (humanitarian) intervention. In this paper I aim not to take a position in this debate but, rather, to examine its terms. I seek to draw out what is assumed, implied, and obscured by thi…
Subjectivity and Vulnerability: On the War with Iraq
Forget September 11
September 11 has been etched on our memories. This article explores the uses and problems of memory in relation to responses to September 11, focusing largely on material from the USA and the Federal Republic of Germany as illustration, and argues that we might be better off forgetting September 11. The exhortation to remember is used to justify responding militarily abroad and, significantly, curtailing civil liberties at home. Criticism of thes…
We Can Do This: Merkel, Migration and the Fantasy of Control
At the height of the so-called 2015 refugee crisis, Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, is thought to have opened the country's borders to a million refugees. She was celebrated as an international leader and the refugees' savior, while the country was seen as having a welcome culture. Retrospectively, however, her refugee policy is construed as a mistake. Both interpretations agree that Merkel opened the border. Deployi…
Killing Civilians: Thinking the Practice of War
Much discussion of the ethics of war revolves around civilians’ alleged special claim to protection, expressed in the principle of non-combatant immunity. This article shows that its supporters do not give persuasive reasons for why civilians should be protected from deliberate harm ahead of combatants. The principle moreover problematically relies on the significance of intention. Intriguingly, the principle is defended in the face of recognisin…
The Tragedy of Violent Justice: The Danger of Elshtain's Just War Against Terror
In Just War Against Terror Elshtain articulates emotions whilst ridiculing others who allegedly privilege emotion over reason. This critique focuses on her use of the notion of `tragedy'. Distinctions are crucial to Elshtain's argument, especially that between combatants and civilians; they are based on the significance of intention. Elshtain seems uneasy, however, about a particular consequence of waging war: civilian deaths. She seeks refuge in…
Generalising the international
Ironically, since 11 September 2001, world politics seems to have taken a turn towards certainty. This article is an intervention that demonstrates how the illusion of the sovereign state in an insecure and anarchic international system is sustained and how it might be challenged. It does so through a Derridean analysis of Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society . The article examines how International Relations (IR) thinking works; it teases out th…
From Security-Space to Time-Race: Reimagining Borders and Migration in Global Politics
In an apparent departure from responses to the so-called 2015 'migration' crisis, Ukrainians displaced by the war have been welcomed relatively unbureaucratically by European states. Yet, despite this, they are positioned as a problem to be solved, a disruption to the normal order and state system. This article asks what this problematization of 'migrants' reveals about the dominant system of thought that assigns people to place and how it might …
Writing War, Against Good Conscience
Deployments abroad of the Federal Republic of Germany's armed forces are often contextualised in relation to the Second World War, but more concrete representations of war pose a difficult political problem. However, they are important in relation to the possibility of discussing war as an ethico-political issue. This article reads two novels, Gert Ledig's Die Stalinorgel and Martin Walser's Ein springender Brunnen, in order to engage in the part…
Military refusers and the invocation of conscience: Relational subjectivities and the legitimation of liberal war
During the Iraq War, some US soldiers refused (re)deployment. While liberal states appear to protect individuals’ right not to fight against their moral convictions by allowing the right to conscientious objection, those whose objections do not align with the regulations have to break the law in order to follow their convictions. This article explores how the legitimation of liberal war is challenged when we listen to the stories such refusers te…
Time, the state system and the double chronopolitics of managing ‘migrants: Implications of the Windrush scandal
This article examines the double chronopolitics of managing migrants through tracing how the spatialised state system positions migrants as ‘out of place’. Taking its cue from the 2018 Windrush scandal in the United Kingdom, which revealed that the state had declared long-term legal residents illegal, the article interrogates the moral order engendered by the imaginary of the state system. It shows how thinking time unsettles hierarchies that the…
The Political Import of Deconstruction-Derrida's Limits: A Forum on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part I
Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference 'Whither Marxism?' hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida's analyses provoked a la…
Writing war/ethics: Departures and Directions
War fascinates and appals. Despite its evident violence, it continues to be produced as good. This article reflects on the responses to my War and the Politics of Ethics in this special issue by thinking through the challenges of writing war/ethics. It sets out the implications of starting from where I did and then explores the directions suggested by the contributions to the volume as well as a wider body of work that has emerged in the area. Th…
Constructivism and Identity: A Dangerous Liaison
Constructivism is regarded as increasingly important in International Relations. More often than not the approach is related to the issue of identity. constructivism and identity are, however, in a dangerous liaison. This article argues that Alexander Wendt's constructivism needs identity as a central concept but that this very concept threatens to undermine the possibility of his constructivism. It is further suggested that this problem has some…
Constructivism in International Relations: The Politics of Reality
Maja Zehfuss' book offers a fundamental critique of constructivism, focusing on the work of Wendt, Onuf and Kratochwil. Using Germany's shift towards participation in international military operations as an illustration, she demonstrates why each version of constructivism fails in its own project and comes apart on the basis of its own assumptions. Inspired by Derridean thought, this book highlights the political consequences of constructivist re…
Forget September 11
September 11 has been etched on our memories. This article explores the uses and problems of memory in relation to responses to September 11, focusing largely on material from the USA and the Federal Republic of Germany as illustration, and argues that we might be better off forgetting September 11. The exhortation to remember is used to justify responding militarily abroad and, significantly, curtailing civil liberties at home. Criticism of thes…
Writing War, Against Good Conscience
Deployments abroad of the Federal Republic of Germany's armed forces are often contextualised in relation to the Second World War, but more concrete representations of war pose a difficult political problem. However, they are important in relation to the possibility of discussing war as an ethico-political issue. This article reads two novels, Gert Ledig's Die Stalinorgel and Martin Walser's Ein springender Brunnen, in order to engage in the part…
Panel Participants
Generalising the international
Ironically, since 11 September 2001, world politics seems to have taken a turn towards certainty. This article is an intervention that demonstrates how the illusion of the sovereign state in an insecure and anarchic international system is sustained and how it might be challenged. It does so through a Derridean analysis of Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society . The article examines how International Relations (IR) thinking works; it teases out th…
Remembering to Forgive? The 'War on Terror' in a 'Dialogue' between German and US Intellectuals
Subjectivity and Vulnerability: On the War with Iraq
Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany
German memories of the Second World War are controversial, and they are used to justify different positions on the use of military force. In this book, Maja Zehfuss studies the articulation of memories in novels in order to discuss and challenge arguments deployed in political and public debate. She explores memories that have generated considerable controversy, such as the flight and expulsion of Germans from the East, the bombing of German citi…
The Tragedy of Violent Justice: The Danger of Elshtain's Just War Against Terror
In Just War Against Terror Elshtain articulates emotions whilst ridiculing others who allegedly privilege emotion over reason. This critique focuses on her use of the notion of `tragedy'. Distinctions are crucial to Elshtain's argument, especially that between combatants and civilians; they are based on the significance of intention. Elshtain seems uneasy, however, about a particular consequence of waging war: civilian deaths. She seeks refuge in…
Hierarchies of Grief and the Possibility of War: Remembering UK Fatalities in Iraq
In her recent work, Judith Butler offers a critique of war that revolves around the related issues of what she calls the grievability of lives and the framing of violence. This article explores aspects of the remembrance of UK military personnel killed on Operation TELIC in Iraq, drawing on Butler’s powerful arguments about the way in which some lives are produced as more grievable than others. It explores a particular set of obituaries from Oper…
Remember the Cold War
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Targeting: Precision and the production of ethics
War necessarily involves destruction. The development of precision-guided munitions seems to have made it possible to produce intended damage with increasing efficiency and to reduce ‘collateral’ damage. This has given rise to the expectation that fighting with such weapons reduces the extent of destruction and, crucially, that it is therefore becoming increasingly possible to protect non-combatants during war. This article examines this idea by …
Killing Civilians: Thinking the Practice of War
Much discussion of the ethics of war revolves around civilians’ alleged special claim to protection, expressed in the principle of non-combatant immunity. This article shows that its supporters do not give persuasive reasons for why civilians should be protected from deliberate harm ahead of combatants. The principle moreover problematically relies on the significance of intention. Intriguingly, the principle is defended in the face of recognisin…
Culturally sensitive war? The Human Terrain System and the seduction of ethics
Since around 2005, efforts have been made within the US military to highlight the significance of culture or the ‘human terrain’ for counterinsurgency operations. The US Army responded to the asserted ‘cultural knowledge gap’ by establishing an experimental programme called the Human Terrain System (HTS), which involves deploying social scientists alongside combat forces. While HTS was received favourably in the US mainstream media, it has been f…
Contemporary Western War and the Idea of Humanity
In the post-cold-war period Western military force has been deployed in the name of protecting humanity despite the obvious paradox of trying to achieve such protection through means that undermine this very aim. This has generated much debate about the merits of (humanitarian) intervention. In this paper I aim not to take a position in this debate but, rather, to examine its terms. I seek to draw out what is assumed, implied, and obscured by thi…
Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, and Postcolonialism
(Nuclear) war and the memory of Nagasaki: Thinking at the (impossible) limit
On the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the world remains marked by violent conflict and the possibility of nuclear war. This seems an apt moment to ask whether the bombings have left a trace in our thinking. This article thus explores how particular articulations of their memory or, alternatively, failures to articulate such a memory, conjure up our world: how they represent and account for violence and how, if at all, …
Culture: Knowledge of the People as Technology of Ethics
This chapter explores how people came to be recognized as central to what the West calls counterinsurgency wars and how cultural knowledge came to be seen as central to war-fighting in line with the vision of ethical war. It examines the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual as setting out how, in practice, culture matters and how it can be made useful to operations. Cultural knowledge therefore had to be made available to the militar…
War and the Politics of Ethics
Contemporary Western war is represented as enacting the West's ability and responsibility to help make the world a better place for others, in particular to protect them from oppression and serious human rights abuses. That is, war has become permissible again, indeed even required, as ethical war. At the same time, however, Western war kills and destroys. This creates a paradox: Western war risks killing those it proposes to protect. This book e…
Conclusion: What can we do to change the world?
Jacques Derrida is one of the most important contemporary philosophers. His strategy of ‘deconstruction’ involves showing how arguments rely on assumptions that at the same time undermine them. This has profound political implications. In September 2011 Occupy Wall Street set up in Zuccotti Park, in New York’s financial district, in order to protest against economic inequality, greed, and the influence of corporations on government, in particular…
Global Politics: A New Introduction
Military refusers and the invocation of conscience: Relational subjectivities and the legitimation of liberal war
During the Iraq War, some US soldiers refused (re)deployment. While liberal states appear to protect individuals’ right not to fight against their moral convictions by allowing the right to conscientious objection, those whose objections do not align with the regulations have to break the law in order to follow their convictions. This article explores how the legitimation of liberal war is challenged when we listen to the stories such refusers te…
The Political Import of Deconstruction-Derrida's Limits: A Forum on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part I
Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference 'Whither Marxism?' hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida's analyses provoked a la…
Writing war/ethics: Departures and Directions
War fascinates and appals. Despite its evident violence, it continues to be produced as good. This article reflects on the responses to my War and the Politics of Ethics in this special issue by thinking through the challenges of writing war/ethics. It sets out the implications of starting from where I did and then explores the directions suggested by the contributions to the volume as well as a wider body of work that has emerged in the area. Th…
Political science (26 works) · Law (22 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Politics (20 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Law (11 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Environmental ethics (7 works)