Olivier Lallemant - Final Post

For this last class, it is interesting to look back to the beginning of the semester, in order to determine what this course brought me. First of all, when I registered for this course, I thought it would be more about the strategic and ethical issues of the “Making of War and Peace”. But eventually, I was surprised but not disappointed at all of the “intellectual” aspect of the course. Studying old and current authors made me discovered a lot of different points of view about the meaning of war and the way to consider it. I learned a lot about these authors, academic ones or others with a field experience, and I think that meeting with so much different points of view is essential to move forward from the “war is bad” paradigm.

The first text that brought me a lot and that I really enjoyed to read is Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and its echo in Foucauld’s and Latour’s texts. Those three texts brought a lot more than a simple new vision of considering war, but also a new vision about how we have to consider History and the place of mankind on Earth. Actually, Tolstoy’s critic about the way History is made by historians only with the so-called “great men” is very useful to consider war (and peace) in general. We usually consider that a king make war to another king to get his territory, or that this king makes war to his people to keep his territory. For example, Bachar Al Assad does not make war to the Syrian population, trying to kill them all to keep his territory. War is far more complicated than that. And this is what Tolstoy and Latour say when they write that we have to consider the “invisible”.  We cannot interpret and geopolitical event only by considering what we see, and trying to find its origins within a gigantic overarching theory (Foucauld). The invisible is what we cannot count, what we cannot see from the TV; it is the individual and national Histories, it is the personal aims that war can lead to achieve… Once we don’t have all the information about what caused a conflict, we cannot consider it, and we cannot build an effective peace in this region. This is the reason why every time a foreign country intervenes to put end to a conflict, peace cannot last. Peace has to be built by those who make war, and if they do not want to live in peace for an invisible reason, they will eventually make war to each other once again.

And this invisibility is what stroke me in the second text that influenced me a lot about how I see war, Laleh Khalili’s Time in the Shadows. I’ve always been interested about the problematic of the incarceration in war times, and this text made me think a lot about it (I bought the book, that I’ve already started to read, and it confirms it). When we speak about the link between invisibility and confinement, it is difficult not to seem to speak about some kind of “conspiracy theory”. But the problem is that invisibility is real in war, and it is a tremendously powerful weapon, to act against the International Law. More generally, the balance between security and ethics is very difficult to keep in wartime. Ethics are the most lethal weakness that a War maker has to avoid. Because the purpose of war is to kill people, and killing is not ethical. When we say it like this, it seems very simple, and it actually is. The invisibility enables to keep ethics on the one hand, and to make war, kill people, torture others, on the other. Usually, people find this compromise acceptable, since security is worth torturing some possible terrorists. This is the reason why States can abandon any ethical behavior as long as citizens cannot see it; hence those States remain stable, and are not collapsing. A State that shows its lack of ethics will collapse eventually, as Syria will, no matter its supports. Sometimes, this is surprising to see how Machiavellian geopolitics and war have always been remaining.