We inhabit worlds in conflict, manifest in irruptions of violence and political turmoil both within and across state boundaries. These are also worlds of injury impacting on individuals and communities, discourses and institutions, including the juridical and normative ordering of the global. The book unravels the question of how war relates to politics, locating it in a conceptual formulation that the book refers to as ‘worlds in conflict’, understood in terms of four analytical categories: violence, people, words, and things. Challenging the idea that war can be confined to a limited spatio-temporal horizon, the book situates war in relation to complex intersections of embodied, sociocultural, socio-political, juridical, and material dynamics. Written in a time of tremendous global uncertainty where major wars have come to challenge the liberal and postcolonial international order, the book provides a new understanding of the complex interplay of the subjective and material, the discursive and institutional, through which conflict and its articulation in war are implicated in the making and re-making of our worlds.

On the theme of visual methods, aesthetic theory, and understandings of war and the political, see Vivienne Jabri. 2024. War, the Aesthetic, and the Political. In War and Aesthetics, ed. Jens Bjering, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade, and Christine Strandmose Toft. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.