Terror and war in socio-political processes

Abstract

Terror and war are forms of social violence that determine processes in the political sphere and are not only tools of political struggle, but also a source of social change. Emphasis is placed on the basic differences of the concepts of «war», «terror», «terrorism» and the peculiarities of their definition in modern scientific and public discourses are indicated. The article analyzes the functional nature of terror and war and their manifestations at the individual and collective levels of social violence in its following forms: political, economic, physical, structural and systemic. War and terror, in fact, turn out to be a universal tool for the cyclical change of certain forms of violence, in particular «mythical», «existential» and «rational» violence. War and terror in their classical sense are always realized as a physical form of violence. Even under the conditions of minimizing the number of victims in the conditions of the superiority of the military force of the army of one of the parties, military violence constitutes a threat of the use of physical force, and the threat of violence is, in fact, violence. Political goals determine the attitude of each member of society to war, the nature of armed struggle, the choice and mobilization of resources for its success. This determines the content of the law on the dependence of the course of war and its outcome on the political goals of the parties opposing each other. The achievement of a political goal is «marked» in the public consciousness as a "victory", and the image of the defeated is Girard’s «victim», on whom aggression is directed, whose level in society usually rises with the beginning of military operations.