Late Modern War and theGeos

Bibliographic Data

ID2236692
AuthorsMark Griffiths (0000-0002-2284-4533, Newcastle University), Henry Redwood (0000-0002-8086-6917, King's College London)
Year2024
Volume18
Issue2
Publication date2024-03-20
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Political Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1749-5679 • E-ISSN: 1749-5687
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ips/olae011
OpenAlexW4394771557
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited62

This article works toward an ontology of war centered on the life of the planet, or geos. Noting a disciplinary tendency to focus on the makers of war, we ask: What if our analyses of war begin not with the technologies of killing but with the life that is targeted? Our response proceeds in four sections. We first identify a 'militarized ontology' of war that forms through the ways that militaries figure violence as spatially and temporally 'precise' and thus distinct from longer-term environmental effects. We then argue that these ontological bounds persist also in critical scholarship on war. Writing against such ontological contingencies, we learn from feminist IR to set out a theoretical path for knowing war on different terms, from the perspective of the geos. From here, our main contribution forms: Attending to war ecologies and non/human health, war appears in a form that critically contrasts with a large part of current work in IR; it is no longer a primarily accelerated, aerial, or remote activity but rather an enduring, terranean, and proximate intervention in the environment and the life it sustains. We close with explication of the significance of geos-centered study of war in IR and beyond

Discipline · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Explication · Just war theory · Ontology · Perspective (graphical) · Political science · Scholarship · Set (abstract data type) · Social science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Global Security and Public Health · Health and Conflict Studies · Law · Philosophy

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