Conclusion: War and Human Rights

Abstract

The aim of this book has been to show that war is always defined in relation to something else, what we have called its other. This other may vary: it may be society, sovereign authority, politics, love, peace, friendship or something else. What is important about this relationship is not that it defines what war is opposite to and distinct from nor does it simply identify what the mechanism is that uses war as an instrument. It reveals the context within which war must emerge. This is not simply the historical or political context. Historical context is important, of course. Each thinker that we have studied can be said to be reacting to the specific war that defined or dominated their era: Hobbes, the religious and civil wars of the seventeenth century; Clausewitz, the wars of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, in which the people became a major player for the first time; Freud, the First World War; Foucault, the war of the racial Holocaust; Virilio, the Cold War of Mutually Assured Destruction; Baudrillard, the First Gulf War; Žižek, the War on Terror and so on. Sometimes this address is direct and conscious; sometimes implicit and incidental. Their accounts, however, emerge in more than an historical context: they rely on a conceptual context as well, in which war is not just a literal material situation, but an abstraction or an idea. This is what makes war available as part of the unfolding of human meaning.