Lawlessness (Globalisation of ----)

Globalisation and fragmentation are companions of each other today. The state of statelessness, of dispersed conflicts, of the imperative of enforcing the state to enforce peace in the post cold war world is a product of that complex situation. Such a state of international affairs is also demonstrative of the fact that international relations theory is inadequate to grasp this phenomenon. Thus while today's mood of triumph is disturbed by widespread statelessness, this state of statelessness reflects on the agenda of state building to the extent that we may say that we are in the age of state-formation again.

In Afghanistan as much in Burma, Cambodia, Bosnia and Somalia, peace making is actually "peace-enforcing", for peace is not achievable through dialogue, it has to be "enforced". The reason is that the state in most of these cases has "withered", there is no agency to provide the house to hold dialogues; and the state has now to be erected from outside so that peace can be enforced. Conflict theory dealt with asymmetries. Now conflict-prevention theory finds these asymmetries too real - so real that negotiation politics is often crumbling on its face. Peace has become "elusive".

Raw force, barbarity, loss of civility, single minded will to destroy the adversary – all these have marked the global expansion of the victorious powers. The spread of barbarity, the absolute evaporation of the culture of trust and reconciliation, and the concentration of force to erase the adversary are the characteristics of the new global age. This is facilitated, as the object of that force is not the vanquished power, which has left the stage in any case, but the anonymous people, the subjects without history, who do not have any more the state to protect them, but who raise the spectre of lawlessness. It is of that globalisation that no one speaks of, and I propose to discuss though briefly.

Spread of technology and the scientific community, diffusion of methods of coercion and of counter-insurgency, privatisation and eventual breakdown of the state, and the sinister air of virtual reality, all have played their role in universalising terror, mass murder, and in the manufacture of global silence over such genocides accompanied by selective protests. Clearly we are witnessing the eclipse of a sense of responsibility. The demise of ideology, we often forget, brings in the demise of the moral community also howsoever the presence of such moral community might have conveyed at some time a sense of freedom-less-ness. In this era of virtual reality characterised by a lack of territorial constraints and mass public pressure, concentration of attack has ushered in revolution in "military affairs" - sophisticated electronic and psychological warfare as shown in Kosovo - which has not been lived up to its claims of targeted annihilation, but certainly successful to a significant extent in manufacturing global silence. The "new wars" that we witness are products of globalisation, which they in turn advance.

We can advance two theses here. First, the civil wars of mutual claims of recognition and determination have done away with every sense of responsibility, restoration of trust, and a just reconciliation of claims. Precisely because old territorial forms of political living (territorial units such as a state, county, province, autonomous republics in a multi-national state, nation-state) are considered irrelevant, that the grab is up for new forms of territory as a matter of life and death struggle in the politics of recognition and determination. In this sense, new wars do not signify banal geopolitics.

Second, the new wars on the basis of the RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs (1)) cannot be fought without a political consensus (G 7, new north-new south, Christian, western, Atlantic), and the RMA thus provokes globalisation of confrontationist politics. It may not be preposterous to argue therefore that neutrality today is more difficult than it was in the days of cold war/long peace.

In any case, the curious history of globalisation should not escape our eyes. Community, state, nation, region, civilisation, and the globe, all have been dumped into the box that the current history of globalisation is. They may jostle for space. But that is fine with today's global order. Similarly, the "internationalism of Gillette's chairman" and the one "expounded by Tagore or Gandhi" both finds accommodation in this current history. This history is producing regions at a furious pace that may work as containers of all these entities. Asia was never a whole to justify its name. It was either east or south or the near east or central or the rim named as Asia-Pacific. Similarly, Europe has never been Europe – the two treaties of Locarno and Rapallo exemplified the agony of trying to make sense of the many Europes in one Europe, an agony that still continues. It all depends on the gaze. The production of political regions to bring the disparate political entities into some order and tie them in a template has become global.

In reading this curious history where a sudden expansion of finance market and mobility of capital, information and skill is invoked to assert the supremacy of the monetarist economics and the end of the age of political confrontation (with the possible exception of the clash between civilisations, but that is not a political clash, but a civilisation-clash, so the argument would run), we shall do well to remember that behind our back, escaping our gaze, a new global politics is shaping up. The fault-lines of that politics are not yet clear. But there is no doubt that in that politics we shall see the engagement of the principle of justice with that of claims and rights, the engagement of the ethic of responsibility with the reality of power unconstrained by responsibility, of our history of wars and peace with their history of the same, an engagement of our statelessness with their state.

The early marks of these engagements are visible in the forms of new political realities in many parts of the world. They give lie to the dubious claims of this curious history, that globalisation promotes trade, trade promotes development, development produces interdependence, and interdependence produces peace, in one phrase that sums up the cinema, liberal peace.

(1) Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) basically new means of warfare, electronic, helped by simulated results, targeted, with less land component
in warfare, precision warfare, guided missiles - claiming to least damaging to civilian population, the dream of Geneva conventions coming true...