Johanna Rodehau-Noack’s research while affiliated with University of Pennsylvania and other places

Conflict prevention is a core item on the agenda of major international organizations and fora. In this article, I trace how war became a problem accessible to international governance. Adopting an object-centered approach to international relations (O-IR), I argue that war’s constitution as a problem of international governance unfolded in three interrelated processes. Firstly, pacifists and philanthropists designated war as a scientific object, thus giving rise to a “science of peace.” Secondly, scholars and pacifists compiled statistics on war, thus translating it across contexts and representing it as a global phenomenon. Statistics helped to make war accessible to advocacy and policymaking as an object of expertise. Thirdly, peace advocates problematized war as a governance object by representing it as a cost-benefit problem and a major cause in the reversal of economic development. By tracing the historical development of war as an epistemic object that can be investigated systematically, an object of expertise that can be measured and compared, and an object of governance that can be manipulated, this article bridges the strands of O-IR that have previously only focused on either knowledge and expertise or governance. Further, it adds to peace and conflict scholarship by providing an intellectual history of the prevention idea and its entanglement with modernism. Finally, it advances broader IR scholarship by offering an analysis of the role of scientific developments and nonstate activism in producing ideas and enabling policy agendas.

This forum urges international relations (IR) practitioners to rethink the nature of both failure and success, and their own responsibility in building an academy that enables scholars of all backgrounds to thrive. Reflecting on their own experiences, the contributors detail factors that commonly stymie promising work in IR. These range from the quotidian-rejections during peer review and frustrations around network-building-to more serious impediments, including the growing neoliberalization of the academy, employment precarity, illness and disability, and limits on academic freedom. The forum offers four central insights: First, we must recognize the difference between constructive and non-constructive research failure and create greater space for the former. Second, we must work harder to identify and address those contributors to research failure that should not be tolerated. This includes a recognition of privilege and positionality and an understanding of failure as fundamentally situational. Concurrently, third, we must also resist narratives that fetishize meritocracy and individual resilience, and render invisible structural barriers to success. Finally, we must better distinguish researcher failure from research failure. The barriers that slow or foreclose promising research harm not only our intellectual community but also our discipline, limiting its potential to address the most significant challenges of the present moment.

With conflict prevention as a commonplace agenda of international organisations, numerous instruments for gathering knowledge about potential armed conflict have emerged. This article focuses on the mode of knowing war through quantification in the form of fatality statistics or ‘death counts’, which are taken by analysts and policymakers to indicate the severity and extent of conflicts. Drawing on official documents and interviews, I argue that fatality numbers are productive of the reality of violent conflict as they shape what counts as conflict and what does not. In the reporting by prevention actors, such numbers indicate past and future trends of armed violence and, in this way, bolster the imperative to prevent by creating quantified futures of conflict. However, fatality numbers also normalise deadly violence as a baseline criterion, thus also limiting the scope of what is known as future conflict and omitting lived experiences from the abstractions behind such numbers.

War and conflict were seen as inevitable, justifiable and productive for centuries, yet today conflict prevention is a core item on the agendas of major international actors. This thesis grapples with how the notion of war as preventable became dominant in international discourse. I argue that for policy to be oriented towards prevention, war needed to be constructed as a problem of international governance. How problems of international politics are constructed matters because such processes determine what a problem is and how it has to be resolved. Using archival material, I show that war was constructed as a problem in three interlocking processes that rendered it undesirable but calculable and, therefore, ultimately governable. This thesis documents these three processes of war’s construction as a governance problem. Firstly, early Christian pacifists designated war as a cataclysmic phenomenon that constitutes the opposite of ‘peace’ and is knowable through science. Secondly, by translating war into statistics, scholars made war comparable across time and space. Thirdly, activists and policymakers problematised war by associating it with existing issues like Christian morality, the civilisational telos, and cost-benefit rationality. From these associations derives the imperative to prevent war because it is both inherently objectionable and has undesirable effects. The representation of war as a governance object is embedded in a broader set of binaries that tied ‘war’ to barbarism and ‘peace’ to civilisation. The argument thus shows how the idea of prevention relies on scientific developments of modernity and its cosmological location in European thought. I close with a speculative discussion of a martial ecological perspective, which abandons the binary conception of war and peace. As it suspends the belief in modernist problem solving and instead advocates to affirm the world as it is, I argue that this approach makes the concept of prevention obsolete. Considering the ethical stakes, I suggest worlding as an ethical alternative to affirmation.

Previous research has examined biomedical metaphors in discourses on military intervention, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism. Starting from the observation that such metaphors also occur in the contemporary conflict prevention discourse, this article inquires into their intellectual origins and implications for the understanding of war and prevention. Drawing on archival analysis, it finds that they manifest in two ways in prevention discourse. In the cataclysmic notion, war is likened to an epidemic or plague. This metaphor was popularised by Christian pacifists in the 19th century and carried forth into 20th-century prevention documents. The more recent risk factor notion is couched in terms of enabling conditions for threats to the body politic. By engaging imagery on immunity and public health, it draws parallels between social and political organisation and functions of the body. The article argues that while both notions of biomedical metaphors of war in conflict prevention discourse are firmly rooted in modernist thinking, this intellectual legacy manifests differently. The cataclysmic notion associates war and disease with barbarism and thus paints prevention as a civilisational objective. The risk factor notion, on the contrary, represents war as a technico-scientific problem and thus shifts the focus towards governing and controlling war through knowledge and technology. Furthermore, both notions converge in the idea of a body politic that is to be protected and in the implicit assumption of world order in which war-as-disease is a temporary deviation from the ‘healthy norm’, while peace-as-health is the desired and default state of affairs.