Violence, Politics and Law. The de-institutionalization of War

Abstract

The chapter examines the process of deinstitutionalization of war against the backdrop of the broader relationship between war and violence. The point of departure is the attempt inherent in all cultures of war to draw a clear distinction between war and peace, on the one hand, and all other forms of violence on the other. That was, in fact, the great enterprise of the modern politico-legal order. But it is precisely the crisis of this political and legal order that tends to make war re-precipitate into the abyss of the most widespread violence. This crisis, which expresses itself today in the formulas of “hybrid warfare,” “grey zone” and even “weaponization of everything”, had in fact already run through the entire twentieth century. And it is precisely to the twentieth-century crisis of the clear distinction between war and violence that the entire second part of the chapter is devoted, by analysing the collapse of the two main brakes on formless violence, law and politics