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`Eternal Peace' as the Graveyard of the Political: A Critique of Kant's Zum Ewigen Frieden

Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Reading

The purpose of this essay is a critical investigation of Immanuel Kant's Zum Ewigen Frieden as a metaphysical and transcendental rather than political project. The essay argues that this project, despite Kant's protestations to the contrary, necessarily produces the `peace of the graveyard'. Eternal Peace needs to be understood not only as a guide to the creation of peaceful relations between states — a common interpretation reflected in the misleading translation of the treatise as `Perpetual Peace' — but also as a philosophical response to the problem of Difference in international politics. As such, it establishes many of the metaphysical tenets through which Liberalism has ever since attempted to establish the conditions for Eternal Peace via the ontological eradication of Difference and the operation of an ethnoand temporocentric epistemology. Consequently, Eternal Peace depends on the death, rather than affirmation, of the Political as the agonistic engagement with the Other.

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