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This article challenges International Relations to turn its view of war around and start not with states, militaries, strategies, conventional security issues or weapons, and not with the common main aim of establishing causes of war. The challenge is to conceptualise war as a subset of social relations of experience, on the grounds that war cannot be fully apprehended unless it is studied up from people who experience it in myriad ways and not only down from abstract places of International Relations theory. To study war as experience requires that the body come into focus as a unit that has war agency and is also a prime target of war violence. It also requires exploration of the concept of experience. Using an exemplary texts approach, the article briefly reminds us where the field is in its war concerns, before noting work on contemporary wars conducted under the flag of feminist International Relations, where experience and bodies have always been front and centre, and where a social war studies emphasis is developing. The discussion then raises definitional complexities that must be addressed and suggests areas where various International Relations traditions could collaborate with feminist International Relations and fields like anthropology to study the social relations of war. Keywords body, experience, warWhat if International Relations (IR) were to turn its usual view of war around and start not with states, fundamentalist organisations, strategies, conventional security issues and a weapons system, and not with the aim of establishing the causes of war, as has so often been the case? What if we think of war as experience, as something ordinary people observe and suffer physically and emotionally depending on their locations? To date, much of IR has been operating comfortably in a world of theoretical abstractions -states, systems, power,

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Having raised the question of whither the international at the end of International Relations a few years ago, this article treats the state of International Relations theory as a continuing endist issue for discussion. Of interest is the restructuring of the field in the post-Cold War years, partly as a result of debates about epistemologies and partly in light of the failure of realisms to lead International Relations to the door of the Soviet and Eastern Bloc collapse, which many thought it could. As the world globalized, so did International Relations, turning itself into a field of differences -theoretical, geographical, philosophical, methodological, and so on. Is this the end of International Relations or its new afterlife? I argue that there are signs that old topics of International Relations, like war, are being taken up in new ways and in new collaborations, such as those that feminist International Relations has forged. At the same time, many camps display the old International Relations tendency to elevate abstract thinking above quotidian international relations, even in the face of clear evidence that the agency of people played a major role in shifting Cold War and Middle East configurations of power. International Relations' camps should strive less for their own distinctive analysis and more for communication with colleagues, ordinary people making today's international relations and policy proponents.