There is probably nothing more fundamental in social life than how people deal with the problem of harm in their relations with each other – how they protect themselves from the various forms of suffering to which they are susceptible by virtue of their mental and physical vulnerability, and how they deal with those who are prepared to kill, injure, exploit and in other ways harm them. There is no lack of literature that considers different aspects of harm in society and world politics. Invaluable resources can be found in many disciplines: criminology, psychology, jurisprudence, anthropology, sociology, political theory and International Relations. But there has been precious little work that draws their findings together with the aim of constructing a conceptual framework that unifies largely unrelated modes of analysis – and there is no body of literature that starts with the assumption that the study of harm can usefully promote higher-level synthesis in the social sciences.

As its subtitle indicates, this book is about theorizing harm, and not about providing a theory of harm. It is a ground-clearing exercise that aims to establish the foundations on which future work on the problem of harm in world politics can build. The longer-term ambition is to produce two other works that consider, first, the relationship between violence and civilization in the Western states-systems and, second, the problem of harm from the vantage-point of world history. No doubt, those volumes will require many revisions to the main arguments of this book.