We present this special section as a virtual platform for a lively intellectual debate on critical questions of war and peace in international politics and international political theory today. The initiative for curating this special section on conflict, war and revolution was a challenge set by one of Global Policy Journal's founding editors, Prof. Patrick Dunleavy, to reflect on the Journal's commitment to bring together policy-driven research on global risks and global collective (and, therefore, peaceful) action. In the context of intractable conflict and competition (rather than collaboration), would it be not time to rethink the focus on international organisations, institutions, global legitimacy and authority as rational responses to collectively shared global risks?
A brief response to this challenge is that many of the premises for the Journal's ethos and remit remain as relevant today. Rather than solely building on contested normative commitments to liberal utopianism and shared value systems, the Journal continues to aspire to track competing concepts of global order and their correlative normative underpinnings, the diversity of political actors and institutions shaping a multipolar order, and crucially, the various types of asymmetric interdependencies between states, markets, societies and groups that translate into unequal and conflictual power relations (Editorial statement).
A more detailed response to the question of conflict in a globalised world was to engage with Paul Kelly's 2022 volume Conflict, War and Revolution: the problem of politics in international political thought, in which Kelly studies and interprets the work of 10 thinkers – Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Clausewitz, Lenin and Mao and Carl Schmitt. We have, therefore, taken the opportunity to invite four contributors to engage with some of the key themes of the book to bring in new and alternative perspectives that centre around the debates on redemptive politics versus the ubiquity of political violence. Each of the invited authors is concerned, in productively different and critical-constructive ways, with many of the questions raised in Paul Kelly's volume.
Photo by Алесь Усцінаў