Three Centuries of Conflict Later: A comparative study between the postulates of Kant and new cosmopolitans.

We already live in a global society, but we are still quite away from achieving the perpetual peace which Kant supposed we would progressively build. This way, the emergence of populist and identitarian politics, which represent a hazard to the stability of national but also international politics, has recently led contemporary cosmopolitans to criticise the tradition by reflecting on how inextricable domestic and global peace are. Nevertheless, no hermeneutical study has been conducted in order to account to which extent those contemporary authors criticise and embrace the traditional cosmopolitan conflict conception. To do so, first, we describe and operationalise Immanuel Kant’s take on conflict. Subsequently, we do so with the contemporary proposals of Jürgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum and Markus Gabriel. And, finally, we conduct two analyses. On the one hand, we undertake a grounded theory analysis of the last three authors’ conceptions of conflict which serves us to fix a grounded contemporary cosmopolitan theory of conflict. And, on the other, we do a comparative analysis between this theory and the one proposed by Kant which serves us to contrast the new and traditional cosmopolitan takes on conflict. As a result of both procedures, we conclude that contemporary cosmopolitans criticise the traditional view of conflict; base their own ones in the tension established between national and international conceptual poles; and this indeed represents a major rearrangement of the traditional cosmopolitan conflict logic.