“As Old as War Itself”? Historicizing the Universal Mercenary

Abstract

IR scholarship has increasingly begun to scrutinize the ahistorical and ahistoricist assumptions pervading the discipline. Specifically, attention has been turned to those concepts, actors, and practices that appear to be without history and that therefore assumed the status of universals. This article contributes to this scholarship by critically investigating the seemingly transhistorical figure of the mercenary, whose history, it appears, is little less than the history of organized warfare itself. This article questions this assumption by investigating how the Renaissance Landsknechte, actors invoked to support the transhistorical mercenary claim, were problematized within their own historical specificity. Through this analysis, this article rejects the notion that the mercenary is a transhistorical phenomenon as the ideas and categories associated with this figure are tied to specific modern accounts of statist political community and individual identity, as well as a modern account of self-interest. It is argued that the mercenary is not a phenomenon that predates the emergence of the modern state and the system of states, but its own existence is grounded within them. This article, thus, reinstates the historicity of this figure and argues that the mercenary is not “as old as war itself” but a product of specific modern conditions.

Studying Problematizations: The Value of Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ (WPR) Methodology for IR

“…It is thus focused on challenging presumed linearities of problem definitions with the intention to unearth the power relations at play within the policy making process as well as the actors, knowledges and events that have shaped a given discourse or particular problematization. Riemann’s (2021) analysis of the seemingly universal figure problem of the mercenary can serve as an example for such a genealogical approach, as his analysis shows that the mercenary problematique is not ‘as old as war itself’ but dependent on notions of modern subjectivity and Westphalian statehood.…”

Introducing the ‘conceptual archive’: A genealogy of counterterrorism in 1970s Britain

“…13 Benjamin de Carvalho, Halvard Leira, and John M. history' . 26 Such emphasis invites assessing mercenary violence in quattrocento Italy or contemporary Libya, for instance, 27 on their own terms: in 'the specificity of … their temporal and spatial contexts' , 28 instead of 'assuming any conceptual continuities over time' . 29 This approach has its strengths.…”