War and ethical change

ABSTRACT

By employing Maja Zehfuss’s book War and the Politics of Ethics as a foil, the article asks how ethical change becomes possible. While Zehfuss is to be lauded for bringing to the fore the problematic consequences of considering ethics and politics as separate realms, the analysis illustrates that four theoretical assumptions are crucial to understand this link: The notion of sedimented practices is used to demonstrate that the ethical remains internally incomplete, dislocated, and thus apt to change continuously. The concept of antagonism is drawn on to show can be seen as a source and a possible reaction to dislocation at the same time, as the cause of the dislocation is seen in the existence of an antagonistic force. Antagonism is necessary for the construction of law as just, but also threatens the very essence of that law by unveiling the dichotomy of conflictual norms, e.g. the recognition of sovereign rights as well as the moral obligation to terminate genocide. Opposed elements are articulated as conflicting, while the alleged purity of law requires the complementarity between its internal elements. Third, legal practices never gain a total or finished character. In fact, they constitute novel sedimented practices, which are in turn partly dissolved by structural dislocation as a constitutive quality of any social formation. In principle, the theoretical model depicted here can be understood as a never-ending circle of the political and the ethical, characterized by the elements of articulation and contingency. Finally, however, by pointing towards contingency and openness, the model at the same time pronounces the ethical danger of closure that keeps lingering in the background of any political process.

KEYWORDS:

• War
• poststructuralism
• social change
• ethics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘Just 3 days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil’. (Bush 2001). For a discussion, see (Evans 2013, 99).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dirk Nabers

Dirk Nabers holds the chair in International Political Sociology at Kiel University, Germany. He has published widely on poststructuralist discourse theory and critical IR theory. His latest book, A Poststructuralist Discourse Theory of Global Politics, was published in 2015 in the Palgrave Studies in International Relations series.