Introduction: Understanding War and Violence

Abstract

Practices of violence permeate the global arena. They take form in diverse locations, from the complex decision-making structures of governments to the most clandestine and informal processes associated with networks to the invisible private location of the individual planning a destructive act. Violence in late modernity has this wide span of operations, manifest at times in inter-state conflicts, but mostly involving practices that are transnational in their locations. Just as the spatial terrain of violence can be global in reach, so too the temporal element of political violence transcends the immediacy of the battlefield. The late modern condition, with its intensified social relations, renders proximate distant events so that practices of violence are almost immediately brought forth into the global space, rendering war in late modernity immediately accessible to the judgement of this arena in all its diverse manifestations, public and private. The use of violence as a form of political practice is situated in contests over interests, values and resources; however, its enabling conditions stem from discursive and institutional continuities that are deep-rooted in social relations.KeywordsInternational RelationModern StatePolitical CommunityPolitical ViolenceSovereign StateThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.