“New Wars”: Disappearance of the Future and/or Synchronization of Temporalities

Abstract

The future-oriented temporal regime of modernity is today being replaced by presentism in the perception of time, not only in Russia or Eastern Europe, but throughout the world. However, this presentism does not always imply subordination of the past and future to the interests of the present. It may involve a conflict among temporalities, which will be settled by a violent synchronization of heterogeneous temporal outlooks or by recognizing radical time gaps. Most often, the politics of time is observable at the macro-level — as subordination of common commemoration practices to dominant narratives or regimes that exercise power over knowledge. In this interpretation, “politics from below” acts as a response to hegemony, but its failure is inevitable. The article points out the artificiality of that dichotomy by studying the writings about “new wars,” which are now becoming a decentralized system for the use of violence to reach extremely varied pragmatic goals. One of those goals is managing the future in a “risk society” or the endless prolongation of a present in which the boundary between ordinary and extraordinary violence is blurred. But at the same time, the “new wars” are also synchronizing “from below.” The politics of time is generated by the incompatibilities between past, present and future without ever reaching a stable symbolic hierarchy. Under these conditions it becomes quite difficult to separate “wartime” and “peacetime”. The article takes up the problematic nature of this demarcation in relation to cotemporary local conflicts in both Russia and the West.