Seminar with Dr. Emily Tannock

War and Progress? On the tension in liberal ideas about the legitimate use of force

What do normative debates about the legitimacy of force reveal about progress in world politics, including whether using force to achieve progress is thought to be possible or even desirable? How might notions of violence become transgressive, constitutive of, or even amount to a progressive international order? And how has this changed in recent history? In this talk, I will discuss the relationship between ideas of progress and the legitimate use of force, by way of three ongoing debates about force across the 20th and 21st centuries: permanent security and atrocity prevention, aggression and self-defence, and humane ‘forever’ war and peace. I will discuss how the norms that have evolved towards these ends shape, and are shaped by, contemporary conflicts, and the role of rules and institutions in this process, including international law. I will also reflect on whether there is a hierarchy between norms of violence, which might render some uses of force more transgressive of international order than others.

Speaker bio

Emily Tannock lectures at the Centre for Future Defence and National Security at Deakin University, Australia, based at the Australian War College. She is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. Before joining Deakin, she was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Queensland where she obtained her PhD.

She has degrees in International Relations from the Australian National University, and in International Law from the University of Melbourne. She has held visiting positions at the European University Institute and at the Centro Studi Americani in Rome. She writes about historical international relations, especially norms about the past, present, and future of war and its impact on societies. Her work has been published in the European Journal of International Relations and in the prize-winning collection on the The Globalization of International Society (Oxford University Press).