Social Sciences

While the subject of wartime civilian casualties has been recognized as an important issue in International Relations (IR), foreign policy and IR scholars have not systematically examined why and how US politicians respond to civilian deaths. This article explores the ethics of and reasons for responsiveness to Iraqi civilian deaths among politicians in the US House of Representatives from 2003 to 2008. The article argues that legislative deliberative responsiveness to civilian deaths is integral to a just debate about war. It finds evidence that partisanship, ideology and sex are associated with responsiveness to civilian deaths, and reveals stark differences in the purposes and tone of Democratic and Republican rhetoric about civilian casualties. The article provides researchers with a more thorough understanding of how and why civilian costs of war emerge within debates among US politicians, and has implications for studies on discourse ethics, congressional war politics and US foreign policy.

IR scholars have recently turned to emotions to understand and explain events in world politics. Although this turn is appealing, most scholars have failed to critically examine the relationships between emotion, language, identity and foreign policy. This article aims to unpack these relationships. Drawing upon Sara Ahmed’s notion of the ‘emotionality of texts’, this article explores how foreign policy may be an affective practice, which can be defined as a ritualized practice of discursively binding emotions to Others’ identities and legitimating foreign policy through a discursive logic of feeling. In this way, identities are produced and policies are legitimated affectively. Neglecting the emotional narratives that constitute Self/Other relations leads to an insufficient understanding of emotion in global politics, an incomplete understanding of how identities emerge and matter as they do, and forecloses new alternatives of apprehending transformative ruptures and enduring patterns of Self/Other interaction. Through an analysis of United States policy towards the Israeli—Palestinian conflict, this article highlights the importance of emotion and affective practices in world politics.

IR scholars have begun approaching Game of Thrones as a form of knowledge and a means for fostering new ways of thinking about violence, sovereign power, and gender. In this essay, I have suggested how reflecting on Game of Thrones alongside Derrida is instructive for thinking about war in its many multi-species manifestations. In particular, this essay explores the non-human perspective of Ghost, Jon Snow’s direwolf, through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s comments about le regard insistant de l’animal [the insistent gaze of the animal] to open up space for thinking about non-human perspectives in war. By tracing Ghost’s gaze through Derrida, we might become drawn into other interspecies connections and into the look of other animals involved in war.

International Relations scholars have recently begun exploring the politics of human-animal relations in global affairs. Building on Jacques Derrida's work on hospitality and animals, this article theorises possibilities of responsibility to animals in war zones, pushing the limits of what it means to be with and for others regardless of their human or animal otherness. Specifically, I develop a critical account of cosmopolitan belongingness to illustrate how our being on earth is always a 'being-with' animal others. In thinking through possibilities of post-human belongingness that could emerge in times of war, cosmopolitanism becomes a futural task, an out-of-time and endless confrontation of past and future opportunities for interspecies togetherness. The theoretical significance of this approach is illustrated with a case study on the killing of stray dogs during the Iraq War. This case reveals a cosmopolitanism calibrated to more fully consider possibilities of human-animal belongingness amidst violence.

While narrative approaches in International Relations (IR) have become increasingly prominent, posthumanist narratives of capitalism remain on the margins. Informed by feminist avant-garde poet Susan Howe and philosopher Jacques Derrida, I develop a 'drift narrative' approach to human-mink relations during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, wherein millions of minks in fur farms were infected by the coronavirus and culled. This approach employs the use of postcapitalist elegies constructed in a wildlife refuge located near a mink factory farm. In a context of global mink culls, the wildlife refuge-where minks live freely-proximate to a local industrial mink fur farm-where minks are caged and killed for profit-became the site of (re)writing IR in drift narrative form. This poetic analysis highlights trans-spatial links of animal capital and employs intermixed elegiac images, sound recordings, and textual fragments to help us become attuned to nonhuman dreams, desires, losses, and futures. Grounding persistence for postcapitalist futures within the dreams of the dead, the drift narrative generates a spectral form of global multispecies solidarity. Contributing to the interspecies and narrative turns in IR, as well as multidisciplinary work on multispecies solidarity, the drift narrative offers an aesthetic and ethical critique of past and future animal capital systems that render more-than-human life as killable.

In Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War, Matthew Leep develops a cosmopolitan account of war that blends sharp inquiry into interspecies politics with original poetry on animals, loss, and war. Informed by the works of Jacques Derrida, this book is not only a somber and sobering exploration of the loss of animal lives during the Iraq War—from the initial US invasion to later struggles with ISIS—but also an imaginative tracing of animal experiences in "spectral-poetic moments." By emphasizing elegies, poetic space, and multispecies belonging, Leep envisions the cosmopolitan text as a hybrid form of critical and poetic engagement with animal others. An insightful mix of cosmopolitan poetics, poetry, and analysis of the Iraq War in its multispecies entanglements, Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War connects contemporary concerns with political violence, memory, and interspecies politics to imagine a more spectral, posthumanist, and poetic cosmopolitanism. Interdisciplinary in scope, this book will engage scholars of international relations, political theory, US foreign policy, animal studies, poetry, and Derrida, as well as those interested in human-animal relations in perilous times.