| Summary/Abstract |
Patricia Owens’s (2015) Economy of Force is one of the most thought-provoking and engaging interventions in recent discourses on war, conflict and security practices. Its central claim is that liberal interventionism, and in particular operations conducted in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, might be understood in terms of what Owens understands as the ‘ontology of household rule’. Using ‘counterinsurgency’ as a case study, Owens’s wider aim is to provide a critique of the ‘rise of the social’ or ‘sociolatory’ in political and international theory. So enamoured are discourses in politics and international relations with ‘the social’, she suggests, that it is taken for granted as a category of explanation in the absence of any serious attempt at a historical explanation of the rise of the social and ‘the household’ as its fundamental ontology.
|