MIT Press Worlds in Conflict: War and the Limits of Politics (Prisms: Humanities and War)

We inhabit worlds in conflict, manifest in eruptions of violence and political turmoil both within and across state boundaries. These are also worlds of injury, impacting on individuals and communities, discourses and institutions, including the juridical and normative ordering of the global. Worlds in Conflict unravels the question of how war relates to politics, locating it in a conceptual formulation based on four analytical categories: violence, people, words, and things. Challenging the idea that war can be confined to a limited spatio-temporal horizon, Vivienne Jabri situates war in complex co-constitutive relations of embodied, sociocultural, socio-political, juridical, and material dynamics. During a time of tremendous global uncertainty where major wars have come to challenge the liberal and postcolonial international order, the book provides a new understanding of the complex interplay of the subjective and material, the discursive and institutional, through which conflict and its articulation in war are implicated in the making and re-making of our worlds. The book has an ambitious remit, one that is responsive to the ethical and political challenges of our time and one that is interdisciplinary in its approach.