It is, however, to question the work that a general belief in or desire for peace performs. Peace, it seems, is a fragile condition, easily undone by signs of trouble, threat, and tumult. Its grammar orders the world by calling for peace and security, peace and unity, order, law, friendship, or development.
This grammar prescribes faith in peace through dialogue. Peace is troubling, but it has remained untroubled. Its political work is apparent in the wars it authorizes and the oppositions it frames. They represent evil and war. George W. The problem is immediately present in the contemporary moment, for in the American Global War on Terror, and the increasing adoption of its technologies and logic by governments and organizations across the globe, the experience of perpetual war for the sake of perpetual peace has become ordinary.
Its logic also defines the previous century. The Cold War arms race, regional conflicts, and anxieties about global annihilation valorized peace as the ultimate goal of violence. In contemporary discourses, the West desires, produces, and champions peace, whereas Islam is violent and either hates peace or brings about the wrong kind. The language of peace has also worked to pacify and delegitimize protests against political oppression, economic inequality, and racial injustice.
This arsenal has proven useful to the perpetuation of inequality and violence; the grammar of peace has tended to deflect attention from structures of power. Or one might dismiss these invocations as unimportant and extrinsic platitudes. One might see them as evidence that appeals to peace, and perhaps times of peace, are continuations of a metaphorical war.
In contrast to these positions, this book is an attempt at unmaking peace, bringing into view instead of covering up what makes peace troubling. At its barest, it is an invitation to look more critically at those who claim to speak in the name of peace, at the ostensibly universal desire for peace, and at the dominant grammar of peace—that is, to see peace as a problem. At its most ambitious, it is a genealogy of the moralities of peace. Rather than foreground problems for peace, this genealogy focuses on the problem of peace, and those problems it deflects and others it elides.
The issue is not simply that war is not the answer—peace is also not the answer; it is not the solution, but the question and the problem. The problem is how the grammar of peace supplies schematizations for how the world works and how we should make sense of it, or how it directs and constrains our political imaginations.
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The basic question is, why does the idea of peace so easily blur into war across the history of political thought? After all, war is the opposite of peace, but peace, we are often told, is the basic aim of war. Even more, war is often presented as the only means for realizing peace. The idea of peace thus occupies 8. Augustine, The City of God Hans J. Knopf, As Martin Heidegger wrote in , With a wink, the nations are informed that peace is the elimination of war but that meanwhile this peace which eliminates war can only be secured by war. Against this war-peace, in turn, we launch a peace offensive whose attacks can hardly be called peaceful.
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War—the securing of peace; and peace—the elimination of war. How is peace to be secured by what it eliminates? Something is fundamentally out of joint here, or perhaps it has never yet been in joint. He is not alone in challenging the grammar of war-for-peace. Fred D. Wieck and J. Tacitus, Agricola, trans. Anthony R. Gregg L. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, trans. Tolerance as such is not the problem.
Rather, the call for tolerance, the invocation of tolerance, and the attempt to instantiate tolerance are all signs of. George Schwab, rev. Matthias Konzett and John P. McCormick, 80—96, in Schmitt, Concept of the Political, Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. We have been more likely to cathect in peace, to dismiss peace, or to look through peace at the wars raging behind it, than to look at it and at the political work its idealization performs.
The last two decades have offered eye-opening critiques of war and violence, and critical examinations of the dark sides of cosmopolitanism, security, freedom, religion, development, society, human rights, humanitarianism, modernity, sovereignty, liberalism, and secularism, but the idea of peace has received relatively little sustained attention.
Also see x xx Preface structures, genealogies, and functions of such claims—alongside their historical counterparts, counterpoints, and perfunctory expressions of skepticism—remain largely unexamined. It signifies differently across contexts, languages, and variant formulations, from ancient thought to contemporary theory and practice across the globe.
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To regard the formula as an old conviction that people have only now overcome transposes a flawed retroactive reading of war and peace onto political thought and concepts. Such formulas about peace, and skepticism toward them, recur with surprising frequency and remarkable stability. The tensions and paradoxes, in other words, have deep historical roots. Historical contestations over the definition of peace and over its involvement with its opposites are integral aspects of the discursive life and political functions of peace.
The questions What does peace actually mean, or When is it right to declare war for peace? It is a claim that has been consistently productive, both in the contemporary moment and in the foundations of political theory. In a discipline that aspires to study power in all its forms, we should regard even our highest aspirations and ideas of peace as political artifacts. By examining the morals, oppositions, and schematizations that make peace into a desire and ideal across the history of political thought, the next chapters aim to unmake the apparent purity of peace, a purity that carries war into the present.
Why is the language of peace sutured to war and violence? Why do we speak of peace and security, peace and order, and peace and justice, rather than peace on its own? What histories of peace lurk in each of these questions?
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What compulsions of morality drive the impulse to simultaneously idealize peace and note its implication in war but to leave this link largely intact? As idealizations of peace are disseminated across political thought, the paradoxical form is displaced from text to text, joining different concepts and contexts.
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There is, however, an insistent and indelible core, a core that valorizes peace and necessitates war. This rational structure has insinuated itself into foundational texts and authors of political theory. At the heart of this structure and the moralization of peace are constitutive antagonisms that are at times forgotten but that cannot be effaced.
First, the frequent association of peace with other concepts, such as friendship, security, unity, concord, and law, rewrites both peace and those other concepts.
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Finally, the idealization of peace in these texts is elaborated with specific enemies in view. Elaborating the political life of peace in terms of these structures and their logics takes up and extends three key challenges in contemporary theorizations of war and peace. The history of contestations over the meaning of peace is, in part, a history of its attachments to other ideas—generally, the same set of ideas that occupy contemporary attempts to theorize peace.
They make it into an ideal by speaking of 1. These additions seem to strengthen peace and make it more desirable. However, they also increase the potential for subversion. Each of these added concepts also facilitates war, acting as a hinge or connection between war and peace. At the same time, the idealization of peace stretches to include these additional concepts. Peace sanitizes them of their violence and furnishes them with alternate justifications.
I call the ideas that form a parasitical structure the insinuates of peace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. It bends peace to its means, makes its aims those of peace, and makes itself appear peaceful. The objects and agents of the insinuate become the objects and agents of peace. Peace cohabits different discursive spaces with these other concepts. Some select few insinuates, or their sum, appear to already be contained under the umbrella of peace.
Whereas the supplement usually designates a single act of replacement, insinuates are a recurrent series of additions. They form an iterative constellation of supplementary concepts; over time, some insinuates disappear, others are added, and the priorities among them shift. Although it may seem that a strong, good, and stable peace requires other ideas, ideals, and relations—justice, security, 3. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected ed. It justifies certain kinds of hostility and refuses others, but it does so in ways that often reveal particular interests, anxieties, and desires—ones that make the war-waging peace-lover the privileged referent of his frames.
Theorizations of peace draw maps of the universe. These theories naturalize the attachment of peace to specific entities, such as the polis or the state; to certain peoples, such as Christians or Europeans; and to certain historical narratives about providence or progress. The categories of peace order and arrange, affiliate and exclude, along these lines. Who emerges as warlike, who as peaceful? Who may wage war for the sake of peace? Ideas, ideals, and texts inhabit multiple contexts. Each such schematization of the world is necessarily partial and incomplete. It emerges out of and against certain figures and spaces—its others and its elsewheres— which it constitutes in constituting itself.
Each shift in scope across these thinkers is a fundamental reconfiguration.
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Layer upon layer, like stable ruins built upon tilted sediments, provincial idealizations of peace bury the theories and the affects that form them to speak in the name of universal peace for humanity. Peace is made into an ideal in relation to specific antagonisms, and it then enables hostility. This argument responds to another aspect of how the boundary between peace and war is porous.
Their form, disposition, lacks, or history are antithetical to peace and obstacles to its realization. Its universalized idealization can construct some parts of the globe as more readily and naturally peaceful and others as warlike, conflict-prone, or in need of intervention. In this book, we will see that some enemies are described as being illegitimate, incomplete, inherently unjust, or against human history.
They threaten both peace and the law of nations that secures it. The form and content of peace are thus imbricated in contextual and conjunctural oppositions, which then continue to flow from peace. Genealogically, peace is an ideal with enemies and antitheses. Not only can peace be weaponized, but its idealization is, structurally and discursively, crafted as a weapon, with specific enemies in view, and honed against specific others.
The weapon has many lives, and its enemies shift. These figures sometimes merge and sometimes disappear.