CRASSH

Conference Review

Understanding New Wars

 

This conference aimed to discern anthropological, psychological, and even spiritual forms of reciprocity underlying new wars. The focus of the papers was on how narratives of victimhood and suffering feed the continuity of combat in times of peace. Applying a perspective of longue durée civilisational dynamics, the papers looked for the driving forces of conflict but also aimed to suggest possible ways of overcoming ever-growing symmetries of violence and transforming spirals of vengeance into active strategies of reconciliation.

 

The conference started with two papers outlining aspects of the perspective of René Girard’s mimetic theory, whose recent book ‘Battling to the End’ has inspired the interpretive line of this conference. Benoít Chantre (Paris) made a case for the importance of the Clausewitzian conception of war as a ‘duel’ for contemporary conflicts. Central to Clausewitz is his idea of the uncontrollability of war. There is the potential for ‘war without limits’, as adversaries never stop accusing the other of having started hostilities. Chantre argued that without a moral choice, the negative reciprocity at work in relations of war may not be understood. Wolfgang Palaver (Innsbruck) used a comparison between Girard’s and Carl Schmitt’s perspective on war and politics in order to show reasons for the apocalyptic stage of our contemporary world.  In Schmitt’s view, politics emerges from a situation of war but it also aims to contain war at the same time. Politics contains war in both meanings of the term contain. In Schmitt’s view, it is the pagan sacred that is instrumental in containing violence. Yet, the growing influence of the biblical revelation (which suggests that the victim is innocent) has made the pagan sacred disappear and made Schmittian politics unable to contain violence.

 

Turning towards the international (dis-)order after the end of the Cold War, Richard Sakwa’s (Canterbury) paper characterised the post-Cold War period as a ‘cold peace’. A cold peace is understood as a mimetic cold war. In other words, while a cold war accepts the logic of conflict in the international system and between certain protagonists in particular, a cold peace reproduces the behavioural patterns of a cold war but suppresses acceptance of the logic of behaviour. Emphasising notions of victimhood for some and undigested and bitter victory for others, the ‘victory’ of the others cannot be consolidated in some sort of relatively unchallenged post-conflict order. Thus, the perceived victim status of one set of actors provides the seedbed for renewed conflict. Using post-Soviet Russia as a case study, Alexander Etkind (Cambridge) speculated on the political and human consequences of the economic dependency on natural resources. He argued that the ‘oil curse’ has produced not only financial but also cultural, metaphysical and potentially, legal differences between the elite and the main body of the people. Since wealth and taxation in this society come from mines or wells and are separate from human capital, political economies of trust, education, welfare, and social security do not work in a ‘cursed’ society such as Russia. Here, there has emerged a double monopoly, which captures two key elements of the economy, natural resources and security services, and uses their synergies to develop unlimited control over the nation. Rather than producing wealth, the population becomes a burden of the state and its charity. It is here, where repression by the state, exclusion and apathy on behalf of society may harbour conflicts within Russian society.

 

Arpad Szakolczai (Cork) gave an anthropological background analysis of new wars, especially with a view to the relationship between globalizing processes and warfare. Starting from the claim that the modern world was shaped by an entire series of puzzling ‘new type of wars’, moving backwards through the ‘Cold War’ and the two World Wars, up to the Napoleonic Wars, the paradox is that modern civilization, intent on peace, prosperity, and progress has been particularly inventive in warfare, and proliferating wars. This fact suggests that the anthropological foundations of modern society and modern thought, including our understanding of terms (or values) like ‘rationality’, ‘freedom’, and ‘democracy’ need to be revisited. While the ideas of René Girard are particularly helpful through the contrast set up between rationality and mimesis, they are quite problematic in his assertions about the violent origins of all cultures and civilizations. Arpad suggested looking at the first type of ‘civilizing process’ that took place in ancient Mesopotamia around 10,000 BC and the manner in which the collapse of this civilization culminated in a series of globalizing processes, including global wars, and the related developments in religion, including rituals of sacrifice. Harvey Ferguson (Glasgow) looked at the relationship between modern war, trauma, and the founding myth of modern western society, which establishes a radically new starting point and posits humanity as an autonomous, self-creating, and ultimately free being.  He showed that the democratisation of trauma after the First World War effectively thrust the past into oblivion, thus forcing the interest of politics into an exclusive orientation towards the future. In this sense, the phenomenon of New War seizes the process of fragmentation and institutionalizes trauma.  New War, therefore, cannot be understood in terms of intentionality, interest, or desire, and is better grasped as a continuous break. From this perspective, modernity appears as a condition of repeated trauma.  Contemporary life emerges from the oblivion of the past and the fragmentation of the present.  It can no longer be constituted as meaningful experience. Contemporary life is surf life; surf is the continuity of the fragment, and the persistence of the discontinuous.  New War is Surfwar; the provocation to awareness and the futile ‘proof’ that the subject (the State), after all, still exists.

 

A group of papers reflected on the arch-conflict of modernity between Israelis and Palestinians. Bringing mimetic theory to bear on the Israeli/Palestinian war, Roberto Farneti (Bolzano/Bozen) identified elements of mimetic violence by stressing striking, twin-like similarities between the rivals. He argued that a number of wars which are currently escalating worldwide are modeled around this arch-conflict. They display the same mimetic structure and replicate the same pattern of mutual hostility. It is, in fact, the East-West cleavage that the Israeli/Palestinian arch-conflict and the ensuing new wars are eventually widening; it is, in other words—and to paraphrase Benny Morris—the Eastern enemies of peace which activate their Western twins (and the other way around). The war between Israelis and Palestinians is presented as a case in point of a more general pattern:  the ‘tragic struggle of the doubles’. Glen Bowman (Canterbury) used the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in order to develop some ideas about the cultural foundations of a process of containment. Focusing on the ‘security fence’ or the ‘apartheid wall’ as a central element of the Israeli state program to contain potential attacks and territorial encroachments by Palestinians, he argued that the dispossession of Palestinians that can no longer convincingly be seen as mere strategy. Developing an anthropological analysis of the concept of ‘border’ in Zionist ideology but also in Israeli thought and practice, he examined the impact of a limitless sovereignty on both an encompassed minority population and on international relations more generally. Mark Anspach (Paris/Bologna) looked at the mimetic sources of the fight for victimhood. Relating the Jewish case to other cases of ethnic and religious conflict such as the tensions between Pakistan and India, he showed that containment by walls occurs elsewhere as well but that the high intensity of attention on Israel is partly due to the fact that the Jews as the ‘world champions of victims’ have ‘inspired’ Palestinians in their perception of being uniquely suffering victims. Fighting for victimhood, in many ways, has made Palestinian nationalism emerge out of Zionism, claiming their own disaster to be greater than the Shoah. In Anspach’s view, fighting for victimhood is by all means a losing proposition. Whilst the Jewish Israeli state becomes the model it also is the obstacle leading to a situation in which new suffering and humiliation reinforces the desire for vengeance. Ziya Meral (Cambridge) sketched out an archaeology of contemporary narratives of victimhood in the Middle East by looking at three waves of memory in the recent past. Whilst the fall of the Ottoman Empire would lead to nation-forming macro narraties and the 1967 war spawned narratives of resentment leading to political Islam, the post-9/11 situation allows identifying three set of memories: Historical discourses suggesting Manichean battles between good and evil are accompanied by quests for hegemony in the Middle East as well as a rekindling of the Shia-Sunni conflict. Overall, Meral argued that the emergence of post-colonial memories of being 'victims' at the hands of the 'West' and their utilization by global jihadists like Al-Qaida for ‘metaphyical wars’ challenge traditional diplomacy and conventional ways of conflict prevention.

 

Finally, Harald Wydra (Cambridge) suggested that the justification of war through self-attributed victimhood has now become ‘global’ as after 9/11 (‘we are all Americans’) even the ‘international community’ has based security strategies and interventionism on the experience of being victim to terrorist attacks. Connecting ‘new wars’ to the material and spiritual effects of ‘old’, total wars in the twentieth century, Wydra argued that the transformations of the meanings of ‘victimhood’ occurred through the very modes of total warfare, starting from the ‘European civil war’ and turning into the global civil war of the Cold War. Attempts to resolve conflicts based on reciprocal mimetic processes by objective mechanisms such as the rule of law are unlikely to break the spiral of violence. Empathy with victims requires a spiritual conversion inside oneself. Conversion can only occur by the moral recognition that beyond the cultural and historical differences, one’s enemy shares the same humanity.