L’art de la paix
By giving this essay a title that echoes that of “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu, the French political scientist Bertrand Badie sets out his intention to demonstrate that war, as a means of dispute settlement, is not inevitable and that such an objective in fact requires the construction of peace.
In this work, which abounds with historical and philosophical references, the author starts by reminding the reader that very early on, war was presented as a natural and perfectly legitimate state, effectively reducing peace to a “state of non-war”. From Heraclitus, who described war as “the father of all and king of all”, to Aristotle, who believed that peace can be practised only as an echo of war, ancient history and its continuation into the Middle Ages and thence to the interrelationships of the Westphalian Order would offer no departure from the classic concept of peace as a mere truce within a state of war that preserves primacy. Furthermore, Badie points out that it was not until the end of the first century, in the year 75 A.D., that Pax, the daughter of Jupiter and Justititia, got her own temple.
In the 19th century, the concept of pax britannica, combining economic, maritime, trade and even political hegemony, “effectively served as a smokescreen for unprecedented colonial expansion, which obviously had its share of violence”, the author writes, adding that it “directly created rival ambitions on the part of the country’s peers, particularly France, which set off in conquest of Africa; it also stimulated economic rivalry with Germany, hastening the First World War. It is fair to say that the pax americana ran barely any deeper. Shared firstly with the USSR, then going it alone at the end of the 20th century, it was reflected in record military budgets and spiralling external military interventions” (our translation throughout). In Korea, Guatemala, Indonesia, Congo, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Libya, Nicaragua, Panama, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan…
“In the final analysis, hegemony is the enemy of peace, as it does nothing to prevent that accumulation of civilian and military victims, but also brings together two serious shortcomings that recent events have brought to light. Firstly, ineffectuality: almost all the hegemonic ‘stabilisation’ interventions that we have listed ended in abject failure to achieve the stated objectives: war has done nothing but add to war. How can we fail to observe, moreover, that power has become powerlessness, that by making an offering to the object of stabilisation, peace has simply become destroyed. In this, we add the negative effects of new parameters: globalisation sits uncomfortably with power. Decolonisation is already showing that the weak will win out over the strong and that peace must accompany the former rather than serve the obstinacy of the latter: peace no longer progresses by investing power, but by integrating weakness. The phenomenon is particularly notable in this modern world, in which interdependency dominates, where the weak admittedly rely on the strong, but in which the strong increasingly depend on the weak, turning peace around until it becomes a regulatory instrument for global complexity, rather than a structure to be managed by the strongest”, Badie writes.
The author also points out the scant effects – to put it mildly – of the agreements designed to bring conflicts to an end. For instance, the Lagos agreements (August 1979) did not put an end to the civil war in Chad; the Arusha Accords (1992-1993) not only failed to end the Rwandan Civil War, but actually preceded a genocide; the three Libreville agreements (2007-2013), like those of Syrte, Birao, N’Djamena, Brazzaville, Nairobi, Benguela, Rome and Khartoum, were unsuccessful in restoring peace to the Central African Republic. And “what can we say about the Oslo Accords (1993), which are remembered mainly for the way they twisted the principle of territoriality and their total failure, the Minsk I (2014), and Minsk II (2015) agreements, which paused the fighting for a short time, but of which only three or four of thirteen provisions were applied?” Badie argues that this all shows that “the art of the transaction seems to have been considerably weakened, indicating that today, peace presupposes a more global and inclusive approach, built on a shared order rather than the sharing of trophies”.
“Economic interdependence increases the cost of war, but does not build peace on its own; similarly, the prospect of an expensive war by no means guarantees that it will be avoided, as the Russia-Ukraine conflict has shown since 2022”, the author notes, going on to stress the “naïveté of the economicism that has consisted of leaving aside the subjective dimension, even though this occurs three times: in the assessment of the costs, in the judgment by each actor of its ability to bear these costs and in the expectations of the economic operators which grow fat on war”.
The author also argues that humiliation is the mainspring of violence and conflict. “The narrative of the Other, the prejudice and confusion (with the classic example of putting Jihadism, Islamism, Salafism and Islam into the same category) has a lot to do with this. But the difficulty lies in the necessary and often forgotten distinction between humiliation as an individual or collective perception, shaping mindsets, and humiliation as a strategy, selected and exploited by political entrepreneurs. The former transcends bad-faith proceedings and even rational analysis: you are humiliated if you consider yourself humiliated. The only thing that can get rid of that feeling is an ostensible change in the behaviour of the person responsible for it. The latter paves the way for all kinds of weaponisation or the deepest cynicism. Arguing that the Russians did not feel humiliated by the way they were treated after the fall of the Berlin wall, by the way they became marginalised, even mocked, overnight, the nation that was once one of the world’s two superpowers, is pure denial. But nobody can deny that Vladimir Putin deliberately exploited this as a trademark to win power and become the leader of Russia in 1999, using the sentiment to justify a cruel war of aggression. We are forced to admit that by allowing that dangerous sentiment to spread, with the cold indifference of the victor, we handed the master of the Kremlin valuable resources to embed his power and retain it by means of war”, Badie writes.
The author warms to his theme: “a belief that peace is only that ‘of diplomats and soldiers’ runs the risk of our ignoring the essential dangers: its art is increasingly linked to the recognition of a collective Other, to the capacity to hold people back before they descend into humiliation, to the aptitude to manage the collective emotions of neighbouring societies and, even more so, those of distant ones. The solution is not influence, the ‘soft power’ that has been so much vaunted in the United States since its defeat in Vietnam, as these solutions add to the universe of feeling without tackling the impulse of belligerence, which might even be stimulated by the naive illusion of setting oneself up as a model. The real meaning of peace is simply developing a diplomacy of otherness”.
“The high number of players involved in conflicts since 1945 is staggering, as suggested by the complexity of the wars in Congo or Sahel. In a situation of institutional enfeeblement, these players proliferate: traditional local leaders, religious or civilian leaders, community, tribal or clan leaders, whose authority grows as the State becomes weaker, numerous militia backed by warlords benefiting from the dislocation of the national armed forces, in Congo or Afghanistan, Mafia enterprises taking advantage of the situation of chaos and entering into agreements with anybody who might be useful to them, specialists in violence of all kinds benefiting from a context that allows them grow their brand. To say nothing of the spoils of the State concerned and those who embody it, desperately and brutally trying to impose their authority, sometimes even to profit from difficult situations! The difficulty lies in the fact that unlike conventional warfare, few of these players have anything to gain from stopping a war that assures their survival: worse still, they are happy to get used to living in a warring society, which ultimately brings them functional advantages. There may be entire sectors of the population who find in this kind of bloodbath the means to satisfy needs which the institutional structures of the past could not meet”, the author explains.
“First and foremost, the art of peace lies in reactivating hopes of social integration on the part of a population that is as shattered as it is forgotten, abandoned to its daily suffering”, Badie stresses, adding that “for this reason, the only way one can promote an order of peace in Africa or the Middle East, for instance, is to do so by means of a serious programme for the reintegration of all of these players who have become lawless. The art in this case is to give peace credibility, to persuade the protagonists that their destiny will be better if the warrior society and the little advantages they enjoy were to disappear”. This strategy has been attempted, with some success, but also some failures, by the UN with its DDR (Demobilisation, Disarmament and Reintegration) programme.
“At an extraordinary meeting of the United Nations Security Council […] on 13 February 2024, António Guterres famously stated that ‘empty bellies fuel unrest’, suggesting that climate change is making sanitary and food conditions worse, creating violence which in turn feed refugee movements. Reciprocally, war leads to a worsening of human security and the vicious circle is, terrifyingly, closed. War and earthquake left 13 million people facing starvation in Syria. At the same meeting, the deputy director of […] the FAO announced that of the 258 million people facing severe food insecurity, 174 million have been put in that situation by the joint effects of climate and conflict; 70% of the countries that are most exposed to climate change are also among the most politically and economically fragile countries; one tenth of all surface area that is currently suitable to grow the most important crops and raise animals may become un-adapted to the climate by the middle of the century. Similarly, 80% of the 700,000 people most exposed to famine in the world are currently living in Gaza, a target for Israeli bombardment”, the author writes.
Badie argues in favour of a “substantial reform of the Security Council, promoting a more in-depth and complex understanding of conflicts, an approach that is finally freed from the subjectivity of the five permanent members, deepening and updating the very notion of international security, involving local players, the States directly involved and, in addition, those who have first-hand experience of the reality of the conflict, strongly and at an institutional level, getting rid of the right of veto so that no initiatives can be blocked, expanding the competences of the Council to allow it to militate for the necessary international social integration”.
Although he acknowledges that a change of this kind would be very likely to be vetoed by one or more permanent members, he believes that it should at least be possible to “move from peacekeeping to peace-building”. “For instance, by reinforcing the prerogatives and missions of the UNDP around the broader concept of human security. With this in mind, its organigramme should be increased to include a bureau specialising in the very definition of global peace and a joint council (States, NGOs) identifying possible areas of intervention and discussing the possibility of working to build global peace”, the author explains. He goes on to argue that “this mechanism would be the equivalent, upstream, of the Peacebuilding Commission and could be a space for prospection, preventative reflection and working together in times of crisis”. Furthermore, its “joint management, under the aegis of a highly respected United Nations programme, would help to raise it above the level of a truncated reading of peace, which would no longer be exhaustively subject to what the games that go on between states will allow to be shown”.
Finally, Badie stresses that peace is also created through education, adding in passing that a valuable contribution is made to this by student mobility and, therefore, European programmes Erasmus and Erasmus Mundus. (Olivier Jehin)
Bertrand Badie. L’art de la paix (available in French only). Flammarion. ISBN: 978-2-0804-5891-9. 243 pages. €21,00
Le cœur pensant
This book is a collection of the articles and speeches by the Israeli author David Grossman, a tireless peace campaigner. All were written between 2021 and 2024. In them, the writer repeats his belief that Israel must “arrive, as soon as it can, at a situation of stability, peace and recognition with its neighbours” and that “any agreement to reinforce Israel’s ties with the States of the region – the Abraham Agreements, or example – must take account of the Palestinian people, their tragedy and injuries –those of the refugees, the occupation” (our translation of the French edition of the book, translated from the original Hebrew).
“What is happening at the moment is the price Israel is paying for having allowed itself to be seduced for many years by a corrupt power that has started it on a dangerous path, which has weakened the institutions of law and justice, the military institutions, the education system, which has endangered the very existence of the country, all to keep the Prime Minister out of prison”, Grossman writes. He goes on to hypothesise that Israel, after the war, will be “much more right-wing, aggressive and racist”. “The war that has been imposed upon us will have cemented stereotypes that define – and will continue to define – the Israeli identity will in future encompass both the trauma of October 2023 and the content of the policy and governance of Israel. Polarisation, the internal gulf”, he writes.
“The ‘situation’, which is only getting worse, raises the question of the State of Israel’s right to call itself ‘democratic’”, Grossman adds, explaining that “an occupying regime cannot claim that it is democratic – it is quite simply impossible. For democracy grows from the profound belief that all human beings are born equal and that a human being cannot be denied the right to determine his or her own fate. These years of occupation and humiliation may lead the occupying population to believe that there is a hierarchy between lives. The lives of the occupied population are seen as inferior, inferior by nature. Their misery and degradation are seen by the occupier as a decree of destiny resulting from the essence of that population (this, as we all know, are how anti-Semites used to consider Jews, and still do). The individuals of that population are seen as people who can be stripped of their natural human rights, whose aspirations and values do not matter. It goes without saying that the occupying population consider themselves superior and, therefore, as dominant by nature. This means that as the influence of the religion grows, so too does the view that it is God’s will. This gradually leads to the extinguishing of a democratic, tolerant and liberal vision of the world. I therefore ask: how do people who believe that man was created in God’s own image allow themselves to trample on that image?”. (OJ)
David Grossman (French version trad. Jean-Luc Allouche and Clément Baude). Le cœur pensant – Réflexions sur un chaos annoncé (available in English with the title The Thinking Heart: Essays on Israel and Palestine). Seuil. ISBN: 978-2-0215-7140-0. 122 pages. €15,00