Graham Parsons

Here is my CV. 

I received my Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2012. I was on the faculty at West Point until last May when I resigned in protest of changes to its academic program. I am currently a Visiting Professor at Vassar College and an adjunct instructor at the Bard Prison Initiative. I have had fellowships with the Marc Sanders Foundation and the Individualisation of War Project at the European University Institute.

I have two developing book projects. The first is Men of War: How Masculinity Threatens the World and What We Can Do About it. This book is part memoir, part history, and part philosophy. Using concrete – sometimes personal – narratives, it explores the connection between masculinity and war. The book shows how masculinity impacts not only boys and men but the social practices of war as well. The civil-military distinction, the permission to kill combatants in war, and the tendency to view war as violent competition as opposed to a means to a strategic end are all products of masculinity. The book closes by offering tools for men and for communities to avoid falling into the traps that masculine epistemology sets for them. 

The other book is Win the Battle, Lose the War: An Ethics of War for Strategic Reality. Many people – even some military leaders – assume war is a straightforward contest of violence. The side that inflicts the most damage on the other wins. This way of thinking is a dangerous mistake. It encourages societies to instigate misguided wars, and it promotes the falsehood that greater destruction will increase the chances of victory. This book challenges this enduring myth and reveals the many ways it warps how we think about war. Drawing on ancient and contemporary military experience, the theory of military strategy, and just war theory, Win the Battle, Lose the War argues that this fairytale draws societies into strategic quagmires and fuels the view that there is a tension between morality and winning wars. The book offers a reconstruction of military ethics that forces decision-makers and citizens to think clearly about what war can accomplish and avoid needless harm, both to their own strategic interests and to people caught in the crossfire. 

I have a chapter in contract for a book I am co-editing (with Coleen Watson) for Cambridge University Press titled What Is War Good For? New Perspectives on Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza. My chapter is called "Masculine Ignorance and the Problem of Stupid War." This project builds on insights from the literature on gender and war, and uses tools developed in feminist and critical race social epistemology, especially the epistemology of ignorance, to explain the phenomenon of military strategic error. I propose that the problem of stupid war is the product, in part, of what we can call “masculine ignorance” – a group-based form of epistemic error grounded in the social construction of gender. Masculine ignorance fosters the false belief that violence is an end in itself and thereby perverts the ability to think about war as a means to an end. Masculine ignorance generates military strategies that, in various ways, prioritize the war itself, rather than any political goals beyond it. As long as our epistemic horizons are structured in this way, we will continue to face the danger of stupid war.

I also recently signed a contract to co-edit (with Lee-Ann Chae) a book series for Cambridge University Press on "Philosophy, War, and Peace." This series will be a major event in the field. Over the next four years, the series will produce 35 titles by leading scholars and practitioners from around the world. We will treat the philosophy of war and peace in its full complexity. Our volumes will cover some traditional as well as some less traditional, emerging questions. The series will also give the field an expansive canon by centering approaches to war and peace beyond just war theory, such as pacifism, peacebuilding, and feminism. Additionally, the series will treat war as the subject of critical theoretical analysis by including titles that investigate the way norms of war might reflect specific nefarious power inequalities. Last, the series will treat the military as a central yet dangerous political phenomenon requiring clear theorization about its place in a just society