Pacification as a key problem of politics in international political thought

Abstract

AbstractThis article is a response to Paul Kelly's discussion of Lenin and Mao in Conflict, War and Revolution: The problem of politics in international political thought (2022). Taking on a postcolonial perspective, it analytically expands how the book theorizes violence by understanding the violence of capitalist and colonial domination as a paradigm of war that structures pacified social relations and politics. The paper proposes that pacification, as a phenomenon that spans different kinds of modern nation‐states, begs for a distinct theory of violence in international political thought. In so doing, it places Marxism, Post Colonialism, Coloniality/Decoloniality, Settler Colonial Studies, Anglophone Indigenous thought, post‐structuralism and Brazilian Anthropology in conversation to reveal shared genealogies of anti‐colonial, decolonial and anti‐capitalist thought without uncritically collapsing these traditions.