No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Towards a phenomenological ontology of war
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2025
Abstract
This paper offers a critique of war from an existentialist-phenomenological perspective. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s theory of ontology and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception, it develops a framework which integrates war and the body – and thus ontology and embodiment – in Critical War Studies. Two arguments are advanced: first, that war is in so far as we embody it (implying that the way in which we embody it determines the way in which it is); second, that the embodiment of war is essentially an agential activity. Thereby, this paper provides impetus for an ontological and moral re-avowal of war in critical academic discourse (for understanding war not primarily as a tragic fate but as our shameful doing). This, in turn, facilitates new perspective for interpretation and critique – to the extent, for example, that understanding the logic of war’s agential embodiment discloses what would constitute, and be necessary for, its disembodiment. Moreover, the paper points to clear possibilities for future research – for clarifying, for instance, the ontological upheaval latent in the prospect of future war.
Video Abstract
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The British International Studies Association.
References
1 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001 [1927]), p. 60 [35], original emphasis (page numbers in brackets refer to the eighth edition of the German text; see translator’s discussion at Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 15).
2 E.g. Anthony Burke, ‘Ontologies of war: Violence, existence and reason’, Theory & Event, 10:2 (2007), no pagination; Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, ‘Powers of war: Fighting, knowledge, and critique’, International Political Sociology, 5:2 (2011), pp. 126–43.
3 Shane Brighton, ‘Critical War Studies’, in Jenny Edkins (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Critical International Relations (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 129–42.
4 E.g. Christine Sylvester, Experiencing War (London: Routledge, 2011); Kevin McSorley (ed.), War and the Body: Militarisation, Practice and Experience (London: Routledge, 2013).
5 The following, for example, all draw on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology: John Hockey, ‘“Switch on”: Sensory work in the infantry’, Work, Employment and Society, 23:3 (2009), pp. 477–93; Caroline Holmqvist, ‘Undoing war: War ontologies and the materiality of drone warfare’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41:3 (2013), pp. 535–52; Kevin McSorley, ‘Doing military fitness: Physical culture, civilian leisure, and militarism’, Critical Military Studies, 2:1–2 (2016), pp. 103–19.
6 E.g. Shane Brighton, ‘Three propositions on the phenomenology of war’, International Political Sociology, 5 (2011), pp. 101–5.
7 Cf. Harmonie Toros, Joe Gazeley, Alex Guirakhoo, Lucie Merian and Yasmeen Omran, ‘“Where is war? We are war”: Teaching and learning the human experience of war in the classroom’, International Studies Perspectives, 19:3 (2018), pp. 199–217. Whence (rather than Where), however, offers nuance appropriate to the existentialist-phenomenological framework developed below. The How/Why questions are of course the concern of causal-positivist analyses; my focus, however, is not on causes of war but on the processual-existential conditions for its possibility.
8 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 32 [12]. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012 [1945]), p. 169.
9 The notion of agentially ‘taking up’ [reprenant] history is Merleau-Ponty’s (Phenomenology of Perception, p. 476); the notion of a ‘tradition’ ‘handed down’ is Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2004 [1960]), p. 296.
10 I am exclusively concerned with human war. This is not to claim that other earthy (or extra-terrestrial) creatures do/could not engage in ‘warfare’; as zoologists (e.g. Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986]) have shown, for example, chimpanzees engage in a type of ‘organised violence’ which fits with many basic criteria offered for defining war (i.e. reciprocal hostile intentions/actions between groups). Rather, I emphasise that human war is a distinctively human phenomenon which must be problematised at the level of human ontology.
11 Given the significance of phenomenology in Western thought and the normative urgency that war poses, it is indeed remarkable that there has been no substantive and sustained phenomenology of war hitherto. ‘Violence’ – an overlapping but essentially distinct object of analysis – has, however, received considerable phenomenological attention (e.g. Michael Staudigl (ed.), Phenomenologies of Violence (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2014); James Dodd, Phenomenological Reflections on Violence: A Skeptical Approach (London: Routledge, 2017).
12 For a critical discussion, see Tanya Narozhna, ‘The lived body, everyday and generative powers of war: Toward an embodied ontology of war as experience’, International Theory, 14:2 (2021), pp. 1–23 (pp. 7–9).
13 Esp. Lauren Wilcox, ‘Embodying algorithmic war: Gender, race, and the posthuman in drone warfare’, Security Dialogue, 48:1 (2017), pp. 11–28; Italo Brandimarte, ‘Breathless war: Martial bodies, aerial experiences and the atmospheres of empire’, European Journal of International Relations, 29:3 (2023), pp. 525–52.
14 On Heidegger’s key role in the development of post-humanist thought, see Gavin Rae, ‘Heidegger’s influence on posthumanism: The destruction of metaphysics, technology and the overcoming of anthropocentrism’, History of the Human Sciences, 27:1 (2014), pp. 51–69.
15 Cf., Audra Mitchell, ‘Only human? A worldly approach to security’, Security Dialogue, 45:1 (2014), pp. 5–21 (p. 6). On the humanism/anthropocentricism that follows from Heidegger’s ontology, see Martin Heidegger’s ‘Letter on humanism’ [1947], in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray, revised, expanded ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 213–66.
16 E.g. Gerard Van Der Ree, ‘Being-in-the-world of the international’, Review of International Studies, 41:4 (2015), pp. 781–98; Bahar Rumelili, ‘[Our] age of anxiety: Existentialism and the current state of International Relations’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 24:4 (2021), pp. 1020–36. For a critical view, see Andrew R. Hom, ‘Heidegger’s heritage: The temporal politics of authenticity, then and now’, Review of International Studies, 49:5 (2023), pp. 885–904.
17 Jelena Subotić and Filip Ejdus, ‘Towards the existentialist turn in IR: Introduction to the symposium on anxiety’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 24:4 (2021), pp. 1014–19; Andrew R. Hom and Cian O’Driscoll, ‘Existentialism and International Relations: In it up to our necks’, Review of International Studies, 49:5 (2023), pp. 783–94.
18 I should, perhaps, also disclose my positionality in relation to this research. In particular, I previously embodied war in a much more active and extreme sense: I was a regular member of the British Royal Marines between 2005 and 2012, trained as a sniper, and ‘served’ twice in Afghanistan, among other places. War, therefore, was once my voluntary doing; for this I bear responsibility (of a kind I theoretically elaborate below). To be sure, this experience is not meant to validate any argument/interpretation I make (indeed, I relate to this memory as one might relate to an autobiography; and I believe it possesses a similar methodological validity). Moreover, although such actions might essentialise the embodiment of war, this paper is concerned with ‘the embodiment of war’ in a much more general (existentialist) sense. Thus, I am not seeking to explain war (in terms of the why and significance of someone’s participation) but to interpret the being of war – as both a possibility and an actuality. This should become clear in the second half of this paper.
19 See note 2 above. This ‘turn’ was notably anticipated by Burke, ‘Ontologies of war’.
20 Tarak Barkawi, ‘From war to security: Security studies, the wider agenda and the fate of the study of war’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39:3 (2011), pp. 701–16.
21 Barkawi, ‘From war to security’, p. 702.
22 Barkawi, ‘From war to security’, p. 704.
23 Barkawi, ‘From war to security’, p. 704.
24 Barkawi and Brighton, ‘Powers of war’, p. 127.
25 Cf. Ilan Zvi Baron, Jonathan Havercroft, Isaac Kamola, et al., ‘Liberal pacification and the phenomenology of violence’, International Studies Quarterly, 63:1 (2019), pp. 199–212 (p. 202), who have recently applied Heideggerian notions to understanding the ‘generative’ nature of violence in terms of its ‘restructur[ing] the social and political world’.
26 Barkawi and Brighton, ‘Powers of war’, p. 126.
27 The pacifist-theoretical agenda would of course be simpler if ‘war’ were exclusively destructive and horrific. Cf. William James’s provocative argument that war cannot be beaten by counter-insistency on its horror, because too often the horror makes the thrill (William James, ‘The moral equivalent of war’ [1910], in The Works of William James, Electronic Edition, vol. Volume 11: Essays in Religion and Morality (Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Corp, 2008), pp. 163–73. We have here, therefore, a ‘realist pacifism’ to which this paper may be understood as contributing.
28 Jens Bartelson, War in International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
29 Astrid H. M. Nordin and Dan Öberg, ‘Targeting the ontology of war: From Clausewitz to Baudrillard’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43:2 (2015), pp. 392–410; Henrique Tavares Furtado, ‘Critique of ontological militarism’, International Political Sociology, 17:3 (2023), pp. 1–17.
30 Intellectual ideas of course have an effect on history (as Barkawi and Brighton concede), yet this effect should not be exaggerated for the primary reason that war exceeds thought about war; see Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, ‘Concepts and histories of war’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 48:1 (2019), pp. 99–104.
31 Barkawi and Brighton, ‘Powers of war’, p. 133.
32 Antoine Bousquet, Jairus Grove, and Nisha Shah, ‘Becoming war: Towards a martial empiricism’, Security Dialogue, 51:2–3 (2020), pp. 99–118 (p. 100). Bousquet has also defended and developed the notion of ontogenesis in war studies; see Antoine Bousquet, ‘In defence of ontogenesis and for a general ecology of war’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 48:1 (2019), pp. 70–8; Antoine Bousquet, ‘War as becoming’, in Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels (eds), Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War (London: Hurst Publishers, 2024), pp. 329–48.
33 Bousquet, Grove, and Shah, ‘Becoming war’, p. 101.
34 See also Christopher McIntosh, ‘Theorizing the temporal exception: The importance of the present for the study of war’, Journal of Global Security Studies, 5:4 (2020), pp. 543–58.
35 Holmqvist, ‘Undoing war’, p. 552.
36 Holmqvist, ‘Undoing war’, p. 552.
37 Lauren B. Wilcox, Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 3.
38 Synne L. Dyvik and Lauren Greenwood, ‘Embodying militarism: Exploring the spaces and bodies in-between’, Critical Military Studies, 2:1–2 (2016), pp. 1–6 (p. 1).
39 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 71.
40 Kevin McSorley, ‘Towards an embodied sociology of war’, The Sociological Review, 62 (2014), pp. 107–28 (p. 112); see also Hockey, ‘“Switch on”’.
41 For an overview, see Christine Sylvester, ‘War experiences/war practices/war theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 40:3 (2012), pp. 483–503 (p. 490, note 30).
42 E.g. Dubravka Žarkov, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-Up of Yugoslavia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Swati Parashar, ‘Feminist International Relations and women militants: Case studies from Sri Lanka and Kashmir’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 22:2 (2009), pp. 235–56; Miranda Alison, Women and Political Violence: Female Combatants in Ethno-national Conflict (London: Routledge, 2009).
43 Sylvester, ‘War experiences/war practices/war theory’, p. 483; Cf. Christine Sylvester, ‘Experiencing war: An introduction’, in Christine Sylvester (ed.), Experiencing War (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 1–7 (p. 1).
44 Christine Sylvester, War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 1.
45 E.g. Kenneth MacLeish, ‘Ethnography and the embodied life of war-making’, in Alison J. Williams, Neil Jenkings, Rachel Woodward, Matthew F. Rech (eds), The Routledge Companion to Military Research Methods (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 219–30; Zoë H. Wool, ‘On movement: The matter of US soldiers’ being after combat’, Ethnos, 78:3 (2013), pp. 403–33.
46 E.g. Derek Gregory, ‘Eyes in the sky – bodies on the ground’, Critical Studies on Security, 6:3 (2018), pp. 347–58. For an overview, see Matthew Rech, Daniel Bos, K. Neil Jenkings, Alison Williams, Rachel Woodward, ‘Geography, military geography, and critical military studies’, Critical Military Studies, 1:1 (2015), pp. 47–60.
47 Swati Parashar, ‘What wars and “war bodies” know about international relations’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 26:4 (2013), pp. 615–30; Julia Welland, ‘Joy and war: Reading pleasure in wartime experiences’, Review of International Studies, 44:3 (2018), pp. 438–55; Kevin McSorley, ‘Sensate regimes of war: Smell, tracing and violence’, Security Dialogue, 51:2–3 (2020), pp. 155–73; Nick Caddick, ‘Life, embodiment, and (post-)war stories: Studying narrative in critical military studies’, Critical Military Studies, 7:2 (2021), pp. 155–72.
48 Rachel Woodward and K. Neil Jenkings, ‘Soldiers’ bodies and the contemporary British military memoir’, in Kevin McSorley (ed.), War and the Body (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 152–64; Synne L. Dyvik, ‘“Valhalla rising”: Gender, embodiment and experience in military memoirs’, Security Dialogue, 47:2 (2016), pp. 133–50.
49 Mark Gilks, ‘The aesthetic influences of war: A phenomenology of Tim Hetherington’s “feedback loop”’, Journal of War & Culture Studies, 17:1 (2024), pp. 7–27.
50 Synne L. Dyvik and Julia Welland, ‘War ink: Sense-making and curating war through military tattoos’, International Political Sociology, 12:4 (2018), pp. 346–61; Mirko Palestrino, ‘Inking wartime: Military tattoos and the temporalities of the war experience’, International Political Sociology, 16:3 (2022), pp. 1–20.
51 Sarah Bulmer and David Jackson, ‘“You do not live in my skin”: Embodiment, voice, and the veteran’, Critical Military Studies, 2:1–2 (2016), pp. 25–40; Sophy Antrobus, Sarah Bulmer, Nick Caddick, Hannah West, ‘Voices of veteran researchers’, Critical Military Studies, 9:1 (2023), pp. 1–4.
52 Joanna Tidy, ‘War craft: The embodied politics of making war’, Security Dialogue, 50:3 (2019), pp. 220–38.
53 Joanna Tidy, ‘Visual regimes and the politics of war experience: Rewriting war “from above” in Wikileaks’ “collateral murder”’, Review of International Studies, 43:1 (2017), pp. 95–111; Synne L. Dyvik, ‘Of bats and bodies: Methods for reading and writing embodiment’, Critical Military Studies, 2:1–2 (2016), pp. 56–69.
54 Wilcox, ‘Embodying algorithmic war’.
55 Brandimarte, ‘Breathless war’.
56 Brandimarte, ‘Breathless war’, p. 528. Cf. Matthew Leep, ‘Introduction to the Special Issue: Multispecies security and personhood’, Review of International Studies, 49:2 (2023), pp. 181–200.
57 Sylvester, ‘War experiences/war practices/war theory’, p. 497.
58 Brighton, ‘Three propositions on the phenomenology of war’.
59 Narozhna, ‘The lived body, everyday and generative powers of war’.
60 Narozhna, ‘The lived body, everyday and generative powers of war’, pp. 2–3.
61 Narozhna, ‘The lived body, everyday and generative powers of war’, p. 3.
62 Sylvester, ‘War experiences/war practices/war theory’, p. 493.
63 One of the main influences here is Elaine Scarry, who understands the ‘structure of war’ as a ‘structure of unmaking’ – it is an ‘[act] of destruction (and hence somehow the opposite of creation)’, ‘the suspension of civilization (and somehow the opposite of that civilisation)’ (Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 12, 21).
64 Narozhna, ‘The lived body, everyday and generative powers of war’, p. 16.
65 Narozhna, ‘The lived body, everyday and generative powers of war’, p. 15.
66 Barkawi and Brighton, ‘Powers of war’. I am only concerned with the implications of their argument in this aforementioned (and highly influential) paper and am not implying anything about their other works – which both contain bodies (e.g. Tarak Barkawi, Soldiers of Empire [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017]) and offer nuance on the question of agency (e.g. Brighton, ‘Three propositions on the phenomenology of war’).
67 Barkawi and Brighton, ‘Powers of war’, p. 136; Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority [1961], trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquense University Press, 1969), p. 21.
68 Barkawi and Brighton, ‘Powers of war’, p. 139.
69 Cf. the existentialist literature on anxiety in IR: Felix Berenskötter, ‘Anxiety, time, and agency’, International Theory, 12:2 (2020), pp. 273–90; Rumelili, ‘[Our] age of anxiety’; C. Nicolai L. Gellwitzki, ‘Stimmung and ontological security: Anxiety, euphoria, and emerging political subjectivities during the 2015 “border opening” in Germany’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 25:4 (2022), pp. 1101–25.
70 Barkawi and Brighton, ‘Powers of war’, p. 140.
71 On this point, I therefore agree with Jens Bartelson (War in International Thought, p. 24) when he warns ‘that we should refrain from attributing ontogenetic capacities to anything but ourselves’.
72 Nordin and Öberg, ‘Targeting the ontology of war’, pp. 399, 404, 405.
73 Nordin and Öberg, ‘Targeting the ontology of war’, p. 403. This statement logically follows from a ‘vital materialist’ perspective (critically discussed below). It should also be noted that this ontology of war (as ‘disappearance’) cannot escape the charge of reification either (see notes 29 and 30 above); a negative statement is still, in its negativity, manifestly positive in terms of discursive effect.
74 Burke, ‘Ontologies of war’.
75 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 31 [11], original emphasis.
76 For a discussion of ontologically ‘presupposing’, see Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 27 [8].
77 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 32 [12].
78 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 32 [12].
79 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 32 [12].
80 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 67 [39].
81 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 37–8 [16].
82 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 37–8 [16], 42 [20], 43 [21], 85 [58]. This is what makes Heidegger’s phenomenology hermeneutical and not transcendental: although Dasein’s pre-ontological nature is implicit in its everyday existence, it cannot overcome this everyday existence to grasp the ‘bare’ nature of existence itself (on this, see Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 62 [38]).
83 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 188 [148].
84 In his Being and Time, Heidegger mentions the body only in passing; he writes, for example, that Dasein’s ‘“bodily nature” hides a whole problematic of its own, though we shall not treat it here’ (Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 143 [108]).
85 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 169.
86 See note 9 above.
87 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior [1942], trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 224. Later, Merleau-Ponty articulates that ‘the experience of perception is our presence at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us’ (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The primacy of perception and its philosophical consequences’ [1946], trans. James M. Edie, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 12–42 (p. 25).
88 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. lxx.
89 Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, p. 188.
90 Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, p. 191.
91 On the notion of ‘gazing’, see Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 232; on ‘gearing into’, p. 367; and on ‘anticipation’, p. 427.
92 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 291; see also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and mind’ [1961], trans. Carleton Dallery, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, pp. 159–90 (p. 171).
93 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 334.
94 ‘The miracle of the real world’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘is that in it sense and existence are one, and that we see sense take its place in existence once and for all’ (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 338).
95 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 354. On the necessity of the intersubjective constitution of sense, especially in the context of time/history, see Gadamer, Truth and Method.
96 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 169.
97 I believe it follows from my argument that ‘peace’, like war, is a positive temporal-ontological predicament which Dasein projects forth. Granting this, even the extinction of Dasein would not result in a ‘perpetual peace’; such an extinction, rather, would result in the negation of the possibility of ontology itself (anthropocentrically, i.e. ontologically, speaking, of course).
98 Above, for example, we saw how Holmqvist (‘Undoing war’, p. 545) proposes this vital materialist notion of agency. At the extreme, this results in the anthropomorphic characterisation of ‘war’ itself as an agent, not dissimilar to the pantheistic Greek notion of an agential god of war (see note 74 above). For a phenomenological argument against the vital materialist position in the context of war, see Mark Gilks, ‘Narrating being through phenomena: The phenomenological and sociological insights of Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier’, Social Epistemology, 35:5 (2021), pp. 490–501.
99 I am not claiming that agency is not compatible with post-structuralism, only that it tends to be disavowed or undertheorised within a framework which prioritises an ontology of symbolic power (as we saw in the first section above). Here, I agree with (and will not repeat) Narozhna’s critique (see note 12 above); though, of course, I disagree with her subsequent application of the phenomenological method.
100 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 467.
101 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 463.
102 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 476.
103 On this point, see Gadamer (Truth and Method), who advances and clarifies Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology. For an argument along these lines in the context under discussion, see Mark Gilks, ‘Battlefield monuments and popular historicism: A hermeneutic study of the aesthetic encounter with “Waterloo”’, Critical Military Studies, 8:4 (2021), pp. 1–21.
104 Gilks, ‘The aesthetic influences of war’.
105 Gilks, ‘Battlefield monuments and popular historicism’.
106 Mark Gilks, ‘A phenomenology of war: A theoretical inquiry into the existential-hermeneutic structure of war, with empirical reflections on the case of the British soldier in Afghanistan’, PhD diss., Brussels School of International Studies, University of Kent (2023).
107 E.g. Antoine Bousquet, ‘Nuclear existentialism: On the philosophical response to life and death under the bomb’, Review of International Studies (2024), pp. 1–19, available at: {https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000512}.