5th Global Conference
Session One: History, War and the State
Chair: Bob Brecher
The Ottoman Perception of War: From the Foundation of the Empire to its Disintegration
Mustafa Serdar Palabiyik
Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
This article seeks to provide an account of the evolution of the ideas on ‘war’ envisaged by the Ottoman administrators and intellectuals. In doing that, it aims to reveal how the perception of war had been transformed in line with domestic and external developments throughout Ottoman history. Accordingly, there had been no uniform perception of war; rather there are particular dominant perceptions for particular periods. While in the initial years of the Ottoman state an understanding based on the mobilization of nomadic communities against the Christian ‘other’, namely the ghaza, had been the case, this rather religious perception was gradually replaced with a more mundane conception of war in the mid-16th century onwards. Starting from early seventeenth century, as a result of some significant defeats of Ottoman armies both in the West and in the East, it was thought that the survival of state could be ensured through diplomacy not through war. Hence until the beginning of the 20th century, diplomacy was the key means of politics for the Ottoman intellectuals. On the other hand, particularly after the end of Hamidian era, in early years of twentieth century, an understanding of resorting to war for the survival of state was developed, which would ultimately result in the Ottoman participation of World War I. In sum, this article examines different representations of war endured in different periods, such as war as a tool of motivation, war as a way of imperial expansion, war as the source of all evils, and war as an opportunity for survival of the state.
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The Secular and the Sacred: Sacrilisation of War in the Modern World
Ali Çaksu
Department of Philosophy,
Fatih University, Istanbul, Turkey
Modern secular political systems have to a great extent confined the religious and the spiritual into the private sphere, and government activities as well as their justification have little reference to religions. Nevertheless, being also a political activity, wars and warfare seems to constitute a sort of exception to this. Unlike other political phenomena and activities, warfare is closely linked to an existential issue, namely death, which marks the end of the temporal existence of the individual. Then how to justify sending young men (and sometimes women) to the battlefield? Defense of the motherland (which in many cultures is another sacred), the nation or national interests does not seem to suffice, as one witnesses other kinds of justifications, discourse and terminology employed by political systems, school textbooks and the media. Thus, religious and theological notions are often used for militarization of society, propaganda, and heroism. However, this is not peculiar to the states and governments, and likewise, it is not surprising to see members of some guerrilla groups (who are Marxist or atheist) calling their deceased “martyrs”.
I suggest that it is not only some terrorists or politicians who make use of theological terms like holy war and crusades, secular political systems as well often justify their warfare activities by making use of theological and religious terminology. Thus, in a sense, each war becomes sacred; each war becomes a holy war, no matter what their grounds and reasons are. It is obvious that such an approach to war does not contribute at all to the global peace; on the contrary it hides the real motives of the statesmen, which are rarely religious.
Politics, the Political and Violence
Javier Franzé
Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología,
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
This paper deals with the relation between politics, the political and violence.
The tradition of western political theory has tended to reduce politics to the State and dissolve violence in political ends. This tradition was broken at the beginning of the XX century by Weber and Schmitt. Their reflections allow for the linking of politics and violence, and for thought on politics beyond the State. Nevertheless they are not enough to elaborate a concept of politics that fully recognizes its relationship to violence.
The conceptual distinction between politics and the political is consolidated in contemporary political theory through authors like Lefort, Rancière, Bourdieu and others. It resolves some of Weber and Schmitt’s insufficiencies, but not all, some of which are quite relevant.
One is the relationship between the political and violence, which I wish to analyze in Lefort, Rancière and Bourdieu in this paper. We can formulate two questions on this: 1) is it not true that conceiving politics as something not reduced to the State ends up omitting violence which is also present in the political, as if the only violence were that of the State?; and 2) is it not true that conceiving politics as something not reduced to the State downplays the monopoly of legitimate violence as a characteristic trait of politics?
To deal with tension about politics, the political and violence opens at the same time others questions as: is violence emerging only from a conflict or also from a consensus?; is violence a physical objective phenomenom or a symbolic and subjective one?; if politics is not a “place”, so that means violence is ubiquitous?