Pacification as a key problem of politics in international political thought

Abstract

This article is a response to Paul Kelly's discussion of Lenin and Mao in Conflict, War and Revolution: The problem of politics in international political thought (2022). Taking on a postcolonial perspective, it analytically expands how the book theorizes violence by understanding the violence of capitalist and colonial domination as a paradigm of war that structures pacified social relations and politics. The paper proposes that pacification, as a phenomenon that spans different kinds of modern nation‐states, begs for a distinct theory of violence in international political thought. In so doing, it places Marxism, Post Colonialism, Coloniality/Decoloniality, Settler Colonial Studies, Anglophone Indigenous thought, post‐structuralism and Brazilian Anthropology in conversation to reveal shared genealogies of anti‐colonial, decolonial and anti‐capitalist thought without uncritically collapsing these traditions.

Debating Conflict, war and revolution: Introduction to the special section

“…By drawing on Kelly's chapter on Lenin and Mao, Desirée Poets explores in her contribution Pacification as a key problem of politics in international political thought (Poets, 2023) violence from a colonial and post-colonial perspective with an emphasis on settler colonies. In her Marxist-driven analysis, Poets aims at bringing 'anti-colonial, decolonial, and anti-capitalist thought [in conversation] without collapsing them'.…”