Narrating political violence without war: Nuclear abolition as war abolition

Abstract

Can International Relations imagine a world without war? For most of us, the answer is no. Global politics is largely predicated on negotiating its inevitability and theorists accept it as a constant. Yet, war itself is a frame, a narration, a collectively held idea about the meaning of certain acts of violence. It structures everything from collective understandings of “peacetime” to the trajectory of history and it retains a timelessness that seemingly transcends temporal context. Anti-war movements, activists, and intellectuals have positioned themselves in opposition to the practice as long as it has existed, but what would it mean to adopt an abolitionist politics toward the concept of war? What this article does instead is to ask what politics could look like absent the circulation of this narrative frame. How would IR’s thinking about violence change or shift if it took this position seriously? And, equally importantly, what might emerge from bringing abolitionist politics into conversation with this concept? This article echoes the observation that—much like the term terrorism—war is a conceptual frame that reflects and amplifies extant power relationships and inequalities. It also argues that attempts to limit it or govern it have instead normalized and enabled its continuation and dominance in discourse regarding political violence. Adopting a politics of abolition reveals the temporal context in which war maintains itself as well as offering a politics suitable to opposing such a ubiquitous idea.