POLITICO-CULTURAL CIVIL WAR

An emerging ‘politicology of armed conflict’ in contemporary world affairs?

Damien Rogers, 1 December 2013

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Abstract

This paper proposes — albeit cautiously, tentatively, and provisionally — a new way of

understanding and explaining the causes, conduct, and consequences of armed conflict in

contemporary world affairs. It surveys disciplinary international relations’ major approaches to

understanding and explaining the politics of world affairs, suggesting that mainstream

approaches tend to offer an overly simplistic characterisation of war as a clash of arms in battle

underpinned by an unduly narrow analytical preference for the state as war-maker. This has

significant implications for practitioners of the discipline as well as for those, such as scholars of

international criminal law, drawing upon the discipline’s knowledge of war for their own ends.

Eschewing disciplinary international relations’ mainstream approaches but following in the

wake of Foucault’s inversion of Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is politics by other means,

this papers suggests that modern politics might be better comprehended not only as war by other

means, but more particularly as a result of some prior, decisive act(s) of organised armed

violence, as an enlargement of war’s province, and as a transformation of war’s conduct. By

reifying modern politics’ politico-strategic, politico-economic, and politico-social dimensions as

the primary terrain over which modern armed conflicts are fought, this paper seeks greater

analytic purchase and explanatory power as this reification could, in turn, yield more

comprehensive accounts of contemporary war which include efforts to reconstruct local

governmental, economic, and societal institutions. Cognisable through this new paradigm — or,

more precisely, what I have dubbed here as an emerging or nascent ‘politicology of armed

conflict’— modernist wars have been provoked, sustained, and aborted by rival utopian projects,

each of which seek to perfect a non-perfectible humanity, dominating to varying degrees the

broader project of modernity through waging an ongoing politico-cultural civil war.

Biographical Note

Dr Damien Rogers is Lecturer of Politics and International Relations within the Politics

Programme at Massey University Albany & PhD Candidate in Law at Te Piringa - Faculty of

Law, University of Waikato: D.R.Rogers@massey.ac.nz.

Author’s Caveat

Please do not cite this paper, as it is a first draft and its arguments are only at rudimentary stage

of development. Feedback is not only welcomed, however, but is also actively sought.

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How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions,

translations, conjoining is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it

is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to

stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 1988), p. 8.

Introduction

The Chief Prosecutors of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg were given, in 1945, a

special mission of ushering into the world a particular kind of newness. These men fulfilled their

mission by being the first prosecutors to successfully use international criminal law as a means

of trying, convicting, and punishing various leaders of a political regime, holding them each

individually responsible, to differing degrees, for either commencing or conducting the Second

World War.1 According to Ronald C. Slye and Beth Van Schaack, “[s]hifting responsibility from

the collective to the individual was a doctrinal revolution that has made possible the multitude of

international criminal proceedings going forward today. In fact, at the moment, it is far easier to

hold individuals responsible for international crimes than states or other collectivities.”2 Most, if

not all, scholars of international criminal law have reflected upon the significance of that

newness, with many considering its legacy in the establishment and operation of the International

Military Tribunal for the Far East, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, the

International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, or the International Criminal Court, as well as in

other so-called hybrid or internationalised courts, such as the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the

Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the Special East Timor Tribunal, the Court

of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.3 Indeed, it would not be

unreasonable to suggest that such reflection constitutes much of the academic field in question.

While scholars of international criminal law continue to focus their attention on a particular

body of international rules criminalising the commission of atrocity crimes — namely war

crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide — war remains for them a salient and

unavoidable concern. For the judges at Nuremburg, it was “the supreme international crime.”4

Important to these scholars’ efforts is the burgeoning pool of international relations scholarship,

some of which has sought, in various ways and to differing degrees, to understand and explain

the occurrence of armed conflict in world affairs.5 The first section of this paper articulates a

map of disciplinary international relations drawn by Ralph Pettman before suggesting that legal

scholars tend to rely heavily upon that discipline’s knowledge of war, though this reliance too

often tends to be highly selective, depriving these scholars of the many benefits associated with

the discipline’s critical and all-too-frequently marginalised paradigms, theories, and concepts.

Because each offers an overly-simplistic characterisation of war as a clash of arms in battle,

which coheres around an unduly-narrow analytical preference for the state as war-maker, the

second section of this paper eschews disciplinary international relations’ mainstream approaches

to explaining the politics of world affairs. Instead, it proposes — albeit cautiously, tentatively,

and provisionally — a new way in which to make sense of the causes, conduct, and

consequences of armed conflict occurring within contemporary world affairs. This novel

‘politicology of armed conflict’ is premised upon an inversion of Carl von Clausewitz’s well-

known dictum that war is politics pursued by other means so that, as Michel Foucault asserted

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during a lecture at the College de France in 1976, modern politics is better understood as being

an extension of war; yet this paper suggests that modern politics is also a result of some prior,

decisive act(s) of armed violence, an enlargement of war’s province, and a transformation of

war’s conduct. This section of this paper also describes the notion of politico-cultural war as

comprising modernity’s externally-focused politico-cultural wars of aggression and modernity’s

internally-focused politico-cultural civil wars. Rather than state-makers seeking power as ends

unto themselves, the latter kinds of war are waged among proponents of rival utopian projects

and are fought over the key institutions governing politico-strategic, politico-economic, and

politico-social life. Since each utopian project pursues its own path towards a perfected

humanity — which is, as John Gray warns, an inconclusive path doomed to failure6 — at stake

here is nothing less than the determination of what it means to be human. By enlarging our sense

of war to include the ubiquitous, but not necessarily always imminent, threat of the use of armed

force as a coercive means of obtaining one’s way over others for non-trivial purposes in world

affairs, and by broadening our ontological focus to the level of politico-culture, this emerging

politicology provides the conceptual space for new analytical frameworks encouraging more

comprehensive accounts of the causes, conduct, and consequences of war.

This paper concludes by suggesting that analytic frameworks derived from this new

‘politicology of armed conflict’ could, in particular, enhance scholars of international criminal

law’s ability to make better sense of war as modernist politics, including the politics of

establishing various international tribunals designed and operated in order to enforce

international criminal law. Even though few legal scholars would claim their field of study is in

itself a form of war-fighting, rather than a response to war-fighting per se, the trial of the accused

very quickly becomes a trial of the accuser and their political projects, as Gerry Simpson astutely

notes.7 Thus, the paper offers a novel (but somewhat belated) way of making sense of that

newness brought into the world in 1946 by the Nuremberg prosecutors and, as such, has salience

for most scholars of international criminal law. Since it reconceptualises war with a greater

comprehension of the world politics, including its key dimensions and its cultural and sacral

contexts, the promise of this politicology should excite the interest of international relations

scholars too.

Having explored disciplinary international relations’ current understandings of war, including

its inability to offer a comprehensive account of armed conflict, and having begun assembling a

nascent ‘politicology of armed conflict, the paper stops short, however, of applying this emerging

politicology in order to generate new analyses of contemporary conflicts: that task is reserved for

another day.

Understanding War

Scholars of international criminal law are, generally speaking, preoccupied not only with the

development of a specific “body of international rules designed to proscribe certain categories of

conduct (war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, torture, aggression, terrorism) and to

make those persons who engage in such conduct criminally liable,”8 but also with the impact of

those rules upon societies. Haunting their preoccupation with the setting and enforcing of that

body of rules is the coercive use of armed force as a means of having one’s way over others in

substantive matters in contemporary world affairs. This is mainly because many of these

prohibited categories of conduct relate to, or are premised upon, armed conflict. Hence, some of

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these legal scholars also give focus to the rules governing the initiation of war (jus ad bellum),

offering various accounts of the restricted conditions under which commencing war is

permissible or justifiable. Many legal scholars also give focus to the rules governing the conduct

of war (jus in bello), offering various accounts of what actions are, or are not, permissible or

justifiable during war. Fewer legal scholars, however, also give focus to the rules of ending war

and commencing peace (jus post bellum), nor explain what actions undertaken in the aftermath

of war are permissible or justifiable.9 In so doing, these scholars help continue the Just War

tradition of thought, the roots of which long precede the international prosecutions at Nuremberg

by dating back to antiquity in Ancient Greece.10

Legal scholars typically categorise war either as an international armed conflict or as an non-

international armed conflict: by the former, I mean situations where armed force is used as a

coercive means between or among states; and by the latter, I mean situations where armed force

is used as a coercive means between one state and one or more groups contesting that state’s

legitimacy and monopoly of the use of force within a particular jurisdiction. These categories

are somewhat problematised, however, as armed conflicts have a self-evident indeterminacy.

The line between domestic riots or internal disturbances and civil war is easily drawn, but

sometimes difficult to sustain. Levels of organised armed violence in global megacities, such as

Rio de Janerio, Johannesburg, and Los Angeles, create casualty lists that are on par with some

civil wars. High levels of organised armed violence in the aftermath of armed conflict

undermine formal declarations of conflict cessation too.11

There are, moreover, certain

conditions under which armed conflicts between groups fighting within a state’s sovereign

territory are understood not so much as an internal armed conflict, but rather, as an international

armed conflict: key determinants here, which may trigger the application of laws of international

armed conflict, include circumstances in which belligerent groups obtain international

recognition as parties to an international armed conflict, the purpose of war is a group’s self-

determination, and, in rare occasions, where the UN has sent intervening forces.12

Problematic

too is the spectre of war-like violence, particularly the commission of crimes against humanity

and genocide, which occur beyond situations of armed conflict, requiring a nexus with neither

international nor non-international armed conflict.

When it comes to accounting for armed conflict, states stand out as the primary entities of

analytic concern for most scholars of international criminal law. This is unsurprising given that

international criminal law is often characterised as a ‘branch’ of public international law which

is, of course, a body of rules concerning the conduct of states,13

while at the same time is also

widely understood as an extension of domestic criminal law.14

Sometimes the concept of the

state is stretched to include state-like entities which follow discernible policy objectives: for

William Schabas, “[w]ithout a state party component, it is difficult to distinguish between

genuine crimes against humanity and the acts of serial killers, motorcycle gangs, and organized

criminal networks.”15

However, the doctrine of individual responsibility, with its teeth first

sharpened at Nuremberg, and the groups protected under the Geneva Conventions of 1947, its

two Protocols of 1977, and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of

Genocide of 1948 — namely, the sick and wounded on land and at sea, prisoners of war, and

civilians, as well as groups based on nationality, ethnicity, religion or race — pose a significant

challenge to the conceptual primacy afforded to states in certain legalist accounts of war. Further

complicating these matters are those significant super-empowered individuals and non-state

groups lacking any desire to adorn themselves in sovereign robes in the sense meant by James

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Rosenau when he wrote that “states are conceived to be sovereignty-bound actors, while

multinational corporations, ethnic groups, bureaucratic agencies, political parties, subnational

governments, transnational societies, international organisations and a host of other collectivities

are called sovereignty-free actors.”16

In terms of fuelling armed conflict, such sovereignty-free

actors include small arms manufacturers, arms merchants, traders, traffickers, and the logistics

companies that support them, as well as mercenaries, private security firms, and security

consultancies, to name but a pernicious few.

In their efforts to provide meaningful accounts of armed conflict as part of their explanations

of international criminal law’s development and importance, scholars of international criminal

law often draw upon a burgeoning pool of international relations scholarship focusing on matters

of war and peace, as well as on matters of security and justice. Indeed, given that disciplinary

international relations was purportedly founded in 1919 as part of a wider attempt to rid the

world of war, then it follows that war — and, in particular, the causes, conduct, and

consequences of armed conflict — are of foundational concern to all practitioners within the

discipline.17

(In practice, that may not always be the case, given the discipline’s vast range of

potential topics.) This does not mean, however, that legal scholars have always fully appreciated

the biases within, and weaknesses of, disciplinary international relations; nor, for that matter,

does this mean that legal scholars have always benefited from the discipline’s various paradigms,

theories, and concepts imbued within the competing analytic languages.

Disciplinary International Relations: The Study of Politics in World Affairs

In World Politics: Rationalism and Beyond, Ralph Pettman draws a map of disciplinary

international relations, which he depicts as a field of scholarship cohering around a set of

heterogeneous languages and concomitant approaches seeking to understand and explain

developments occurring either within or across world affairs’ politico-strategic, politico-

economic, and politico-social dimensions.18

According to Pettman, the politico-strategic

dimension of world affairs concerns ‘statesmen’ and ‘stateswomen’ as they go about their

business of state and their diplomatic-military affairs of ‘state-making.’ It is the most

prominently-treated dimension within the discipline. While the politico-economic dimension of

world affairs concerns entrepreneurs, investors, producers, consumers, traders, managers, and

workers who are ‘market-making’ and is deemed to be of cognate significance by most

practitioners of disciplinary international relations, most also consider it subordinate to the

politico-strategic dimension. The politico-social dimension of world affairs concerns the ways in

which people search for identity in an ongoing attempt at ‘self-making.’ It is the least recognised

of the three dimensions to world affairs and is not yet recognised as a dominant disciplinary

concern (probably due only to widespread intellectual myopia).19

All three dimensions are

relevant and, indeed, necessary to understanding and explaining the politics — that is, “all those

things we do, individually and in concert, to get and use power over others for non-trivial

purposes”20

— of contemporary world affairs.

Those practitioners of disciplinary international relations giving their primary focus to

explaining events and trends occurring within the politico-strategic dimension of world affairs

tend to fall into three clumps: firstly, those who are generally pessimistic about human nature

tend to be realists; secondly, those who see human beings as generally calculating tend to be

internationalists; and thirdly, those who are generally optimistic about human nature tend to be

globalists. Explaining the causes, conduct, and consequences of war has oftentimes been a

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pressing concern for practitioners giving focus to the politico-strategic dimension of world

affairs. Indeed, as Charles Tilly has written, states made war and war made states.21

To be sure,

state-makers not only cause or prevent war, but also shape the ways in which their militaries and

militias conduct war, playing roles in ending war and reconstructing states in war’s aftermath.

Practitioners of disciplinary international relations focusing their attention on explaining

events and trends occurring within the politico-economic dimension of world affairs also tend to

fall into three clumps: firstly, those who are generally pessimistic about human nature tend to be

mercantilists; secondly, those who see human beings as generally calculating tend to be

liberalists; and thirdly, those who are generally optimistic about human nature tend to be market

universalists. While explaining the causes, conduct, and consequences of war is not usually a

primary concern for practitioners giving focus to the politico-economic dimension of world

affairs, greed is an oft-cited cause of wars, privatised armed forces, arms manufacturers, and

traders are understood as key ingredients fuelling conflict dynamics, and the neoliberal

dispensation is understood as shaping reconstruction efforts in the immediate aftermath of some

conflicts. According to Rod Alley, for instance, “[a]ny unfettered liberalization or deregulation

of trading in goods, services and capital is correspondingly more severe in its toll upon state

capacities already seriously weakened by internal conflict.”22

Those practitioners of international relations giving their primary focus to explaining the

politico-social dimension of world affairs tend to fall into three clumps too: firstly, those who are

generally pessimistic about human nature tend to be nationalists; secondly, those who see human

beings as generally calculating tend to be individualists; thirdly, those who are generally

optimistic about human nature tend to be collectivists. Understanding and explaining the causes,

conduct, and consequences of war has sometimes been a pressing concern for practitioners

giving their focus to the politico-social dimension of world affairs. In those instances,

practitioners are often quick to point to identity-making as a significant factor helping explain the

causes and conduct of wars, particularly wars waged in the name of a nation or by ethnic or other

political groups. At the same time, collectives such as nongovernmental organisations and civil

society are recognised as playing ameliorating roles in conflict zones and post-conflict settings.

As such, Pettman’s map of disciplinary international relations looks like this:

Politico-Strategic

(State-making)

Politico-Economic

(Market-making)

Politico-Social

(Self-making)

Pessimistic

Realists

Mercantilists Nationalists

Human Nature Calculating

Internationalists

Liberalists Individualists

Optimistic Globalists

Market Universalists

Collectivists

Table 1: Mainstream language-users of disciplinary international relations 23

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Like all maps, this is a navigational aid, pointing to major features of the wider landscape, rather

than a detailed, forensic examination of a particular area of terrain. Pettman’s map of the

discipline is important for locating the various and, at most times, competing analytic languages

and concomitant approaches comprising disciplinary international relations. The map also

signals why particular languages and approaches find more use than others to explain particular

topics, though all languages have something valuable to contribute to the production of

knowledge concerning the politics of world affairs, including the tensions between war and

peace as well as security and justice.

Mainstream Approaches

Contention exists among the various mainstream approaches to understanding and explaining the

politics of world affairs. While realists, mercantilists, and nationalists share pessimistic

assumptions about human nature, they each refer to differing sets of ontological entities. This

has far-reaching effects on their respective analyses. Prioritising the state as the primary entity

within their analyses of world affairs, realists tend to depict state-makers relying upon self-help

practices in a dog-eat-dog world. Since human beings are understood here as essentially base,

realists’ explanations tend to foreground those state-makers pursuing their interests in ways

demonstrating those interests are understood to be in conflict with other state-makers’ interests.

The practices of realpolitik and the notions of sovereignty, anarchy, and the balance of power are

crucial to these explanations of state-makers’ conduct, particularly the pursuit of security through

self-defence. “They see the bottom-line to the protection process as being the physical use of

force, and any peace as being at best merely a lull between wars,” Pettman explains, and “[i]n

these terms, all other state-makers look like potential enemies, and the prudent state-maker will

craft his or her policy plans accordingly.”24

Rather than prioritise states as the primary entities of world affairs, mercantilists favour firms

and commercial businesses, as they are understood to be the most important market-makers.

Mercantilists’ explanations of the politics of world affairs tend to focus on the pursuit of wealth

creation and accumulation. Important to these explanations are the practices of market self-

reliance, economic nationalism, and autarky, particularly as market-makers use tariffs and

subsidies to protect local firms from the excesses of predatory capitalism and to encourage

vertical integration for locally-based transnational firms. Foreign markets are inevitably

conceived as hostile markets, according to mercantilist’s zero-sum logic. “The kill-or-be-killed

ethos is predominant here too,” Pettman explains, and “[i]t may be commercially mediated but it

is still strong enough to make state-centric self-sufficiency the policy of choice for practitioners

and analysts alike.”25

Unlike realists focusing on the state and unlike mercantilists focusing on firms and

businesses, nationalists tend to focus on what Benedict Anderson has described as “imagined

political communities.”26

When offering their explanations of the politics of world affairs,

nationalists tend to depict nations as being fostered through, and cohering around, notions of

civic solidarity, as well as through common languages, culture, and history. Since they are

fostered around commonalties, nations are also treated as highly-exclusionary forms of self-

making based upon attitudes differentiating those of “us” from within the nation from “they” that

are foreigners and thus appropriate sources of suspicion and fear. A bifurcation reveals some

nations actively seeking statehood, though not all nations embark on journeys of self-

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determination. Although there are many states containing various nationalisms, Pettman

explains that while “the hyphen between nation and state is now firmly in place, […] in practice

the fit is often extremely poor.”27

While internationalists, liberalists, and individualists share calculating assumptions about

human nature, they each tend to focus their explanations of the politics of world affairs on

different ontological referents. Like realists, internationalists prioritise the state as the primary

entity in world affairs, but (unlike realists) tend to examine state-makers’ cooperative practices,

particularly as part of a search for international security. The logic informing these explanations

is not kill-or-be-killed, but rather, live-and-let-live. The nature and extent of interdependence

and reciprocity within the states-based system, the positive role played by intergovernmental

organisations and international law, and the resort to armed force only as a last resort are

concepts that find frequent use by internationalists. Accordingly, “internationalist state-makers

tend to see each other as rivals, that is, rather than potential enemies, and those analysts who

approve what they do tend to promote and protect a similarly calculating approach.”28

Like mercantilists, liberalists tend to prioritise market-making actors, such as firms and

commercial businesses, but (unlike mercantilists) tend to explain their conduct by reference to

calculated risks and the lobbying of governments to disestablish tariffs and subsidies at home and

abroad in order to facilitate the free movement of goods, services, finances, and capital across

international borders. In their accounts of the politics of world affairs, liberalists tend to

emphasise the ways in which economic actors cooperate, abide by a common set of laws and

rules, and form enduring collective trading and exchange arrangements. These explanations also

betray a strongly-held belief in the virtues of comparative advantage, the possibility of market

harmony, and the convergence of private and public good.29

Like nationalists, individualists focus on the processes of self-making, but rather than explain

identity in terms of imagined political communities as nationalists do, individualists give focus to

the doctrine of the sovereign self and the belief that individuals should become autonomous from

their societies, that is, become socially-emancipated, self-realising beings. Important to these

explanations is the notion of human rights protected through the rule of law. Since human

beings are by nature calculating creatures, ‘individuated’ individuals are usually depicted as

interacting, engaging, and cooperating with other socially-emancipated selves located anywhere

in the world, irrespective of their nationality. These individualists show people making the

intellectual calculations needed to appreciate that helping others is often in one’s longer-term

self-interest.30

According to Pettman, “[e]veryone is an individual, being a unique genetic

experiment. The social individuation of the individual is another matter, though. Not all societies

individuate. Many, if not most, inculcate conformity instead. Even societies that individuate

teach conformity as well. We are a social species, and without society there would be no social

practice, including the social practice of individuation itself.”31

Finally, while globalists, market universalists, and collectivists each make optimistic

assumptions about human nature, they each tend to focus their various explanations of the

politics of world affairs with reference to differing sets of ontological entities. Globalists tend to

focus on state-makers advocating the emergence of a single world government as a kind of

‘Kantian alternative’ to both the reliance on brute force in a dog-eat-dog world and the reliance

on cooperation in a live-and-let-live world. Cosmopolitanism is paramount to this notion of a

world-wide confederation of states, which gives way to the emergence of a world government.

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By being able to imagine another kind of world polity, globalists understand state-making elites

as capable of maintaining cosmopolitan friendships.32

Market universalists tend to focus their explanations of politico-economic issues by referring

to firms and commercial businesses as well as to the promise and prospects of a single world

market free from the fetters of state intervention. Understood in the light, firms and business

would be at liberty to “produce, trade, invest, work and consume.” While market universalists

may concede that a certain amount of faith in human nature is required to envisage a world

market free from state supervision, they tend to argue that this faith is warranted by human

beings’ capacity for altruism. As a species, human beings do not necessarily rely on brute force

or calculated cooperation in order to obtain their way over others for non-trivial ends. The

history of humanity is replete with examples of human collusion, communion, and association

through various collectivities.33

Collectivists tend to focus their explanations of the politics of world affairs upon the self-

making activities of certain social groups, depicting these groups participating in networks

functioning across boundaries as the basis for an emerging civil society of global reach. These

social groups exist because some people want to compensate for the powerful and alienating

effects of individualism. Collectivists tend to analyse these groups and their webs of

connectivity independently of states. Their optimism about human nature informs accounts of

the promise of a global civil society comprising interest groups and social movements where

stronger groups need not oppress weaker ones. According to Pettman, “[a]s the anarcho-

capitalist does in the politico-economic dimension, and the globalists does in the politico-

strategic one, the politico-social collectivist considers such optimism warranted nonetheless,

however, seeing our species as sufficiently altruistic to behave consistently in non-competitive,

meta-cooperative, cosmopolitan ways.”34

Despite their heterogeneity, these mainstream analytic languages and concomitant approaches

to understanding and explaining the politics of world affairs share a characterisation of war as the

clash of arms in battle, or series of battles, and more often than not involving the diplomatic and

military resources of the state. It is a concept of war that has its roots in the infantry battles

waged during the Classical Age in Greece, “where brief but brutal battle resulted either in

concessions granted to the army of invasion or a humiliating, forced retreat back home for the

defeated.” These battles were mainly fought by small landholders who agreed to limit killing “to

a single, brief nightmarish occasion.”35

Parallels between these occasional, brief battles and the

occasional, brief battles at the ballot box suggest this characterisation of war may have also been

an antecedent for western democracies. The age of industrialisation has no doubt helped to

secure the relationship between state-makers and war-makers owing to the professionalisation of

standing armies from about the late eighteenth century.

Here, then, regardless of the differing assumptions about human nature, shifting preferences

for certain dimensions of world affairs and for particular entities within those dimensions,

disciplinary international relations’ mainstream approaches tend to characterise war as a clash of

arms in battle, or as part of a series of battles. Since scholars of international criminal law draw

heavily on these mainstream approaches’ knowledge of war for their own accounts of armed

conflict, be they of international or non-international character, this characterisation normally

pertains. This is especially the case as those scholars, drawing heavily upon disciplinary

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international relations’ knowledge of war, rarely engage with those approaches marginalised by

the discipline’s mainstream.

Marginalised Approaches

In addition to the abovementioned nine analytic languages, there are at least six other major

approaches to understanding and explaining the politics of world affairs, all of which have been

relegated to the margins of the discipline.

As practitioners of disciplinary international relations, environmentalists tend to focus their

attention on explaining the negative ecological impacts brought about by pollution, resource

depletion and over-population, each an unwanted feature of world affairs. When

environmentalists consider war, they tend to see it as an extension of modern politics, drawing

attention, for example, to the role resource scarcity plays in causing wars, including “wars of the

future [which] will largely be fought over the possession and control of vital economic goods—

especially resources needed for the functioning of modern industrial societies.”36

Postcolonialists, on the other hand, tend to emphasise the imperial nature of the politics of world

affairs, highlighting the significance of the ongoing legacies of colonialism and arguing that

“established conceptions of the political underwrite Western dominance.”37

When wars are

considered here, they are understood as being extensions of imperial politics and as part of the

ongoing contest between colonial master and colonial subject, especially wars of de-colonial

self-determination. As practitioners of disciplinary international relations, feminists tend to

construe modern politics as being ‘man-made,’ pointing to gender-based disparities in power,

status, and wealth as evidence of unacceptable bias within the conduct of modern world affairs.

Accordingly, the politics of world affairs is a highly-gendered politics seriously biased in favour

of men. When analysing war, which is also understood here to be an extension of that politics,

feminist explanations tend to focus on the gendered aspects of war, not only on the important

roles played by women occupying the ‘home-front’ or the deployment of girl soldiers, or the use

of rape and rape camps as a weapon of war, but also the disproportionate harm wrought on

women as civilian casualties.

In addition to those approaches to explaining the politics of world affairs that have been

marginalised, some practitioners of disciplinary international relations approach their topics

based not upon some assumption about human nature, but rather, around the importance of

material conditions and human nurture. Prime among these are Marxists who understand the

politics of world affairs as an ongoing class struggle and the relationship to modes of production.

For Marxists, “[w]orld affairs is primarily about the spread of world capitalism and the

exploitation that results, in other words, and for the classical Marxists it is this that ultimately

determines our voting, shopping, self-affirming behaviour, and not some essentialised need for a

balance of power, say.”38

As practitioners of disciplinary international relations, constructivists

tend to provide explanation of the politics of world affairs by showing that “social factors like

ideas, [specifically beliefs, aspirations, identities, cultures] norms, language, and values are

relatively detached from their material contexts, and as having profoundly causative effects on

world affairs.”39

As Wendt famously put it, ‘anarchy is what the state makes of it.’ Finally,

critical theorists working within the discipline of international relations tend to offer

explanations of the politics of world affairs by standing “apart from the prevailing order of the

world and ask[ing] how that order came about.” According to Robert W. Cox:

12

Critical theory, unlike problem-solving theory, does not take institutions and social order

and power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with

their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing. It is directed

towards an appraisal of the very framework for action, or problematic, which problem-

solving theory accepts as its parameters. Critical theory is directed to the social and

political complex as a whole rather than to the separate parts.40

Irrespective of any characterisation of war, which may well be what analysts make of it, the

nature and scope of what is meant by the politics of world affairs is subject to sustained critique

by these three ‘materialist’ approaches.

According to Pettman, then, “put very crudely, there are three dimensions to world affairs and

three assumptions about human nature (each applicable to each of these dimensions), which

results in a matrix of nine analytic languages. There is the Marxist alternative to the whole

matrix. And these world affairs make margins as well, where different assumptions often obtain,

and consequently, so do different analytical languages.”41

This is, to a very large degree, the

major ways in which the disciplinary international relations understand and explain the politics

of world affairs. Pettman’s comprehensive map, therefore, is as follows:

Politico-Strategic

(State-making)

Mainstream

Politico-Economic

(Market-making)

Politico-Social

(Self-making)

Marginalised

Pessimistic

Realists

Mercantilists Nationalists

Postcolonialists

Human Nature Calculating

Internationalists

Liberalists Individualists

Feminists

Optimistic Globalists

Market Universalists

Collectivists

Environmentalists

Human Nurture

Marxists

Constructivists

Critical Theorists

Table 2: Disciplinary international relations’ mainstream and marginalised approaches

Here, then, by drawing selectively from the discipline’s mainstream, scholars of international

criminal law derive for themselves an over simplistic characterisation of war and, at the same

time, deprive themselves of the many benefits associated with disciplinary international

relations’ materialist and all-too-frequently marginalised paradigms, theories, and concepts.

They deprive themselves, for example, of the benefits gained from the ways in which the

analytic preferences of these marginalised approaches tend to direct foci towards the plight of the

world’s environment, indigenous peoples, and women, thereby attuning their respective

explanations of the politics of world affairs to the collateral damage of war. War thus tends to be

13

understood here as something more than a clash of arms in battle but is, nevertheless, perceived

as an extension of modern politics and its three main analytic dimensions.

Moreover, the discipline of international relations, as understood in accordance with Pettman’s

map, does not offer a comprehensive account of war. As Roderick Alley argues, the discipline of

international relations does not yet have the analytic frameworks needed to generate explanations

concerning the ways in which commercial, military, and political influences interact, shaping

civil wars and their external dimensions. An interdisciplinary approach is therefore seemingly

required. “Yet to emerge are bodies of knowledge that explain how and why the contemporary

state-based system react to, and is influenced by intra-state conflict. International relations

analysis thus has some distance to travel before it can offer a comprehensive account of why

external impacts of intra—state conflict matter,” Alley explains before lamenting that

“international relations analysis had only just begun to accumulate a stronger knowledge base

regarding the impacts that conflict internal to states exert upon eternal settings.”42

His point has

relevance beyond civil wars, however. As Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers concede, “the

subsequent growth in the study of war across several disciplines has now made it impossible for

a single academic to be master of the subject in its entirety.”43

Here, then, just as not every

approach within disciplinary international relations gives focus to war as part of explaining the

politics of world affairs, the discipline does not have a monopoly on the study of war. In fact,

there is not yet a viable ‘politicology of armed conflict.’

Modernist Politics: War by Other Means?

The characterisation of war as a clash of arms during battle and the depiction of state-makers

(and aspiring state-makers) as war-makers was shared by the Prussian soldier Carl von

Clausewitz who, responding to his experience of the Napoleonic wars, famously wrote that war

is a mere continuation of policy by other means. In particular, Clausewitz posited that:

We see, therefore, that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political

instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other

means. All beyond this which is strictly peculiar to War relates merely to the peculiar

nature of the means which it uses. That the tendencies and views of policy shall not be

incompatible with these means, the Art of War in general and the Commander in each

particular case may demand, and this claim is truly not a trifling one. But however

powerfully this may react on political views in particular cases, still it must always be

regarded as only a modification of them; for the political view is the object, War is the

means, and the means must always include the object in our conception. 44

By this, Clausewitz meant that war was politics conducted by other means and armed conflict

followed as a result of the exhaustion, or failure, of politics. The consequences of this failure

were increasingly catastrophic in the industrial age, when nation-states harnessed and deployed

mechanised armies, navies and air forces in the battlefield of total war.

For Michel Foucault, a statement such as the above made by Clausewitz could not stand

uncontested. During a series of lectures at the College de France in 1976, Foucault inverted

Clausewitz’s well-known dictum, suggesting instead that modern politics is the continuation of

war by other means. According to Foucault, politics was the continuation of war by other means

because relationships of ‘politicised’ power emerged from relationships of armed force

14

established through conflicts occurring at particular places and times. These new power relations

help to transform a condition of conflict into a condition of peace, preserving the result of

conflict in “a sort of silent war” that enshrines (uneven) relationships of force, re-inscribing that

relationship in institutions, economic inequalities, social relations language, and in some cases,

individual’s bodies. Such a peace masks the ongoing ‘political’ rivalries over access to power

which are best understood “as so many episodes, fragmentations, and displacements of the war

itself. We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history

of peace and its institutions.”45

Although Foucault did not explore the consequences of his inversion of Clausewitz’s dictum,

instead moving on quickly into his investigations of biopower, biopolitics, and governmentality,

the implications of his inversion remain profound. As Julian Reid puts it “[w]ar figures

ultimately for Foucault not as a primitive state of being against which modern societies and their

power relations can be differentiated, nor simply as a utile instrument for the pursuit of the grand

strategies of state in paradoxical compromise of the civil condition of modern societies, but

rather, as a ‘condition of possibility’ for the constitution of modern power relations in which the

aleatory condition of species life is variably recruited, set free, manipulated, and put to work in

the development of modern social arrangements.”46

Hence, there are at least three profound

implications for scholars interested in better understanding and explaining the causes, conduct,

and consequences of armed conflict in contemporary world affairs.

Firstly, emerging as a result of some prior, decisive act(s) of organised armed violence,

modern politics was initially underpinned by, as it is constantly underscored by, the threat of

armed force. Modern politics’ foundational act(s) of organised violence might be the 12th

century Mongolian explosion, which created the conditions needed for the rise of the world

institutions which constitute the modern world. For Samuel Adshead, and Joseph Fletcher before

him, these institutions were the basic information circuit, the microbian common market, the

global arsenal, the religious internationals, the world market, and the secular republic of letters

and science.47

For others, the foundational acts of violence might have occurred as part of the

seventeenth century Thirty Years War. The French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, US War of

Independence and its Civil War have each, in some way, helped reshape the ways in which

politics occurs in world affairs. My point here is not to select any particular act, or set of acts, of

organised armed violence as being authoritative, but rather, to open up the possibilities for

modern politics’ foundational violence.

Secondly, modern politics represents an enlargement of war’s province. Politics is ‘waged’

not only over states, or states and economies, or states, economies, and societies. Politics is

waged for control over politico-cultural projects as it is waged by politico-cultural projects. The

modernist project is supreme in this regard. It emerged in Europe during the seventeenth

century, mostly as a result of a concerted and collective effort to prioritise the use of reason as an

ends unto itself. The scientific and industrial revolutions were both progeny of this effort and a

spur for a burgeoning pool of knowledge about the material world and sophisticated military

firepower later used by a few European states to construct empires of global reach. Even though

these empires disintegrated during the early twentieth century, distinctive traits remain

significant, especially state-based sovereignty, capitalism, and forms of civic identity such as

individualism and nationalism.48

This is what Pettman would describe as “‘deep’ politics on a

global scale, since it is about human beings getting their way on planet earth. It is about human

capacity that has made us highly successful in Darwinian terms, for the moment. As such, it is a

15

politico-cultural experience we all share.”49

The project of modernity has undertaken a series of

politico-cultural wars of aggression against pre-modern projects. Two of the most significant of

these wars of aggression occurred as part of the Age of Discovery, following the respective

voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasca da Gama. The Age of Empires also witnessed such

wars as the eighteenth century scramble for Africa, the formal colonisation of the subcontinent

following the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the opening of Japan by Admiral Perry and his warships,

and the opening of China by ‘Treaty Port’ accessions.

Thirdly, modern politics represents a transformation of war’s conduct. The formal cessation

of hostilities becomes less meaningful when power relations transcend the clash of arms during

battle. The battleground of modern politics is no longer to be understood as some

geographically-bound area, but rather, is the three main politico-dimensions of world affairs.

More specifically, the politico-strategic, politico-economic, and politico-social dimensions of

world affairs become reified, that is, objectified in the way that all practitioners of disciplinary

international relation have objectified states, international organisations, firms and markets,

nations, individuals, and collectivities. Since politics is waged over reified politico-dimensions,

this kind of war pays little regard to those on modernity’s margins, namely the poor, women, and

indigenous, or for those advocating wider ecological concerns. Indeed, if these are addressed at

all, they are considerations of secondary importance.

Since modern politics is war by other means, war’s enlarged province is politico-culture, and

its method of conduct is to exert power over world affairs’ reified politico-dimensions, then the

entire field of disciplinary international relations articulated above and mapped by Pettman is, in

fact, a discipline which seeks to make sense of war (as politics) of world affairs. But without a

set of key analytic referents, a politicology of armed conflict remains incomplete.

Politico-Cultural Civil Wars

Modernity has not only been at war with other politico-cultural projects; it has also been at war

with itself. These politico-cultural civil wars are fought by proponents of modernity’s

contending utopian projects. Key examples of utopian projects from the twentieth and twenty-

first centuries include, inter alia, Nazism, Shintoism, Soviet-styled communism, Christo-

Slavism, and Islamic fundamentalism, each of which are products of the European

Enlightenment50

and, hence, of the project of modernity. These utopian projects are not

necessarily aligned in accordance with particular states, though “[e]conomists, environmentalist,

and human rights experts are just as divided among themselves as Finns, Frenchmen, or Fijians

about how to understand the world and what to do with it.”51

Waging these wars as a means of

delivering utopia on earth requires a high degree of political supremacy not only over the state,

economy, and society, but of the international systems governing state-making, market-making,

and self-making.

Promulgated through the policies and related activities of the Nationalist Socialist German

Workers Party (NSDAP) in the decades following the First World War, Nazism is a set of ideas

and preferences concerning German society. Central to these ideas is the view of German

society as an organic nation or volk, an imagined community bound by blood as a single race of

people, though this volkisch ultra-nationalism precedes the rise of Nazism, reaching back to the

Napoleonic Wars.52

Nazism views German society as superior, placing it at the apex of a

hierarchy of races constituting the human species. Within this hierarchy, races were ascribed

16

particular characteristics which were immutable and transmitted inter-generationally. As Eric D.

Weitz explains, “[t]he lofty accomplishments of human beings, from architecture of the ancient

Greeks to the classical music of nineteenth century Germans, were the results not of isolated

instances of individual creativity, but of a genius bred and sustained by the racial characteristics

that ‘lay in the bold.’ The Nazis’ term of identification switched effortlessly from ‘German’ to

‘Aryan’ indicating their blending concepts of nation and race.”53

At the very bottom of this

hierarchy — indeed, even below it as a subhuman species — was the Jew who, for Hitler,

belonged to a race, membership to which was a permanent condition: “Jews were the maggots

feeding on a rotting corpse, the parasites that had to be surgically removed, the sexual predators

preying on German women, a spider that sucks people’s blood, a plague worse than the Black

Death, the sponger who spreads like a noxious bacillus and then kills the host.”54

Building on

this Anti-Semitism, Nazism calls for Germany’s biological, spiritual and political regeneration as

a means of rescinding the ‘shackles of Versailles,’ defeating the anti-German Jew-Bolshevik

conspiracy, and rearming in preparation for a Greater Germany comprising all Germans with a

single territory extending far into Eastern Europe.55

The politico-social objective here is to

remake the German nation as a utopia on earth, and the German state and economy were to be

harnessed to that end. Despite claims to the contrary, Nazism is very much a modern

phenomenon, a product of the Enlightenment, and “a child of our age.”56

Many of its beliefs

were in circulation across Europe for centuries.57

As John Gray explains:

Nazi policies of extermination did not come from nowhere. They drew on

powerful currents in the Enlightenment and used as models policies in

operation in many countries, including the world’s leading democracy.

Programmes aiming to sterilize the unfit were underway in the United States.

Hitler admired these programmes and also admired America’s genocidal

treatment of indigenous peoples: he ‘often praised to his inner circles the

efficiency of America’s extermination — by starvation and uneven combat —

of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.’58

For Zygmunt Bauman, “[t]he Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at

the high stage of our civilisation and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this

reason it is a problem of that society, civilisation and culture.”59

Even though both Nazism and

the Holocaust were direct descendants of the Enlightenment, some modernists attempted to

portray both as “a wound or a malady of our civilisation.” Once guilt is projected onto someone

else, some ‘Other’, then the remainder of humanity is presumably freed from culpability and a

life of material progress can be safely resumed.60

Like Nazism, Shintoism was a modern phenomenon, arising in the aftermath of the Meiji

Restoration and during Japan’s sometimes forced and nearly always rapid modernisation.

Shintoism was a political creed, resembling a theology of sorts, commonly known as the

‘imperial way.’ Here, the emperor was understood and treated as the literal living embodiment of

Japan’s past and present, a paragon of moral virtue for all. Shintoism sought to use the powers of

the state and the might of its industrial economy in order to liberate Japan from foreign

influence, particularly unwanted notions of democracy, liberalism, and individualism. Once

liberated from such oppression by the state, the Japanese nation, increasing confident, would be

capable of waging a holy war against the West and its ideologies. At stake here was the

imposition of a highly-conservative vision of Japan’s traditional imperial culture insulated from

foreign influence. Although its roots can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century, Herbert

17

Blix maintains “its revival at the end of the 1920s, and its actual application in real-life Japanese

diplomacy during the 1930s, helped Japan break with its immediate past—and also greatly

narrowed the nation’s range of possible choices.”61

Soviet-styled communism was yet another mid-twentieth century utopian project. The

Bolsheviks sought to alter human nature and create an entirely new type of human being: the so-

called ‘socialist man.’ Science and pseudo-science were employed to assist, though the state of

relevant scientific proved insufficient. According to Gray, “by the late thirties human subjects —

German and Japanese prisoners of war, soldiers and diplomats, Poles, Koreans, and Chinese,

political prisoners and ‘nationalists’ of all kinds (including Jews) — were being used in medical

experiments in the Lubyanka prison in the centre of Moscow.”62

A more recent utopian project can be seen at play in the Yugoslav wars of dissolution.

Significant here was Christo-Slavism, a type of nationalism that understands Slavs as being

Christian. Conversions to other religions threaten the existence of the Slavic nation. Muslims

residing in Yugoslavia have become Turks and are thus culpable for the murder of Lazar at the

battle of Kosovo and the ensuing pollution of the Slavic nation. For Michael A. Sells, “[a]t

moments of crisis, the Kosovo ideology helps efface the boundaries between notions of religion

and race and turn religious nationalism into the most virulent form of realist ideology.”63

This

utopianism did not involve the regular observance of discernibly religious practices.64

According to Gray, Islamic fundamentalism is – as was Nazism and Soviet-styled

communism — a thoroughly modern utopian project. Notwithstanding its proponent’s claims to

the contrary, radical Islam is not anti-Western, but rather, has been significantly influenced by

western ideology. Like other utopian political projects, history is understood by radical Islamists

as merely foreshadowing a new world where the human condition is remade. “If there is a

uniquely modern myth, it is this,” Grey urges.65

Also a product of the politico-cultural project of modernity and at least equally as damaging

as its utopian counterparts is the “late twentieth-century faith in a global free market,”66

sometimes referred to as neoliberalism but hereafter in this thesis as free-market

fundamentalism. By free-market fundamentalism, I mean here a set of ideas, practices, and

policy preferences which are based on an assumption, drawn from classical political liberalism,

that adult individuals possess an inalienable right to make choices about how to pursue their

welfare, regardless of if those choices are poor.67

More specifically, these ideas, practices, and

policy preferences seek to apply so-called market mechanisms into areas of social life hitherto

organised, governed, and conducted in other ways.68

By displacing traditional social paradigms

with a set of reified market relations, free-market fundamentalism privileges individual economic

imperatives ahead of collective human wellbeing.69

At the core of this particular worldview lies

the individual — and, by extension, the sanctity of the inalienable rights they possess as the

human species — as the primary referent in world affairs. In this sense, states exist insofar as

they set rules for commerce to occur, enabling the enforcement of contracts. Preferences here

are for democracies, markets without governmental fetters, and individuals as sovereign unto

themselves within the politico-strategic, politico-economic, and politico-social dimensions of

modernist world affairs, respectively.

While liberalism has tended to dominate the politics of modern world affairs since at least the

end of the First World War, its dominance has been routinely and, at times, fiercely contested by

various rival utopian projects: Nazism and Shintoism leading up to and during the Second World

18

War; Soviet-styled communism during the Cold War; Christo-Slavism in the aftermath of the

Cold War (though to a lesser degree); and Islamic fundamentalism during the so-called war on

terror. None of these utopias can ever be achieved in practice, however, though they are each

hugely costly for the human species when examined in terms of those killed by them, those who

die for them, and the enormity of human potential never realised; as described by Gray,

“[u]topias are dreams of collective deliverance that in waking life are found to be nightmares.”70

Nazism and Shintoism were defeated and, in defeat, discredited during the Second World War,

whereas Soviet-styled communism was defeated and, in defeat, discredited during the Cold War.

Free-market fundamentalism, however, has not yet tasted its defeat, existing for many as an

unproblematic paradigm of choice.

Conclusion

Since utopian projects wage politico-cultural civil war for control over the world’s preeminent

politico-strategic, politico-economic, and politico-social systems, the notion of politico-cultural

civil war differs markedly from those more well-known understandings of civil war as armed

conflict fought over the institutions of government and the authority to rule over a particular

territory, such as the English, American, or Spanish civil wars. It differs too from the type of

global civil war understood by Carl Schmitt as occurring over the self-enclosing structures of the

states-based system, which he refers to as the second nomos of the earth, with its land “divided

into states, colonies, protectorates, and spheres of influence.”

These politico-cultural civil wars are waged not only through the reconstructing local politico-

strategic and politico-economic institutions in the aftermath of armed conflict, but also through

the reconstruction of politico-social institutions designed specifically to enforce international

criminal law in the aftermath of mass atrocity. Of significance here, especially for scholars of

international criminal law, is Koskenniemi’s claim that “international law was born from a move

to defend a liberal-internationalist project in a time of danger and opportunity.”71

It is significant

because politico-cultural civil wars are fought for control over the structures, processes, and

procedures used to govern modernist world affairs by policing international society’s norms and

related rules of behaviour. Institutions of international criminal law not only help form part of a

particular utopian project,72

but they also helped transform world order from one where states are

considered co-equal, regardless of international armed conflict, to an order where states are

distinguished based on their conformity to good governance or on their allegiance given to

particular political projects.73

As the rule of international criminal law creeps towards a particular world order,74

liberal

proponents claim that this order is somehow immune from politics.75

Put in another way, the

assertion of international law is often an assertion against politics, especially where that politics

is understood as leading into a state of international anarchy, for the law seeks to constrain

politics through non-political rule.76

In practice, international law more generally presents a

mechanism through which important political decisions are deferred elsewhere.77

According to

Koskenniemi, “[t]exts, facts and history were capable of being interpreted in the most varied

ways. In making his or her interpretation, the jurist was forced to rely on conceptual matrices

which could no longer be defended by the texts, facts, or histories to which they provided

meaning. They were, and are, arenas of political struggle.”78

Indeed, the rule of international law

is itself a battleground over which rival projects seek to gain ascendency over their opponents.79

19

Creating specialist bodies of law, such as international criminal law, offer further opportunities to

pursue particular political agendas.80

As Gerry Simpson argues:

war crimes trials are political trials….not because they lack a foundation in law or

because they are crude products of political forces but because war crimes law is

saturated with conversations about what it means to engage in politics or law, as well as a

series of projects that seem to employ these terms in the service of various ideological

pretences. This, in turn, enables the use of international criminal law against rival

utopian projects, effectively placing those projects on trial.

Simpson goes further, arguing that:

Most obviously, the trial is an investigation of, and accusation against, the

political project of the accused. Accordingly, at Nuremberg Fascism (from the

Soviet perspective) and Nazism (from the Anglo-American perspective) were

on trial. In The Hague, during the Milosevic trial in particular, nationalism was

in the dock, and in Arusha at the [ICTR] the consequences of racism were

central to the process of judicial reckoning. Put more agnostically, war crimes

trials can be understood as the proceduralised clash of competing ideologies.81

The implication here is that those who stand accused of committing atrocity crime are indicted

less for these crimes and more for where they are positioned in the aftermath of armed conflict or

political struggles.82

Hence, international criminal law always endorses some hegemonic meta-

narrative, implicit in which is a particular, but highly contested, understanding of a political

conflict. Couching a person’s individual culpability within the contours of that meta-narrative

renders invisible the power yielded over significant politico-strategic, politico-economic, and

politico-social structures and the inequalities these create by constructing a scapegoat.83

Here, then, even though few legal scholars would claim their field of study is in itself a form

of war-fighting, rather than a response to war-fighting per se, the trial of the accused very

quickly becomes a trial of the accuser and their political projects, as Gerry Simpson astutely

notes.84

The analytic frameworks derived from this new ‘politicology of armed conflict’ could,

in particular, enhance scholars of international criminal law’s ability to make better sense of war

as modernist politics, including the politics of establishing various international tribunals

designed and operated in order to enforce international criminal law. This nascent politicology

offers a novel (but somewhat belated) way of making sense of that newness brought into the

world in 1946 by the Nuremberg prosecutors and, as such, has salience for most scholars of

international criminal law. Since it reconceptualises war and law with a greater comprehension

of the world politics, including its key dimensions and its cultural and sacral contexts, the

promise of this politicology should excite the interest of international relations scholars too.

20

Endnotes

1 The Nuremberg Indictment accused the following leaders of the Nazi state: Martin Bormann, as Nazi Party

Secretary; Rudolf Hess, as Deputy Fuhrer; Franz Von Papen, as Chancellor of Germany; Wilhelm Frick, as

Minister of the Interior; Hans Frank, as Governor-General of Poland; Constantin Von Neurath, as Minister of

Foreign Affairs; Joachim von Ribbentrop, also as Minister of Foreign Affairs; and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, as

Reich Commissioner of The Netherlands; Karl Donitz, as Commander-and-Chief of the German Navy; Hermann

Goering, as the Commander of the German Air Force; Alfred Jodl as General of the Wehrmacht; Ernst

Kaltenbrunner as a Senior Official of the SS; Wilhelm Keitel, as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces;

Erich Raeder, as Commander of the German Navy; and Albert Speer, as Minister of Armaments. The Indictment

also accused the following leaders of Germany’s wartime economy: the industrialist, Gustav Krupp Von Bohlen

Und Halbach; both Walter Funk and Hjalmar Schacht, as successive Ministers of Economics and Heads of

Reichsbank; Robert Ley, Head of the German Labour Front; and Fritz Sauckel, General Plenipotentiary for

Labour Deployment. Social leaders indicted included Hans Fritzche, a senior official within the Nazi

Propaganda Ministry; Alfred Rosenberg, a senior official within the Nazi Party; Baldur Von Schirach, as Head of

the Hitler Youth; and Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Sturmer, a virulent anti-sematic newspaper. 2 Ronald C. Slye and Beth Van Schaack, International Criminal Law (New York: Wolters Kluwer, 2009), p. 269.

3 See International Prosecutors ed. Luc Reydams, Jan Wouters, and Cedric Ryngaert (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2012). 4 See Kirsten Sellars ‘Crimes against Peace’ and International Law, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2013). 5 For an exploration of scholars of general international law and their recourse to disciplinary international

relations, see Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law

1870-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), particularly “Chapter 6. Out of Europe: Carl

Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, and the turn to ‘international relations’.” 6 John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 20.

7 Gerry Simpson, Law, War & Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Cambridge:

Polity, 2007), p.14 8 Antonio Cassese, International Criminal Law (2

nd Ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 3.

9 Remedies seem imminent: see Carsten Stahn, Jennifer S. Easterday, and Jens Iverson (eds.), Jus Post Bellum:

Mapping the Normative Foundations, (Oxford: Oxford University press; Forthcoming). 10

See Alex J. Bellamy, Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq (Cambridge: Polity, 2006). 11

Beatrice Pouligny, The Politics and Anti-Politics of Contemporary ‘Disarmament, Demobilisation, and

Reintegration Programmes (Paris: Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, Secretariat General de la

Defence Nationale, and the Programme for Strategic and International Security Studies, 2004), p. 14. 12

Eve La Haye, War Crimes in Internal Armed Conflict (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 13-

15. 13

Cassese, p. 4. 14

Slye and Schaack, p. 2. 15

Schabas, p. 5. 16

James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1990), p. 36. (Emphasis in original text.) 17

Hidemi Suganami, “The Causes of War”, An Introduction to International Relations (2nd

Ed) eds. Richard

Devetak, Anthony Burke, and Jim George (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 190; see also

Bellamy, p. iix. 18

Ralph Pettman, World Politics: Rationalism and Beyond (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p.33. 19

Ibid, pp. 25-6. 20

Ibid, p. 6. 21

See Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992 (Cambridge MA and Oxford UK:

Blackwell, 1990), especially “Chapter 3: How War Made States, and Vice Versa.” 22

Roderic Alley, Internal Conflict and the International Community: Wars without End? (Aldershot: Ashgate,

2004), p. 30.

21

23

Modified from Pettman, World Affairs, p. 33. 24

Pettman, The Metaphysics of World Affairs: A Map for the Millennium, unpublished working paper, dated 12

November 2000, p. 4. Copy held on file by the author. 25

Ibid, p. 7. 26

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and

New York: Verso, 2006). 27

Pettman, Metaphysics, p. 9. 28

Ibid, p. 6. 29

Ibid, p. 7. 30

Ibid, p. 10. 31

Ibid, p. 9. 32

Ibid, p. 6. 33

Ibid, p. 8. 34

Ibid, p. 10. 35

Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York: Alfred A. Koff,

1989), p. 4. 36

Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict ((New York: Henry Holt and Co,

2002), p. 213. 37

Phillip Darby, “Pursuing the Political: A Postcolonial Rethinking of International Relations,” Millennium:

Journal of International Studies (2004) Vol. 33 No. 1, p. 3. 38

Pettman, Metaphysics, p. 11. 39

Ibid, p. 13. 40

Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” Millennium:

Journal of International Studies, (1981) Vol.10 No. 2, p. 129. 41

Pettman, World Politics, p. 32. 42

Alley, pp. 208-9. 43

Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers, “Introduction,” in Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers eds., The Changing

Character of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 1. 44

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book 1, Chapter 1, Article 24, (1874), translated by Colonel J.J. Graham.

<http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1946/1946-h/1946-h.htm> 45

Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College De France, 1975-76 Trans. David

Macey (New York: Picador 2003), pp. 15-6. 46

Julian Reid, “Life Struggles: War, Discipline and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault,” in Foucault on

Politics, Security and War, ed. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal (New York; Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p.

66. 47

S.A.M. Adshead, T’ang China: The Rise of the East in World History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p.

xii. 48

Ralph Pettman, “Psychopathology and World Politics,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs Vol. 32 no. 3

(September 2010), p. 475. 49

Pettman, World Politics, p. 42. 50

Gray, p. 37 & p. 69. 51

Martti Koskenniemi, The Politics of International Law (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2011), p.

69. 52

Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 85-86. 53

Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias or Race and Nation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University

Press, 2003), p. 106. 54

Ibid, p. 106. 55

Griffin, p. 97. 56

Ibid, p. 111. 57

Gray, pp. 55-6. 58

Ibid, p. 62. 59

Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (New York: Cornell University Press, 1989). 60

Ibid, p. xii. 61

Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 200), p. 11. 62

Gray, p. 41.

22

63

Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkley: University of California

Press, 1996), p. xv; see also p. 51. 64

Sells, p. 87. 65

John Gray, Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern, (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 3 66

Gray, Black Mass, p. 75. 67

Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish (London, Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2003), pp. 63-4. 68

Maria Bargh ed. Resistance: An Indigenous Response to Neoliberalism (Wellington: Hiua Publishers, 2007), p. 1. 69

Jane Kelsey, Serving Whose Interest? The Political Economy of Trade Services Agreements (Oxon: Routledge-

Cavendish, 2008), pp. 2-3. 70

Gray, Black Mass, p. 17. 71

Koskenniemi, The Politics of International Law, p. 75. 72

Simpson, p. 20. 73

Ibid, p. 142. 74

Ibid, p. 34. 75

Ibid, p. 141. 76

Koskenniemi, The Politics of International Law, pp. 36-7. 77

Ibid, p. 58. 78

Ibid, pp. 61-2. 79

Ibid, p. 223. 80

Ibid, p. 65. 81

Simpson, p. 15. 82

Ibid, p. 114. 83

Koskenniemi, The Politics of International Law, pp. 234-235. 84

Gerry Simpson, Law, War & Crime, p.14