Abstract
Patricia Owens’s (2015) Economy of Force is one of the most thought-provoking and engaging interventions in recent discourses on war, conflict and security practices. Its central claim is that liberal interventionism, and in particular operations conducted in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, might be understood in terms of what Owens understands as the ‘ontology of household rule’. Using ‘counterinsurgency’ as a case study, Owens’s wider aim is to provide a critique of the ‘rise of the social’ or ‘sociolatory’ in political and international theory. So enamoured are discourses in politics and international relations with ‘the social’, she suggests, that it is taken for granted as a category of explanation in the absence of any serious attempt at a historical explanation of the rise of the social and ‘the household’ as its fundamental ontology.
The aim of this comment is threefold: first, I argue that using the category of ‘the household’ to explain the complexities of the international and, in particular, late modern forms of colonial interventionism involves the commission of a fundamental category error in the interpretation of international politics; second, I question the abstraction of ‘the household’ as an analytic category, and highlight, through a brief engagement with Adorno and Marx, the intellectual and political implications of such an abstraction and the conceptual choices that come with it; and, third, as an author writing in the genre, I respond to Owens’s charge of ‘sociolatory’ in her critique of Foucault-inspired writing in international relations.
The aim of this comment is threefold: first, I argue that using the category of ‘the household’ to explain the complexities of the international and, in particular, late modern forms of colonial interventionism involves the commission of a fundamental category error in the interpretation of international politics; second, I question the abstraction of ‘the household’ as an analytic category, and highlight, through a brief engagement with Adorno and Marx, the intellectual and political implications of such an abstraction and the conceptual choices that come with it; and, third, as an author writing in the genre, I respond to Owens’s charge of ‘sociolatory’ in her critique of Foucault-inspired writing in international relations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 208-214 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Security Dialogue |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jun 2016 |