Beyond War and By Way of a Conclusion: Solidarity, the Politics of Peace and Political Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Conflicts in late modern times are no longer distant isolated events, contained within their own spatiality and temporality, but are immediately present in the global arena, suggesting this arena at one and the same time as a wide and dispersed space for the mobilisation of material and human resources for ongoing antagonisms. From the local wars associated with state breakdown, to the network wars conducted by clandestine organisations, to the wars of invasion conducted by a global hegemon, the complex interconnections that span the global and transcend state boundaries come to constitute the enabling conditions for the conduct of war. This arena cannot simply be conceived in terms of the increasing dispersion of social and political life, but as being differentiated in terms of differential access to regulatory practices and institutions (including those associated with trading and financial links), to material resources, and communications media. What differentiates network and interventionist wars is that the agents involved in their conduct view the global as the remit of their operations. The global matrix of war suggests a global sphere of operations that transcend the inside/outside, domestic/international divide, suggesting the primacy of transnational modes of conduct that draw upon resources that are both domestic and international. However, the global as a spatial terrain is not simply external to the wars of the present, but is a constitutive element of these wars, just as the form that these wars take is constitutive of the global as a distinct juridico-political space.

Cosmopolitanism as it is classically conceived presupposes some form of state sovereignty, something like a world state… For a deconstruction to be as effective as possible, it should not, in my view, oppose the state head on and in a unilateral fashion.

Jacques Derrida¹