Abstract
Abstract War metaphors permeate the world we live in. From wildlife documentaries (natural war) to the curbing of academic freedom (war on woke), it seems that anything can be described in an essential likeness to warfare. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this paper investigates the ubiquity of war metaphors in critiques of violence within Critical Security Studies and International Political Sociology. The analysis focuses on three concepts recently advanced as alternatives to the shortcomings of securitization theory and its reliance on a mythological idea of liberal peace: fighting, martial politics, and struggles. The paper investigates how each of these concepts is built in relation to war metaphors and explains this as revealing of an underlying symptom, a form of ontological militarism, which these alternatives to securitization cannot properly work through. It advances the concept of ontological militarism as the attribution of heuristic privilege to war turning it into the cypher of all social relations by investment in an assumed indistinction between war/peace and war/struggle. The paper invites critiques of liberal civility in International Relations (IR) to take seriously the point whereby the resort to war metaphors becomes the symptom of an inability to escape the symbolic horizons of a violent militaristic order.
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