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This review supplements William Bain’s Political Theology of International Order by sketching out two historical threads that are inseparable from the histories of European thought and order that occupy the book. There are gestures toward both strands along the margins of Bain’s account, in a few observations and footnotes. They also have important implications for the place of political theological difference in this story and for the status of colonialism, hierarchy, and resistance. First, I expand on some of the book’s references to non-Christians and discuss the place of Islamic theology. Second, reflecting on Luther in relation to Muslim empires and adapting Bain’s acknowledgment of Grotius’s justifications for colonialism, I highlight the significance of hierarchy, enmity, and violence for a number of the thinkers mentioned, especially what their political theologies authorize in relation to non-Christians. These two sets of observations can help us imagine a complementary story less about international order than about the politics of proselytization and colonization. It also raises questions about the work that political theology as an analytic can do, especially when we globalize political theory and international political thought. I conclude by pondering the place of resistance in relation to imposed order and immanent order.

Recent decades have seen a turn toward colonialism and anticolonial thought in the discipline of political theory. This turn has done the crucial work of bringing questions of dispossession, racialization, and the critical imaginaries of marginalized bodies of thought into the mainstream of the discipline. The expansion, however, has been marked by a tendency to typecast the archive of anticolonial thought with a handful of figures. This article examines the edge of the archive, or three thinkers who are only at its margins. They are Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, Qāsim Amīn, and Sayyid Quṭb, each of whom occupies a central place in the archive of modern Islamic thought. The article reads the peripheries of their works, tracing the arcs formed by their incidental references to places around the world, and, ultimately, probing their location in anticolonialism and contemporary critical thought. The article calls this double method of selection and interpretation periphereia.

The definition of Islam as submission, the claim that Islam needs a Luther, and the desire to identify jihād with private and spiritual struggle, all reflect a series of compulsions and elisions. The three idioms are fundamental to how Islam has been constituted in language as a subject and as a problem. They each also have forgotten genealogies. This article outlines these genealogies and their intersection through the politics of translating Islam as submission, peace, or salvation; of narrating its place and temporality in modernity; and of reinterpreting historical texts and exemplars through the prism of liberalism and toleration. These three moves take Islam out of history. The dislocation of Islam winds through three disciplinary moments that track political theory’s investments in philology, teleology, and philosophy. The article concludes by pointing toward critical possibilities and resources that emerge out of alternative discursive formations—formations that dwell alongside or behind the three idioms and that remain suppressed in them.

This article tells the archival story of how Rawls invented a hypothetical Muslim state that he called “Kazanistan.” It examines drafts of The Law of Peoples from 1992 to 1998, Rawls's notes, his personal correspondence, and the sources preserved in his archives. I track Rawls's gradual interest in Islam, which resulted in his invention of Kazanistan during the final revisions, in March 1998. Contrary to the aesthetics of rigor and simplicity in ideal theory's methods, Rawls's actual method in his incursion into “comparative philosophy” and Islam was circuitous and contingent. And contrary to ideal theory's self-presentation as emerging from an ahistorical conceptual realm, the idealized abstraction of Islam emerges from Rawls's own history, or from an ideologically limited set of texts, conversations, and political debates about Islam. The genealogy of Kazanistan illustrates how liberal philosophy extracts data from other disciplines to construct other peoples, without regard for the surrounding disciplinary politics.

Massimiliano Tomba's Insurgent Universality locates an “alternative legacy of modernity” in how revolutionary movements across three centuries and four continents interpreted and claimed different pasts, concepts, and alternatives for themselves. These movements, from the Communards to the Zapatistas to the Russian Revolutionaries, engaged in democratic experiments in self-government, radical equality, and collective possession. In this forum, Tomba's interlocutors offer reflections and questions about the position of the critical historian, universality, and colonialism. Tomba's response explains the stakes of his project with two further examples of his historiographic practice.

This introduction surveys works of comparative political theory, defined here as a discursive space from which to deparochialize the Eurocentric nature of political theory, to advance substantive research in and from global bodies of thought, and to hear from cognate fields. Its methods of comparison focus not on the literal juxtaposition of two discrete objects, but rather on the transformations that occur through engagement with the unfamiliar; and its aims for inclusion are not tokenistic appropriations of marginalized thinkers, but theorizations of global asymmetries of knowledge and power. The chapter argues that the contributions of comparative political theory are connective and disruptive as much as cumulative. As such, it explains how the entries and organization of this handbook can be used to build conversations, challenge paradigms, and trace thematic preoccupations across divergent contexts of time, place, and experience.

In recent decades, the trope that classical Muslim thinkers anticipated or influenced modern European thought has provided an easy endorsement of their contemporary relevance. This article studies how Arab editors and intellectuals, from 1882 to 1947, understood the twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Ibn Ṭufayl, and Arabo-Islamic philosophy generally. This modern generation of Arab scholars also attached significance to classical Arabic texts as precursors to modern European thought. They invited readers to retrospectively identify with Ibn Ṭufayl and his treatise, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. Comparisons of Ibn Ṭufayl to European thinkers, and re-presentations of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān as the precedent or genesis of European thought, facilitated these editors’ global imaginaries, anti-colonial projects and political fantasies. This article tracks these projects and fantasies through the afterlife of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān from early printings and generalist surveys to later editions and studies, as Ibn Ṭufayl’s significance became sutured into his imagined importance for Europe, and for going beyond Europe.

Chapter 1 examines peace and war in Plato’s Laws. The dialogue’s speakers schematize war along an aesthetic pattern of symmetry, of polis against polis, person against person. These wars suggest an orderly universe. Ultimately, they locate peace in a different aesthetic—namely, the wholeness of the polis. The characters’ generalization of the polis as the primary site of well-ordered peace and war reflects anxieties about the polis’s finitude and about sources of disordering violence, notably Greek empires, Persia, and slave revolts. Second, Plato has his characters rehabilitate peace against arguments about its insufficiency by affirming that “war is for the sake of peace” and by appealing to peace’s parasitical structure: they insinuate fraternity, friendship, unity, security, and law into peace. In both Plato’s Laws and contemporaneous Athenian orations, these insinuates gain primacy over peace and facilitate war, including wars that govern the polis’s interior and police its surrounding neighbors.

The desire to transform or “save” the enemy is fundamental to Erasmus’s understanding of peace, and he twins it with the desire to reform oneself. This chapter argues that theorists who look to Erasmus’s writings for his alleged (and allegedly secular) pacifism misunderstand his political theology of peace. The structures of Erasmus’s “universal peace” revolve around the distinction between Christianity and the Ottoman Empire (“the Turk”) and the providential primacy of Christians. He calls for peace, unity, and love; these additives overtake peace, and he defines each in opposition to the Turk. Erasmus privileges the Christian as the true subject of peace, and Christian speech and dialogue as an enactment of God’s Word. In this political theology, peace is necessary, but necessity also authorizes either Christian war or the conversion of the non-Christian.

Gentili, Grotius, and other jurists absorb war and peace into the frame of law. They license the expansion of law into the basic measure for both conceptualizing and regulating war and peace. In the process, they produce a polemical opposition between enemies by law and enemies of law, or the lawful and the lawless. Against lawless, faithless enemies of law, peace is uncertain if not impossible. Such enemies include those with a different form, like pirates, expansionary empires, and peoples with “criminal” or “unnatural” customs. At the same time, Gentili and Grotius imagine that the laws of war and peace are perpetual and universal: they apply to all peoples everywhere. Colonialism enables them to gather and treat distant peoples’ practices as an assurance of their law’s universality.

Peace is the elimination of war, but peace also authorizes war. We are informed today that this universal ideal can only be secured by the wars that it eliminates. The paradoxical position of peace—opposed to war, authorizing war—is encapsulated by the claim that “war is for the sake of peace.” War for Peace is a genealogy of the political theoretic logics and morals of “peace.” It examines peace in political theory, as an ideal that authorizes war, in the writings of ten thinkers, from ancient to contemporary thought: Plato, Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, Thomas Aquinas, Desiderius Erasmus, Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, Ibn Khaldūn, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and Sayyid Quṭb. It argues that the ideal of peace functions parasitically, provincially, and polemically. In its parasitical structure, peace is accompanied by other ideals, such as friendship, security, concord, and law, which reduces it to a politics of consensus. In its provincial structure, the universalized content of peace reflects its idealizers’ desires, fears, interests, and constructions of the globe. In its polemical structure, the idealization of peace is the product of antagonisms and it then enables hostility. As idealizations of peace are disseminated across political thought, a core that valorizes peace and necessitates war insistently remains. War for Peace uncovers the genealogical basis of peace’s moralities and the political functions of its idealizations, historically and into the present.

This interlude examines the desire to correct or admonish one’s friends, neighbors, or brothers. It foregrounds the politics and ethics of this desire in the writings of Plato, al- Fārābī, Aquinas, and Erasmus, and then examines how al-Jāḥiẓ and Ibn Ḥazm confront the aporetic qualities of this desire in their advice on the treatment of friends. The second half of the interlude discusses how various texts from the genre of advice for rulers, or mirrors for princes, schematize the relationship of war and peace to the enemy. These schematizations include the topos that whoever desires peace should prepare for war. They also include a significant alternative schema that Erasmus raises, but which he does not explore. This alternative is based on separation.

This chapter discusses three unacknowledged discursive functions of peace—namely, that peace functions parasitically, provincially, and polemically. First, idealizers of peace rarely speak of peace on its own but of peace and security, law, friendship, order, and so on. The chapter calls this structure of discursive supplementation parasitical in which each of these added elements is “an insinuate of peace.” Second, idealizations of peace reflect particularistic desires, fears, interests, anxieties, and theories of difference. This logic of universalized idealization is provincial. Third, idealizations of peace are polemical in that they make peace into an ideal in relation to constitutive antagonisms and against specific enemies. This idealization then enables further hostility. The chapter situates these arguments in relation to affiliated arguments, including “politics is a continuation of war,” “peace talk is empty,” “peace has eroded,” and those of just war theory. Finally, it discusses the political work and theoretical elisions of the tropes surrounding “Islam and peace,” the opposition between “Islam and the West,” and “cross-cultural” understandings of peace.

This chapter examines the opposition between productive war and purposeless violence through Immanuel Kant’s and Sayyid Quṭb’s writings on peace. Kant criticizes colonialism, but he passively sanctions its historical structures, and his ambiguities about intervention and statehood open to imperial action. Kant’s discussions of Arabian Bedouins, political economy, and hospitality, and his construction of the globe through imagery drawn from Orientalism, reframe how his peace plan produces an unjust enemy. Meanwhile, Quṭb’s theorizations of empire and postcolonialism diagnose Euro-American empires as unjust enemies. In his neglected peace plan, he proposes reforming the legal order of states in the “Islamic world,” creating a federation, and policing the globe against imperial aggression. The shared sequence of state, law, and federation provides a grammar for determining who polices the globe and for diagnosing whose political form and legal order are wrong. The idea of universal peace anticipates a lawless enemy of peace.

The writings of al-Fārābī and Aquinas make visible a morality that informs the oppositions between the peaceful and the warlike, and between just war and illegitimate aggression. In their typologies of different groups and cities, each designates some group as warlike, or as waging war for no good reason. Each contrasts this group’s disposition to illegitimate aggression to other kinds of violence and war, including, for Aquinas, “just war.” But each also implies—at times inadvertently—that recourse to violence can radically transform those who use it, which puts into question the political work of such classifications and elisions. Indeed, each describes a peace-loving group that wages war. Unlike diagnoses of the warlike disposition, the commitment to peace privileges “intentions” in a way that elides and ultimately sanctions the desire to correct others—one’s brothers, neighbors, friends, and enemies—in the name of peace.

The second Interlude unfolds additional intersections across all the chapters. These intersections emerge through geographic linkages, the contexts of colonialism, and histories of textual citation. First, it considers the translation of Grotius’s theological writings into Arabic for theorizing the politics of the missionary. Second, it highlights that some jurists turned some states into pirates, and others turned pirates into states. Third, it analyzes claims about Ibn Khaldūn’s significance for Europe and for Islam, as well as for theorizations of the desert nomad, such as Kant’s. Finally, it offers a reading of Pufendorf’s claim that Hobbes duplicates Plato’s Laws and only mimics Cleinias’s arguments, and it ultimately situates Hobbes on the enemy, neighbor, pirate, and nomad in relation to empire.

Chapter 5 focuses on the opposition between civilized commodious peace and uncivilized war, or the notion that peace brings prosperity, whereas war is unproductive. Hobbes’s idealization of peace denies the ways in which the things of peace can come from and bring about violence and war. Ibn Khaldūn helps us ask how, for whom, and when peace becomes a basic desire. In both cases, this economy of peace’s morals grows out of a political economic arrangement. This arrangement of peace produces frontiers, or spaces in which other laws, or lawlessness, is upheld. With Ibn Khaldūn, the desert nomad becomes the sedentary dynasty’s enemy and its past. Hobbes’s heavily neglected discussions (and slippages) of settler colonialism and empire frame his understanding of peace, its sanitized “commodious” insinuates, its antonyms in the savage and nomad, and the ways it spreads war and death across the globe.

This chapter examines the complex and ambiguous thought of Egyptian jurist Qāsim Amīn. Amīn’s work is fraught with issues of gender and freedom, which are occasioned by ideas about the sociological conditions of modernity that include the premise of natural selection in the competition between societies. Amīn worried that Egypt had made itself unable to compete fully in the evolutionary conflict between societies and linked the competition to normative questions about individual freedom and, especially, the position of women in society. At the same time, Amīn also sought to counter the universalist claims of certain interpreters and critics of Islam. Thus he sought to navigate unsteady terrain in describing the meaning of a progressive society without simply reproducing European ideas. Idris’s chapter demonstrates the difficulty of writing in ambiguous and profoundly asymmetric colonial circumstances. Seeking both to defend and reform Islamic societies – and both admiring and fearing colonial power – Amīn wrote divergent texts for different audiences: in French, he made defensive arguments; in Arabic, reformist. The conclusion of the chapter powerfully illustrates the ways in which the strategy would misfire: European commentators would in the end deploy Amīn’s Arabic language work as support for further imperial entrenchment.

Summary This work shows a cascaded internal multiple attenuation workflow based on top-down inverse scattering series (ISS) predictions followed by adaptive subtraction. The ISS multiple modeling is purely data driven and does not assume a priori subsurface information such as velocity field and known generating horizons. Adaptive subtraction is employed to match the predicted model with the internal multiples present in the data set. A case study using the topdown cascaded workflow was applied to a pre-stack field data set located in western Alberta, Canada, where the interval between the Duvernay formation and the shale/basin contact is contaminated by strong internal multiples. The workflow attenuated most of the internal multiples present in the target zone, improving the overall primary resolution and highlighting weak events previously hindered by multiples.