LAUSR

Relations (IR) throughout time. More specifically, although most analysts tend to forget, the very emergence of IR as an academic discipline rests on the concern of avoiding war and building peace in the international scenario. Consequently, Roger Manning’s War and Peace in the Western Political Imagination should be read carefully by everyone within the fields of IR and Political Science. The book’s main purpose, which it successfully fulfils, is twofold. On one hand, it seeks ‘to examine how the legacy of the classical antiquity influenced philosophers, theologians, political theorists, humanist scholars, and educated members of governing elites and military aristocracies with regard to the phenomenon of war’ (p. xxi), while, on the other hand, the spotlight is on how the ‘attitudes of classical Greek and Roman writers were transmitted through late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance to thinkers at the beginning of the Age of Reason’ (p. xxi). In order to develop his study, Manning structures the book around five chapters, producing a deep and concentrated analysis of the thinking of a wide range of authors – going from the martial legacy of classical antiquity to the problematisations developed by Erasmus, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Grotius, to name just a few. The major highlight of the book is precisely its wide scope and deep engagement with the texts analysed. However, for those more knowledgeable in regard to Peace Studies, there are two main issues that are worth mentioning. First, the book sometimes gives a sense that the understanding of peace underpinning its analysis is that peace is the mere opposite of war. This is a narrow understanding about peace that Peace Studies has already enlarged. Second, it feels as if the book presents an unbalanced account between the analysis of war and the analysis of peace. This reinforces the already present and structured hierarchical privilege that the study of war has over the study of peace within the discipline of IR and related fields and therefore is somewhat problematic. Nevertheless, these two issues do not diminish at all from the fact that War and Peace in the Western Political Imagination is definitely a significant and excellent contribution to the debate about war and peace within the discipline. Ramon Blanco (Federal University of Latin American Integration (UNILA), Brazil)