Genealogies of peace: Hostility, consensus, and war in comparative political thought

This dissertation is a genealogy of the concept of peace, its moralities, and its disseminations. Although peace is touted today as a universal ideal or neutral description, I approach it as a historical and cultural artifact, arguing that through canonical texts of political theory to contemporary discourses, its meaning is constituted through antagonisms, polemics, and exclusions. This project makes the three overarching claims that the structures of peace are polemical, provincial, and parasitical . First, peace has been fashioned for and honed against specific others, used to facilitate hostility, and elaborated as a filter for historically specific animosities. Second, universalized notions of peace are grounded in claims about \u27the world\u27 that reflect historically specific and particular interests, fears, and desires, as well as theories about humanity\u27s relationship to war and peace. Finally, peace has attained its meaning through constellations of ideals that are insinuated into it. Rather than strengthening it, these \u27insinuates of peace\u27 increase its potential for self-subversion and limit its possibilities. Corresponding to these three claims, this project highlights repressed alternatives, namely an ethic of sparing and letting be, peace as a particular relation, and a reconceptualization of the truce. Chapter 1 surveys contemporary discussions and deployments of peace, and argues that its structures are polemical, provincial, and parasitical. Chapters 2–6 analyze the disseminations and reconfigurations of these structures through canonical works of political theory, linked through chains of citation, including Plato\u27s Laws (Chapter 2), the writings of al-Farabi and Aquinas (Chapter 3), Erasmus (Chapter 4), Grotius and Gentili (Chapter 5), and Kant and Sayyid Qutb (Chapter 6). Chapters 7 and 8 locate these structures in contemporary and historical discourses about Islam and peace. Both European and Arabic sources are examined, including attempts to define Islam in relation to peace, war, Christianity, God, liberalism, and colonialism. The final chapter turns to Ibn Tufayl\u27s Hayy ibn Yaqzan for the alternate forms of ethical conduct that it portrays. As a whole, these chapters argue that the lineages, effects, and uses of peace as a concept demand that we rethink the status of peace as a universal ideal