22 - War and peace

Summary

Our points of view were very different; now they have converged around peace. No one here is interested in war anymore.

Padrino Pilartes, guerrilla colonel in Angola

A civilian is shot on a city street; a television cameraman, waiting at a dangerous crossroads to see somebody killed or mutilated, films the shooting; a soldier sent by the United Nations as a “peacekeeper” to a city officially called a “safe area” watches, unsure what to do and paralyzed by fear. The elements of this troubling collage are also elements of what some military analysts are now calling “postmodern” or “future” war. In their analysis, the wars between states and their armed forces that dominated history for several centuries … are now being replaced by a new kind of conflict, like that in Sarajevo, in which armies and peoples become indistinguishable. In such wars, states are replaced by militias or other informal – often tribal – groupings whose ability to use sophisticated weaponry is very limited.

news item

Most inquiries into the prospects for peace and war are locked into an underlying line of reasoning that can only lead to gloomy conclusions. Since the predisposition of individuals and groups toward conflict and violence ranges across the whole of human history, such reasoning asserts, the probability of these predispositions atrophying is nil. No matter that in the long run technologies transform practices, that societies evolve new perspectives, that institutions undergo huge individuals acquire new skills and have a capacity for learning - neither singly nor in combination are any of these dynamics conceived to make the slightest inroad into the violence-prone proclivities through which people have always conducted their lives.