We all think we know what war is, yet it has always been explained in relation to something else: sovereign authority, civil society, peace, friendship, love. Traditionally, war has been perceived as either the opposite of these values, or as their instrument. Yet, in our time, it seems to be both of these things at once: social values, like human rights, are both what justifies war, and what we need to protect from war. In this book, Nick Mansfield studies this paradox through a reading of canonical thinkers on war like Hobbes and Clausewitz, and also of other thinkers (from Freud and Bataille to Deleuze and Guattari, Levinas and Derrida) who have attempted to deal with our complex and contradictory relationship to war. He also investigates the way that the most influential recent thinkers (from Virilio and Baudrillard to Mbembe, Badiou and A iA ek) have theorized war.