War for Peace assails what to many may seem an unimpeachable value. What could be wrong with the desire for peace? A lot, it turns out and, above all, with the idea that everyone must share this desire. Murad Idris’s compelling study argues that peace operates as a coercive ideal, one we have to avow or risk making ourselves personae non gratae. In proposing that the very “grammar” of peace is coercive, Idris makes a provocative and contestable claim. Many readers in political theory and intellectual history will resist the idea that certain concepts carry built-in logics. But Idris mounts a powerful case through meticulous and imaginative readings of a series of 10 key thinkers, some treated in well-conceived pairings, others handled on their own because of their distinctive influence on ideas of war and peace: Plato, Al-Fārābī/Aquinas, Erasmus, Gentili/Grotius, Ibn Khaldūn/Hobbes, and Kant/Sayyid Qutb. Although the book’s subtitle speaks of “Western and Islamic thought,” Idris problematizes these categories, treats them as ideological formations, and shows how closely the binary itself has been bound to theories of peace. He writes epigrammatically: “Theorizations of peace draw maps of the universe” (p. 4); “peace is an ideal with enemies and antitheses” (p. 6); “Peace, power and violence travel as a constellation” (p. 314). And Idris takes great care with language, scrupulously giving the original (Greek, Latin, Arabic) for many words within quotations and tracking cognate concepts through texts in which such threads are lost in translation, as in a fascinating analysis of a passage in al-Fārābī that is dense with words sharing the root j-m-ʿ, indicating the idea of togetherness.
Idris mounts a three-pronged critique of the ideal of peace as “parasitic, provincial, and polemical.” It is parasitic in that each formulation turns out to pair peace with other values— “insinuates”—whose connotations are indispensable in giving the ideal meaning and content. Much of the book’s work tracks the emergence, accumulation, and reordering of insinuates of peace in political thought from the pre-Socratics to the twentieth century, among them friendship, justice, order, law, concord, and civilization. Peace is provincial in that it is always presented as a universal ideal, even though its content is always (necessarily) particular and it tends to exclude certain others from its purview by framing them as inherently bellicose. It marks out zones of peace, hostility, and, importantly, pacification. Peace is polemical because it is deployed combatively against those supposedly warlike enemies and because it enables hostility. As the particular antagonisms that shaped a particular moment of peace’s idealization are forgotten, its associated concepts come to seem internal to the very notion. In tracing a history of these accretions and forgettings, Idris restores specificity to the moments and authors in his story and a recognition of the contingencies that shaped their respective views of peace. At the same time, by attending to lines of influence and borrowing, he manages to narrate the history of a concept with considerable coherence over a long period and a diverse array of authors. The resulting balance between particularity and reverberation is one of the book’s great pleasures and strengths.
Given the importance for so many later thinkers of Plato’s treatment of war and peace in the Laws, Idris begins with a cogent analysis of the “discursive choreography” of that work. The Laws stages an encounter between competing conceptions of peace with their respective constellations of insinuates and, Idris argues, ultimately suggests the limitations of all of them. Many readers, from Aquinas and al-Fārābī to contemporary scholars, have read the Athenian Stranger as Plato’s mouthpiece and presumed that his account of peace—as friendship within the city and a paramount value of human existence—was Plato’s own. Idris more compellingly, and with a nod to Jill Frank’s readings of Plato, argues that the dialogue invites readers to consider the closures and failings of the views set out by the various interlocutors. On this reading, peace is for Plato, as it is for Idris, not a supreme value but a problem and a question.
Pre-Socratic peace orations illustrate other insinuates of peace, in addition to friendship, that provide the context for Plato and that themselves have long afterlives in the career of the concept: agreement (so that difference threatens peace), security (peace is real only when everyone’s security is assured), and self-restraint (true peace obliges mutual goodwill). Association with distinct clusters of these insinuates leads the ideal of peace to do different sorts of political work for various authors and traditions. For early modern jurists such as Gentili and Grotius, the insinuate of law encourages the proliferation of the state form with its demand for certain kinds of enemies, namely other states. (The perpetration of violence by “empires that call themselves cities and states” [p. 259], as Idris puts it, is a preoccupation central to both our books, as is the violent process by which the state form proliferated.) These jurists used the aim of peace to justify harsh tactics that would force the enemy to come to terms quickly. They used law to narrow war’s legitimate subjects by casting certain combatants as pirates or lawless brigands, even as Grotius justified the waging of war by the Dutch East India Company (arguably more pirate than state). The insinuation of “civilization” with peace appears in Idris’s pairing of Ibn Khaldūn’s account of the desert nomad as both the origin and the enemy of the sedentary dynasty with Hobbes’s notion that peace enables “commodious living.” As Idris points out, Hobbes tied peace to many insinuates, among them justice, agreement, obedience, and complaisance. What results is a narrow conception of peace that demands a very particular sort of subject and subjectivity: fearful, private, in need of protection. With productive attention to the neglected settler-colonial aspect of Hobbes’s argument, Idris proposes that Hobbes elaborated his ideal of peace “through and against the Americas” and insinuated it “with a political economy that defines human activity through commerce, travel, and knowledge” (p. 235).
Civilization as an insinuate of peace threads through this history, along with the associated idea that civilized peace lovers have the authority and the duty to reform the warlike, and to wage war in order to do so. The correcting agent turns out to be a consistent perpetrator of war in the name of peace, but the “grammar” of the opposition between the peaceful and the warlike “cannot account for its own implication in practices of violence and war” (p. 73). Such a dynamic of corrective war appears in complex form in Erasmus, who merits a chapter to himself given his reputation as a thoroughgoing pacifist: this concept of corrective war is powerfully dismantled here, in part through analysis of the importance of Erasmus’s virulent anti-Ottomanism for his political thought. As Idris argues, Erasmus’s notion of peace troublingly insinuates unity and concord, demanding mutual understanding and banishing disagreement and difference. The same is not, it must be said, true for Kant, who recognized antagonism as an intrinsic and sometimes constructive force in human relations. And we might read the macabre joke about the peace of the graveyard that begins Toward Perpetual Peace as suggesting that Kant was more skeptical of the promises of peace than Idris’s reading of his “teleology of perpetual peace” allows (p. 273). Idris reads Qutb as an insightful critic of Western imperialism whose response to imperial violence took the form of a kind of mirror to Kant’s. In both, peace is built up first within constituent units, then in a federation or bloc of lawful states. Qutb’s violent, global-policing peace looks, on this account, less like the distinctively Islamic phenomenon his reputation as the founder of radical Islamism suggests and more like an anticolonial variation on an old theme.
The choice of authors who all confirm the proposition that peace is a constitutively violent ideal may lead to the worry that Idris has cherry-picked his illustrations. Examples from traditions of nonviolence could have made for illuminating counterpoints to the claims made here, even if some might ultimately corroborate the book’s central argument. W. E. B. Du Bois’s lifelong, complex commitment to peace as a universal value was a direct outgrowth of his anti-imperialism and antiracism. Gandhi, in contrast, seems to have written remarkably rarely of peace, and then mostly critically for reasons like Idris’s own. (And though in conversation with both Western and Islamic thought, Gandhi arguably falls outside the scope of the book.) Idris might well disagree with accounts of Gandhian nonviolence as necessarily antipolitical: he himself proposes to remake peace “from a moral ideal into a political idea” (p. 321; compare Uday Mehta, “Gandhi and the Common Logic of War and Peace,” Raritan 30 [1], 2010). But an engagement with thinkers, whether Du Bois or Gandhi, or perhaps Leo Tolstoy, who apparently did not, like the 10 considered here, use peace to license violence, would alleviate the impression that Idris reads thinkers only a certain way: to root out the violence lurking in their ideas. Or perhaps he would find that violence lurks in their thinking too, which would be of a different sort of interest.
War for Peace is largely a work of (highly original) interpretation and critique of the violent ideal of peace, whose unsettling portrait it draws through these 10 figures. Idris does sketch alternatives such as indifference, disengagement, and truce; the last is, precisely in his view, “peace without insinuates” (p. 268), although the idea of truce has its own imperial history, as Lauren Benton argued in her 2019 Toynbee Prize lecture at the American Historical Association. I would have welcomed Idris’s reflections on peace in comparison to other political concepts for a sense of what it is about peace that makes it constitutively coercive, although such speculation might have taken him beyond the careful analysis that is one of the book’s great virtues. He suggests several responses without directly answering the question. Perhaps because peace is an ideal; but then do all ideals (justice, equality) operate similarly? Perhaps because peace is an inherently negative concept—the mere absence of war—and therefore empty and hard to sustain without those insinuates? Or perhaps he believes these logics are simply particular to peace, but then others share these features (“civilization” is similarly polemical and provincial). Idris notes carefully that, although the logics he traces are “internal to idealizations of peace” as we find them in the history of political thought, they are not “inherent in the idea” (p. 318). Indeed it is precisely by recognizing the recurrence of these logics, he proposes, that we might come to think about peace differently by prying it free from insinuates like civilization, universality, and security. In the end, Idris does not oppose peace in any form but rather advocates a “more modest peace” (p. 321). Resurrecting the notion of truce—particular, temporary, unstable, fraught with mistrust—from the purgatory into which it has been cast by traditions that glorified perpetual and universal peace is inspired and productive, even if truce proves, in the end, as treacherous a concept as peace.
