Tragedy in War and Peace: Poetic Encounters in International Relations

• In Event: Tragedies of Politics in the Anthropocene: War, Violence, and Species Extinction

Abstract

Notions of tragedy are pervasive in International Relations scholarship, however its use is often deployed to simply refer to a sad situation, such as “collateral damage” in a “just war”. In contrast to the classical meaning where moral duties are in radical conflict, such that the problem cannot be willed away and that whatever is done will involve wrong-doing. A genuine acceptance of the tragic in international relations today ought to lead to a more prudent theorizing, aware of the limitations of grand narratives and easy solutions to complex dilemmas of war and peace. This paper argues that overly analytic and quantitative theorizing in IR has led to a loss of grappling with tragedy. The antidote which this paper offers is Giambattista Vico’s notion of poetic wisdom. How might literature and poetry aid International Relations scholarship to understand contingency and uncertainty of military interventions where to intervene may exacerbate or intensify death and destruction, while inaction may mean indifference to human suffering? In what ways have we failed to examine a tragic conflict of moral duties by overemphasizing the ‘science’ of war as opposed to how humans construct meaning from their suffering in war. This paper provides the theoretical framework for contstructivist IR scholars to explore the tragedy, contingency, and ambiguity that occurs at the boundaries of the human condition in war and conflict in the 21st Century.

Author

• John R Emery, University of California, Irvine