An alternative containment policy: Curbing war and violence in a global society

Abstract

War and violence seem to be unavoidable. The illusions concerning the globalization process are gone and global governance is almost just a reminder of the past. The competition among the superpowers, dissolution of states and societies in the Middle East and Africa, and the return of the crisis of the neoliberal world order from the margins to the center are all contributing to the emergence of new and violent conflicts at the international, intra-societal as well as the intra-communal levels. In the current hybrid warfare, the boundaries of state-to-state and non-state warfare as well as separating spheres of war and peace have been blurred. There is also a new dimension to the violence in terms of their extent and brutality, as evidenced by the civil wars in Africa and in the Middle East. In addition, a new arms race between the great powers has already started with respect to the conflicts between the US, Russia, China and India. Finally, if the “war on terror” is further narrowed to a purely military point of view, a worldwide conflagration will be ignited and a new cycle of war and violence unleashed. In response to the processes of disinhibition of war and violence, this article developed a conception of their containment through a sustained and ongoing process of curbing the same forces. The limits of war-like and violent action must be rediscovered, since unrestrained and unleashed violence is in the long run destructive to state, society and community. The leading perspective of this paper is that of a more peaceful world. Yet this perspective cannot be directly equated with peace, since, in order to reach this goal, non-peaceful, military means would be also employed. It calls for the expansion of non-military zones, the Kantian conception of democratic peace or Senghaas’s notion of the “civilizational hexagon”, and the military containment of the expansion of war and violence.