Abstract
Practices of violence permeate the global arena. They take form in diverse locations, from the complex decision-making structures of governments to the most clandestine and informal processes associated with networks to the invisible private location of the individual planning a destructive act. Violence in late modernity has this wide span of operations, manifest at times in inter-state conflicts, but mostly involving practices that are transnational in their locations. Just as the spatial terrain of violence can be global in reach, so too the temporal element of political violence transcends the immediacy of the battlefield. The late modern condition, with its intensified social relations, renders proximate distant events so that practices of violence are almost immediately brought forth into the global space, rendering war in late modernity immediately accessible to the judgement of this arena in all its diverse manifestations, public and private. The use of violence as a form of political practice is situated in contests over interests, values and resources; however, its enabling conditions stem from discursive and institutional continuities that are deep-rooted in social relations.
The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.
Hannah Arendt1
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Chapter 1 Introduction: Understanding War and Violence
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York and London: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1970), p. 80.
The just war tradition has a long history in moral philosophy, a history that is deeply-rooted in Christianity, but that has distinct articulations across other religious doctrines, including Islam and Judaism as well as Buddhist and Hindu traditions. See Terry Nardin (ed.) The Ethics of War and Peace: Religious and Secular Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977)
Jean Bethke Elshtain (ed.), Just War Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
For the international law tradition, see E. de Vattel, The Law of Nations (New York: AMS Press, 1987)
S. von Pufendorf, The Law of Nature and Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934)
H. Grotius, The Law of War and Peace (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925).
As Michael Howard pointed out, the assumed inevitability of war’s continuing presence in the international system suggested that the sole option available was to “codify its rationale and to civilise its means.” See Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (London: Temple Smith, 1978), p. 18.
See especially E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1939)
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of World Order (London: Macmillan, 1977).
As elaborated by Kenneth Waltz, in his Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
For a discussion of the debate between correlation and causation, the latter conceptualised in constitutive terms, see David Dessler, “Beyond Correlations: Towards a Causal Theory of War”, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 35 (1991), pp. 337–55.
Clausewitz’s On War is here the defining text, though recent rationalist approaches to war rely variously on game theory and microeconomic theory. See Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by M. Howard and P. Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). For rationalist approaches in International Relations,
See Michael Nicholson, Rationality and the Analysis of Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
B. Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981).
Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 308.
For an excellent text on debates within the philosophy of the social sciences, see Martin Hollis’s The Philosophy of Social Science: An Introduction(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
For the application of these debates in politics and international relations, see Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)
David Marsh and Gerry Stoker (eds), Theory and Methods in Political Science (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
For this debate in International Relations, see Hollis and Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations, op. cit., and Alexander Wendt, “On Constitution and Causation in International Relations”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 24, special issue (1998), pp. 101–17.
James Der Derian, “9/11: Before, After and In Between”, Craig Calhoun, Paul Price and Ashley Timmer (eds), Understanding September 11 (New York: The New Press, 2002), p. 178.
Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power”, in Power/Knowledge, edited by Colin Gordon (New York and London: Prentice Hall, 1980), p. 117.
See Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment”, in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Vol. 1 of The Essential Works of Foucault, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), p. 319
Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
The concept of a “global matrix of war” used here is drawn from an earlier investigation. See Vivienne Jabri, “War, Security and Liberal State”, Security Dialogue, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2006), pp. 47–64.
Hans Joas, War and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p. 10.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 63.
There is much written in the recent past on the so-called “western way of war”, defined variously as “risk-transfer warfare” and “humane warfare”. See, respectively, Martin Shaw, “Risk-transfer war, the militarism of small of small massacres and the historic legitimacy of war”, International Relations, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2002), pp. 343–60
Christopher Coker, Humane Warfare (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
Vivienne Jabri, Discourses on Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 41–50.
Walter Benjamin draws on Sorel, whose Reflections on Violence was first published in Italian in 1906, in developing his argument for the constitutive role of violence in his Critique of Violence, published in 1921, See Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1996).
M. Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 56.
Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States AD990–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 1985), p. 13.
Rob Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 155.
According to Hardt and Negri, controversially, this relocation of juridical power suggests the emergence of “Empire”. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2000).
Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research”, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1969), pp. 167–91.
See especially, Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
As highlighted by Butler in her critique of instrumental conceptions of agency and their application to the first Gulf War. See Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations”, in Seyla Benhabib, et al, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 42–5.
Vivienne Jabri, “Critical Thought and Political Agency in Time of War”, International Relations, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2005), p. 70.
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, Vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 6.
David Campbell, Politics Without Principle (Boulder CO and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993), p. 7.
David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
Vivienne Jabri, “Shock and Awe: Power and the Resistance of Art”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2006), pp. 819–39.
Howard Caygill, “Violence, Civility and the Predicaments of Philosophy”, in David Campbell and Michael Dillon (eds), The Political Subject of Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).
Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 71.
David Slater, Geopolitics and the Postcolonial: Rethinking North-South Relations (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 10.
Slater points in particular to Zizek and Castoriadis in this context. See especially, Slavoj Zizek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism’”, Critical Inquiry, Summer 1998, pp. 988–1009.
See Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity (New York: Humanity Books, 1998).
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Jabri, V. (2007). Introduction: Understanding War and Violence. In: War and the Transformation of Global Politics. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230626393_1
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