War and Civilizationist Horizons

The 21st century has been defined by a language of war and war making, both rhetorical and physical. It began with the US-led ‘war on terror’ and the assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq that sparked two decades of semi-permanent war in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere. In the western hemisphere the ‘war on drugs’ have failed spectacularly and have enabled rather than curbed the extraordinary dominance of criminal cartels across many countries in the region. Russia has framed the steady enlargement of NATO as a hostile action, as an undeclared war on its historical and civilizational territory, allowing it to frame its assaults on Ukraine since 2014 as purely defensive measures. In South Asia, the Hindu nationalist government has for the past decade framed its aggressive rhetoric and actions against India’s minorities as a form of defensive war against ‘anti-national elements’ and criminal enterprises that are claimed to be sponsored by Pakistan.

More recently, the Hamas attack on Israel and the war waged by Israel against infrastructures and people across Gaza is framed as a civilizational conflict as rightwing leaders have re-activated the long held Zionist representation of Israel as a bulwark of western civilization and democracy against the ‘forces of evil’, comparing the bombing of Gaza to the Allied destruction of Nazi Germany.

In all these scenarios war is both real, physical but also metaphorical and fantasmic, often framed as a righting of historical wrongs, as a form of civilizational revanchism. For Al-Qaeda, 9/11 was a continuation of a conflict that began with the Crusades and deepened with colonialism; the American response was framed in terms of defending the homeland against ‘a new Pearl Harbor’; for Putin and his supporters the assault on Ukraine is a continuation of the liberation of Russian territory akin to the great patriotic war against the Nazi war machine; for the Hindu nationalists, making India Hindu (again) is framed as a historical ‘revenge fantasy’, a liberation from the mental slavery supposedly created by centuries of Muslim rule; for the Israeli right and the settler movement celebrate the current war on Gaza as a “second Nakba”,  an opportunity to complete the annexation and expulsions of the 1948 war and re-establish the historical biblical Israel.

In this first workshop of the New Civilizationism Network, we invite reflections and presentations around the theme of civilizational war, memory, genres of retrieval and revanchism, and violence as a source of historical justice.