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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Problematising war: Towards a reconstructive critique of
war as a problem of deviance
Christine Andrä*
Institute of Political Science, Technical University Dresden, Dresden, Germany
*Corresponding author. Email: christine.andrae@tu-dresden.de
(Received 17 June 2020; revised 5 April 2022; accepted 8 May 2022; first published online 4 July 2022)
Abstract
This article redirects extant critiques of the modern problem of war at this problem’s underlying logic of
deviance. According to this logic, war constitutes a kind of international conduct that contravenes behav-
ioural norms and that can be corrected through diagnostic and didactic means. Thereby, war is rendered
into a problem falling within the scope of human agency. However, this agency rests on and reproduces
this logic’s constitutive blind spots. Therefore, it seems imperative to develop ways of problematising war
otherwise. The article provides two starting points for (critical) IR scholarship seeking to undertake such a
project. Firstly, it combines two Foucaultian tools, the concept of problematisation and the method of
genealogy, to direct critique at the logics underlying our evaluative –analytical, ethical, and political –
judgements. Secondly, it uses these tools to trace the contingent emergence of the logic of deviance in
a crucial example within the wider genealogy of the problem of war: the Carnegie Endowment’s commis-
sion of inquiry into the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Based on original archival research, I highlight
different elements of this inquiry’s problematisation of war –its frames, assumptions, ways of knowing,
and subjects of knowledge –to make them available for reconstruction.
Keywords: War; Problematisation; Genealogy; Critique; Foucault; Balkan Wars
Introduction
In the late summer of 1913, an international commission of inquiry, nominated and sponsored by
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), set out to investigate and produce a
report about the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Addressing itself ‘to the attention of the govern-
ments, the people and the press of the civilized world’, the commission’s report was ‘to make
plain just what is or may be involved in an international war carried out under modern condi-
tions’.
1
Thereby, the commissioners and the CEIP hoped to generate ‘such a reaction …as to
make another war impossible’.
2
Their ambition turned on the spirit of the age, which saw in
war an opportunity for heroism and a driver of progress. In its chosen means, however, the
CEIP’s initiative was very much in line with the general zeitgeist. The commissioners amassed
empirical evidence to demonstrate ‘the cruelty and ferocity and the worst outrages’of the
Balkan Wars that had occurred ‘in spite of the Hague Conventions’,
3
and to enable their readers
‘to learn the absurdity of the notion …that war can enrich a country’and ‘to understand how,
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association. This is an Open
Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which
permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes
and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914), Preface.
2
CEIP, New York and Washington Offices Records, 1910–1954, Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Collection (hereafter CEIP Achive), Vol. 121, Letter Dutton to Butler, 23 July 1913.
3
CEIP, Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, p. 14.
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even from far off, war reacts on all nations to their discomfort and even to their serious injury.’
4
Thereby, they sought to show that war was ‘an outdated instrument, not only immoral, but inef-
fective’.
5
Documenting and recounting the horrors of the Balkan Wars, the Carnegie commission
made war into a problem insofar as it deviated from legal, economic, and moral norms, as well as
into a problem that could be addressed through the generation and dissemination of scientific
knowledge.
Taking the commission’s work as a crucial example within the wider genealogy of the modern
problem of war, this article aims to open up for critical discussion the logics of this modern prob-
lem. These logics, I contend, comprise the assumptions underlying and the principles structuring
efforts at making war problematic, as well as the different ways of knowing and subjects of knowl-
edge constituted within these makings. The logic on which the article centres is that of war as a
problem of deviance. The CEIP commission’s work is a prime example of this logic, as are more
recent developments such as international stabilisation missions and contemporary perspectives
on the power of law over war.
6
According to the logic of deviance, war constitutes a kind of con-
duct that contravenes behavioural norms.
7
As such, it is a problem that can be alleviated, cor-
rected, and potentially even abolished from without –by different means, but crucially
through the production and dissemination of empirical knowledge.
8
In charge of this production
and dissemination, in turn, are subjects whose epistemic and ethical capacity for dealing with war
depends on their being external to the problem at stake. Ultimately, this logic of war as a problem
of deviance serves a particular (and particularly) modern project: namely, the project of decreas-
ing the incidences of and the harm done by war, or vice versa, of increasing the scope of human
agency over war.
Given that war was long considered an inevitable fact dictated by divine will or human nature,
or also an unquestionable means of statecraft, the assumption that war is a human-made and
hence a potentially soluble problem constitutes a remarkable achievement.
9
Yet this achievement
comes at a price. The logic of war as a problem of deviance renders problematic some wars by
normalising other wars, and it accords agency over war to some by denying this agency to
others.
10
Within this logic, moreover, it is impossible to make sense of war’s constitutive role
within modernity.
11
Tracing these matters in the example of the CEIP commission, I show
that they were based on and reproduced not only the commissioners’civilisational and orientalist
ideas, but, entangled with these, also a specifically modern logic that saw war as a problem insofar
as it constituted a deviant or abnormal and hence a corrigible kind of conduct.
For getting to work on this logic, the article utilises two Foucauldian tools: a conception of
problematisation as the contingent and conflictual emergence of problems, and a method of
genealogy that studies this emergence historically in order to question how problems are
4
Ibid., p. 236.
5
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, Note d’Estournelles to Bacon, 18 September 1913.
6
Tarak Barkawi, ‘From law to history: The politics of war and empire’,Global Constitutionalism, 7:3 (2018), pp. 315–29;
Marta Iñiguez de Heredia, ‘Militarism, states and resistance in Africa: Exploring colonial patterns in stabilisation missions’,
Conflict, Security & Development, 19:6 (2019), pp. 623–44.
7
Martin Ceadel, The Origins of War Prevention: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1730–1854
(Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1996).
8
Punishment being the other most important means for correcting deviant international conduct (Wolfgang Wagner and
Wouter Werner, ‘War and punitivity under anarchy’,European Journal of International Security, 3:3 (2018), pp. 310–25).
9
Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, The Internationalists: And Their Plan to Outlaw War (London, UK: Allen Lane,
2017); John Mueller, ‘Changing attitudes to war: The impact of the First World War’,British Journal of Political Science, 21:1
(1991), pp. 1–28.
10
Barkawi, ‘From law to history’; Claudia Brunner, Epistemische Gewalt: Wissen und Herrschaft in der kolonialen Moderne
(Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2020).
11
Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl, War in Social Thought, trans. Alex Skinner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2012); Teresa Koloma Beck and Klaus Schlichte, Theorien der Gewalt zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2014); Nelson
Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
706 Christine Andrä
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constituted contemporarily. In combination, problematisation and genealogy amount to a
particular kind of critique that, rather than judging a problem’s truth or falsity, directs itself at
the underlying logics that enable analytical questions about, normative evaluations of, and
practical efforts towards this problem.
12
By probing these logics’non-necessary becomings,
this critique seeks to facilitate the conversion of contingency into agency and to enable us ‘to
change’, as Michel Foucault once wrote, ‘the given terms of the problem’.
13
Along these lines,
this article’s genealogical analysis of the emergence of the problematisation of war as deviant
intends to provide a basis on which we may broaden the range of choices available to us in
our dealings with war. Specifically, the analysis calls on us to rethink and reconstruct the founda-
tions, the scope, and the means of our agency over war.
In doing so, the article seeks to strike up a conversation within International Relations (IR)
about the logics through which war is rendered problematic –including, but not limited to, by
our own IR analyses. That war constitutes a problem which our research can help to address
is one of the foundational assumptions of the discipline of IR,
14
and mainstream IR analyses
of different theoretical persuasions have been holding fast onto the idea that the systematic ana-
lysis of war’s causes can alleviate the problem that war constitutes.
15
Meanwhile, critical, feminist,
poststructuralist, and post- and decolonial scholarship has picked at the static and state-centric
frames that mainstream IR applies to war.
16
Criticising that ‘[t]he problem of war becomes the
central question for IR only in a certain kind of way, as major war between sovereign nation
states’, this scholarship highlights issues that exceed the confines of the problem of war thus
understood, including militarism, the continuities of war within peacetime politics and society,
and the intersecting nexuses of war and gender relations, and war, imperialism, and colonial-
ism.
17
In addition, a smaller number of critical studies have also looked into how certain ideas
about war serve to legitimate and hence enable the continued possibility of war.
18
Taking
much inspiration from these critical interrogations, I suggest a twofold extension of their insights.
On the one hand, the analysis of the problematisation of war offered in this article shifts the ques-
tion from what the problem of war consists in to how, that is, through which logics, war is ren-
dered problematic. On the other hand, the article proposes a reflexive twist to existing critiques:
rather than denouncing the role of others’ideas in the reproduction of war, it demands that we
question –and either justify or amend –our own (critical) logics for rendering war problematic.
The article proceeds as follows. The first section sketches with broad strokes how war has
become the problem that it is today. The second section rereads Foucault on problematisation
and genealogy to develop both into tools for the analysis and critique of this problem. The
12
Michel Foucault, ‘Practicing criticism’, in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings,
1977–1984, trans. Alan Sheridan et al. (London, UK: Routledge, 1990), pp. 152–6.
13
Michel Foucault, ‘An interview with Michel Foucault’, in James D. Faubion (ed.), The Essential Works of Michel
Foucault, Vol. 3: Power (New York, NY: The New Press, 1994), pp. 239–97 (p. 288).
14
Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 1990), pp. 18–19.
15
Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson, Causes of War (Malden, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2010); Stephen Van Evera,
Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
16
Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, ‘Powers of war: Fighting, knowledge, and critique’,International Political Sociology,
5:2 (2011), pp. 126–43; Swati Parashar, ‘What war and “war bodies”know about international relations’,Cambridge Review of
International Affairs, 26:4 (2013), pp. 615–30.
17
Tarak Barkawi, ‘Decolonising war’,European Journal of International Security, 1:2 (2016), pp. 199–214 (p. 206). See also
Cynthia Enloe, Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Iñiguez
de Heredia, ‘Militarism, states and resistance’; Christine Sylvester, War as Experience: Contributions from International
Relations and Feminist Analysis (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013).
18
Jens Bartelson, War in International Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Anatol Rapoport,
‘Editor’s introduction’, in Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. J. J. Graham (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1968 [orig.
pub. 1832]), pp. 11–80; Hidemi Suganami, ‘Stories of war origins: A narrativist theory of the causes of war’,Review of
International Studies, 23:4 (1997), pp. 401–18; Maja Zehfuss, War and the Politics of Ethics (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2018).
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third section introduces the Carnegie commission as a crucial example within the genealogy of
the problematisation of war and attends to different aspects of this problematisation: the frames
through which the commission rendered war problematic, the underlying logic that these frames
shared, as well as the ways of knowing and subjects of knowledge constituted within this logic. My
analysis relies on primary sources collected from the archives of the CEIP’s New York and
Washington Offices and its Paris-based Centre Européen, dating from October 1912 to July
1914 and comprising planning documents and personal notes; correspondence between the
staff at the CEIP’s offices, the commissioners, and other interlocutors in the United States and
Europe; newspaper clippings; and the commission’s published report.
19
The conclusion poses
the question of how these aspects of the problematisation of war, given that they continue to
operate in the contemporary present, could be changed.
How war became a modern problem
That war is a problem which we can take action against is an idea which comes naturally to us
today. Upon closer scrutiny, however, our taken for granted belief in not having to take war for
granted turns out to be a historical novelty.
20
As Martin Ceadel explains, while moral and reli-
gious ‘[c]ondemnation of war has a very long tradition’both within Europe and beyond, for
the longest time, this tradition presumed ‘little scope for human agency in such matters’.
21
It
was only from the early nineteenth century onwards that the ‘assumption that humans could
bring international relations under at least partial control’slowly began to gain currency and
that, concurrently, ‘the belief that war was the normal condition of international relations was
replaced by the belief that it was an abnormal one.’
22
Thereafter, it took another century and a
half for the idea that war was as an anomalous, yet corrigible kind of international conduct to
establish itself as the majority view among politicians, civil society, and the general public, at
least in the Global North/West.
23
Culminating, after the Second World War, in the prohibition
of the use of force in Article 2.4 of the United Nations Charter, the understanding of war as a
problem of deviance has played an important role in international politics ever since.
24
The fact that there continue to be wars today does not contradict this. Rather, the notion of
war as a problem of deviance provides the underlying logic for the ‘normative register’in
which today’s wars are overwhelmingly conceived.
25
This register and its underlying logic
demand that those wishing to make the case for war must justify their arguments against the
more general countervailing assumption that holds war to be problematic.
26
More importantly
still, when the questions of what counts as a war (or of which wars count) and what counts as
a problem are posed based on this normative register, its underlying logic invites answers that
work by differentiating normal from abnormal political conduct. In effect, these answers normal-
ise and invisibilise some kinds of violence in international politics –while rendering other vio-
lences deviant, conspicuous, and in need of correction.
As an example of how the modern understanding of the problem of war works in contempor-
ary international politics, consider international stabilisation missions. A ‘co-ordinated response
to situations of instability’in ‘societies experiencing or emerging from violent conflicts’, these
19
In 1993, the CEIP reissued the commission’s report as a commentary on the then-ongoing wars in Yugoslavia. See also
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 4–5.
20
This formulation is inspired by Koloma Beck and Schlichte, Theorien der Gewalt, p. 22.
21
Ceadel, Origins of War Prevention, pp. 5–6.
22
Ibid., p. 1.
23
Mueller, ‘Changing attitudes to war’.
24
See also Koloma Beck and Schlichte, Theorien der Gewalt, pp. 27–8, 96–7; Stephen C. Neff, War and the Law of Nations:
A General History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), part IV.
25
Barkawi and Brighton, ‘Powers of war’, p. 141.
26
Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960),
pp. 237–8.
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missions operate predominantly on the African continent and often take a robust approach
reliant upon military means.
27
As Marta Iñiguez de Heredia shows, this approach is frequently
justified by recourse to ‘the construction of [African] conflict’as the opposite of ‘modern and
“proper”politics’.
28
In this context, the logic of war as a problem of deviance underlies and
facilitates not just the robust approach of these stabilisation missions, but also furthers ‘colonial
tropes’,‘racialised frameworks’, and an ‘epistemological Eurocentrism’that, in combination, ‘cir-
cumscribe politics and political agency to the West’and help to reproduce global power
structures.
29
These and related assumptions about the deviant and apolitical nature of violent conflict in
Africa are also mirrored in and bolstered by academic debates.
30
Indeed, scholarship on war
more generally often bases itself on the understanding of war as a problem of deviance. A recent
example is Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro’s study of how the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact
ushered in an overall decline of the incidence of war.
31
As their critics indicate, their analysis is
blind to the historical and contemporary wars and violences inflicted by the Global North on the
Global South, as well as to how international law in general and the outlawry of war in particular
have contributed to enabling these.
32
Moreover, and as Tarak Barkawi points out, Hathaway and
Shapiro’s arguments unwittingly ‘erase the historical agency of nearly everyone but a few white
Westerners’.
33
In all of this, the authors uncritically found themselves on a ‘modern attitude’
that ‘regard[s] war as uncontroversially bad’, uncivilised, and irrational.
34
Aligning themselves
with this modern understanding of the problem of war, their analysis provides a particularly
stark example of how this understanding’s underlying logic can contribute to reproducing the
constitutive blind spots of research on war.
Insofar as the modern understanding of the problem of war thus permeates both international
politics and scholarship thereon, how can we account for its emergence? Some scholars argue that
changes in ideas about war followed on the heels of political and social, material and techno-
logical changes in both warfare itself and war reporting.
35
Others make sense of the emergence
of the modern problem of war in the context of the more general understanding of modernity as
inherently progressing towards non-violence.
36
Yet others hold that after a century of limited dir-
ect exposure to war, the First and Second World Wars came as particularly awful shocks for many
in the West, catalysing the view of war as deeply problematic.
37
Finally, the literature also points
to the ‘shifting, and sometimes uncomfortable, coalition of voices’of peace activists who, during
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, castigated war as ‘immoral, uncivilized, disgusting,
futile (particularly economically)’, increasingly superfluous in the face of legal alternatives such as
27
Iñiguez de Heredia, ‘Militarism, states and resistance’, p. 625; John Karlsrud, The UN at War: Peace Operations in a New
Era (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
28
Iñiguez de Heredia, ‘Militarism, states and resistance’, p. 629.
29
Ibid.; see also Zubairu Wai, ‘The empire’s new clothes: Africa, liberal interventionism and contemporary world order’,
Review of African Political Economy, 41:142 (2014), pp. 483–99.
30
See, for example, Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, ‘On the economic causes of civil war’,Oxford Economic Papers,50
(1998), pp. 563–95.
31
Hathaway and Shapiro, The Internationalists.
32
Anna Geis, ‘Outlawing war is not enough to promote international peace: The ambivalence of liberal interventionism’,
Global Constitutionalism, 7:3 (2018), pp. 342–57.
33
Barkawi, ‘From law to history’, p. 317.
34
Hathaway and Shapiro, The Internationalists, p. 9. see also Barkawi, ‘From law to history’, p. 322.
35
Antoine Bousquet, ‘The concept of war in world politics’, in Felix Berenskoetter (ed.), Concepts in World Politics
(London, UK: Sage, 2016), pp. 91–106; Bernd Hüppauf, ‘The emergence of modern war imagery in early photography’,
History and Memory, 5:1 (1993), pp. 130–51; Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (eds), The Changing Character of War
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011).
36
Koloma Beck and Schlichte, Theorien der Gewalt.
37
Barkawi, ‘From law to history’, p. 322; Mueller, ‘Changing attitudes to war’, p. 12.
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arbitration, mediation, and international organisation, and also as ‘a mechanism through which
the capitalist class carried out its disputes, using the working classes as cannon fodder’.
38
However, as faras war as a problem of deviance is concerned, these arguments remain underdeter-
mined. None of them can explain why and how precisely this logic of the problem of war emerged –
nor do they make this historical emergence available for critical and reconstructive thought. The
remainder of this article begins to take on this task. Thereto, the next section develops a set of concep-
tual and methodological tools, which I then put to use on the example of the Carnegie commission.
Problems and their logics: Problematisation, genealogy, and critique
To get at the logics of the modern problem of war, this article combines Foucault’s concept of
problematisation with his method of genealogy. While both problematisation and genealogy
are by now well-established analytical tools in IR, to achieve the particular purposes for which
I intend to wield them, they need some sharpening. To this end, I here undertake a rereading
of Foucault and some of his interlocutors on problematisation, genealogy, and critique. This
rereading conceives of problematisation not only as an object, but also as a mode of critique –
and a reconstructive one at that. Thereby, the section lays the basis for the analysis to follow,
which considers the contingent and conflictual emergence of the problematisation of war to fur-
ther problematise it, that is, to afford insights into the logics that would have to be –and that can
be –changed in order for the problem of war to be constructed otherwise.
Problems as processes: Rereading Foucault on problematisation
Within recent IR scholarship, the concept of problematisation has been applied to the study of
world-political problems ranging from piracy
39
to sexual violence
40
to climate change.
41
Building
on Foucault and various of his interlocutors, these analyses yield not only manifold empirical
insights, but also a number of theoretical propositions. For instance, readings of Foucault in con-
junction with Mitchell Dean conceptualise problematisation as ‘a particular instance in which gov-
erning is called into question’,
42
leading on to theoretical proposals on the role of problematisations
in the emergence of global governance, governmentalities, and governed objects.
43
Readings of
Foucault in combination with Carol Bacchi take problematisations as ‘problem representations’
and theorise their discursive production through as well as their effects on governmental policy pro-
cesses.
44
Finally, readings that pair Foucault with John Dewey understand problematisations as sets
of ‘practical conditions and institutional mechanisms’that enable the production of problems; on
this basis, they then theorise problematisation as ‘the starting point for politics’.
45
In this section, I
variously draw from these different propositions, but ultimately offer a reading of Foucault on
38
Ibid.; see also Ceadel, Origins of War Prevention; David Cortright, Peace: A History of Movement and Ideas (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
39
Christian Bueger, ‘Orchestrating the response: Somali piracy and ontological complexity’,Global Policy, 4:1 (2013),
pp. 86–93.
40
Samer Abdelnour and Akbar M. Saeed, ‘Technologizing humanitarian space: Darfur advocacy and the rape-stove pana-
cea’,International Political Sociology, 8:2 (2014), pp. 145–63.
41
Bentley Allan, ‘Producing the climate: States, scientists, and the constitution of global governance objects’,International
Organization, 71:1 (2017), pp. 131–62.
42
Olaf Corry, Constructing a Global Polity: Theory, Discourse and Governance (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), p. 60; see also Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London, UK: Sage, 1999).
43
Allan, ‘Producing the climate’; Michael Merlingen, ‘From governance to governmentality in CSDP: Towards a
Foucauldian research agenda’,Journal of Common Market Studies, 49:1 (2011), pp. 149–69.
44
Bueger, ‘Orchestrating the response’; Marjolein Derous, ‘Problematizations in the EU’s external policies: The case of
Singapore as “the other”’,Asia Europe Journal, 16 (2018), pp. 423–37; see also Carol Bacchi, Analysing Policy: What’s the
Problem Represented To Be? (Frenchs Forest, New South Wales, Aus.: Pearson, 2009).
45
Christian Bueger and Tim Edmunds, ‘Pragmatic ordering: Informality, experimentation, and the maritime security
agenda’,Review of International Studies, 47:2 (2021), pp. 171–91 (pp. 175–6); see also Bueger, ‘Orchestrating the response’;
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York, NY: Swallow Press, 1946).
710 Christine Andrä
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problematisation that differs from them in its empirical focus and theoretical intention. I broaden
the analytical scope beyond problems of government to political problems more generally, focus the
analysis on practices rather than on discourses, and shift the analytical attention from the politics to
which problematisations give rise to the politics arising within problematisations.
Distinguishing problems from other human-made research objects such as behaviours and ideas,
Foucault once explained that he had sought ‘to analyze the process of “problematization”–which
means: how and why certain things …became a problem’.
46
Shared by many Foucault-inspired IR
analyses, this understanding of problematisation as the processual becoming of problems also serves
as a baseline for the conceptualisation suggested here.
47
Within Foucault’s own work, the under-
standing of problems as processes is in line with his ‘epiphenomenal’
48
approach to research and
his eluding of given, unified, or ‘natural’objects of inquiry,
49
as well as with his view of history
as ultimately unfamiliar.
50
Based on these historico-philosophical tenets, problematisations as
processes cannot be thought of, as Martin Saar points out, ‘as one becoming or even as one histor-
ical event’.
51
Moreover, it would be futile to look for generalisable regularities within these pro-
cesses, to stipulate causal mechanisms, or to seek to predict their future development.
52
Rather,
problematisations must be understood as emerging in a haphazard fashion, through multiple, dis-
persed, and frequently accidental processes. For empirical analyses of problematisations, this means
paying attention to how an object such as war has been rendered problematic not by an ingenious
stroke of the pen or at a pivotal meeting, but through manifold larger and smaller, gradual and
abrupt changes unfolding over a period of time.
As these kinds of processes, what do problematisations consist of –and which of their aspects
can we, their overall unfamiliarity notwithstanding, seek to study empirically? On the one hand,
problematisations consist of practices and their conditions of possibility.
53
In his inquiry into the
problematisation of sexuality, for instance, Foucault was interested in ‘the conditions in which
human beings “problematize”what they are, what they do, and the world in which they live’,
as well as in ‘the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed’.
54
Problematisations both emerge from earlier practices and are the enabling and constraining con-
ditions for our current (problematising) practices.
55
Since problematisations thus consist in ‘what
people do’all the way down, it is, as Paul Veyne explains, through the practices that (re)produce
problematisations that they can be observed.
56
46
Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angeles, CA: semiotext(e), 2001), p. 171, emphasis in original.
47
Abdelnour and Saeed, ‘Technologizing humanitarian space’; Allen, ‘Producing the climate’; Bueger and Edmunds,
‘Pragmatic ordering’.
48
Philippe Bonditti, Andrew Neal, Sven Opitz, and Chris Zebrowski, ‘Genealogy’, in Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans,
Andrew Neal, and Nadine Voelkner (eds), Critical Security Methods: New Frameworks for Analysis (London, UK:
Routledge, 2015), pp. 159–88 (p. 166).
49
Paul Veyne, ‘Foucault revolutionizes history’, in Arnold I. Davidson (ed.), Foucault and His Interlocutors (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 146–82 ( pp. 149–50).
50
Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in Paul Rabinow and Rose Nikolas (eds), The Essential Foucault:
Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York, NY: New Press, 2003), pp. 76–100.
51
Martin Saar, ‘Genealogische Kritik’, in Rahel Jaeggi and Thilo Wesche (eds), Was ist Kritik? (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp,
2013), pp. 247–65 (p. 255, emphasis in original, own translation).
52
Joseph MacKay and Christopher David LaRoche, ‘The conduct of history in international relations: Rethinking philoso-
phy of history in IR theory’,International Theory, 9:2 (2017), pp. 203–36 (p. 224).
53
Similarly: Bueger and Edmunds, ‘Pragmatic ordering’, p. 176; Bueger, ‘Orchestrating the response’, p. 88.
54
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Richard Hurley (New York, NY: Vintage
Books, 1990), p. 10.
55
That these conditions of possibility are not transcendental, but themselves made up of historically accumulated practices
distinguishes Foucault’s work from that of Marx and Freud, but also from Kant (Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique:
Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 109–28; see also Veyne,
‘Foucault revolutionizes history’).
56
Veyne, ‘Foucault revolutionizes history’, pp. 156–7; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
trans. Alan Sheridan (London, UK: Penguin, 1995).
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On the other hand, empirical analyses of problematisations can focus on the operations of
power in the making of problems. Foucault’s conceptualisation of power has been widely
discussed in IR and beyond. Rather than rehearsing these discussions, for the purposes of this
article, I go with Amy Allen’s summary, according to which Foucault ‘combines a constitutive
conception of power –that is, a conception of how power works to constitute subjects …–
with an agential conception –that is, a conception of how power is exercised by agents to con-
strain or act upon the actions of other agents.’
57
Since ‘[w]here there is power, there is resistance’,
this twofold understanding of power can be realised empirically by paying close attention to com-
peting efforts at problematisation as well as to the conflicts and struggles arising in the context of
these efforts.
58
More concretely, my analysis of the problematisation of war starts from the frames through
which war is rendered problematic to then consider their logics, for example, the underlying
assumptions of and the principles structuring these frames. I take my cue for distinguishing
between frames and logics from Judith Butler’sFrames of War as well as from IR scholarship
that stresses the rationalities of problematisations. On the one hand, Butler contends that frames,
by ‘selectively producing and enforcing what will count as reality’, become ‘the means through
which social norms are relayed and made effective.’
59
Frames, that is, have inclusionary as well
as exclusionary effects: they produce reality –for instance, the (un)grievability of the lives of dif-
ferent populations exposed to war –by ‘always keeping something out’of the frame.
60
On the
other hand, the extant IR literature on problematisations highlights their ‘underlying assump-
tions’,
61
‘style[s] of reasoning’,
62
and ‘political rationality’.
63
Differentiating between frames
and their logics is analytically worthwhile because it is with regard to both frames and logics
that conflicts and contingencies arise within problematisations. Along these lines, controversies
between the commissioners, the CEIP, and other parts of the peace movement concerned not
only the commission’s frames for rendering war problematic, but also a clash between the
logic of deviance underlying these frames and different dialectical alternatives to it. Making vis-
ible these kinds of arguments, an analysis that looks both at the frames of problems and at their
underlying logics helps us to get at the politics within problematisations.
Moreover, differentiating the frames through which war is rendered problematic from their
underlying logics enables an analysis of how ways of knowing and subjects of knowledge are con-
stituted within these logics. Famously, Foucault claimed that rather than knowledge being the
antipode of power, ‘power and knowledge directly imply one another’so that ‘the subject who
knows’is the effect of these relations of power-knowledge.
64
This suggests that we need to inquire
into how knowledge comes into play within conflicts about the logics of the problem of war, as
well as into how problematisations produce not only war as a problematic object of knowledge
and action, but also subjects capable of and responsible for dealing with this object.
65
Taking
inspiration from Foucault’s empirical studies of the problematisations of madness, crime, and
sexuality, we can do so by focusing on the ways of knowing that take effect within the production
of problems and on the subjectivities this production presupposes and brings about.
57
Amy Allen, ‘Power/knowledge/resistance: Foucault and epistemic injustice’, in Ian James Kidd, Gaile Pohlhaus, and José
Medina (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (London, UK: Routledge, 2017), pp. 187–94 ( p. 188).
58
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1:An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Pantheon
Books, 1978), p. 95.
59
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London, UK: Verso, 2009), pp. xiii, xix.
60
Ibid., p. xiii.
61
Derous, ‘Problematizations in the EU’s external policies’, p. 424.
62
Bueger, ‘Orchestrating the response’, p. 88.
63
Merlingen, ‘From governance to governmentality’, p. 152.
64
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 27; see also Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), p. 4.
65
Bueger, ‘Orchestrating the response’, p. 88; Vivienne Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics (Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 6.
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Finally, a focus on the logics underlying problematisations offers a handle on the resolutely
modern character of war as a problem of deviance –as well as on how, by virtue of this logic,
the making of this modern problem has played into more widely constituted systems of oppres-
sion. On the one hand, insofar as the understanding of war as a problem of deviance is but the
flipside of modernity’s presumably progressive pacification,
66
its underlying logic implies that this
understanding struggles to adequately grasp not only modern war as a phenomenon in itself, but
also the multiple violent contributions of war to the constitution of modernity.
67
On the other
hand, the understanding of war as a problem of deviance relies on the presumption of a rational
modern subject singularly capable of authoring epistemic and ethical projects of correction and
improvement.
68
Insofar as it is constituted in contradistinction to non- or not-yet-modern others,
this modern subject’s capacity for taking action against war is founded on the denial of this cap-
acity to its ‘primitive’,‘uncivilised’,or‘barbarian’others. In sum, the logic of deviance, by pre-
suming modernity as the opposite of war as well as the modern subject as uniquely capable of
making it so, implies war to be a problem of others who, however, are incapable of addressing
it. Thus, the modern understanding of war as a problem of deviance obscures its reliance on civi-
lisational, orientalist, and racist figures of thought and invisibilises how war as such is a broader
problem that has crucially enabled imperial, colonial, and patriarchal violences.
Agency out of contingency: Rereading Foucault on genealogy
To put this conceptualisation of problematisation into action, I turn to genealogy. Basing them-
selves on Foucault, IR scholars from the late 1980s onwards have written genealogies to question
international practices, principles, and institutions
69
–and have thereby also sought to sound out
IR’s disciplinary limits.
70
As a particular kind of historical analysis in IR, genealogy has been sti-
pulated to provide ‘political’histories of knowledge
71
and reflexive ‘histories of the present as
inside stories’;
72
most importantly, it has been claimed as a way of doing history that denaturalises
previously taken for granted ideas and practices. Moreover, genealogy has also been discussed as a
research tool that is ‘effective by virtue of being episodical and exemplary’: that to achieve their
denaturalising effect, genealogies do not need to amount to comprehensive, continuous, or rep-
resentative histories, but rather probe the contingent emergences of the contemporary present
across different episodes and examples.
73
As there is thus no shortage of discussions of genealogy in IR, and much to agree with in these
discussions, my rereading of Foucault on genealogy focuses on one issue in particular: namely, on
the question of how insights into historical contingency can serve to foster contemporary agency.
No longer content with ‘mere’denaturalisation, Foucauldian scholarship in IR and beyond has
more recently turned to Foucault’s call for historical analyses to ‘separate out, from the contin-
gency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking
66
Koloma Beck and Schlichte, Theorien der Gewalt, p. 29.
67
Maldonado-Torres, Against War, pp. 3–4.
68
Robbie Shilliam, ‘Decolonising the grounds of ethical inquiry: A dialogue between Kant, Foucault and Glissant’,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39:3 (2011), pp. 649–65; see also Robbie Shilliam, ‘Modernity and moderniza-
tion’,Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies (2011).
69
Jens Bartelson, Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); James Der Derian, On
Diplomacy (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Richard Price, Chemical Weapons Taboo (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1997).
70
Scott Hamilton, ‘A genealogy of metatheory in IR: How “ontology”emerged from the inter-paradigm debate’,
International Theory, 9:1 (2016), pp. 136–70.
71
Srdjan Vucetic, ‘Genealogy as a research tool in international relations’,Review of International Studies, 37:3 (2011),
pp. 1295–312 (p. 1312).
72
Bartelson, Genealogy of Sovereignty, p. 69.
73
Ibid., p. 73, emphasis in original; see also Bonditti et al., ‘Genealogy’; Vucetic, ‘Genealogy as a research tool’, p. 1300.
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what we are, do, or think’.
74
It is along these lines, for instance, that Jens Bartelson’s history of the
idea of ‘ontogenetic war’aims to ‘set [people] free’to think differently about war ‘by exposing the
contingency of all prior conceptualisations’.
75
Insofar as everything could have been otherwise,
that is, it could now be made to be otherwise, too. Operating at such a general level of argument,
however, analyses such as Bartelson’s struggle to identify more precisely the ‘points where change
is possible and desirable’and offer precious little guidance on how we might work towards ‘the
very specific transformations’that Foucault demands.
76
To facilitate the emergence of agency out of contingency, it does not suffice for genealogy to
demonstrate that everything is contingent and hence could have been otherwise. Instead, geneal-
ogy can ‘[invite] specific strategies for either developing alternative practices or improving exist-
ing practices’, as Colin Koopman argues, ‘[b]y focusing on the specific ways in which our
practices are contingent, and not merely the general fact of their contingency.’
77
How can geneal-
ogy trace these more specific contingencies? On the one hand, this is a question of archival
research. Foucault’s genealogies famously worked their way through ‘a vast accumulation of
source material’in order to ‘identify the accidents, the minute deviations –or conversely, the
complete reversals’.
78
On the other hand, it is also a matter of genealogy as a history of the present
that seeks to establish a reflexive relationship between contemporary problematisations and the
contingent practices and conditions out of which they have formed.
79
As a tool for providing insights into contingency that can open up new possibilities for agency,
genealogy depends on the existence of an agential subject laying claim to these possibilities. In
this context, I offer a final rereading of Foucault, whose genealogies are often taken as wholesale
rejections of this kind of subject. According to Amy Allen and Johanna Oksala, Foucault
renounced the Enlightenment subject capable of self-reflection as an ahistorical constant,
yet allowed for and indeed counted on this subject as an historical actuality. In line with the con-
ception of power suggested above, this means that for Foucault, freedom –for instance, the free-
dom to think differently about and act otherwise towards war as problematic –‘is not only a
non-subjective opening of possibilities’. Rather, it is also exercised by the subject who is ‘critically
reflecting on itself and its behavior, on beliefs and the social field of which it is part’.
80
By delving
into the contingencies that made not only our problems, but also us as subjects in charge of work-
ing on them, genealogy thus offers us resources for critical reflection on the specifics of these con-
tingencies. Thereby, it seeks to enable us not just to rethink, but also to practically remake
ourselves and our problems.
Problematisation and genealogy as critique
As this last point already hints at, genealogical analyses of problematisations can themselves con-
stitute problematising practices. In particular, this is the case when such analyses self-consciously
set about to further the problematisations they are inquiring into –when, as Koopman puts it,
74
Michel Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York, NY: Pantheon
Books, 1984), pp. 32–50 (p. 46).
75
Jens Bartelson, ‘A reply to my critics: War and historical ontology’,Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 48:1
(2019), pp. 105–14 (p. 111); see also Bartelson, War.
76
Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment’, p. 46. For a related criticism, see also Marta Bashovski, ‘The looping effects of IR’s
concepts: Bartelson on ontogenetic war and the politics of classification’,Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 48:1
(2019), pp. 79–89.
77
Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, pp. 141–2.
78
Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, pp. 76–7, 81. Whereas Nietzsche’s genealogies, to denounce our moral values,
rely on a small number of frequently speculative examples, Foucault’s genealogies contain excessive empirics to enable an
experimentation with these values (Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, pp. 61–2).
79
The argument is not that something of the past continues to exist, unchangedly, in the present, but that it acts to enable/
constrain present possibilities (Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 12; Oksala, Foucault on Freedom, p. 192).
80
Oksala, Foucault on Freedom, p. 190; see also Allen, ‘Power/knowledge/resistance’.
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‘[t]he critical inquirer observes practical problematizations that are already extant’in order to
‘draw up, organize, and engage’them and thus to ‘contribute to the ongoing reproduction of
problematizations already under way’.
81
Foucault’s work is exemplary of this particular mode
of critical inquiry and practice.
82
His genealogies of the becoming problematic of madness,
crime, and sexuality are profoundly historical, yet simultaneously, he also sought to problematise
how these problems are formed in the present. Thereby, they amount to a ‘critique of who we are’
that, or so Foucault hoped, ‘is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits
imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’.
83
In doing so, genealogies of problematisations constitute a particular kind of critique, which, in
contrast to those kinds of critique that aim to judge things or circumstances as good or bad,
directs itself at the logics that enable these analytical, ethical, and political judgements. For
Foucault, critique ‘is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter
of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsid-
ered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.’
84
Or, as Judith Butler writes, ‘the primary
task of critique will not be to evaluate whether its objects …are good or bad, valued highly or
demeaned, but to bring into relief the very framework of evaluation itself.’
85
Probing this frame-
work and hence the preconditions of our ways of knowing about problems and of making prob-
lematic, genealogies of problematisations seek out the constraints these place on our
contemporary problematising practices.
Their aim in doing so is ultimately a reconstructive one: to enable changes in our modes of
thought, our ways of taking action upon our problems, and ourselves as subjects in charge of
the problems we face. Genealogies of problematisations work to realise this aim by making the
remaking of problems a more urgent task. They ‘descriptively clarify extant problems’in order
to ‘normatively intensify the force we feel in confronting these problems’.
86
What is more, geneal-
ogies of problematisations also provide us with insights which we can use to get to work on
reconstructing our problems. As Paul Rabinow explains, Foucault’s genealogies of problematisa-
tions examined ‘the previous forms that had been articulated as responses to a specific set of his-
torical problems, thereby making them available for a different use or set of uses: as intellectual
instrumentalities to illuminate contemporary problems and possible solutions.’
87
By tracing the
contingencies and conflicts out of which our contemporary problems have emerged, genealogies
of problematisations enable us to see more precisely our (imperfect) freedom in seeking out new
ways of rendering problematic and equip us with insights that we can ultimately use to construct
our problems otherwise. In this way, problematisation, far from being merely an object, is also a
mode of critical inquiry and action.
The Carnegie commission of inquiry and its problematisation of war
After the First Balkan War (October 1912 to May 1913) had pitted the Balkan League, an alliance
comprised of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia, against the Ottoman Empire, the Second
81
Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, p. 99; see also Bonditti et al., ‘Genealogy’, p. 169.
82
Importantly, this is also so beyond problematisation and genealogy as academic tools of critique, as is evidenced by
Foucault’s activism –which often stood in marked tension to his theoretical work. See, for instance, Mugambi Jouet,
‘Foucault, prison, and human rights: A dialectic of theory and criminal justice reform’,Theoretical Criminology (online
first); Anna Terwiel, ‘Problematization as an activist practice: Reconsidering Foucault’,Theory & Event, 23:1 (2020),
pp. 66–84.
83
Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, p. 10.
84
Foucault, ‘Practicing criticism’, p. 154.
85
Judith Butler, ‘What is critique? An essay on Foucault’s virtue’, in David Ingram (ed.), The Political: Readings in
Continental Philosophy (London, UK: Basil Blackwell, 2002), pp. 212–27 (p. 214).
86
Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, p. 100.
87
Paul Rabinow, ‘Dewey and Foucault: What’s the problem?’,Foucault Studies, 11 (2011), pp. 11–19 (p. 16); see also
Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, pp. 135–6.
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Balkan War (June to July 1913) was waged between the former allies, and later on also Romania
and the Ottoman Empire. This second war was still ongoing when Nicholas Murray Butler, the
Director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Division of Intercourse and Education, suggested to Elihu
Root, the president of the CEIP, that the wars ‘give us great opportunity for prompt action. If you
approve I will send [a] notable commission at once to [the] Balkans to ascertain facts and to fix
responsibility for prolonging hostilities and commencing outrages.’
88
Overriding the reservations
of Andrew Carnegie, the CEIP’s founder, the commission Butler envisioned was soon constituted
under the presidency of Paul Henri d’Estournelles de Constant, a French diplomat, senator, and
Nobel laureate who headed the CEIP’s Centre Européen. And so, on 20 August 1913, ten days
after the Treaty of Bucharest had concluded the Second Balkan War, four commissioners left
Paris for Belgrade: Henry Noel Brailsford, a British journalist; Samuel Train Dutton, the head
of Teacher’s College at Columbia University; Justin Godart, a French lawyer and politician;
and Paul Milioukoff, a Russian historian and member of parliament.
89
Upon their return on
28 September 1913, a lengthy and complicated writing process ensued. Finally, in May 1914,
their report was published.
Given the outbreak of the First World War mere weeks later, the CEIP commission obviously
did not succeed in achieving its stated aims –its work did not make another war impossible.
Nonetheless, this work makes for a crucial example within the wider genealogy of the modern
problematisation of war. For one, the Carnegie commission constitutes the first instance in
which an international commission of inquiry –an institutional form codified by the Hague con-
ventions –was used to study ‘vital’matters of international conflict.
90
Moreover, the CEIP more
generally was an influential proponent of the pacifying force of scientific knowledge in inter-
national affairs. Besides the department headed by Butler, it also housed two research depart-
ments specialising in the study of war from the perspectives of economic history and
international law, respectively. Overall, through its various knowledge-production activities, the
Carnegie Endowment played a decisive role in establishing the international ‘normative frame-
work within which experts and the wider public discussed competing knowledge claims’about
war and peace.
91
Finally, many of the actors involved in the commission later on carried forward the under-
standing of the problem of war that the commission had propagated. Brailsford went on to pub-
lish almost three dozen books, among them many anti-militarist and anti-imperialist titles.
92
D’Estournelles, who remained a French senator and the head of the CEIP’s Centre Européen
until his death in 1924, became a major critic of the Versailles Treaty’s terms and an avid sup-
porter of the League of Nations.
93
Butler, by contrast, advocated against the United States’mem-
bership in the League and for its entry into both the First and the Second World War –and he
also actively supported the Kellogg-Briand Pact. While these positions might seem contradictory,
they all rested on the same framing of war as a legal problem that had already animated Butler’s
work for the Carnegie commission.
94
88
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, Telegram Butler to Root, 19 July 1913.
89
A further three members –the German law professor Walther Schücking, the Austrian law professor Paul Redlich, and
the British editor Francis W. Hirst –only collaborated afterwards (Frances Trix, ‘Peace-mongering in 1913: The Carnegie
International Commission of Inquiry and its report on the Balkan Wars’,First World War Studies, 5:2 (2014), pp. 147–62
(pp. 148–9)).
90
Shane Darcy, ‘Laying the foundations: Commissions of inquiry and the development of international law’, in Christian
Henderson (ed.), Commissions of Inquiry: Problems and Prospects (Oxford, UK: Hart, 2016), pp. 231–56.
91
Jens Wegener, ‘Creating an “International Mind”? The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Europe, 1911–
1940’(PhD thesis, European University Institutel, 2015), p. 14.
92
F. M. Leventhal, The Last Dissenter: H. N. Brailsford and His World (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1985).
93
Adolf Wild, Baron d’Estournelles (1852–1924): Das Wirken eines Friedensnobelpreisträgers für die Deutsch-Französische
Verständigung und Europäische Einigung (München: Schön Verlag, 1973).
94
C. F. Howlett, ‘Nicholas Murray Butler’s Crusade for a warless world’,The Wisconsin Magazine of History, 67:2 (1983–
1984), pp. 99–120 (pp. 107–08).
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The problem of war: Legal, economic, and moral frames
In the work of the Carnegie commission as among international lawyers and peace activists of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries more generally, there were two contending ideas
about what exactly war as a legal problem consisted in. Exemplifying the first of these two
ideas, some of the correspondence originating from the CEIP’s Centre Européen references ‘la
guerre elle-même’as the problem that the commission was to tackle,
95
and some of the commis-
sion’s members also toyed with the idea that their report was aimed ‘against war in general’.
96
Ultimately, however, the commission found that claiming war per se to be problematic would
undermine its intention of rendering war into a problem that could be addressed by practical
means: ‘If [the commission] discovers that the atrocities were inevitable, inseparable from the
condition of war, what an exposure of the powerlessness of civilization!’
97
A focus on certain vio-
lent acts within war –on ‘outrages’or ‘atrocities’against civilians, such as murder, arson, pillage,
and rape –promised to make for a better addressable problem.
98
The primary sources also indicate how hard won an achievement this more focused problema-
tidation of war was, necessitating both reconsideration of long-standing lines of thought and
minute editorial decisions. A first draft of Chapter VI of the report argued that ‘[t]he devastations
were of two kinds, those made necessary by war, [and] those that were irregular’,
99
but was
revised to read that ‘[t]he havoc committed was of two kinds, one lawful and the other directed
against private property.’
100
The added emphasis on the actual perpetration of wartime violence
and the distinction now drawn between lawful and unlawful instances of such violence exemplify
the manifold questions of detail that went into rendering war problematic. At the same time, the
commission also had to negotiate the more general framework provided by international law,
which pitted the problem of war as such against the problem of wartime violence. In the final
report’s introduction, d’Estournelles reflects that while, as a participant of the Hague
Conferences of 1899 and 1907, he had been of the view that ‘[t]o humanize war’constituted ‘a
hypocrisy and a satire, leading to its being too easily accepted’, he had since changed his mind
and now believed that ‘[t]o refuse to humanize war for fear of making it too frequent, is to let
the weight of the governments’fault fall upon the soldier.’
101
The final report’s chapter on ques-
tions of international law arising from the Balkan Wars affirms d’Estournelles’s newfound con-
viction. Weighing the prospects of rendering either the opening of hostilities or excessive wartime
violence into violations of international law, it embraces the latter line of argument.
102
Alongside these frames of war as a legal problem, the commission’s work also pointed to war’s
economically and morally problematic aspects. ‘From the economic point of view’, Chapter IV
opens, ‘war is a destruction of wealth’.
103
The chapter goes on to outline the problem in detail.
Already ‘before war is declared the prospect of conflict between the countries …affects the finan-
cial situation’,as‘[c]redit facilities are restricted; monetary circulation disturbed; production
slackened; orders falling off to a marked degree; and an uncertainty prevails which reacts harm-
fully on trade.’With ‘the declaration of war and mobilization’,‘able bodied men’are drafted, and
‘work stops in factories and in the fields’, with negative repercussions for individual households
95
CEIP Archive, Vol. 201, Letter Prudhommeaux to Haskell, 6 January 1914; see also CEIP Archive, Vol. 201, Letter
d’Estournelles to Butler, 19 February 1914.
96
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, L’Humanité, La mission Carnegie poursuit son enquête, 9 September 1913.
97
CEIP, Report,p.3.
98
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, Letter Butler to Root, 19 July 1913.
99
CEIP Carnegie Endowment for International Peace European Center Records, 1911–1940, Columbia University, Rare
Book and Manuscript Library Collection (hereafter CEIP European Archive), Box 11, Folder 11.5, Godart, Draft of
Chapter VI, p. 9a.
100
CEIP, Report, p. 244.
101
Ibid., p. 14.
102
Ibid., p. 208.
103
Ibid., p. 235.
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and national economies. Once ‘the fighting begins’,‘[t]housands of human lives are sacrificed’,in
particular the lives of those most capable of ‘fruitful labor’. Yet the economically destructive
nature of war is not limited to the annihilation of human lives: ‘highly expensive supplies of can-
non, gun carriages and arms are ruined’, and ‘there is destructive bombardment of towns, villages
in flames, the harvests stamped down or burned, bridges, the most costly items of a railway,
blown up.’‘Outrages’against civilians are accompanied by further economic destruction, as ‘non-
combatants have to suffer …invasion, excesses and it may be flight, with the loss of their
goods.’
104
In sum: ‘Hundreds of thousands of deaths, soldiers crippled, ruin, suffering, hatred
and, to crown all, misery and poverty after victory. War results in destruction and poverty in
every direction.’
105
The commissioners’frames for rendering war into a moral problem, in turn, hinged on the
notion that excessive wartime violence would yield negative consequences for ‘the psychological
and ethical development of peoples’.
106
The commission’s concern with the ‘moral effects of the
atrocities’lay with individuals and collectives, and moreover with ‘the sufferers as well as those
guilty of committing them’.
107
Discussing orders to commit violence against civilians, the report
notes these orders’‘moral effect upon hundreds and thousands of young men’and declares that
‘the moral loss is irretrievable.’
108
At the collective level, too, the deleterious effect of the ‘revolt-
ing’events of the wars was feared to manifest itself ‘in the inner consciousness of moral deteri-
oration and in the loss of self respect that the nations will chiefly suffer.’
109
This moral problem of
war is notable not least for its combination of ethical and psychological reasoning: it fuses the
notion that an object, an action, or a state of being could be deemed good, right, or proper
with ideas about external stimuli and behavioural responses. Thereby, war becomes a moral prob-
lem not only insofar as certain occurrences within war are ethically problematic, but also because
it has negative psychological consequences.
Competing logics for problematising war: Deviance vs transcendence
To appreciate what the commission’s frames for rendering war into a legal, economic, and moral
problem have in common, it is instructive to take a closer look at two alternative frames of the
problem at stake: a Marxist understanding of war as expressive of and instrumental for class
struggle, and a Hegelian idea of war as heroic and a driver of progress.
110
In contrast to these
two notions’dialectical structuring of war as a problem to be transcended from within, according
to the frames of the commission’s problematisation war was a problem of behavioural deviance
that could be corrected from without.
The Marxist understanding of war as an expression and a means of class struggle was at the
heart of a letter sent to the CEIP ten days prior the commission’s departure. Its author, Victor
Bérard, took the Balkan Wars as exemplary of the broader conflicts ‘between the farmer and
the exploited slave and the Greek proprietor or exploiter’.
111
D’Estournelles had invited
Bérard, a French peace activist, to participate in the commission. Declining the invitation,
Bérard went on to explain that the Balkan Wars had ‘revived the days of our France between
1570 and 1589 [sic]. And the towns of this Balkan …have revived the life of our Paris, between
March and May 1871.’
112
In his view, the Balkan Wars and their violence were a smaller part of a
104
Ibid.
105
Ibid., p. 264.
106
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, Letter Butler to d’Estournelles, 29 September 1913.
107
CEIP, Report, pp. 266–7.
108
Ibid., p. 267.
109
Ibid., pp. 269, 185–6.
110
The terms ‘Marxist’and ‘Hegelian’are based on Joas and Knöbl, War in Social Thought.
111
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, Letter Bérard to d’Estournelles, 18 August 1913.
112
Ibid.
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larger problem: the problem of class relations. What is more, they also formed part of this pro-
blem’s solution.
Since the more radical parts of the Western European peace movement were not among its
intended audiences,
113
the commission mostly ignored this alternative problematisation of war.
Therefore, the few instances in which the commissioners did expressly seek to counter it are
all the more interesting. When d’Estournelles sent a copy of Bérard’s letter to Butler, he para-
phrased that in Bérard’s opinion, ‘the massacres have their origin in social hatred more than
in religious or political ones.’
114
For the CEIP, this ‘social’problem of war had nothing to do
with class relations. Rather, it blended war’s economically and morally problematic aspects:
There is one other fact, partly economic but distinctly social, which should not be over-
looked. …upward of a million and a half of men have been under arms during the past
year. …To be withdrawn from useful productive labor is bad enough; but life in the bar-
racks, with much idleness …, is sure to be demoralizing and harmful. …War causes
many kinds of human waste and this is one of them. The life of the recruits who are
kept in service under present conditions in the Balkan States is unnatural and not favorable
to moral growth.
115
Here, ‘labor’did not constitute the point in which exploitative class relations crystallised for revo-
lution to take its origin. Instead, the removal of individuals from ‘productive labor’was a mech-
anism through which war led to economic and moral anomalies and precarities. By offering this
alternative account of war as a social problem, the Carnegie commission thus refuted by subver-
sion the Marxist idea of war as a means and expression of class struggle.
Much more than any peace activist’s Marxist framing of the problem of war, the Hegelian idea
of war as heroic and a driver of progress –as constituting an ‘open door to glory and renown’and
as stimulating the development of a ‘class of better human traits’
116
–was what the commis-
sioners and the CEIP were arguing against. It is interesting, therefore, that this Hegelian under-
standing of war can sometimes also be read between the lines of the final report, especially in
some of the passages that were originally drafted by Milioukoff. Because of ‘[t]he intoxication
of combat’, Milioukoff argued, soldiers were sometimes not ‘able to deliberate and choose’in a
rational way: caught in the ‘horrors of battle itself, …men were actuated and dominated solely
by [battle’s] fury’.
117
Yet since this nature of combat ran counter to human nature, war’s excesses
would ultimately bring about a progressive counter-reaction: ‘The things we have described …
show in their very horror abnormal conditions which can not last. Fortunately for humanity,
nature herself revolts against “excesses”’.
118
Through this dialectic of intoxication and revolt,
the problem of war would transcend itself and ultimately further human progress.
The Hegelian understanding of war as heroic and a driver of progress was the conventional
view of war at the time. To further the CEIP’s official position –which consisted in a wholesale
condemnation of war
119
–without alienating public opinion, the commission therefore took an
ambiguous stance on it. The report agreed with public opinion that the First Balkan War had
been an emancipatory war of liberation, but emphasised that ‘this first war was only the prelude
to the second fratricidal war’, which had also been ‘the more atrocious of the two’.
120
Again, this
113
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, Letter Butler to d’Estournelles, 21 July 1913; Vol. 201, Letter Prudhommeaux to Haskell, 21
November 1913.
114
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, Letter d’Estournelles to Butler, 27 August 1913. Emphasis in original.
115
CEIP, Report, p. 269.
116
Ibid., p. 265.
117
Ibid., p. 141.
118
Ibid., p. 147.
119
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, Andrew Carnegie, Entry into the guestbook of the Centre Européen, 2 July 1913.
120
Ibid., p. 1.
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was also an editorial issue: in redacting the report’s chapters, Butler took great care to ensure that
the text would not stray too far from the CEIP’s official views.
121
In addition, the commission also
sought to develop the idea that peace could provide for exactly the kind of progress that, accord-
ing to the Hegelian view, war was assumed to bring about: ‘In default of a war, courage applies
itself to fertile invention, towards exploration, to dangerous scientific experiments, to aerial and
submarine navigation.’
122
Finally, the commission’s problematisation of war also challenged the
Hegelian view’s dialectical logic of the problem of war more directly. On the one hand, it diluted
claims about the ‘nature’of war by emphasising questions of human agency, responsibility, and
culpability.
123
On the other hand, it proposed a dialectical counter-claim of its own: ‘violence car-
ries its own punishment with it and [therefore] something very different from armed force will be
needed to establish order and peace in the Balkans.’
124
Taken together, the Carnegie commission rejected dialectical logics of the problem of war,
whether the view of war as expressive of class struggle or the idea of war as a driver of historical
progress, in favour of a logic of deviance according to which war was problematic insofar as its
economic costs and moral downsides outweighed its benefits and advantages.
125
These two logics
differed with regard to how war actually constituted a problem. Following a dialectical logic, war
was a problem to be transcended: a driver for getting from one state of being to the next, better
state, war was a problem to be recognised and overcome from within. By contrast, according to
the rational logic favoured by the Carnegie commission, war was a problem to which there could
be a solution: it was an anomalous and deviant kind of behaviour to be diagnosed and corrected
from without.
Taking action against war: Empirical vs metaphysical knowledge
Specifically, the underlying logic of the Carnegie commission’s problematisation of war called for
corrective action directed at politicians, journalists, and civil society in the ‘civilised’parts of the
world. If their report succeeded in educating their intended audiences, the commissioners hoped,
this would go a long way towards the prevention of future wars. Out of its intended audiences, it
was the general public that the CEIP was most concerned to impress: ‘Public opinion needs to be
directed and held to this point’, for ‘[i]t is too easily carried away by admiration for feats of arms,
exalted by historians and poets.’
126
To correct these erroneously idealistic views of war, the commissioners developed what they
referred to as a ‘scientific’way of knowing war. What characterised this way of knowing was
that in producing empirical insights about the Balkan Wars, it sought to emulate, as far as possible,
the epistemological ideal of direct observation.
127
Butler, for one, was delighted that the commis-
sioners were going to deliver neither ‘philosophical articles on war’nor ‘descriptions of battles’,
but rather had ‘gone into territory war has devastated and studied its moral, economic and social
[consequences] by the inductive method of observation’.
128
More generally, the CEIP and the com-
missioners attributed a unique didactic value to observation-based, empirical knowledge: ‘For the
education of public opinion, nothing compares to precise examples taken directly from reality.’
129
121
For an example, compare the draft of Chapter VI (CEIP European Archive, Box 11, Folder 11.5, Godart, Draft of
Chapter VI, p. 9a) with the final report (CEIP, Report, pp. 244–5).
122
CEIP, Report,p.4.
123
Ibid., pp. 19, 49, 68.
124
CEIP, Report, p. 15.
125
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, Explicatory note d’Estournelles to Bacon, 18 September 1913.
126
CEIP, Report, p. 236.
127
See also Dzovinar Kévonian, ‘L’enquête, le délit, la preuve: les “atrocités”balkanique de 1912–1913 à l’épreuve du droit
de la guerre’,Le Mouvement Social, 222:1 (2008), pp. 13–40.
128
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, Letter Butler to d’Estournelles, 7 October 1913.
129
CEIP Archive, Vol. 199, Letter Prudhommeaux to Haskell, 20 December 1912; see also Vol. 201, Letter Prudhommeaux
to Butler, 6 January 1914.
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However, this belief in the utility of empirical knowledge was not uncontested at the time. In a
letter to Butler, Léon Montluc, a French jurist and peace activist,
130
objected:
With reference to the evils of war, common sense suffices to teach us that war is inseparable
with frightful proceedings, all sorts of delinquencies, crime and atrocities? …It is clear that
it is a very hard and almost unattainable task, to aim at evidencing atrocities, crimes, delin-
quencies committed during a period of warfare! …Therefore my humble opinion is that the
Commission took a great deal of trouble to meet with a very puny benefit, a benefit which is
no other than to circulate and enhance the horrid effects of war …. People are learning all
sorts of things, indeed, but prescinding of the clear notion of moral duties founded on true
philosophy or Christian religion, I am afraid no good can be derived from the diffusion of
extensive but shallow knowledge all over the people.
131
As Montluc’s letter indicates, the commission’s problematisation of war was not only up against
alternative logics of the problem at stake, but also against the view that knowledge founded on
metaphysical systems such as philosophy or religion constituted a corrective device far superior
to the observation-based, empirical knowledge the commission offered. Montluc had no inten-
tion of desacralising the ‘evil’problem of war and feared that producing and disseminating empir-
ical knowledge about war would distract people’s‘clear notion of moral duties’. Yet within the
CEIP commission’s archive, Montluc’s philippic is an outlier. The vast majority of the primary
sources convey an unsuspecting enthusiasm for what Butler, d’Estournelles, and many of their
contemporaries understood to be ‘[t]he first study ever made by the same scientific method
that would be used in a laboratory, of the moral, social and economic effects of the war.’
132
Subjects responsible for and capable of action against war
According to the logic of deviance underlying the commission’s problematisation, the production
and dissemination of ‘scientific’knowledge about war amounted to action against war –and the
actors first and foremost responsible for taking such action were those who could be deemed cap-
able of producing this kind of knowledge. What overtly qualified the commissioners in this
regard was that they were ‘men of eminent moral and intellectual virtues’,
133
qualities that rested
on their ‘experience’,‘conscience’, and ‘responsibility’.
134
When an inquiry was conducted by
‘[m]en of great worth and of the sincerest good will’, the final report’s introduction explains,
then ‘[t]hese words, truth, independence and disinterestedness’ceased to be ‘vain words’, but
became actualised.
135
As a contemporary of the commissioners put it, ‘[t]he value of this mass
of evidence’, and more generally of the knowledge they had produced, ‘must depend on the acute-
ness of the commissioners.’
136
In this, the commissioners established their epistemic and ethical virtue by drawing an hier-
archical distinction between themselves as ‘Europeans who are searching for the truth’
137
and the
‘peasants’and ‘plain people, such as shop-keepers, workmen, private soldiers, and others’
138
whom they encountered on their journey. Most of these encounters were chance occurrences.
130
At the time, Montluc was ‘one of the correspondents of the [CEIP’s] Division of International Law, member of the
Court of Appeals of France, and member of the Institute of International Law, and also President of the “Breton Group
of Peace and Liberty”’ (CEIP Archive, Vol. 41, Letter Butler to North, 26 August 1913).
131
CEIP Archive, Vol. 39, Letter Montluc to Butler, 10 December 1914.
132
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, Letter Butler to Carnegie, 25 October 1913.
133
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, Letter d’Estournelles to Butler, 1 August 1913.
134
CEIP Archive, Vol. 201, Letter d’Estournelles to Butler, 24 November 1913.
135
CEIP, Report,p.5.
136
T. S. Woolsey, ‘Report of the International Commission to inquire into the causes and conduct of the Balkan Wars’,
American Journal of International Law, 9:1 (1915), pp. 279–81 (p. 280).
137
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, Letter D’Estournelle to Butler, 6 September 1913.
138
CEIP Archive, Vol. 200, Letter Butler to d’Estournelles, 31 July 1913.
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Originally, the commissioners had imagined that their report would draw on conversations with
high-ranking representatives of governments as well as on official statistics. Yet in some parts,
government officials were unwilling to meet with the commissioners, and in other cases, official
statistics were inexistent.
139
Forced to adapt their approach, the commissioners increasingly
resorted to interviewing ‘plain’people, whom they assumed to be ‘telling the truth’because,
being ‘villagers, simple, uneducated, and stunned by their sufferings’, they were ‘incapable of
invention’.
140
When the commissioners did encounter people who seemed to possess what, in
themselves, they would have considered adequate epistemic faculties, these interlocutors were
taken as exceptions that proved the rule –so that, for instance, ‘an elderly woman of the middle
class …told her painful and dramatic story with more intelligence and feeling than most of the
peasant witnesses.’
141
In sum, the commissioners deemed most of the people they spoke with to
be incapable of recognising or taking responsibility for the truth of their own accounts. Therefore,
‘the Commission assumes responsibility, in the sense that it believes that the witnesses told the
truth.’
142
This hierarchical ordering of subjects according to their ability for recognising and bearing
responsibility for true knowledge was based not only on sexist and classist ideas, but also on
civilisational, orientalist, and racist assumptions of European modernity as a uniquely suitable
spatio-temporal starting point from which to undertake the project of problematising war. The
commission believed the worst of the violences it documented to have been ‘the direct heritage
of slavery and war’that the Balkan states had experienced at the hands of the Ottoman Empire
143
and saw the inhabitants of the Balkans as ‘primitive’,
144
yet not innately so: if their new ‘patrons,
the Great Powers of Europe’, gave them ‘roads, and railways, and waterways, schools, laboratories,
museums, hospitals and public works’, they could indeed become ‘civilised’.
145
Yet until such a
point was reached, it fell to squarely modern subjects such as the Carnegie commissioners to pro-
duce true knowledge about the Balkans Wars.
In the end, however, the CEIP abandoned any plans it had initially entertained for instructing
and improving the ‘less civilised’people and governments of the Balkan states. It neither orga-
nised a conference on the problem of war specifically in the Balkans, nor did it otherwise ‘assist
each government in repairing [the damage caused by war], by making known …the real aims
and resources of the country.’
146
Instead, the commissioners brought their capacity for epistemo-
logical and ethical action to bear on the cause of peace globally (that is, in the West). To influence
‘civilised’public opinion towards this end, the commissioners took the Balkan Wars as examples
of modern and, at the same time, ‘uncivilised’warfare. On the one hand, these wars were fought
on European soil and as such constituted examples of ‘just what is or may be involved in an inter-
national war carried out under modern conditions’that showed ‘the shocking horrors which
modern warfare entailed.’
147
On the other hand, they were fought by countries and people
whom the commissioners and their audience considered to be ‘uncivilised’, neither fully modern
nor fully European.
The argument is noteworthy not only for the inherent contradictions of the Balkan Wars as
examples of the problem of modern war, but also for what fell by its wayside. As an anonymous
critic of the commission put it: ‘What are you going to do in the Balkans, you French, you
Americans, you English, you Russians, you Germans? Have you not enough to do with
139
CEIP, Report, pp. 7–8, 243–4.
140
Ibid., pp. 100–01.
141
Ibid., p. 102.
142
Ibid., pp. 103, 138.
143
CEIP, Report, p. 14.
144
See, for example, ibid., p. 3.
145
Ibid., p. 19; see also Todorova, Imagining the Balkans.
146
Letter D’Estournelles to commission, 21 August 1913; see also CEIP, Report,p.8.
147
CEIP, Report,p.x.
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Morocco to look after, with Mexico, with South Africa, India, Persia?’. However, this broad hint at
the wars waged by the commissioners’respective countries of origin was dismissed out of hand by
D’Estournelles: ‘Yes, we have plenty to do at home, but let us give up all exterior action if we pre-
tend to wait until everything in our own house or conduct is reformed, before we can attempt to
help others.’
148
Shared by the other members of the commission and the CEIP, this stance ren-
dered deviant the atrocities of the Balkan Wars not least by turning a blind eye to the violences of
numerous other wars that, when it came to the problem of ‘modern’war, would arguably have
made for more obviously fitting examples.
Conclusion
Building on existing critiques of the modern understanding of the problem of war, this article has
sought to direct our critical attention towards this problem’s underlying logic of deviance. To this
end, I firstly provided an abbreviated sketch of the emergence of the modern understanding of the
problem of war from the early nineteenth century to the contemporary present. This sketch high-
lighted how the logic of deviance underlying this modern understanding renders some wars prob-
lematic by normalising and invisibilising other wars; how it endows some actors with agency over
war by denying this agency to others; and how it builds upon and reproduces more general
assumptions about modernity as inherently rational, civilised, and progressively non-violent.
Next, a rereading of Foucault and some of his interlocutors within and beyond IR developed
problematisation and genealogy into analytical tools for reconstructive critique. In particular, I
argued for conceptualising problematisation as the contingent and conflictual emergence of
problems, and for genealogy as an analysis of such emergences that opens up new and specific
possibilities for agency.
Finally, the article traced the contingent emergence of the problematisation of war in the work
of the Carnegie commission, a crucial example within the wider genealogy of war as a problem of
deviance. The analysis centred on the logics structuring this problematisation. For the commis-
sioners and the CEIP, modern war was neither a dialectical problem to be overcome through vio-
lent action from within nor a problem to be addressed first and foremost by means of
metaphysical knowledge. Rather, it was a problem of behavioural deviance that could be corrected
through diagnostic and didactic action from without. This meant that agency over war necessi-
tated empirical knowledge that, in turn, was to be produced from a position to the outside of the
problem war constituted. Accordingly, the commissioners deliberately refrained from relating the
problem of modern war to wars ‘at home’, and they deemed themselves epistemically and ethic-
ally capable of problematising war by denying these very faculties to the ‘primitive’and ‘unciv-
ilised’people they encountered on their research journey.
Overall, by tracing the contingent and conflictual emergence of the problematisation of war in
the example of the Carnegie commission, this article’s genealogical analysis has put into question
the foundations, the scope, and the means of the modern understanding of war as a problem of
deviance. By this, I do not mean to suggest that war was perhaps not so problematic after all.
Rather, precisely because war continues to be a problem, I want to raise the question of how
exactly it is so. It is to this end that I have sought to highlight the logics of war as a problem
of deviance and to make more specific aspects of these logics –their frames, underlying assump-
tions, ways of knowing, and subjects of knowledge –available for reconstructive critique. Insofar
as the article has abstained from suggesting a way ahead, this is not because there were no alter-
native logics available to us on which we might draw for problematising war otherwise.
149
Instead,
it is because problematisation as proposed in this article is but a starting point for critical thought
148
Ibid.
149
See, for example, Maldonado-Torres, Against War. But see also attempts at critiquing the violence of colonial modernity
beyond the paradigm of war, for example, Henrique Tavares Furtado, ‘Confronting the gated community: Towards a deco-
lonial critique of violence beyond the paradigm of war’,Review of International Studies (online first).
Review of International Studies 723
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and action. In this spirit, this article’s genealogical analysis of the problematisation of war hopes
to be of help to attempts at finding new ways to think differently about and act otherwise towards
the problem of war.
Acknowledgements. This article has taken many twists and turns, and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the many people
who have provided feedback on earlier versions: Claudia Aradau, Tarak Barkawi, Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Kerry
Goettlich, Stefano Guzzini, Katharina Krause, Keith Krause, Marco Krüger, Katarina Kušić, Milja Kurki, Birgit Poopuu,
and Elisabeth Schweiger, as well as audiences at the 2019 Pan-European Conference on International Relations, the 2019
Millennium Conference, and the 2021 EISA ECR Workshop ‘What is War?’. In addition, very many thanks are due to
Jen Comins and the staff at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I would also like to extend my sincere
thanks to the three anonymous reviewers for their very constructive, incisive, and encouraging comments, which helped to
significantly improve this piece, as well as to the RIS editors for their kind guidance and advice all throughout the review
process. Of course, any errors and omissions remain my own. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge financial support: A
Doctoral Career Development Scholarship from Aberystwyth University and a Fulbright Scholarship for Visiting
Researchers to the United States enabled the research on which this article is based, and funding from Technical
University Dresden made possible its open access publication.
Christine Andrä is a Lecturer and Research Associate at the Institute of Political Science, Technical University Dresden. She
holds a PhD in International Politics from Aberystwyth University. Her research interests include war, violent conflicts and
their aftermaths; the relationship between knowledge and (international) politics; the role of art/craft in international politics;
and interpretive, historical, critical, and creative approaches to the study of International Relations.
Cite this article: Andrä, C. 2022. Problematising war: Towards a reconstructive critique of war as a problem of deviance.
Review of International Studies 48, 705–724. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000274
724 Christine Andrä
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000274 Published online by Cambridge University Press
