Abstract
Introduction
Jens Bartelson’s War in International Thought is in many ways an exemplary text. 1 The book offers a sophisticated historical reading of the function of a particular understanding of war – ontogenetic war – on modern subjects’ dominant views of the production and reproduction of political and legal orders. Dating back to at least the thought of Heraclitus, an ontogenetic conception takes war to be a ‘productive force’ that can be utilised in the creation or rehabilitation of order. 2 Tracing the reappearance of presuppositions about ontogenetic war through a wide range of texts dating from the early 17th to the late 19th century, Bartelson’s examination of ontogenetic war links the work of early modern and modern historians, military strategists, cartographers, lawyers, and contemporary mainstream and critical International Relations (IR) scholars. Bartelson demonstrates that, despite dominant early modern and modern conceptions of war as the enforcement of laws by stronger agents on weaker ones, and as a contest between moral and legal equals, respectively, the ontogenetic understanding of war reappears in different contexts again and again. Bartelson shows that the ontogenetic understanding of war is particularly significant because it can help explain how underlying presuppositions about the nature and function of war have shaped prevailing views of the contemporary state and international system, as well as justifications of humanitarian and other military interventions.
Beyond Bartelson’s exemplary study of the function of ontogenetic war, however, this text is of particular value as a model of theoretical approaches. War in International Thought is a historical study of concepts, but it is not a conceptual history in the tradition of works like that of Reinhart Koselleck. 3 Rather, Bartelson examines the historical ontology of war, in the vein of Foucault, examining what presuppositions have informed historical and contemporary understandings of war. 4 Historical ontology thus helps IR scholars understand how they have come to believe the discipline’s dominant conclusions – for example, why does a claim such as Charles Tilly’s ‘[w]ar made the state and the state made war’ ring true? 5 Part of the response lies in what Bartelson, after Ian Hacking, calls the ‘looping effects’ of ontogenetic war. 6 Looping effects, for Hacking, are a consequence of definition and classification practices – when a person is identified and classified as a particular human ‘kind’, they often take up the characteristics of that definition. Hacking has examined ‘human kinds’ associated with social scientific conceptualisations of child abuse, multiple personality and homosexuality. 7 In these cases, he has noted how the definition or classification of one as a particular ‘kind’ may change the person and change how a person views their own past. This is a looping effect, where the behaviour of the person may then require re-evaluating the definition of the kind, creating ‘loop upon loop’. 8 In order to examine the repeated and long-ranging effects of understandings of ontogenetic war on the phenomenon of war more broadly, however, Bartelson transposes looping effects from their application to ‘kinds’ of people – what Hacking calls human kinds – to concepts, and particularly the concept of ontogenetic war. 9
This contribution focuses on Bartelson’s engagement with Hacking, and advocates for the usefulness of Hacking’s concepts and approaches for the discipline of IR. To date, Ian Hacking’s work has been predominantly taken up in two broad spheres in IR: in discussions of constructivism as a theoretical approach 10 and in reference to studies of risk and security. 11 Constructivist discussions that engage Hacking generally refer to his The Social Construction of What? to challenge positivist arguments about the ontology and epistemology of the objects of study of IR. 12 Alexander Wendt has adapted Hacking’s conception of kinds of people to ‘social kinds’, or the objects of the social sciences, which might be constructed from below or above, but are not positivist ‘realities’. 13 By contrast, studies of risk and security in international relations that have taken up Hacking’s work engage the substance (rather than method) of his histories of ideas, particularly on the emergence of probability. 14 Bartelson engages Hacking’s thought differently, taking seriously his conception of the effects of definition and classification practices and their political consequences in legitimising certain kinds of understandings. 15 In what follows, I map points of contact between Hacking’s discussion of historical ontology and looping effects, and Bartelson’s application of the concepts, but I re-position Bartelson’s discussion more specifically in relation to the politics of classification. The looping effects of ontogenetic war, as Bartelson shows, are significant not least because they demonstrate the persistence of specific ways of thinking – of a politics of classification – as crucial to questions of political order, which is productive of both possibilities and limits. I conclude by applying Bartelson’s transposition of looping effects to another key concept in IR, the concept of subjectivity, which IR scholars have increasingly viewed as changing in a variety of ways in recent decades. Reading these diagnoses as looping effects, however, shows us that they tend to be framed around the same modern presuppositions of the self-making, or self-actualising subject.
Historical Ontology, Classifications, Looping Effects
Historical ontology, for Hacking, is the examination of how ideas, concepts, objects of thought and kinds of people, among other things, ‘come into being’. 16 This sense of emergence, of being or existence, is what makes this approach an ontology, but the emphasis on emergence of ideas in particular contexts, and through particular histories, makes it a historical ontology. Briefly put, a historical ontology analyses ‘to what it is possible to be or to do’. 17 Hacking pushes this further, however, to explain that, true to his Foucauldian influence, the historical ontology approach is reflexive and evinces an interest in us, those constituted as modern subjects located in a particular time and place, a particular now. Historical ontology examines how it became possible to think about particular concepts and conceptual problems as ours. This, he suggests, is crucial for understanding our concepts and problems in their contemporary iterations, and our contemporary motivations for mobilising these concepts as ours. It must be noted that for Hacking, as for Foucault, this is a Eurocentric project: the reflexive us under examination by a historical ontology tends to be that of the modern European subject. As Foucault notes in his examination of the history of modern knowledge and the emergence of the concept of subjectivity, he is undertaking a distinctly ‘regional study’. 18
How we mobilise particular concepts as ours – whether or not we do so consciously – is central to Bartelson’s study of the function of the concept of ontogenetic war. Unlike much thinking on war in IR, Bartelson’s aim is not to pinpoint the causes of war, but rather to consider the background questions that shape how we understand or give meaning to war. The book’s main chapters do just this by tracing how the ontogenetic conception of war has been a presupposition underlying early modern and modern conceptions of war, and has informed temporal, spatial and legal understandings of political orders. The emergence of each of these understandings through presuppositions of the ontogenetic function of war form the chapters of the book. For example, in Chapter Two, Bartelson reworks Tilly’s much cited aphorism that ‘[w]ar made the state and the state made war’, 19 asking how the concept of war came to define our understandings of the state and the international system, distinguishing these temporally from the orders that preceded them. Here, by examining a range of texts from Machiavelli’s The Art of War to a range of geopolitical guidebooks and political histories from the 16th to 18th centuries, Bartelson shows that these views of the order-making properties of war were not necessarily products of an empirical historical situation, but rather of beliefs that this has been the case, beliefs anchored in the deep salience of the longstanding concept of ontogenetic war itself. Not only did early modern historians of states assume an ontogenetic function for war, but more recent claims of war’s ontogenetic functions, like those encapsulated by Tilly’s aphorism, constitute the looping effects of earlier permutations. Thus, what is significant here is not that ‘war made the state and the state made war’ 20 but rather that we think this is the case. A historical ontology reveals that what is at stake are the effects of the claim for future understandings of the consequences of war on political order.
While Bartelson rightly does not devote much space beyond the introductory and concluding chapters to a methodological discussion, to mobilise Bartelson’s use of historical ontology in IR, a consideration of the interplay between ontology and epistemology within historical ontology is instructive. While Hacking borrows the term ‘historical ontology’ from Foucault, whose usage of it I discuss in the next section, Hacking’s formulation of historical ontology as a methodological approach has much in common with what the historian of science Lorraine Daston has referred to as ‘historical epistemology’. 21 Rather than foregrounding how objects come into being, a historical epistemology more explicitly emphasises the categorisation or classification of objects as objects of knowledge. A historical epistemology, which Hacking considers a subset of historical ontology, is perhaps closer to Bartelson’s emphasis on ‘how conceptions of war condition the range of motivations and justifications available to actors’. 22
Historical epistemology is also a particularly helpful method for examining the epistemological presuppositions implicit in concepts such as war or subjectivity because it makes explicit the question of limits. By focusing on the categories or classifications through which particular concepts can be known, a historical epistemology demonstrates that classifications are also determinations. That is to say, they shape what we can know and how we can use this knowledge at particular historical moments. 23 Historical epistemology, and historical ontology more broadly, examine the delimitation of possible choices available to us at any given historical moment, and, specifically how these possibilities come into being in history. 24 This means that historical ontology’s objects of study tend to also be quite specific in examining the possibilities for certain kinds of concepts and ideas to become possible as choices.
This is the case in Bartelson’s study of the ontogenetic understanding of war as a choice consistently made by a range of historical and contemporary thinkers seeking to explain specific (and general) instances of war and warfare. The ontogenetic understanding of war has repeatedly reappeared as a justification for the explanation for choices made in and about war and warfare. Bartelson describes this as a ‘productive circularity’ about the possible meanings of war where ‘[m]any of those things whose existence has been explained with reference to the productive force of war were later invoked to understand and legitimize the use of force’. 25 Here, and elsewhere in the text, Bartelson emphasises the productivity and range of possibilities that are available as a consequence of an ontogenetic understanding of war . Yet, productive circularity is also a limit – the possible choices available to the actors and commentators Bartelson discusses are limited by the persistent reiteration of the ontogenetic understanding of war. This tension is apparent in Bartelson’s reformulation of Wendt’s oft-cited maxim that anarchy is what states make of it to summarise the historical ontology of war. War, Bartelson writes, ‘is thus what we make of it through our creative tampering and the linguistic conventions that govern the use of its concept’. 26 Bartelson gives a nod to the social construction of war through the use of particular conceptions of war, but also, in juxtaposing ‘creative tampering’ and ‘linguistic conventions that govern the use of its concept’, he demonstrates the tension between possibility and limit, iterative difference and conceptual – and epistemological – dead end. ‘Creative tampering’ suggests reflexive understandings and desires for change, as Bartelson suggests that his aim is to trace the concept of ontogenetic war historically in order to ‘loosen. . . its grip on our political imagination’. 27 By contrast, the possibilities for creative tampering are governed by linguistic (and epistemological) conventions about the use of particular concepts. The making of our understandings of war, what we can change of accepted, longstanding and powerful definitions, is in tension with the linguistic and epistemological durability of those accepted longstanding and powerful definitions. On my reading, this tension is underemphasised in Bartelson’s account of the function of ontogenetic war, where an underemphasis on limits, in particular, suggests perhaps greater possibilities for creative tampering than might actually be available. Elsewhere in this symposium, Antoine Bousquet makes a similar point, noting that, in taking stock of Bartelson’s call for a rejection of the concept of ontogenetic war, it is necessary to take stock of the ‘implicit ontology’ through which this rejection functions and the politics and possibilities it engenders.
One approach to highlighting the interplay between possibilities and limits in the study of the ontogenetic understanding of war might be to position more explicitly the historical ontology of war within a politics of classification, as Bartelson notes. 28 It is through the classification of war as a particular kind of event – say, ontogenetic – that our specific normative responses to war are generated. Classification practices operate through sets of categories and languages that form the basis for political discourse and possibility or impossibility. Thus, to speak and to act in intelligible ways usually requires being implicated in long-reaching, historically specific and politically coercive orders of thought. Classifications like that of an ontogenetic understanding of war function as limits within which a promise of greater understanding is possible. Classification in this sense has multiple effects, acting as what the poet William Blake calls ‘mind-forg’d manacles’, 29 where the classification systems through which the limits of our understandings – and more broadly, our social and political lives – are determined. The conscious or unconscious decisions to order objects of knowledge in one way rather than another, to rely on one understanding rather than another, often have political purposes or effects. The political effects of such practices of classification are demonstrated most forcefully in Bartelson’s discussion of European powers’ colonial warfare, which, Bartelson shows, was initially informed by an ontogenetic understanding of war. On this view, in much the same way that war had created European political order, not only the state and international system, but also the nation, 17th and 18th century thinkers believed that war could also produce order in the places Europeans colonised. On this basis, then, colonial violence could be justified. 30 Bartelson suggests that it is only in the 19th century that justifications for war were made based on racialised hierarchies between Europeans and non-Europeans. These justifications, Bartelson goes on to conclude, have set out both frames and chains of understanding through which subsequent ideas emerge and function, their looping effects.
The looping effects of ontogenetic war, and the value of examining them through a politics of classification, are particularly well described in Bartelson’s concluding discussion of how contemporary wars and warfare are legitimised through ontogenetic presuppositions about the function of war. Bartelson notes that while the ontogenetic understanding of war went out of fashion among liberal thinkers after World War II, it has been experiencing a ‘return of the repressed’ over the past several decades, which Bartelson traces to discussions around ‘failed states’ and subsequent debates about nation-building and the justification of intervention. 31 The connection Bartelson makes between contemporary analyses and theories of war and earlier justifications is a function of the historical ontology approach. Bartelson makes this connection in order to highlight the cumulative consequences of the ontogenetic understanding of war rather than the reasons ‘why ontogenetic capacities have been attributed to war’. 32 These consequences are the looping effects of the ontogenetic understanding of war. It is important to emphasise that these are not a matter of agency, or particular actors, but a matter of concepts and their effects. Indeed, one possible outcome is that actors may be unaware of how their attribution of ontogenetic capacities to war can affect the phenomenon of war – we may think that war has ontogenetic capacities, but we might not actually know, or be mistaken about, what these ontogenetic capacities actually produce. 33 The cumulative effects of classification and its consequences further delimit the possibilities for subsequent available actions in different contexts.
Yet, even though Bartelson argues that it is not the aim of a historical ontology to explain the reasons ‘why ontogenetic capacities have been attributed to war’, 34 the question of the cumulative consequences of the looping effects of ontogenetic war now (and again) can perhaps be addressed through more explicitly positioning ontogenetic understandings of war within a politics of classification. Why, if the concept of ontogenetic war went dormant, or was repressed in the mid-20th century, has there been a ‘return of the repressed’ in the past several decades, as Bartelson suggests by attributing ontogenetic faculties to examinations of failed states and interventionist wars? As noted above, classifications exist in a tension between possibilities for greater understanding within a particular category, and limits to possible understanding within a category. Classifications, like ontogenetic understandings of war, also make claims to the creation of political order. 35 A recourse to a familiar classification can be a recourse to a familiar political order, a ‘return of the repressed’. Thus, the post-Cold War re-appearance of the attribution of ontogenetic understandings of war to discussions of so-called failed states, nation-building, and intervention could be understood as a recourse to claims of epistemological and political order in a time of political and epistemological uncertainty. Questions of uncertainty about political order are regenerated through familiar categories, like that of the ontogenetic capacities of war and familiar propositions about the creation of political order.
Reading the return of the repressed category of ontogenetic war through a politics of classification also extends Bartelson’s concluding statements about the aims of a historical ontology of ontogenetic war for social scientists. Here, Bartelson notes that critical IR scholars who moralise about justifications and legitimations for war also begin from the ontogenetic presuppositions about war, even though they may not be aware that this is the case. If we do not understand the histories through which our presuppositions are formed and from which they evolve, we risk not understanding what we do with the concepts we utilise. 36 This is a major indictment and a significant epistemological problem. Bartelson’s response is that a historical ontology of war, in fostering a greater understanding of the recurrent usages of the ontogenetic understanding of war as an explanation for the emergence of political order, can be the basis for the creation of new categories for understanding how political order is formed. Importantly, these new ways of understanding should include a degree of self-awareness on the part of scholars about the violence with which claims to political order tend to be made. 37 Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton similarly affirm this claim when they note that reflexivity is crucial to understanding ‘the multiple lines of complicity in which we continuously and inextricably find ourselves’, but push this beyond the questions of meaning-making and choice. 38 More pointedly, Aida Hozić’s contribution to this symposium notes that self-awareness is necessary not only on the part of critical IR scholars who moralise about justifications and legitimations for war, but also for those of us who seek to engage in meta-level critiques of the assumptions of critical scholars. 39
Thus, repositioning Bartelson’s problem slightly to ask not why ontogenetic capacities have been attributed to war but, rather, why do we believe that war has ontogenetic capacities brings us back to the limits produced by a politics of classification. Looping effects are important for understanding the histories through which our ideas have emerged, so that we may be more aware of our own presuppositions in the analyses we make and so that we can better understand the sometimes-violent potentials of these presuppositions. But looping effects also do more than this – they alert us to how our systems of thought are limited by the categories we call up. In this sense, the creation of new forms of understanding how political order is created is perhaps an even more difficult problem than it already appears to be. For this reason, too, it may be worth investigating why it is we believe in our existing categories, other than the fact that they are ours.
Conclusion: Toward a Historical Ontology of Subjectivity in IR Theory
Bartelson’s book shows us how Hacking’s historical ontology is useful for rethinking the concept of war and the consequences of our classifications around war. There are other problems of IR where this method is valuable. Subjectivity is one area where this kind of work can be done and is the example I draw upon in this concluding section, focusing specifically on the concept of the self-making or self-actualising subject.
The modern subject has long been diagnosed as changing in various ways but, in IR and neighbouring disciplines, these diagnoses have multiplied in the past two decades. 40 While many of the recent discussions of changing forms of subjectivity in IR have drawn on the thought of Foucault, these have tended to focus on the genealogical work and questions of biopolitics and governmentality. 41 The historical ontology approach is particularly instructive here because Hacking’s usage draws also on Foucault’s earlier archaeological work and the work on questions of order and knowledge. 42 Ian Hacking adapts historical ontology as a methodological approach, from Foucault’s reference to the necessity of future studies that could be described as ‘a historical ontology of ourselves’. 43
In ‘What is Enlightenment?’, where the term ‘historical ontology’ first appears, Foucault sets up the contemporary status of the subject in relation to Euro-modern Enlightenment inheritances, which are bound up with the limits through which our subjectivity is formed and the question of what is no longer necessary for the constitution of autonomous subjects. 44 In this way, Foucault both points out the possibility of shifting subjectivities, but also emphasises the necessity of engaging with this possibility through the limits of our knowledge. This is the historical ontology of ourselves which, Foucault maintains, is undertaken through a series of questions that include ‘[h]ow are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations?’ 45 These questions get at a key aspect of the historical ontology of ourselves as subjects whose interest in particular kinds of self-knowledge and self-actualisation are rooted in Enlightenment conceptualisations of the latter. 46 In other words, the categories of knowledge with which the concept of the modern subject is associated undergo looping effects.
While the above characterisation of the modern subject can perhaps be deemed canonical in certain corners of critical IR over the past two decades, there have also been many diagnoses of new forms of subjectivity, including the subjectivity of cosmopolitan government, the networked subject, the collective subject and the resisting subject. For example, Vivienne Jabri has written that from within cosmopolitan forms of governmentality there emerges a politics of solidarity, and cosmopolitan forms of subjectivity. 47 Here, political subjectivity can be affirmed through the assertion of presence in spaces of cosmopolitan governmentality where security is viewed as a primary imperative. Such assertions of presence, Jabri suggests, are also interjections into given understandings of political subjectivity. 48 The assertion of political subjectivity in this way, by those who are governed, has at its core, however, a presupposition of political subjectivity as self-actualising. Thus, as in the case of why the ontogenetic understanding of war often serves as a presupposition underpinning understandings of so-called failed states and interventions, the presupposition the self-actualising subject loops back to reappear as a description of the assertion of presence. Bartelson makes a similar point in his reading of the function of cosmopolitan solidarity elsewhere in Jabri’s work: 49 whereas Jabri’s aim is to theorise ‘the emergence of global sovereign subjectivity’ through war, and through it channel the forces of antagonism to more peaceful ends, Bartelson argues that this approach, based on an ontogenetic understanding of war, is a gamble that could well result in less than peaceful outcomes. 50 While I am less than fully convinced by Bartelson’s conclusion that historicising concepts like ontogenetic war can ‘loosen its grip on our political imagination’ and hence make us more responsible to wars’ effects, I do believe reading Hacking with Bartelson’s methodological inflections in an IR context can assist us in more broadly considering the categories and limits through which our understandings are formulated and, importantly, can have cumulative effects on the phenomena we study.
A second case demonstrates this point further. Discussions of protest and resistance have been a particularly fertile ground for diagnoses of new forms of subjectivity and, in particular, for collective or plural forms of subjectivity. Writing of the Spanish Indignadas movement in his 2012 Networks of Outrage and Hope, the sociologist Manuel Castells explains that through the movement’s languages and practices there emerged new ways of being and being together, new forms of subjectivity. The ‘movements in the squares’, like the Indignadas movement, emerged through online forms of organisation and explicitly disavowed hierarchical forms of political organisation. Thus, the seemingly spontaneous physical presence of thousands of bodies in public space, Castells and others have written, engendered a rejection of leadership which meant that ‘the network became the subject’. 51 It was the connections fostered online and in the squares that created, Castells argued, a new form of networked subjectivity. In this case, too, however, the diagnosis of new forms of subjectivity presupposed the concept of the self-making subject. As Castells notes, the motivations of the movements were based around the construction of individual autonomy – in this sense, the network itself is not the subject, but rather the vehicle through which the promise of autonomous subjectivity could be fulfilled. 52
The problematic of the diagnosis of new forms of subjectivity that nonetheless presuppose the characteristics of the modern subject is a more substantial problem than I have space to discuss here, and its instantiation in the discipline of IR is symptomatic of a longstanding epistemological problem. 53 One face of this epistemological problem is that of the question of the limits to possible kinds of understanding, or possible categories, exposed by Hacking’s approach to historical ontology, and by Bartelson’s application of it through the tracing of the function of understandings of ontogenetic war. Applying historical ontology to the question of subjectivity, and the self-making subject, a much larger, and more abstract concept, highlights both the value of Bartelson’s original transposition for understanding the presuppositions through which IR’s concepts function, but also the tremendous work to be done in unpacking the epistemological difficulty of creating new categories of understanding through which to consider how political order and new forms of political subjectivity might emerge. Bartelson’s contribution in War in International Thought is, first, a crucially important new analysis of the consequences of the ontogenetic function of war; and second, and equally important, a valuable methodological model for thinking expansively about the material and epistemological effects of concepts and their classification. As the concluding section of this piece has asserted, the application of this methodological model can shed light on our presuppositions about the foundational concepts of modernity and its instantiation in international relations, like the concept of subjectivity.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1.
Jens Bartelson, War in International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
2.
Ibid., 15.
3.
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).
4.
Bartelson, War in International Thought, 1; Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
5.
Charles Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History of European State-Making’, in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 42.
6.
Ian Hacking, ‘The Looping Effects of Human Kinds’, in Causal Cognition: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach, eds. Dan Sperber, David Premack and Ann James Premack (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1995), 351–94. See also, Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Ian Hacking, ‘Making Up People’, in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought, eds. T.C. Heller, M. Sosna, and D.E. Wellbury (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 222–36.
7.
Hacking, ‘The Looping Effects of Human Kinds’, and Hacking, ‘Making Up People’.
8.
Hacking, ‘The Looping Effects of Human Kinds’, 369–70.
9.
Bartelson, War in International Thought, 24.
10.
See for example, Alexander Wendt, Social Theory in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Stefano Guzzini, ‘A Reconstruction of Constructivism in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations 6, no. 2 (2000): 147–82. For a problematisation of constructivist approaches using Hacking, see Inanna Hamati-Ataya, ‘Reflectivity, Reflexivity, Reflexivism: IR’s “reflexive turn” – and Beyond’, European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 4 (2012): 669–94.
11.
On uses of Hacking’s work on probability and chance in studies of risk and security in IR, see for example, Claudia Aradau and Rens von Munster, Politics of Catastrophe (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Insuring War (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).
12.
Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
13.
Wendt, Social Theory in International Relations, 41, 74.
14.
Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) and The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
15.
For perhaps the closest discussion of Hacking on historical ontology and looping effects to that of War in International Thought, see Duncan Bell, ‘Writing the World: Disciplinary History and Beyond’, International Affairs 85, no. 1 (2009): 3–22. Bartelson’s 2009 text, Visions of World Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), similarly mobilises Hacking’s concept of dynamic nominalism to theorise the function of the concept he is tracing in that text, world community.
16.
Hacking, Historical Ontology, 1.
17.
Ibid., 22.
18.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 2002), x.
19.
Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History of European State-Making’, 42.
20.
Ibid.
21.
Lorraine Daston, ‘The Coming into Being of Scientific Objects’, in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–14.
22.
Bartelson, War in International Thought, 184.
23.
Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
24.
Hacking, Historical Ontology, 23.
25.
Bartelson, War in International Thought, 24.
26.
Ibid., 23.
27.
Ibid., 22.
28.
Ibid., 12.
29.
William Blake, ‘London’, in The Collected Poems, ed. Alicia Ostriker (London: Penguin, 2004), 143.
30.
Ibid., 145–58.
31.
Ibid., 184–201.
32.
Ibid., 201.
33.
Ibid., 24–5.
34.
Ibid., 201.
35.
This, for example, is the basis for Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
36.
Bartelson, War in International Thought, 9.
37.
Ibid., 201.
38.
Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, ‘Concepts and Histories of War’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48, no. 1 (2019).
39.
Aida Hozić, ‘Jens Bartelson’s ‘As If’ World and the (Im)Possibility of Critique in International Relations Theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48, no. 1 (2019).
40.
See for example, Vivienne Jabri, ‘Cosmopolitan Politics, Security, Political Subjectivity’, European Journal of International Relations 18, no. 4 (2011): 625–44; and Vivienne Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Jenny Edkins, Nalini Persram, and Véronique Pin-Fat, Sovereignty and Subjectivity (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999); Globalizations 12, no. 1 (2015), Special Issue on ‘Occupying Subjectivity: Being and Becoming Radical in the Twenty-First Century’; Ty Solomon, ‘Time and Subjectivity in World Politics’, International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2014): 671– 81; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Assembly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Multitude (New York: Penguin, 2004); Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope (Cambridge: Polity, 2012); Inanna Hamati-Ataya, ‘Worlding Beyond the Self? IR, the Subject and the Cartesian Anxiety’, in Claiming the International, eds. Arlene B. Tickner and David Blaney (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 27– 44; R.B.J. Walker, Out of Line (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).
41.
See for example, Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, Foucault on Politics, Security and War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Mackmillan, 2008); Nicholas Kiersey and Doug Stokes, Foucault and International Relations: New Critical Engagements (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); David Chandler and Georgio Shani, ‘Assessing the Impact of Foucault on International Relations’, Special issue, International Political Sociology 4, no. 2 (2010).
42.
Hacking, Historical Ontology 5, 73–86. For several engagements with Foucault’s archaeological approach in international relations, see Philippe Bonditti, Didier Bigo and Frédéric Gros, Foucault and the Modern International (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
43.
Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2007), 97–119.
44.
Ibid., 110.
45.
Ibid., 117.
46.
On this point, see also Beatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
47.
Jabri, ‘Cosmopolitan Politics, Security, Political Subjectivity’.
48.
Ibid., 638.
49.
Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics.
50.
Ibid., 187; Bartelson, War in International Thought, 200.
51.
Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope, 125–9.
52.
Ibid., 228.
53.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, and, for a location within IR, Inanna Hamati–Ataya, ‘Worlding Beyond the Self? IR, the Subject and the Cartesian Anxiety’.