I am grateful for the invitation to comment on Christopher Coyne’s In Search of Monsters to Destroy (2022). The book is a great read, well written, and makes a clear and convincing economic argument regarding the deleterious impact of empire. Criticisms of empire are plentiful, but fewer are those couched in the language of economics. Coyne’s book redresses that by elaborating a convincing argument explaining why and how a liberal empire works against liberal aims.

The book resonated with me on several levels. For one, judging by its preface, Coyne and I seem to have had a few similar triggers and interests on our academic journeys. My own BA was in economics. I then moved to international relations and European studies. The final examination of that MA was during 9/11. We did not know the planes had hit the towers ten minutes before we went in. Three hours later, fifty students of international politics emerged, caught up, and spent the evening reflecting on how the world had changed (or not).

That, in a way, was also a trigger for my further academic journey—a journey that here again, if I compare it to Coyne’s, seems to reveal some overlapping research interests. That is, I became increasingly interested in when and why violence is seen as legitimate, and whether, when, and why the state is seen as legitimate. I became interested in the critique of the war system, and in how effective nonviolence can be in both dissent and in policy.

In Search of Monsters to Destroy (hereafter, ISMD) therefore resonated with these interests (Coyne 2022). It resonated, to use different words, with my interests in anarchism and in pacifism. Seeing that both terms do appear in ISMD but only in the endnotes, in what follows, I explore and spell out a little further the ways in which the book resonates with anarchism and with pacifism, but also how both traditions can contribute to and develop the analysis presented in the book.

KEYWORDS: Christopher Coyne, In Search of Monsters to Destroy, Anarchism, Nonviolence, Pacifism