This essay was first presented as the inaugural lecture for the academic year 2024-2025 at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, 7 October 2024, under the title “Meta Wars of the 21st Century: Media Spectacles, Genocide, Public Indifference, and Resistance”. Read PDF here
Also available in Turkish here
In times of historical upheaval, single events sometimes gain the status of a paradigm. Without
ceasing to be part of history, they begin to function at the same time as a model for understanding
other events and even the entire historical process. They reveal the conditions of possibility that mark
the horizon of the present, and subsequently become a tool for understanding and explaining the past
Ladies and Gentlemen, Colleagues and Friends,
Today marks the first anniversary of the outbreak of a terrible war with potentially catastrophic consequences for your country and region and the wider world. It will thus come as no news to you when I say that we are living in an age of multiplying wars and chilling predictions of war; or that millions of people, at various points on our planet, are gripped by feelings that our world is sliding into confusion, lawlessness
and violent disorder, and that, if current-day trends continue, a mega-war is coming, and that things are going to end badly. Their gloom and caution are understandable.
Global military spending has been rising for nearly a decade, reaching $2443 billion in 2023, an increase in real terms that year of 6.8%, the steepest since 2009. An American president lost in a mental fog approves the bombing of Yemen and the largest US naval battle since the Second World War, the occupation of eastern Syria and combat operations in Iraq, all without the approval of Congress, then asserts that “the United States is not at war anywhere in the world”; the same president who urges an Israeli ceasefire while feeding its war machine with weapons that make peace improbable; and simultaneously, on another front, finances an unwinnable war against Russia, authorises long-range weapons for use against people inside its territory, and refuses to agree to the negotiations that would halt the senseless killing and environmental destruction.
Fears are meanwhile growing that global warming will trigger armed conflicts because of mass exoduses of people fleeing rising waters, crop failures, parched lands, and extreme weather events. The worst displacement crisis on our planet is already happening in Sudan, where a deadly uncivil war backed by outside forces has uprooted the lives of over 11 million people and plunged half the population into
hunger. And there are the planned genocides: in Gaza and the West Bank, where Palestinians are suffering unspeakably cruel war crimes; in Syria, where more than 500,000 people have died and half the population forcibly displaced; and in Myanmar, where, following the 2021 coup d’etat, a nasty military government, in open defiance of an International Criminal Court of Justice (ICJ) provisional measures order, terrorizes 600,000 mostly Muslim Rohingya peoples in a hellscape of shelling and pillaging of villages, night raids, communication blackouts, mass arrests, sexual violence, torture, murders, disappearances, restricted access to food, water, shelter, sanitation, and medical care, and the forcible military conscription of men and boy
children to fight for the Myanmar army and its allies in nasty frontline battles against the Arakan Army.
It requires little reflection to understand that these are indeed dangerous trends and tht we are passing through gloomy times in which old proverbs, sayings, and clichés make a comeback in blogs, columns, and pundits’ postings. War is the rhetoric of our times, we could say. There is a time for peace, and a time for war, we hear. Truth is war’s first casualty. War is death’s feast. Sovereignty must be defended. War is
hell. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.War is the statesman’s game. War is capitalism with the gloves off. A great country can have no such thing as a little war. It’s easier to begin a war than to bring it to an end. The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
An unfortunate if unintended effect of these oft-quoted, routine dicta is that they “normalize” war. They make it seem that war is an enduring feature of the human condition – that humans are creatures who live in a state of war by nature, that on our tiny planet humans are the only species to organize mutual savagery and the planned elimination of its fellow members using sticks and stones, muskets and rifles, bombs, rockets, and drones; or, in the pithy words of Plato, among humans, only the dead will not witness war. The trouble with these dicta is their faux timelessness. They have a metaphysical quality; they suppose or imply that whatever humans may say or imagine, war is nature doing what nature does (natura naturans), that since “man” is the “fighting animal, emotional, passionate, illogical”, war is ultimately the result of “forces inherent in human nature”; or, as Elon Musk has said recently: “All creatures fight…Animals in the jungle, every single day, every minute are constantly trying to kill each other. We’re not unusual in that respect”. In such formulations, history goes missing in action, which is unfortunate because history really matters when trying to make sense of the strange novelty and possible future of the meta wars of our age.
Let us pause, for any cursory glance at the past should underscore the elementary point that war is not only a human fabrication – an invention “like any other of the inventions in terms of which we order our lives, such as writing, marriage, cooking our food instead of eating it raw”, as the anthropologist Margaret Mead noted – but that through time the modes and means of war have undergone significant alterations.
Historians typically define war as a mutually recognized conflict between two or more groups as groups, in which each group puts an army, however small, into the field to fight and kill, if possible, some or all the members of the other group’s army. While they often disagree about matters of timings and technologies, they help us realize, for instance, the profound military and political significance of newly invented weapons
(the sword, Greek fire, crossbow, the machine gun, chemical weapons, the atomic bomb, drones) and changing modes of imagining and making war. We come to understand how, during the second half of the 19th century, war fought by cavalry and close infantry formations was rendered obsolete by rifles, steel cannon, and bursting shells; and, more chillingly, we are forced to wonder whether nuclear weapons
and the so-called “balance of terror” will permanently protect our planet from human self-destruction, or whether, as the British historian of war A J P Taylor once put it: “a deterrent may work ninety-nine times out of a hundred. On the hundredth occasion it produces catastrophe”.
