Winning? The Politics of Victory in an Era of Endless War

Abstract

Two decades after the “war on terror” was first waged, there is little conceptual clarity about what it means to win a war. Indeed, despite the burgeoning literature on endless war and victory, there is no substantive engagement with how these themes intersect when thinking ethically about the question of war and what passes for peace. This forum seeks to spark a conversation to address this gap. Bringing together theorists and ethicists working on the themes of war and peace, we ask: What might we render visible and redress by thinking critically of the politics of victory in an era of endless war? Further, to the extent that just-war theory has long offered a grammar for the ethics of war, how does it help or hinder this quest?

How love orders: an engagement with disciplinary International Relations

“…In the space he created – but did not always inhabit – Niebuhr drew attention to the ways in which the just war tradition failed to conceive of the creative possibilities of coercion mobilised by other entities and in service of other ends. In so doing, he foreshadowed contemporary critiques of the tradition (Hartnett et al, 2022) and its complicity in the perpetuation of statist, capitalist, imperialist and racialised violence.…”