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This article challenges International Relations to turn its view of war around and start not with states, militaries, strategies, conventional security issues or weapons, and not with the common main aim of establishing causes of war. The challenge is to conceptualise war as a subset of social relations of experience, on the grounds that war cannot be fully apprehended unless it is studied up from people who experience it in myriad ways and not only down from abstract places of International Relations theory. To study war as experience requires that the body come into focus as a unit that has war agency and is also a prime target of war violence. It also requires exploration of the concept of experience. Using an exemplary texts approach, the article briefly reminds us where the field is in its war concerns, before noting work on contemporary wars conducted under the flag of feminist International Relations, where experience and bodies have always been front and centre, and where a social war studies emphasis is developing. The discussion then raises definitional complexities that must be addressed and suggests areas where various International Relations traditions could collaborate with feminist International Relations and fields like anthropology to study the social relations of war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Memory is a defining feature of the human condition. But the vectors and social dynamics of memory, the linkages between the individual and the collective, and the roles that traces of the past play in constituting identities and in shaping political life are complex, varied and contested. So too are the ethical demands that memory makes on us. What is clear, though, is that violence - its grim modalities, its diffuse consequences, its representation and comprehension - must stand at the centre of any understanding of memory and politics. The articles in forum explore some of the intersections between memory, politics and violence. In this introduction I set the scene for them, examining some of the relevant issues at stake and outlining some of the key positions in the scholarly literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many have noted how the Bush administration's linking of Iraq to the war on terror lent a certain degree of legitimacy to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Few scholars who have noted this linkage, however, have theorised about the specific discursive mechanisms that allowed Iraq to be incorporated and normalised within the war on terror. This article utilises the theoretical framework of Ernesto Laclau to analyse how 'Iraq' was (re)constructed as a threat through the war on terror. The productive power of the discourses constructing 'Iraq' is examined in the wording of poll questions as sites of reproduction and naturalisation of the dominant understandings of Iraq and the war on terror. Rather than tools used to measure public opinion that exists independently of them, this article argues that polls are better viewed as vehicles through which foreign policy and security discourses are stabilised and naturalised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventionally in International Relations thought war is seen in instrumentalist terms, and in a reduction of Clausewitz's project, as merely the extension of (foreign) policy through other means. The ontological commitment that is the mainstay of this project is often unrecognised; a discursive commitment that war constructs masculinity, conceived in (uni)form terms, that through such construction, a nation emerges, separate, distinct, and sovereign. The paper argues that these seemingly unconnected themes which emerge from discourses on war are intimately related, that instrumentality is a commitment to a coherent and certain subjectivity, and that it is this commitment which produces the 'abject': targets of war, reviled on the one hand, and much needed for the continual structuration of war on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion piece focusses on the 'war' in Northern Ireland, which it claims has been ignored by International Relations. It illuminates the relevance of international relations to the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland. The article emphasises the role of the United States as a Third Party, the end of the Cold War, and the Irish entry into the European Union. It finally reiterates the need to reconsider the validity of realism in International Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In interpreting the end of the Cold War as an implosion of familiar institutional arrangements, this article critically engages with particular liberal stories which claim a global victory for liberal values and institutional forms. Since the end of the 1950s, the foundations of a liberal international order have increasingly been questioned by the development of transaction flows which have largely been generated inside liberal institutions themselves. Thus, liberalism risks running past itself: claims of liberalism's victory paradoxically correlate with the dissolution of liberal values and institutions. In conclusion, the article reviews nostalgic and dialogic liberal strategies for arranging Post-Cold War international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]