5th Global Conference
Session Two: Theoretical Philosophy in the Analysis of War
Chair: Andrew Wilson
Across the Margins: Toward an Interdisciplinary Theory of War
William T. Harmon and Jeffrey H. Harmon
Senior Army Fellow, Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, USA
Modern armies’ myopic dependency on Clausewitzian approaches to strategy underutilizes insights that could be garnered from other potentially useful disciplines. Such a deficiency is commonly driven by a correlative over-reliance on socioeconomic and historical analyses of power by policymakers, resulting in not only a tapered ability to wage war effectively with minimum cost, but in a deeply diminished competence in avoiding conflict altogether.
Fields as diverse as biology, ethology, game theory, behavioral endocrinology, cognitive neuroscience, memetics, psychology, choice theory, anthropology, and others serve to supplement modern political analyses, comprising a multi-faceted approach to war that deepens our comprehension of the dynamics at work.
We describe as example the current theoretical commitments of the United States Armed Forces and government in strategy-building, then provide detail on how such commitments might be enhanced by a broader base. We outline the relevant disciplines to be included in an interdisciplinary theory of war, then show how such perspectives might specifically affect strategy, operational art, tactics and peace-making efforts. We then suggest organizational and doctrinal military adaptations, focusing on ground forces, aligned with this interdisciplinary approach.
War as Double: Modern and Post-Modern Thinkers Redefine War
Nick Mansfield
Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy,
Macquarie University, New South Wales,
Australia
The two most influential ways of understanding the relationship between war and civil society have been firstly, the Hobbesian idea that strong government is instituted in order to protect us from the war that is our natural state, and secondly, Clausewitz’s idea that war is continuous with society and politics. War here is either society’s opposite or its instrument. The Hobbesian model flourishes in contemporary social policy where crime, violence and drug use are seen to be the irruption into the social order of a mindless archaic chaos. Clausewitz’s ideas, on the other hand, remain the most commonly referred to by social theorists, who insist on war as the way supposedly peace-loving societies seek their objectives. The continued dominance of this argument has lead to the current consensus that the difference between war and peace has all but disappeared in our age.
However, many modern and postmodern thinkers have argued for an understanding of war in which ambivalence or doubleness characterizes the relationship between war and society: to Freud, war revealed the ambivalence that made love and hostility potentially indistinguishable in all human relationships. To Bataille, war exposes us to a cosmic violence, which society tries to harness for its own ends, attempting to advance the social by way of that which most ruthlessly defies it. Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the war-machine shows that the means societies use to organise war implant at their heart a culture fundamentally alien and hostile to them; and Derrida deconstructs the binary oppositions on which the meaning of war depends, between war and peace, and friend and enemy.
How useful is this other way of thinking about war? Can it provide insights into the way war is currently being fought, and its future? Can it help us understand why social policy is now so often described as warfare? This paper aims to assess this other way of thinking about war in ways that will be useful to both analysts of warfare, and those discussing the relationship between war, culture and society.
Foucault and the Continuation of War in the 20th Century
Jason Edwards
School of Politics and Sociology,
Birkbeck,
University of London,
London, United Kingdom
In his lecture series published as Society Must be Defended, Michel Foucault set out to chart the emergence of a discourse that sees the permanent trace of war in modern social and political institutions and relations. Foucault’s analysis stops at the nineteenth century. In this paper, I’ll aim to do three things. First, I’ll evaluate Foucault’s understanding of war as both a model and the reality of modern social relations in Society Must be Defended. The central question here is whether in these lectures Foucault slips into a conceptualisation of war as the essence of all social relations. If so, this might be thought to lend weight to a claim commonly made by his critics: that Foucault ultimately falls back onto a Nietzschean social ontology of the will to power. Second, I’ll ask whether Foucault’s analysis can be extended into the twentieth century, and in particular whether we continue to see the suppression of the historico-political discourse of politics and social order as the continuation of war by the philosophico-juridical discourse of sovereignty and the law. Finally, I’ll assess to what extent we have witnessed a revival of this discourse of the continuation of war since the last years of the twentieth century.