Murad Idris’s War for Peace: Genealogies in Western and Islamic Thought

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This panel critically interrogates the interventions of Murad Idris’s War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (OUP 2018) into a number of bodies of work in political theory, some established and some emergent, on the blurring of war and peace; comparative political theory; political theology and secularism; just war theory and alibis of violence; and liberalism, empire, and postcolonialism. War for Peace offers an ambitious and provocative genealogy of peace as a morality in the service of war. It argues against the tendency to treat peace either as a universal ideal or an empty platitude in order to better scrutinize the work that invocations of peace have performed and continue to perform. Though a close examination of ten major thinkers in Western and Islamic thought—Plato, al-Farabi, Aquinas, Erasmus, Gentili, Grotius, Ibn Khaldun, Hobbes, Kant, and Sayyid Qutb—Idris argues that idealizations of peace are parasitical, provincial, and polemical. Adapting Jacques Derrida, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Carl Schmitt, he tracks the continuities and shifts in how peace is supplemented with other ideas, constructed in ways that re-entrench anthropological and geographic hierarchies, and elaborated against particular enemies. Critics on the panel will consider how War for Peace conceptualizes peace, the thinkers it juxtaposes, and the alternatives it raises. The panel will also consider the book’s conversations with comparative political theory, critical theory, peace studies, and the history of political thought, as well as the challenges it levels at dominant readings of these thinkers.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Roxanne L. Euben University of Pennsylvania

Presenters

• Banu Bargu University of California, Santa Cruz

• Adom Getachew University of Chicago

• Neil Roberts Williams College

• Humeira Iqtidar King's College London