Peace and war: unclear concepts.

di

 Federico Salvati

(federicoslvt@gmail.com)

"What is peace?" Asked Susan Sontag in her 2001 Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech. Even if it could seem a plenitude, to outline a concrete definitions of this concept might turn out to be quite difficult. Along with common sense, war and peace are dichotomized concepts, antonyms constructed on the absence of a contentious situation. If we linger upon this for more than a moment we can easily understand how this definition is poor and unsatisfactory. The mere absence of war can't at all be classified as peace. Let us think about the current situation of frozen-conflicts scattered around the world ( for instance the Koreas scenario or the Nagorno-Karabakh war). Even though there is no open fight, we can not define light-heartedly these situations as peaceful ones. A range of feminist authors indeed formalize peace as the “elimination of insecurity and danger”. Bluntly put: a more realistic definition of peace has to be centered on a positive and pro-active relation either within or between social groups. On the other hand, absence of violent conflict (the so called “negative peace”) does not prelude to a peaceful situation per se. such formalization of peace has a strong explanatory power but it mystifies more than it can clear them out. The natural fallow up to this stage shall be: to what extent do we need a pro-active social value in order to define a context as a peaceful situation? And what of these values should be understood as inescapable in order to do so? Granted there is no certain answer to such a question, but it must be noted that this is not a fancy academic frill. Au contraire, this is the apothegm of the international “peacemaking” activity. In other words: how do we make it sure to avoid a potential conflict scenario and how do we prevent it from a future development? In order to untangle this knot, I could produce in this article a long and boring list of widely-shared common sense statements about what is important and what is not in human social life. Instead I think it would be more interesting to quote the well-known realist thinker Kenneth Waltz who said: “To explain war is easier than to understand peace. If one ask what might cause war the simple answer is 'anything'...”. Scholars always prefer to study war rather than peace enforcement, since the first one is more easy to detect (even if lately things have become much more complicated), to define and to harness. According to the far famed Clausewitz's definition, war is nothing more than a “duel on an extensive scale.... mere continuation of policy by other means”. If we understand war as the exercise of violence in order to attain an objective, its substantial causes could be, theoretically speaking, infinite, since whatever human impulse can lead to the exercise of violence, whenever it is in the faculty of the subject and its exercise shall demonstrate to be the best way to obtain what longed. Developing the essential tenets of Clausewitz' reflection Christopher Coker in his book: “can war be eliminated?”disavows the nature of war as a social idea. Contrarily to what John Muller asserted, war is no socially-constructed-activity and as such can not and will not be eliminated only by the human self-reasoning.

According to Coker's position War is a destructive manifestation of the deep-rooted human ethos to live part of our life as a fight. This attitude allow us to overcome hurdles and to win difficulties.

To refuse this nature would be a XIX-century-totalitarian-regime style hypocrisy. I won't be very popular in asserting that but: “violence in not always bad”.

Even if (for the sake of the debate) we could imagine a world wherein human being has been totally “de-violentized” this world would be a sheer nightmare. The idea of conflict latu senso is a powerful and essential part of our moral nature. No violence would mean complete compliance with the authority, incapacity to contest, protest, to think out of the box, self determination and so on... war as we mean it is a narrow outburst of something widely bigger which has more extensive implication in our daily life. The  key question at this point is: does the externalization of a conflict have to be always destructive? Is there a way to channel it in a more constructive existence? (in order to have further information on this read “constructive conflicts” by Kriesberg and Dayton)

Concluding: war and peace are tow very complicated concept. However what has been said above is only a theoretical proposition which HAS VERY LITTLE TO DO WITH PRACTICAL REALITY. Still we need to discuss it in order to evolve our concept of what we have been taught or we think we know. I know I am leaving the reader with lots of unresolved questions but a further investigation on peace and war would require definitely more time and space and would be pretty boring. Nonetheless I won't feel any scruples in declaring that things get better in time. We institutionalized most of our activities, we have the capacity to evolve, to do better and to be more aware and empathic to our neighbor and conflicts (global scale or just back street fights) make no exception to this.