On February 24, the start of a war shook the world -- Russian troops launched a multi-prong attack on Ukraine to topple its government and neutralize military establishments. The West termed the war in Ukraine as an unprovoked attack by Russia -- a form of invasion.
Contrarily, Russia claims they are operating a special military operation to “de-nazify” the region. Ukrainians are dying within these opposing views and actions, and Europe is set to receive a massive flow of refugees.
The situation centring this war makes us think about war and peace. While Russian troops appear as invaders and destroyers, they claim to be the emancipators -- breaking the shackles of Western hegemony forced by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Aggression by powerful countries towards relatively weaker countries is not a new phenomenon. It happened previously to establish colonies, eliminate dictatorships, promote democracy, uphold world peace, and promote human rights. Invasions take different forms, and the invading powers are never short of some “plausible” explanations.
Many wars and conflicts have led to unimaginable suffering in human history. So, have we always been prone to wage war, be greedy, or remain indifferent to others’ misery? Are we innately aggressive and war-prone, or did we start dominating others at some point in history?
In their search to answer these questions, David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything (2021) proposed we should not search for an innate human nature espousing a theological debate -- mainly because “good” and “evil” are human concepts, depending entirely on interpretations and perspectives.
Nonetheless, scholars like Jared Diamond and Francis Fukuyama have argued -- the invention of agriculture and its feasibility in sustaining high population density transformed human society from the core. We started fighting over resources, and some leadership emerged -- who could dictate our actions and/or influence our perceptions.
At the extreme end of this process, we now live in the constant threat of war. We find similar arguments about human society in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings, and we keep wondering how we could avoid this historical mess.
While this narrative is self-assuring, David Graeber and David Wengrow argued, there is extraordinarily little scientific evidence of this, and small-scale groups were not always egalitarian, and similarly, not all large human groups had kings, presidents, or even bureaucracies.
The idea of the original peaceful condition is a prejudice. Contrarily, Thomas Hobbes speculated human nature as a war of all against all. From the Hobbesian perspective, we overcame disunity and established peace and order by creating some form of a sovereign entity with absolute power. Nonetheless, the world we live in today is far more cruel and violent.
Even if we cannot trace the history of humans to a state of innocence, we do not always find humans in the propensity to wars. Warfare is sponsored by something resembling a state presumably in the interests of the society it presides over. With the advancement of technology, powerful states could conquer a great distance without needing them to assimilate with the defeated -- and war became much more frequent.
The constant fear of war perfected cheap ammunition and weapons with which competing superpowers armed their allies. These weapons, in turn, either directly or indirectly, have been introduced into the furthest natural resource or strategic geographic bases of the world, where they have become the instruments of escalating violence. As a result, military assistance has become one of the principal fronts of global politics. Further, with the increasing number of nuclear warheads, global peace remains at risk, and the war or threat of a military response has become an extension of politics.
The political aspect of war and its pervasiveness is revealed by how wars polarize the competing states. Moreover, how the war is perceived tells a lot about today’s world order. Even if we ponder over the media coverage of Ukraine, we get a glimpse over the Western narrative of war and how they are responding to it.
News coverage of the crisis primarily referred to the situation as an unlikely affair to be happening in Europe. While a similar crisis is likely to happen elsewhere in a not so “civilized” place, affecting the others of the human race --many find it shocking that the European population has become the so-called refugees.
Besides, the crisis is allying European powers in different directions. Germany has announced increasing military spending. Some bordering countries with Russia are aiming to join NATO. Britain is introducing policies to welcome refugees with Ukrainian passports while ignoring others, and so on.
We must admit --wars lead to extreme human suffering, and in the book A History of Warfare (1994), John Kegan focused on what it means to be in the midst of the action. It led him to conceive battle as a field of human experience outstandingly permeated by fear, while traditional military history focuses on manifestations of courage.
In wars, the generals and officers try to persuade their soldiers to kill others, even civilians who did not intend to kill them. Likewise, the combatant troops and people are coerced to risk their lives for some mythical narrative of maintaining peace and security for some imagined communities, countries, or empires.
This large-scale war in Ukraine is reshuffling the dynamics of the world and how we perceive or experience it. The world’s situation reflects what Herbert Marcuse argued in the book One-dimensional Man (1964) --we are living in constant fear of an atomic catastrophe.
The effort to prevent such a catastrophe tends to shadow the origins of such threats: The powerful countries are peacefully involved in producing means of destruction. Contemporary societies are becoming more affluent and prosperous as they perpetuate an imminent danger. Nuclear weaponry at the disposal of a few world leaders created an unprecedented situation where something that threatens world peace is also being considered an extension of politics.
Mohammad Tareq Hasan, PhD is an anthropologist and teaches at the University of Dhaka.
