Larvatus Prodeo

On a couple of reports on tonight’s tv news, I saw a citizen of Mumbai being interviewed who demanded the Indian government go to war with Pakistan. That set me to wondering what such a war – and God forbid one is launched – would solve. War, increasingly, has lost its (perhaps always somewhat illusory) ability to resolve conflict after intensifying it. There are a lot of factors operating here – but one aspect of the globalist discourse that doesn’t receive as much attention as it should (and it’s one aspect that clashes with the more ideological aspects of neo-liberal globalisation talk, and maybe there’s a connection there) – is the inability of states to monopolise the use of violence on their own territory. That capacity, was of course, the key aspect of Max Weber’s classical sociological definition of the state. And, as other sociologists such as Norbert Elias have demonstrated, it’s not either an abstract conceptual nicety or an ahistorical effect, but rather something that has developed over time. Indeed, it can, and no doubt has been argued that the United States is not a modern state at all because it’s never taken seriously one of the core things modern states do – that is, to disarm their own populace. (The better to govern them, among other reasons, and that’s why you get the strong cultural link between guns and liberty.)

In 1999, the celebrated historian Eric Hobsbawm participated in a range of conversations with Italian writer Antonio Polito, subsequently published as On The Edge of The New Century. One of the most striking points Hobsbawm made was that the secular trend of the increasing ability of states to prevent non-state violence on their own territory went into reverse in the 1970s. That’s not the sort of declining power of the state that globalists normally talk of (preferring to see the state as losing power to the market), but it’s at the centre of a lot of what is happening in today’s world, and what is happening to make it a far less safe place. One could hardly imagine that a hypothetical Indian victory in war over Pakistan would render either that territory governable or India’s less violent. As well as assymetry in warfare, we’re also seeing the fruits of a deterritorialisation of identifications which can be pushed to the ultimate limit of death, and the state is also presenting itself as something far more akin to what “public” authority was in pre-modern history – a competing power centre among many. These shifts demand far more thinking through – because in many respects far too many of our political and social currents are still shaped by the concepts of a modernity now partially in ruins. One sociological thinker who’s been doing this hard work is Saskia Sassen, long one of the most interesting writers on globalisation, and she has an important article in Open Democracy on the implications of warfare over the space of the city, prompted by the Mumbai terror attacks.

Continue reading ‘Cities, states, globalisation and warfare (and global sociology)’