Ingy Higazy
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Considered to be the single most continuous historical event in, and thus an integral feature of, human history, war is a historically loaded term to engage with. How can one begin to define a ubiquitous past and present event and, to some, human condition such as war? One approach to defining war, and thus an approach to the scholarly study of war, begins with an historical chronology of the development of modes and norms of warfare. This approach is most common in the discipline of International Relations (IR), which begins its study of war with the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece. Despite its limitations, a chronological history of the development of warfare is crucial, because the seeming historical continuity of war might mistakenly suggest a continuity in the modes and methods of war (essentially, war-making). Thus, accounting for the mutations in war, and the relationship of war to politics, society, and the economy more generally paints a more in-depth picture of what war is, and why it is important to account for it as a central term/pillar in the study of Political Economy.

Modern warfare revolutionized how and, most importantly, where war battles are fought, as well as who fights them. Beginning with Napoleon in France in the early nineteenth century, wars have become highly organized and economic (in this sense, calculated) undertakings. Thus, modern war-making revolutionized society and began to underpin political and social, as well as urban, organization in the nineteenth century onward. The French philosopher Michel Foucault perhaps best traces modern war’s revolutionizing of society—and the extent of the war-making machine, the military—in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). For Foucault, the social organization and logic of war not only gave birth to processes of discipline and surveillance in society, but also constituted its very political logic(s). For Foucault, the discipline needed to produce and sustain efficient militaries found its way into the spatial organization of prisons, schools, and hospitals. Thus, Foucault famously argued, by inverting von Clausewitz’ statement,[1] that “politics is the continuation of war by other means” (Foucault 2003, 15). Foucault’s inversion of the statement introduced a new framework through which social theorists could begin to conceptualize of war. It establishes that war, not politics, is the main driver behind the project of modernity and is an instrument and effect of modern power. It also troubled the distinction, widely accepted and especially advocated for within the liberal strand of IR, between war and peace. In doing so, Foucault effectively argues that what we usually perceive of as realms of peace, and within foreign affairs, diplomacy, are simply different iterations of war. In his study of the emergence of the modern Egyptian Military in the nineteenth century, historian Khaled Fahmy situated his study as a critical response to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. While Fahmy did not reject Foucault’s diagnosis of modern power, through his study of the nascent war-making institution in Egypt, he argued that such a theoretical standpoint—that war underpins all life processes—overshadows moments and windows of resistance to wars and war-making. To Fahmy, such moments of resistance, like war-making, also defined the course of modernity.

Yet, what is war? And why is it central to modernity? The Oxford Dictionary approaches its definition of war from a solely political, state-based framework, and begins by defining war as first and foremost “an armed conflict between political actors.” However, within the subfield of historical sociology, war is conceived of as, first and foremost, a social process (see Mann 

1988). Thinkers like Charles Tilly conceived of war-making as essential in the development and organization of large-scale bureaucracies. Thus, for Tilly, modern war-making efforts essentially made the modern state (see Tilly 1992 and 1985). Ingrained within Tilly’s theory of modern war-making and state-making is the role of circulation and exchange, and thus of economics (broadly conceived), in war. Thus, war is also an economic process. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, in The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (2012), clearly engage war as a tool of global capitalism. Their extensive analysis of the role of several wars, namely the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II, in the making of the United States (US) a global facilitator and police of capital attest to the centrality of war in political economic processes, and especially capitalist processes of production. In fact, war was essential in the construction of global infrastructures for the movement of capital. Panitch and Gindin trace extensively how the construction of continental infrastructures in the US opened new spaces for capital accumulation, and how such infrastructures later aided the American capitalist class in exporting its products, and relations, abroad (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 29-31).

War is furthermore crucial to the functioning and understanding of one of modernity’s most central and uneven processes: imperialism. The French-Egyptian Marxian thinker and theorist Samir Amin conceptualizes of the trajectory of modern capitalism as essentially imperialist, building on Lenin and critics of capitalism who avidly thought about the centrality of imperialism in the capitalist project. In his last interview, Amin argued that: “We cannot discuss how to prevent war. War and chaos are inscribed into the logic of this decaying system” (“Globalization and Its Alternatives: An Interview with Samir Amin,” 13). Thus, for Amin and his anti-imperialist critique of capitalism—or more accurately, his critique of the intertwined processes of capitalism and imperialism—war is not an aberration or an outlier. It resides at the very heart of the capitalist process. Thus, war, especially the Cold War, was an instance of anti-imperialist organizing which situated ‘abstaining’ from and opposing the war as a platform for anti-imperialist and Third World solidarity.

Bibliography

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1975.

Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey. Picador, 2003.

Mann, Michael. “States, War, and Capitalism.” Social Forces 67, no. 3 (1989): 699-724.

Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. London: Verso, 2012.

Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990. Blackwell, 1992.

Tilly, Charles. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, 169-191. Cambridge University Press, 1985.