In this article, I put three works into conversation: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Kenneth Waltz’s Man, the State and War. I do this in order to interrogate the foundations and sources of social violence, both within societies and between them. I compare Golding’s and Hobbes’s stories of ‘origins’ to illustrate how, on the one hand, fairly straightforward notions of supply and demand, production and reproduction, and a social division of labour belie the possibility of a pre-social state. Indeed, that both Hobbes and Golding were commenting on English society and its history, rather than a mythical anarchy, only reinforces this often-ignored point. No one would call Golding a theorist, yet there is a great deal of social theory to be found in the novel. No one would call Thomas Hobbes a political economist, yet there is a great deal of political economy to be found in Leviathan. Waltz, of course, wrote about the conditions out-side of societies rather than within them, but we may take the sources of violence that concern him to lie not in the anarchy he posits but in the lessons learned, by both statesmen and schoolboys, as they are socialised into ‘proper’ behaviour towards their inferiors.

Memory is a defining feature of the human condition. But the vectors and social dynamics of memory, the linkages between the individual and the collective, and the roles that traces of the past play in constituting identities and in shaping political life are complex, varied and contested. So too are the ethical demands that memory makes on us. What is clear, though, is that violence – its grim modalities, its diffuse consequences, its representation and comprehension – must stand at the centre of any understanding of memory and politics. The articles in forum explore some of the intersections between memory, politics and violence. In this introduction I set the scene for them, examining some of the relevant issues at stake and outlining some of the key positions in the scholarly literature.

In her recent work, Judith Butler offers a critique of war that revolves around the related issues of what she calls the grievability of lives and the framing of violence. This article explores aspects of the remembrance of UK military personnel killed on Operation TELIC in Iraq, drawing on Butler’s powerful arguments about the way in which some lives are produced as more grievable than others. It explores a particular set of obituaries from Operation TELIC: those posted by the Ministry of Defence on its website. The concern is not with the fact that some lives remain unacknowledged, but rather with how the loss of lives that are acknowledged as grievable is represented. The obituaries here are a significant part of the production the frame that makes war possible. In Butler’s scheme of grievable Western lives versus ungrievable non-Western lives no consideration is given to members of the military whose lives are grievable and yet put at risk in order, apparently, to protect other lives. Introducing this complication makes it possible to examine further how hierarchies of grief enable the possibility of war.

This article analyses the commemoration of political violence and its victims in the aftermath of the Chilean dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973–90). We assess the varied political processes involved in commemoration, and we identify those whose struggles to reclaim sites and spaces associated with past human rights violations represent a new political, and in some cases antipolitical, repertoire. We also examine shifts in official stances and action regarding human rights and political commemoration.

Following the ‘aesthetic turn’ in International Relations (IR) the discipline has witnessed an upsurge of interest in new types of research material. Products of popular culture are one among these. Although works that articulate international relations with popular culture have yielded interesting research results, there is a need for sustained methodological and metatheoretical reflection. The article suggests that pragmatism would provide an untapped yet fruitful resource for this task. The unique value of pragmatism lies in the fact that it offers a solid metatheoretical basis for inquiries as well as a methodological solution. Metatheoretically, pragmatism has a specific contribution to make as it begins with practice, with the need to come to terms with the concrete facts of worldly existence. Instead of conceptualising international relations and popular culture as separate categories which form ‘interfaces’ with one another, pragmatism views them as dialectically related moments of semeiosis. Methodologically, this thought can be operationalised by way of analysing products of popular culture as a set of ‘interpretants’ – a term which designates one side of Charles S. Peirce’s sign theory’s triangular conception of the sign. The theory contains a set of distinctions which can be turned into a fruitful interrogative framework with the help of which it is possible to avoid forms of reductionism and to generate multidimensional explanations of international political phenomena.

Although the nation is supposedly a secular modern community, characterised by linear chronological time, I argue that warfare contributes to the creation of the nation as a sacred community of sacrifice in three respects. Firstly, it can act as a mythomoteur in the historical consciousness of populations so that it becomes a reference point or framework for explaining and evaluating events. Secondly, in the modern era it generates a cult of the fallen soldier organised around commemorative rituals and practices that seek to form a moral community. Thirdly, the consequences of warfare shape the long-term social and political goals of national populations, often at the expense of their individual welfare. After elaborating on these aspects, I will investigate the following topics. Firstly, what is the evidence supporting the idea of the nation as a mnemonic community of sacrifice? Secondly, who generates such ‘memories’, why and what purposes do they serve? Finally, what sustains the power of such ‘memories’ over time, in an increasingly sceptical and supposedly postmodern age?

I explore alternate meanings of causation and the generic ways in which constitution can have causal consequences. I address the question of constitutive causality in the context of the debate about the rise of the territorial state. I evaluate claims linking its emergence and success to the prior development of linear perspective. To do this, I compare the spatial revolution that took place in the Renaissance with the one that began in the 19th century.

Many have noted how the Bush administration’s linking of Iraq to the war on terror lent a certain degree of legitimacy to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Few scholars who have noted this linkage, however, have theorised about the specific discursive mechanisms that allowed Iraq to be incorporated and normalised within the war on terror. This article utilises the theoretical framework of Ernesto Laclau to analyse how ‘Iraq’ was (re)constructed as a threat through the war on terror. The productive power of the discourses constructing ‘Iraq’ is examined in the wording of poll questions as sites of reproduction and naturalisation of the dominant understandings of Iraq and the war on terror. Rather than tools used to measure public opinion that exists independently of them, this article argues that polls are better viewed as vehicles through which foreign policy and security discourses are stabilised and naturalised.

In this article, I argue that an attention to the absent past, and its demands, is very much part of what we do when we do justice. I also urge that identity, the sense of a shared something, is dependent on memory as an ingathering of the past. Where the community sees grave injustice in that past, that too can come to be an active force in the present. The ways in which this often benign and familiar part of politics metamorphoses into memory-fueled political violence is at the centre of that analysis. My task here is not to judge that violence, either in general or in the particular (Northern Irish) illustrations I draw on. Rather, my goal is to move beyond a view of memory politics, including its violent dimensions, that sees it from the outset as a kind of profound irrationality or madness.

This article explores the question of why states attempt to ‘do good’ or behave morally beyond their own borders. It draws on the conceptual model developed by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in her work on moral development. Klein suggested that children develop ways of dealing with moral ambiguity and guilt by projecting idealised forms of good and bad into the wider world beyond the family. There, they are separable from each other in ways that more complex, intense familial relationships do not allow, are safer to deal with because they are less bound up with personal identity and survival, enabling reparation of an internal sense of the good. The article explores how far Klein’s approach might provide a basis for thinking about state behaviour. Situating Klein within a communitarian framework, it argues that her ideas provide insight into the ways in which states might project good beyond the morally more complex community in order to reinforce a stronger sense of a ‘good state’. It explores the question of how far international normative behaviour is derived from a projection of domestic ideas of what is good; and how far the expression of good in the international context supports the development and safety of norms at home. These themes are discussed in relation to British policy in Africa between 1997 and 2007.